Since Phoenix’s infectious Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix ended up on several of our top ten lists this year, I finally succumbed to the hype and listened to the album, and I’m really glad I did. If I’d done that earlier, it would likely have been on my top ten. Ah well. In any case, the last artist you might expect the bright and poppy Phoenix to cover would be Bob Dylan, but they did just that recently for German magazine Musikexpress. Here is Phoenix’s shortened version of Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (from his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde).

Phoenix – Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

(via Pitchfork)

[The MP3s available here are for sampling purposes only. Please support the artists by buying their albums and going to their shows. If you are the artist or label rep and don't want an MP3 featured, please email me]

Occasionaly a lyricist is able to pen in a sparse collection of words something so profoundly moving that it rivals the narrative punch of drawn-out novels and scripts. Something immediately compelling is parcelled into a few choice words and a sudden clarity of understanding overwhelms. The universe for that moment is resting on each verse, the music accentuating every pause and intonation. Part wonder at the craftmanship of each phrase, part immersion in the storytelling, the following songs are testaments to the range of great lyrics I consider worth commemorating in this playlist. A song like Nick Cave’s Darker with the Day is a baroque feast of words that teeter into sublimely evocative storytelling vignettes, whereas a song like Cat Steven’s Father and Son rests at the other end of the spectrum, succinct and composed in its competing voices. And, of course, there is my favorite song lyrical or otherwise, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, which includes these sorrowful verses:

I hear that your building your little house deep in the desert, your living for nothing now, hope you are keeping some kind of record… and you treated my woman to a flake of your life, and when she came back she was nobody’s wife.

1) Nick Cave – Darker with the Day (the last song of the phenomenal achievement ‘No More Shall We Part’… ‘a gilled jesus shivering on a fisherman’s hook’)
1) Nick Cave – Darker with the Day

2) Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat (crystalline perfection, to shatter and reassemble and shatter again, the eternal ache)
2) Leonard Cohen – Famous Blue Raincoat

3) Cat Stevens – Father and Son (ah youth, ain’t it the truth)
3) Cat Stevens – Father and Son

4) Junip – Ghost of Tom Joad (ok, this should be by Bruce Springsteen, but as I do not own that version in mp3 format, this stunning cover will suffice. ‘welcome to the new world order’)
4) Junip – Ghost of Tom Joad

5) Bob Dylan – Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall (the song that made Allen Ginsberg tear up reminiscing about in Scorsese’s ‘No Direction Home’ documentary. I normally do not approve of ‘list’ songs, but this is truly the distillation of something bigger than us all, a damn near way of life)
5) Bob Dylan – Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

6) Will Oldham – I See a Darkness (Johnny Cash does a haunting cover of this that you can listen to on my Don Quixote playlist, but Oldham gives the right chill factor to these perfectly chosen words)
6) Will Oldham – I See a Darkness

7) Tim Buckley – Song to the Siren (‘long floatin’ on shipless oceans/ I did all my best to smile/ til your singin eyes and fingers/ drew me loving to your isle’ ‘nuf said)
7) Tim Buckley – Song to the Siren

8 Tom Waits – Time (very hard to choose one example of Tom Waits talents, but this is a favorite of mine from Rain Dogs, even though the more obvious choice would be Ol’ 55)
8 Tom Waits – Time

9) Vic Chesnutt – See You Around (best end song to a playlist ever, in addition to the great lyrics. Vic kicks your ass around with his verbiage, such a brilliant little song and it captures so much of my personality in the process I had to include it)
9) Vic Chesnutt – See You Around

All this week: b&w photos of some of my (and your) favorite artists.

Dylan.

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To send image suggestions of weekly themes, shoot me an email.

[The MP3s available here are for sampling purposes only. Please support the artists by buying their albums and going to their shows. If you are the artist or label rep and don't want an MP3 featured, please email me]

The news today gets me thinking about the Dust Bowl, this looming spectre of the past that I never lived through but which I have grown to appreciate through my vicarious admiration of the works of Ford and Steinbeck. The faux-nostalgia of borrowed cinematic memories has conjured a vision of the Great Depression that feels more real to me now then my domesticated life. As part of one of the first generations in Western civilization unburdened with the hardships of war and financial instability, yet privy to the knowledge of past events, I feel the absence of burden all the more acutely as an affront to my more primal instincts. It is sad to think that in spite of the security I possess there is some additional impulse that longs for upset. Perhaps it is the pull of my biological capacities which require and are designed for more than convenience. Perhaps it is the sublime pull of aesthetics that seeks the sensation of immediacy which conflict offers. Or maybe it is that I am not as young as I used to be and all I can think of is entropy, the personal and the impersonal histories (the Great Depressions) superimposed on one another as a single running narrative.

In the last week I have become deeply disheartened with the state of the world, a sensibility I am usually able to factor out of my thoughts with little trouble – man’s frail absurdity was always something I could sidestep as I pursued my personal interests – but the vile hypocrisies of Church and State have become too boorish to ignore. I want to purge it all, and escape to a place that better suits my newly enflamed mood.

The Ghost of Tom Joad is just such a place. How I want to live inside this song, and sit beside that campfire away from the highway that is kidding no one. Both the original version by Bruce Springsteen and the recent cover by Jose Gonzales (Junip is his side project) do the trick, but if I had to choose I would go with the stark power of Jose’s rendition. I originally conceived of this post around Junip’s version but as I became more enthusiastic with the Great Depression mythology underlying it, I soon decided to make an entire playlist out of it, to flesh out the world of Tom Joad that I long to be a part of. I include the infamous final speech of John Ford’s classic ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, a speech that has yet to make it to YouTube unfortunately, so the printed word will have to suffice. A fervent idealist from a faraway reality, Tom Joad is a man of action who confronts the social injustices he sees all around him, something I admire but do not yet emulate.

01 Junip – The Ghost of Tom Joad

01 Junip – The Ghost of Tom Joad

02 Woody Guthrie – Tom Joad Part 1

02 Woody Guthrie – Tom Joad Part 1

03 Bob Dylan – Workingman’s Blues #2

03 Bob Dylan – Workingman’s Blues #2

04 Tom Waits – Time

04 Tom Waits – Time

05 Leadbelly – Midnight Special

05 Leadbelly – Midnight Special

06 Blind Willie Johnson – John the Revelator

06 Blind Willie Johnson – John the Revelator

07 Bob Dylan – Man of Constant Sorrows

07 Bob Dylan – Man of Constant Sorrows

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Henry Fonda’s classic speech from ‘Grapes of Wrath’:

Tom Joad: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled -

Ma Joad: Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casey.

Tom: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’ll get me one way or another. Till then -

Ma: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.

Tom: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. Just, as long as I’m an outlaw anyways, maybe I can do something, just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out that clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? They could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom: Maybe it’s like Casey says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then -

Ma: Then what, Tom?

Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere, wherever you can look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready and where people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build. I’ll be there, too.

Ma: I don’t understand it, Tom.

Tom: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.

by mike in MP3 Playlists, Music 

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