The 3rd post with 12 Bob Dylan covers done by incredible women
This is my third collection of good cover versions of Dylan songs sung by incredible women, many of the songs are suggestions from our readers. Thank you, for great tips and for pointing me to great music that I hadn’t heard before.
What is a “buried treasure”, “a hidden gem” or “an underrated gem” ? Well, to me, it’s a great song that seldom (or never) is on the “best-of” lists of the artist, and it could have/should have been.
I am talking about great songs that are often overlooked. We are talking about personal favorites that you wouldn’t rate among the artists top 20 (maybe), but deserve some more praise and recognition than they get.
Neil Young has a lot of those, here are my 11 chosen ones (the Spotify playlist is at the end of the post):
Words – Between the lines of age, Glastonbury 2009 (Harvest):
Kristoffer “Kris” Kristofferson (born June 22, 1936) songwriter, musician, actor, and former soldier. He is best known for writing and recording such hits as “Me and Bobby McGee”, “For the Good Times”, “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night”. Kristofferson is the sole writer of most of his songs, and he has collaborated with various other figures of the Nashville scene such as Shel Silverstein. In 1985, Kristofferson joined fellow country artists Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash in forming the country music supergroup, The Highwaymen. In 2004, Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He is also known for his acting work, including starring roles in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and A Star Is Born, the latter for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor.
When musicians decides to write their memoirs they are often uneven (this is a kind statement). They often struggle to give words the life that do in their songs, this “new” format may not come naturally to them. That said, many of these men and women have great stories to tell and often provide compulsive reading. They do stumble in their wording and structure from time to time, but the stories are compelling and they succeed in capturing the spirit of their cultural moment with astonishing insight.
These twelve ten books are great examples of how it can be done if the authors manage to adjust to the new form. They are good period, not because they are written by famous artists, but because they reflect all the creativity, movement and human drama you’d expect from people driven by art. We kept it to memoirs, so no fictional prose (sorry, Nick Cave), no poetry (sorry, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen), there are some of the books that touches different genres but all these books are mainly memoirs.
They are not necessarily the best biographies about artists written (although sometimes they are) but they are the best books written/narrated by the musicians themselves!
Egil makes the lists from the 60s and 70s, and I will hereby start doing the 90s. The remaining decades? we’ll see when we get there 🙂
The 1990s, pronounced “nineteen-nineties” or abbreviated as “nineties”, was a decade that began on January 1, 1990, and ended on December 31, 1999.
Culturally, the 1990s was characterized by the rise of multiculturalism and alternative media, which continued into the 2000s. Movements such asgrunge, the rave scene and hip hop spread around the world to young people during the decade, aided by then-new technology such as cable television and the Internet.
The 90s will not be done sequentially, I will start with 1995 and then, well, who knows…
This was the year that the Internet entered public consciousness.
Lyricist/guitarist Richey Edwards of the Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers goes missing from a hotel in Bayswater, London on the eve of a planned tour of the United States. His car is found two weeks later at Severn View services in Aust.
Astronaut Norman Thagard becomes the first American to ride into space aboard a Russian launch vehicle.
Mississippi ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The amendment was nationally ratified in 1865.
The DVD, an optical disc computer storage media format, is announced.
The final original Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is published.
The 10 best Movies in 1995:
Strange Days
The Usual Suspects
Seven
Wild Bill
La cité des enfants perdus
Smoke
Bound
Devil in a blue dress
La Haine
Il Postino
A good year at the movies!
Egil has commanded:
Only one song per artist/group
The song must be released that specific year
Songs from live albums not allowed
Restricted to only 20 songs
A lot of wonderful music was released in 1995, very hard to pick only 20. Lets start this demanding task…
Here is a Spotifyplaylist (missing Palace Music and Van Morrison)
Lake Marie by John Prine from the album Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, released 4th April 1995:
In a 2009 interview with The Huffington Post, Prine fan Bob Dylan commented, “If I had to pick one song of his, it might be ‘Lake Marie.'”
The song was inspired in part by Prine’s crumbling marriage and a series of grisly murders the singer remembered the Chicago news media having a field day with when he was a kid. The John Prine Shrine website quotes the singer discussing his inspiration for the song: “It’s an actual place along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. There’s an entire chain of lakes along there, small lakes, and I remember as a teenager growing up in Chicago, a lot of the teenagers would go to these lakes and in the summer time kind of get away from the city. Lake Marie was kind of just one that stuck out in my mind. About ’59, ’60, ’61, I grew up in Maywood – it’s a western suburb of Chicago, and we started hearing about murders that weren’t related to the mob. You know, John Wayne Gacy was like, about two towns away from me and you just hear about it. The suburbs were kind of thought to be a pretty safe place at the time, and then some of these unexplained murders would show up every once in a while, where they’d find people in the woods somewhere. I just kind of took any one of them, not one in particular, and put it as if it was in a TV newscast. It was a sharp left turn to take in a song, but when I got done with it, I kind of felt like it’s what the song needed right then.”
