Category Archives: Great albums

Great albums

Mar 01: Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon in 1973

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Mar 01: Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon in 1973

The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by Pink Floyd, released in March 1973. It built on ideas explored in the band’s earlier recordings and live shows, but lacks the extended instrumental excursions that characterised their work following the departure in 1968 of founder member, principal composer, and lyricist, Syd Barrett. The themes on The Dark Side of the Moon include conflict, greed, the passage of time, and mental illness, the latter partly inspired by Barrett’s deteriorating mental state.

My relationship with Pink Floyd comes in waves, and I must say that Jonathan Wilson and the latest album by The South has rekindled my Pink Floyd interest. The influence by Pink Floyd is so obvious. I just had to go back and listen closer. Two other bricks in the wall (pun intended) was Gov’t Mule and Flaming Lips’s Pink Floyd cover project. Some of my favourite bands love Pink Floyd, there has to be more to them. So, right now I’m on top of the wave, I listen to Pink Floyd a lot.

Classic albums: The making of Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd:

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan albums, Great albums

Bob Dylan: Shadows In The Night

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Bob Dylan Shadows In The Night

Q: Why did you make this record now?
A: Now is the right time. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I heard Willie [Nelson]’s Stardust record in the late 1970s. All through the years, I’ve heard these songs being recorded by other people and I’ve always wanted to do that. And I wondered if anybody else saw it the way I did.
~Bob Dylan (AARP interview – Feb 2015)

I love these songs, and I’m not going to bring any disrespect to them. To trash those songs would be sacrilegious. And we’ve all heard those songs being trashed, and we’re used to it. In some kind of ways you want to right the wrong.
~Bob Dylan (AARP interview – Feb 2015)

The great shock here, then, is Dylan’s singing. Dylan’s focus and his diction, after years of drowning in sandpaper, evoke his late-Sixties poise and clarity on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline — also records of deceptive restraint and retrospect — with an eccentric rhythmic patience in the way he holds words and notes across the faint suggestions of tempo. It is not crooning. It is suspense: Dylan, at 73, keeping fate at arm’s length as he looks for new lessons, nuance and solace in well-told tales.
~David Fricke (rollingstone.com – Feb 2015)

..But while Shadows In The Night is nostalgic, it is not sentimental. As a celebration of classic songcraft, it is as sincere as any of Dylan’s many forays into traditional American roots idioms. But how does Sinatra measure up to Dylan’s other early heroes? “Right from the beginning he was there with the truth of things in his voice,” Dylan wrote in the days after Sinatra’s death. “His music had a profound influence on me, whether I knew it or not. He was one of the very few singers who sang without a mask.” Shadows In The Night, then, is Dylan’s way of saying thank you.
~Michael Bonner (uncut.co.uk – Jan 2015)

Stay With Me (offical)

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Great albums, Music Calendar, Steve Earle

Feb 28: Steve Earle released Train a Comin in 1995

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“This ain’t no part of no unplugged nothin — God, I hate MTV”
~Steve Earle (Liner notes)

I got to thinking,…if I don’t make this record now, I won’t get the chance to make it. .. I’m singing the best I’ve sung in years. Mainly [because of] no dope. Heroin relaxes your vocal cords, it lowers the top of your range a little bit, and then when you try to sing over it…
~Steve Earle (to SPIN in 1995)

I wish I’d never come back home
It don’t feel right since I’ve been grown
I can’t find any of my old friends hangin’ ’round
Won’t nothin’ bring you down like your hometown

Hometown Blues – From Later With Jools Holland 1995:

Wikipedia:

Released February 28, 1995
Genre Folk, country, country rock, bluegrass
Length 40:21
Label Warner Bros.

Train a Comin’ is an acoustic studio album by Steve Earle. The album, Earle’s first in five years, was released in 1995. In addition to Earle, it features Peter Rowan, Norman Blake, Roy Huskey, and Emmylou Harris. The album was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

steve earle 1995

If you see her out tonight
And she tells you it’s just the lights
That bring her here and not her loneliness
That’s what she says but sometimes she forgets

Sometimes She Forgets:

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Great albums, Music Calendar, Van Morrison

Feb 28: Van Morrison released the album Moondance in 1970

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van morrison Moondance

In Moondance, Morrison bursts forth in warm Technicolor. The Van Morrison that the public would come to know and recognize over the decades—Van the Man, the Belfast Cowboy, etc—essentially makes his first appearance on Moondance.
~Erik Hage

This is Van Morrison’s 6th Symphony; like Beethoven’s equivalent, it’s fixated on the power of nature, but rather than merely sitting in awe, it finds spirituality and redemption in the most basic of things. The pinnacle of Van The Man’s career, and maybe, of non-American soul in general.
~Nick Butler

And It Stoned Me:

And It Stoned Me (live @ Montreux 1980):

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David Crosby, Great albums

Feb 22: David Crosby released If I Could Only Remember My Name in 1971

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“My girlfriend had been killed in a car crash and  the only place I could exist was in the studio, Garcia would come every night. The Airplane and the Dead were recording in the same complex… They were all buddies of mine…”
– David Crosby about the recording of his masterpiece (Mojo)

Rolling Stone Magazine put it at number 37 of the “Greatest Stoner Albums” and said:
“Like a super-stoned campfire jam with an A-list of Cali hippie-rockers – including Joni Mitchell and most of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and CSNY – this hazy solo project by the altered-consciousness overachiever sounds like it was pretty much made up on the spot. See the toasted strum-fest “Music Is Love” (with Neil Young on congas!) and “Tamalpais High,” with Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen noodling around wordless Crosby-Nash harmonies. By the time it’s over, you may not remember your name, either.”

I believe a couple of Santana and Quicksilver Messenger Service members also visited.

Photo: BBC/Tricia Yourkevich
Photo: BBC/Tricia Yourkevich

David Crosby – Cowboy Movie (Live, Jan 31, 2014) a very fine version! :

It is an album that grows on you, it feels like a mess at first, but it soon starts to make sense. This is a coherent album with wonderful melodies and harmonies. For me it is the quintessential “Laurel Canyon” album, a true classic.
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