5 wonderful acoustic Bob Dylan covers by Ron Sexsmith
Ronald Eldon “Ron” Sexsmith (born 8 January 1964) is a Canadian singer-songwriter from St. Catharines, Ontario.Sexsmith started his own band when he was 14 years old and released recordings of his own material in 1985 at age 21. He was the subject of a 2010 documentary called Love Shines.
We really like Ron Sexsmith here at Alldylan, and Ron really knows how to sing Bob Dylan’s songs. He has a great YouTube series where he covers a lot of artists, he picks songs across a many genres. He has done a lot of Bob Dylan songs, I’ve picked my 5 favourites. Let’s start with the best:
“Wrecking Ball is a leftfield masterpiece, the most wide-ranging, innovative, and daring record in a career built on such notions. Rich in atmosphere and haunting in its dark complexity…The fixed point remains Harris’ voice, which leaps into each and every one of these diverse compositions — culled from the pens of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Earle, and others — with utter fearlessness, as if this were the album she’d been waiting her entire life to make. Maybe it is.” – Jason Ankeny (Allmusic)
Wrecking Ball is the eighteenth studio album by Emmylou Harris, released on September 26, 1995 throughElektra Records. Moving away from the traditional acoustic sound for which she had become known, Harris collaborated with rock producer Daniel Lanois and engineer Mark Howard. The album has been noted for atmospheric feel, and featured guest performances by Steve Earle, Larry Mullen, Jr., Lucinda Williams and Neil Young, who wrote the title song.
I saw Emmylou Harris live for the first time this summer, it made me go back and listen to all her albums again, with added interest and new-found love of her music. Not that I had ever lost it, but it felt fresh and deeper after the show in Oslo.
Wrecking Ball is my favourite Harris album, and I rank it among the 30 best albums ever made.
Emmylou Harris talks about Sweet Old World and sings the song with Neil Young:
“All the songs had to work completely and honestly by themselves on acoustic guitar or on piano. If they didn’t, they weren’t worth putting on the record.”
~Ryan Adams (about ‘Gold’)
“[Gold is] me not buying my own bullshit for two seconds.”
~Ryan Adams
Gold is the second studio album by Ryan Adams, released September 25, 2001 on Lost Highway Records. The album remains Adams’ best-selling album, certifying gold in the UKand going on to sell 364,000 copies in the U.S. and 812,000 worldwide.Adams noted that “with Gold, I was trying to prove something to myself. I wanted to invent a modern classic.”
Lou Reed – Full Concert
Recorded Live: 9/25/1984 – Capitol Theatre (Passaic, NJ)
There have been a great bootleg in circulation from this show (but in wrong running order) and the guys at Music Vault have been so kind to give us some tremendous video footage (in the right running order as far as I can tell) from the show. A very fine concert indeed!
Personnel:
Lou Reed – Vocals, Guitar
Robert Quine – Guitar
Fernando Saunders – Bass, Vocals
Peter Wood – Keyboards
Lenny Ferarri – Drums
“I woke up this mornin’ and none of the news was good And death machines were rumblin’ ‘cross the ground where Jesus stood And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way And there was nothin’ anyone could do or say
And I almost listened to him Yeah, I almost lost my mind Then I regained my senses again And looked into my heart to find
That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem” – Steve Earle (Jerusalem)
Steve Earle released this “protest album” post 9/11, but contrary to widespread belief it is not a concept album about the tragic events on that date. Yes, there are some songs relating to it, but only three out of eleven (maybe four). There were som controversy when it came out, especially the song John Walker’s Blues were widely discussed and often slated in right wing media. It is not a song that takes sides, it is a song that tells us that an ordinary American kid fell in with the wrong crowd (in this case, the Taliban). Earle make us look at this boy, and he does not say that he is innocent, but he says that he should be treated like a human being despite his faults and despite his guilt. It is a fantastic song.
“…Earle has crafted a vision of America thrown into chaos, where the falling of the World Trade Center towers is just another symbol of a larger malaise which surrounds us. Before its release,Jerusalem already generated no small controversy over the song “John Walker’s Blues,” which tells the tale of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh as seen through his own eyes. While “John Walker’s Blues” is no more an endorsement of Lindh’s actions than Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” was a tribute to mass-murderer Charles Starkweather, even though it’s one of the album’s strongest songs, if anything, it doesn’t go quite far enough.”
– Mark Demming (allmusic.com)
Photo AllDylan
Steve Earle made a “state of the nation” album, and he is confused and he doesn’t come up with the answers, but he asks the important questions!
