Great Album

August 20: Bob Dylan Released Slow Train Coming

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

bob dylan slow train coming

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]It’s in my system. I don’t really have enough time to talk about it. If someone really wants to know, I can explain it to them, but there are other people who can do it just as well. I don’t feel compelled to do it. I was doing a bit of that last year on the stage. I was saying stuff I figured people needed to know. I thought I was giving people an idea of what was behind the songs. I don’t think it’s necessary any more. When I walk around some of the towns we go to, however, I’m totally convinced people need Jesus. Look at the junkies and the winos and the troubled people. It’s all a sickness which can be healed in an instant. The powers that be won’t let that happen. The powers that be say it has to be healed politically.
~Bob Dylan (to Robert Hilburn – Nov 1980)

Musically, this is probably Dylan’s finest record, a rare coming together of inspiration, desire and talent that completely fuse strength, vision and art.
~Jann S. Wenner (rollingstone.com – Sept. 1979)

Slow Train Coming was a collection of songs Dylan had originally intended to donate to backing singer Carolyn Dennis.
~Clinton Heylin (The Recording Sessions)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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August 16: Sleeps with Angels by Neil Young and Crazy Horse was released in 1994

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

 

When dreams come crashing down like trees
I don’t know what love can do
When life is hanging in the breeze
I don’t know what love can do
My heart, my heart, I’ve got to keep my heart

 

August 16: Sleeps with Angels by Neil Young and Crazy Horse was released in 1994

 

This is an album that ranks among Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s best, and in effect it is “Tonight’s the night part 2”. It is a dark, brooding masterpiece, with many of the same themes as “Tonight’s…”. It is a record than explain to us why Neil Young have earned the honorary title, The Grunge Godfather.

Sleeps with angels (official video):

Sleeps With Angels is the twenty-second studio album by  Neil Young, his sixth with Crazy Horse, it was released on the Warner Bros. Records/Reprise (same as Tonight’s the Night by the way) label.

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August 8: Bob Dylan: Another Side Of Bob Dylan (album)

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

another side of Bob Dylan

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]“I wrote my fourth album [“Another Side of Bob Dylan”] in Greece, but that was still an American album.”
~Bob Dylan (to Robert Shelton June 1978)

“Tom Wilson, the producer, titled it that,” [Another Side of Bob Dylan] “I begged and pleaded with him not to do it. You know, I thought it was overstating the obvious. I knew I was going to have to take a lot of heat for a title like that and it was my feeling that it wasn’t a good idea coming after The Times They Are A- Changin’, it just wasn’t right. It seemed like a negation of the past which in no way was true. I know that Tom didn’t mean it that way, but that’s what I figured that people would take it to mean, but Tom meant well and he had control, so he had it his way. I guess in the long run, he might have been right to do what he did. It doesn’t matter now.”
~Bob Dylan (to Cameron Crowe Sept. 1985)

“His writing and control of atmosphere on songs like ‘To Ramona’ and ‘Spanish Harlem Incident’ come across as early flashes of the creative explosion that he was to go through in 1965–66. A great minor album, and his last solo album until the 1990s.”
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

My Back Pages:

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August 5: The Beatles released “Revolver” in 1966

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

The-Beatles-Revolver

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]”twice as good and four times as startling as Rubber Soul, with sound effects, Oriental drones, jazz bands, transcendentalist lyrics, all kinds of rhythmic and harmonic surprises, and a filter that made John Lennon sound like God singing through a foghorn.”
~Robert Christgau

The Beatles had initiated a second pop revolution – one which while galvanising their existing rivals and inspiring many new ones, left all of them far behind.
~Ian MacDonald (Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties)

….. Either way, its daring sonic adventures and consistently stunning songcraft set the standard for what pop/rock could achieve. Even after Sgt. Pepper, Revolver stands as the ultimate modern pop album and it’s still as emulated as it was upon its original release.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine (allmusic.com)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Elanor Rigby:

Released 5 August 1966
Recorded 6 April – 21 June 1966,
EMI Studios, London
Genre Rock, psychedelic rock
Length 35:01
Label Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)
Producer George Martin

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July 22: Elvis Costello – My Aim Is True (1977)

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

elvis costello my aim is true

On My Aim Is True, Elvis’ raw energy comes through in a way that’s never completely recaptured on later records. While the songs range from mellow country twang to full-on, spitting assault, there’s a strange cohesiveness to the album simply by virtue of its rough, rushed feel. Although it’s a studio album, there’s a latent energy to Nick Lowe’s production that grants My Aim Is True all the immediacy of a live show.
~Matt LeMay (pitchfork.com)

Elvis Costello’s debut album brought home to me just how timid Little Criminals really is. Costello’s best songs are anything but timid, but they’re as intelligent as some of Newman’s finest, as endearingly elusive in their meanings, and funny in the same bitter, self-deprecating manner. They are also, like Newman’s signature songs, very weird.
~Greil Marcus (rollingstone.com)

.. it’s that his sensibility is borrowed from the pile-driving rock & roll and folksy introspection of pub rockers like Brinsley Schwarz, adding touches of cult singer/songwriters like Randy Newman and David Ackles. Then, there’s the infusion of pure nastiness and cynical humor, which is pure Costello. That blend of classicist sensibilities and cleverness make this collection of shiny roots rock a punk record — it informs his nervy performances and his prickly songs. Of all classic punk debuts, this remains perhaps the most idiosyncratic because it’s not cathartic in sound, only in spirit.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine (alldylan.com)

Welcome to the working week
Oh, I know it don’t thrill you, I hope it don’t kill you
Welcome to the working week
You gotta do it till you’re through, so you better get to it
~Elvis Costello (Welcome to the working week)

Welcome to the working week

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July 10: The Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night in 1964

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

A_Hard_Day's_Nigth

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]We were different. We were older. We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers. The early stuff – the Hard Day’s Night period, I call it – was the sexual equivalent of the beginning hysteria of a relationship. And the Sgt Pepper-Abbey Road period was the mature part of the relationship.”
– John Lennon (1980)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

A Hard Day’s Night is the third album by The Beatles; it was released on July 10, 1964. The album is a soundtrack to the A Hard Day’s Night film, starring the Beatles. The American version of the album was released two weeks earlier, on 26 June 1964 by United Artists Records, with a different track listing. This is the first Beatles album to be recorded entirely on four-track tape, allowing for good stereo mixes.

HDN

In 2000, Q placed A Hard Day’s Night at number 5 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2003, the album was ranked number 388 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The soundtrack songs were recorded in late February, and the non-soundtrack songs were recorded in June. The title song itself was recorded on April 16.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]…but A Hard Day’s Night is perhaps the band’s most straightforward album: You notice the catchiness first, and you can wonder how they got it later.

The best example of this is the title track– the clang of that opening chord to put everyone on notice, two burning minutes thick with percussion (including a hammering cowbell!) thanks to the new four-track machines George Martin was using, and then the song spiraling out with a guitar figure as abstractedly lovely as anything the group had recorded.”
– Tom Ewing, Pitchfork[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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