June 22: Happy 83rd Birthday Kris Kristofferson – His 10 best songs

 

June 22: Happy Birthday Kris Kristofferson (born 1936 – age 81) – His 10 best songs

One of my fav artists, and he’s written many great songs.

This is a list (+ videos), not a bio… so here goes:
(preferred album version included)

  1. Sunday Morning Coming Down – The Austin Sessions (1999)
  2. Me and Bobby McGee – Kristofferson (1970)
  3. Why Me – The The Austin Sessions (1999)
  4. Help Me Make It Through the Night – Kristofferson (1970)
  5. For the Good Times – The The Austin Sessions (1999)
  6. Here Comes That Rainbow Again – The Essential Kris Kristofferson (2004)
  7. The Silver Tongued Devil and I – The Silver Tongued Devil and I (1971)
  8. To Beat the Devil – The Austin Sessions (1999)
  9. Nobody Wins – The Austin Sessions (1999)
  10. The Pilgrim, Chapter 33 – The Silver Tongued Devil and I (1971)

Yes! I LOVE “The Austin Sessions” album…

There are many great video clips on youtube, and I’ve tried to compile the best versions (live versions are as always preferred):

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Well I woke up Sunday morning,
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
An’ I shaved my face and combed my hair,
An’ stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

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10 Best Rolling Stones Songs from 1965 (Videos & Spotify Playlist)

Here is my top 10 list of songs recorded in 1965.

  1. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
  2. The Last Time
  3. Get off of My Cloud
  4. 19th Nervous Breakdown
  5. As Tears Go By
  6. Mothers Little Helper
  7. Play With Fire
  8. I´m Free
  9. She Said Yeah
  10. Cry To Me

1. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (Jagger/Richards)

This raw classic cemented the Stones as the nasty anti-Beatles. .. Keith says the way they wrote the song became typical for how he and Mick collaborated. “I would say on a general scale, I would come up with the song and the basic idea,” Keith wrote, “and Mick would do all the hard work of filling it in and making it interesting.”
– Bill Janovitz (Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones)

Built on the Stones’ greatest riff, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” near-singlehandedly turned “rock & roll” from a teenage fad into something far heavier and more dangerous.
rollingstone.com

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10 Great Country songs from the 1970s (videos & spotify playlist)

The 1970s brought us many great country songs, here are 10 I´m listening to today.

I´ve also added a spotify playlist at the end of the post.

Kris Kristofferson – Help me make it through the Night (1970)

Take the ribbon from your hair
Shake it loose and let it fall
Layin’ soft upon my skin
Like the shadows on the wall

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10 Great old acoustic blues songs

“I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.”
― Cornel West, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir

If you don’t know the blues… there’s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
-Keith Richards

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It’s better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.
-Willie Dixon

Here´s a list with 10 GREAT old acoustic blues songs. I´ve added youtube “videos” & a spotify playlist.

 

Blind Willie Johnson – Dark was the night, cold was the ground (1927/29)

Check out: 

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The Best Albums 2016: 20 to 11 (part 2/3)

(Check out part 1 here, 30-21)

20 Cass McCombs – Mangy Love

Released: August 26 , 2016
Producer: 
Rob Schnapf, Cass McCombs & Dan Horne
Label: Anti Records
“Mangy Love makes itself distinct from its predecessors with its outright jazziness and ethereality. Wit’s End was a traipse though the densely forested hills of solitude; Big Wheel and Others was a road trip through odd, nameless American sub-societies,; and Mangy Love is Cass McCombs in outer space.”
– Dustin Lowman (Drowned in Sound)
This album really made me listen to the lyrics, I was fooled by the sweet melodies – but the lyrics are tough, hard, rough poems about love,sex, life and death. McCombs knows how to play with words (Switch):
Turn you on, you light up the room
Turn you off, it’s dark as a tomb– Hallgeir
End of Year lists
# 33 – American Songwriter
# 59 – Gorilla vs. Bear
# 29 – LA Music Blog
# 26 – MOJO
# 25 – Piccadilly Records
# 7 – Q Magazine
# 31 – Stereogum
# 31 – Uncut
Best songs: Opposite House, Bum Bum Bum and Switch 

Continue reading “The Best Albums 2016: 20 to 11 (part 2/3)”