Thursday, February 16, 2012

Thursday Morning Music Shuffle - City of Electric Light Mix

words and music
music and words
songs and singers
singers and songs
i
am
simply
a
man
who
writes 
about words and music and singers and songs
the power of music to inspire and enthuse to infuse my spirit, my soul
again and again, i go to that well
and music comes through
place and time travel with a song, a band
take me back to a moments which no longer exist
and are no longer possible
do you remember?
ah - that song
you know the one
with music and words 
and words and music

A song shuffle for today as clouds and stray, straggling showers pelt down on our heads..

Los Angeles is the stunning debut by punk legends - X. John Doe, Exene Cervenka, DJ Bonebrake and Billy Zoom.  Sugarlight is one of the songs on that album that paints a dark yet powerful tableau of a place and time which I never knew and never will experience, but which I can emotionally connect with via the music.

<----check out Los Angeles by X on Amazon

They Might Be Giants have been making great music for a long, long time. They have a distinctive and interesting sound. Join Us came out last year. Can't Keep Johnny Down from that album has a delicious hook and that classic TMBG sound.
<-----check out Join Us by TMBG on Amazon

Old Devil Moon is a song from the 1947 musical Finean's Rainbow. Here it is performed by the legendary Lena Horne. The Moon is a powerful symbol and source of myth. Lunacy.


<--------check out this Lena Horne album on Amazon


The  idea transporting Homer's Odyssey from the ancient world to the Great Depression Era Southern United States and infusing it with American Roots music seemed/seems ridiculous until you realize it is the Coen Brother involved with T-Bone Burnett in charge of the music.  O Brother, Where Art Thou?  The signature song from the film was written in the early 20th Century (if not earlier). Dan Tyminski from Alison Krauss' band Union Station handles the vocals on I am a Man of Constant Sorrow.

  <-------check out the Deluxe Edition of the O Brother, Where Are Thou? Soundtrack on Amazon.

I Believe in You was a hit for country music singer Don Williams in 1980.  About 28 years later, Nashville based alternative rock band, Lambchop recorded a cover of the song and put it on their OH (ohio) album. Kurt Wagner plays it pretty straight on this stripped down version of the song.

<------check out OH (ohio) by Lambchop on Amazon

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Affiliated Links:
Old Devil Moon Old Devil Moon
" Christopher] Fowler repeatedly challenges the reader to redraw the boundaries between innocence and malevolence, rationality and paranoia. His strength lies in the way he unveils the darker side of the ordinary."-"Guardian" A geologist trapped in a town without water is lured into a desperate escape plan. A boy plans a murder in an eerie funfair. A cop witnesses an inexplicable plague of madness. A teenager learns a deadly trick with his cell phone. Christopher Fowler's tenth collection of uniquely disturbing short stories contains the blackest humor and the darkest fears. Christopher Fowler is the author of twelve novels, including the Bryant & May series. He lives in London.


Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times
A giant of American music opens the book on his wrenching professional and personal journeys, paying tribute to the vanishing Appalachian culture that gave him his voice. He was there at the beginning of bluegrass. Yet his music, forged in the remote hills and hollows of Southwest Virginia, has even deeper roots. In "Man of Constant Sorrow," Dr. Ralph Stanley gives a surprisingly candid look back on his long and incredible career as the patriarch of old-time mountain music. Marked by Dr. Ralph Stanleyas banjo picking, his brother Carteras guitar playing, and their haunting and distinctive harmonies, the Stanley Brothers began their career in 1946 and blessed the world of bluegrass with hundreds of classic songs, including aWhite Dove, a aRank Stranger, a and what has become Dr. Ralphas signature song, aMan of Constant Sorrow.a Carter died in 1966 after years of alcohol abuse, but Dr. Ralph Stanley carried on and is still at the top of his game, playing to audiences across the country today at age eighty-one. Rarely giving interviews, he now grants fans the book they have been waiting for, filled with frank recollections, from his boyhood of dire poverty in the Appalachian coalfields to his early musical success with his brother, to years of hard traveling on the road with the Clinch Mountain Boys, to the recent, jubilant revival of a sound he helped create. The story of how a musical art now popular around the world was crafted by two brothers from a dying mountain culture, "Man of Constant Sorrow" captures a life harmonized with equal measures of tragedy and triumph.

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