Posts Tagged ‘Columbia Records’

BOB DYLAN – ” Bringing It All Back Home ” Released March 22nd 1965

Posted: March 22, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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bob dylan bringing it all back home

Bringing It All Back Home is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in March 1965 by Columbia Records. The album is divided into an electric and an acoustic side. On side one of the original LP, Dylan is backed by an electric rock and roll band—a move that further alienated him from some of his former peers in the folk song community. Likewise, on the acoustic second side of the album, he distanced himself from the protest songs with which he had become earlier identified (such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”), as his lyrics continued their trend towards the abstract and personal. although the acoustic side included some tracks in which other instruments were backing up Dylan and his guitar, but no drums were used.

The album reached the top ten of the Billboad Albums chart, the first of Dylan’s LPs to break into the US top 10. It also topped the UK charts later that Spring. The lead-off track, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, became Dylan’s first single to chart in the US, This is the point where Dylan eclipses any conventional sense of folk and rewrites the rules of rock, making it safe for personal expression and poetry, not only making words mean as much as the music, but making the music an extension of the words. A truly remarkable album.

“She Belongs To Me”  extols the bohemian virtues of an artistic lover whose creativity must be constantly fed (“Bow down to her on Sunday / Salute her when her birthday comes. / For Halloween buy her a trumpet / And for Christmas, give her a drum.”)

“Maggies Farm” is Dylan’s declaration of independence from the protest folk movement. Punning on Silas McGee’s Farm, where he had performed “Only A Pawn In Their Game”at a civil rights protest in 1963 (featured in the film Dont Look Back), Maggie’s Farm recasts Dylan as the pawn and the folk music scene as the oppressor. Rejecting the expectations of that scene as he turns towards loud rock’n’roll, self-exploration, and surrealism, Dylan sings: “They say sing while you slave / I just get bored.”

“Love Minus Zero/No Limit” is a low-key love song, a “hallucinatory allegiance, a poetic turn that exposes the paradoxes of love (‘She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all’)…[it] points toward the dual vulnerabilities that steer ‘Just Like A Woman.’ In both cases, a woman’s susceptibility is linked to the singer’s defenseless infatuation.”  Among other things, Bringing It All Back Home had a substantial effect on the language of a generation.

“Outlaw Blues” explores Dylan’s desire to leave behind the pieties of political folk and explore a bohemian, “outlaw” lifestyle. Straining at his identity as a protest singer, Dylan knows he “might look like Robert Ford” (who assassinated Jesse James), but he feels “just like a Jesse James”.

“On The Road Again” catalogs the absurd affectations and degenerate living conditions of bohemia. The song concludes: “Then you ask why I don’t live here / Honey, how come you don’t move?”

“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” narrates a surreal experience involving the discovery of America, “Captain Arab” (a clear reference to Captain Ahab Of Moby Dick fame), and numerous bizarre encounters. It is the longest song in the electric section of the album, starting out as an acoustic ballad before being interrupted by laughter, and then starting back up again with an electric blues rhythm. The music is so similar in places to Another Side of Bob Dylan’s “Motorpsycho Nitemare” as to be indistinguishable from it but for the electric instrumentation. The song can be best read as a highly sardonic, non-linear (historically) dreamscape parallel cataloguing of the discovery, creation and merits (or lack thereof) of the United States.

“Gates Of Eden” builds on the developments made with “Chimes of Freedom” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”. “Of all the songs about sixties self-consciousness and generation-bound identity, none forecasts the lost innocence of an entire generation better than ‘Gates of Eden,’” “Sung with ever-forward motion, as though the words were carving their own quixotic phrasings, these images seem to tumble out of Dylan with a will all their own; he often chops off phrases to get to the next line.” (This is the only song on the album that is mono on the stereo release and all subsequent reissues.)

One of Dylan’s most ambitious compositions, “Its AlrightMa (I’m Only Bleeding) is arguably one of Dylan’s finest songs. Heylin wrote that it “opened up a whole new genre of finger-pointing song, not just for Dylan but for the entire panoply of pop”, A fair number of Dylan’s most famous lyrics can be found in this song: “He not busy being born / Is busy dying”; “It’s easy to see without looking too far / That not much is really sacred”; “Even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked”; “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”; “If my thought-dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” In the song Dylan is again giving his audience a road map to decode his confounding shift away from politics. Amidst a number of laments about the expectations of his audience (“I got nothing, Ma, to live up to”) and the futility of politics (“There is no sense in trying”; “You feel to moan but unlike before / You discover that you’d just be one more / Person crying”), Dylan tells his audience how to take his new direction: “So don’t fear if you hear / A foreign sound to your ear / It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing.”

The album closes with “Its All Over Now Baby Blue” described as “one of those saddened good-bye songs a lover sings when the separation happens long after the relationship is really over, when lovers know each other too well to bother hiding the truth from each other any longer … What shines through “Baby Blue” is a sadness that blots out past fondness, and a frustration at articulating that sadness at the expense of the leftover affection it springs from.” If Paul Clayton is indeed the Baby Blue he had in mind, as has been suggested, Dylan was digging away at the very foundation of Clayton’s self-esteem.” However, the lyric easily fits in with the main theme of the album, Dylan’s rejection of political folk, taking the form of a good-bye to his former, protest-folk self, according to the Rough Guide to Bob Dylan. According to this reading, Dylan sings to himself to “Leave your stepping stones [his political repertoire] behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you’ve left [folkies], they will not follow you … Strike another match, go start anew.” The only musician besides Dylan to play on the song is Bill Lee on Bass guitar.

In a interview Dylan said, My thoughts, my personal needs have always been expressed through my songs; you can feel them there even in ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. When I write a song, when I make a record, I don’t think about whether it’ll sell millions of copies. I only think about making it, the musical end-product, the sound, and the rhythmic effect of the words. ~Bob Dylan (to Sandra Jones, June 1981)

A surrealist work heavily influenced by Rimbaud (most notably for the “magic swirlin’ ship” evoked in the lyrics), The album was hailed it as a leap “beyond the boundaries of folk song once and for all, with one of [Dylan’s] most inventive and original melodies.

“Mr. Tambourine Man” was “Dylan’s pied-piper anthem of creative living and open-mindedness…a lot of these lines are evocative without holding up to logic, even though they ring worldly.” called “rock’s most feeling paean to psychedelia, all the more compelling in that it’s done acoustically.”

One of Dylan’s most celebrated albums, “Bringing It All Back Home” was soon hailed as one of the greatest albums in rock history.
In a 1986 interview, film director John Hughes cited it as so influential on him as an artist that upon its release, “Thursday I was one person, and Friday I was another.”The album closes with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue“, However, the lyric easily fits in with the main theme of the album, Dylan’s rejection of political folk, taking the form of a good-bye to his former, protest-folk self, according to the Rough Guide to Bob Dylan. According to this reading, Dylan sings to himself to “Leave your stepping stones [his political repertoire] behind, something calls for you. Forget the dead you’ve left [folkies], they will not follow you…Strike another match, go start a new.” The only musician besides Dylan to play on the song Bill Lee on bass guitar.

Other songs and sketches recorded at this session: “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “She Belongs to Me”, “On the Road Again”, “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”, “You Don’t Have to Do That”, “California,” and “Outlaw Blues”, all of which were original compositions.

….when we recorded Bringing It All Back Home, that was like a break through point, it’s the kind of music I’ve been striving to make and I believe that in time people will see that. It’s hard to explain it, it’s that indefinable thing..
~Bob Dylan

bob dylan bringing it all back home

BOB DYLAN – ” Bob Dylan ” Self Titled Debut Album Released 19th March 1962, 55 Years Ago Today

Posted: March 19, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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bob dylan album 1962

Bob Dylan’s first album can hardly be faulted. It is a brilliant debut, a performer’s tour de force on an album called Bob Dylan, he was a somewhat typical-sounding folksinger who revealed little of the originality and revolutionary spirit that would guide further albums like “Highway 61 Revisted, Blonde On Blonde and Blood On The Tracks, making him one of the most significant artists of the past 100 years.

Of the 13 songs found on Dylan’s self-titled debut, only two were written by him. Another handful were traditional tunes on which Dylan gave himself arrangement credit. But seeing that those two originals  “Talkin’ New York,” done as a talking blues, a popular form among folksingers of the era, and “Song to Woody,” a tribute to musical hero Woody Guthrie written in Guthrie’s very own style , were far from original, the release of Bob Dylan on March 19th, 1962, which hardly seemed like a monumental event at the time. Seventeen songs were recorded, and five of the album’s chosen tracks were actually cut in single takes (“Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” “In My Time of Dyin’,” “Gospel Plow,” “Highway 51 Blues,” and “Freight Train Blues”) while the master take of “Song to Woody” was recorded after one false start. The album’s four outtakes were also cut in single takes. During the sessions, Dylan refused requests to do second takes. “I said no. I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.”

Even now, the record bears few hints that the wobbly-voiced singer backing himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica would, in just a few short years, alter the course of folk music, pop music and rock ‘n’ roll.

The album was recorded over two days in November 1961 in a New York City studio with legendary producer John Hammond, whose long career included pivotal roles in shaping the musical legacies of Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and Springsteen . He had met Dylan just a couple months earlier, when the young musician was enlisted to play harmonica on a record by folksinger Carolyn Hester. The album was ultimately recorded in three short afternoon sessions on November 20th and 22nd (1961). Hammond later joked that Columbia spent “about $402” to record it, and the figure has entered the Dylan legend as its actual cost. Despite the low cost and short amount of time, Dylan was still difficult to record, according to Hammond. “Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike,” recalls Hammond. “Even more frustrating, he refused to learn from his mistakes.

Dylan was absorbing an enormous amount of folk material from sitting and listening to contemporaries performing in New York’s clubs and coffeehouses. Many of these individuals were also close friends who performed with Dylan, often inviting him to their apartments where they would introduce him to more folk songs. At the same time, Dylan was borrowing and listening to a large number of folk, blues, and country records,

Hammond immediately signed Dylan, who began to search for songs that would make up his first album. Most of them were pretty familiar numbers to the singers and budding songwriters who hung around the New York City folk clubs Dylan frequented. Traditional favorites like “In My Time of Dyin’,” “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “House of the Rising Sun” were among those laid down in mostly single takes in late 1961.

Bob Dylan didn’t make much of a dent with music fans upon its release. In fact, it didn’t even make the albums chart. But it was a learning experience for the singer-songwriter, who was quickly finding his voice among the bustling folk scene. He was loved by his contemporaries, and soon he had enough confidence to perform his own songs in his own style.

Almost 15 months later, Dylan returned with “The Freewheelin Bob Dylan”, which included mostly original songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” The link to his debut was there, but it was almost like a new artist had emerged over the course of a year. It was a new Dylan this time out, and his legend was just around the corner.

Side one

  1. “You’re No Good” – Jesse Fuller 1:40
  2. “Talkin’ New York” – Bob Dylan 3:20
  3. “In My Time of Dyin’” – trad. arr. Dylan 2:40
  4. “Man of Constant Sorrow” – trad. arr. Dylan 3:10
  5. “Fixin’ to Die” – Bukka White 2:22
  6. “Pretty Peggy-O” – trad. arr. Dylan 3:23
  7. “Highway 51” – Curtis Jones 2:52

Side two

  1. “Gospel Plow”  – trad. arr. Dylan 1:47
  2. “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” – trad. arr. Eric von Schmidt 2:37
  3. “House of the Risin’ Sun” – trad. arr. Dave Van Ronk 5:20
  4. “Freight Train Blues” – trad., Roy Acuff 2:18
  5. “Song to Woody” – Bob Dylan 2:42
  6. “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” – Blind Lemon Jefferson 2:43

BOB DYLAN – ” Triplicate “

Posted: February 2, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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There isn’t much that  Bob Dylan has failed to do during his career. The freewheeling artist has won Grammy Awards, an Oscar, a Pulitzer citation and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, plus, of course, most recently, A Nobel Prize in Literature . He’s released 37 albums in a 54-year career whose course would be plotted with a series of sharp left turns. But, before today , he’s never released a three-disc record.

Triplicate, which drops March 31st via Columbia Records, will be the Minnesota-born songsmith’s follow-up to 2016’s traditional pop covers record “Fallen Angels”, and mines a similar vein to that Sinatra-indebted work. Each disc of Triplicate will feature a thematically arranged 10-track sequence that features efforts from across the Great American Songbook. As has been the case for much of Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour Phase,” the record was self-produced by Dylan (under his Jack Frost moniker).

You can find the tracklist for Triplicate below, along with the wistful and regret-soaked lead single “I Could Have Told You” (A song which Frank Sinatra once recorded).

BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON – ” Gods Don’t Never Change “

Posted: December 29, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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I featured the above album recorded by Various artists in a tribute to gospel and bluesman Blind Willie Johnson “God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson”, As a musician, Blind Willie Johnson has few peers. Even now through the mists of time and his own lo-fi recordings, his best tracks pulse with apocalyptic power. Listening to them today, it’s easy enough to imagine folks gathering around him on a street corner, stirred as his raspy preaching and keening guitar hit them in their souls.
Seminal gospel-blues artist Blind Willie Johnson is regarded as one of the greatest bottleneck slide guitarists. Yet the Texas street-corner evangelist is known as much for the his powerful and fervent gruff voice as he is for his ability as a guitarist. He most often sang in a rough, bass voice (only occasionally delivering in his natural tenor) with a volume meant to be heard over the sounds of the streets. Johnson only recorded a total of 30 songs during a three-year period and many of these became classics of the gospel-blues, including “Jesus Make up My Dying Bed,” “God Don’t Never Change,” and his most famous, “Dark Was the Night — Cold Was the Ground.”

And now, seventy-one years after he died, the gospel-blues great has been nominated for two Grammys.

The nominations are for the above album God Don’t Never Change, a widely praised tribute album of his tunes reinterpreted by the likes of Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, and Lucinda Williams.

They’re just the latest to sign onto the long list of Blind Willie Johnson’s admirers. Countless others—including Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Reverend Gary Davis, Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, Eric Clapton, the Blues Project, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, and Captain Beefheart have been inspired by his potent musical mix of godly lyrics and the blues’ visceral impact.

Blind Willie Johnson was born in 1897 to a sharecropper and his wife in a small town near Waco, Texas, he grew up attending the Baptist church among the most music-driven fundamentalist Protestant sects. Baptist choirs and congregations took an otherworldly “unison moaning” approach to hymns that, to the un-devout, can seem sexual as hell.

The feeling of rapture shaking his Baptist church is one likely reason the boy wanted to become a preacher. And the cigar-box guitar his father gave him when he was five set him on the road toward becoming a gospel-blues street musician. It was around this time that the young Willie went blind. Depending on who you believe, either he tried staring at a 1905 partial eclipse and suffered the consequences, or his stepmother threw lye water mixed with Caustic Soda at his father when he attacked her because she was playing around with other men, and some of it hit the boy’s face.

As blues historian Samuel Charters is the main reason we know as much about Johnson as we do put it in his liner notes for the Roots and Blues series Complete Recordings of Willie Johnson, “Singing and begging are about the only two ways a blind man can make a living in farm country.”

By his teens, Johnson was an itinerant performer who worked city streets and burgeoning Christian Conventions with a fiery panache. He honed the ferocious preaching-singing delivery out of the Baptist church that he’d also heard other street preachers use. And he developed his deft, multifaceted slide-guitar attack, mostly tuning his Stella to open-D. For recordings, at least, he wielded a knife as a slide, finessing his unparalleled dexterity to double his vocals, play call-and-response, or bristle with edgy rhythms.  Over the years, Johnson played guitar most often in an open D tuning, picking single-note melodies, while using his slide and strumming a bass line with his thumb. He was, however, known to play in a different tuning and without the slide on a few rare occasions. Regardless of his excellent blues technique and sound, Johnson didn’t want to be a bluesman, for he was a passionate believer in the Bible. So, he began singing the gospel and interpreting Negro spirituals.

By 1927, Johnson had built a big enough regional reputation to interest Columbia Records‘ “race records” scouts. Race records by black artists were aimed primarily at the 1.6 million black emigrants fleeing the rural South for the urban North and the (often unfulfilled) promise of better jobs and living conditions. (This modern-day Exodus was immortalized in painter Jacob Lawrence’s famed Migration series.) For them, race records brought the nostalgic sounds of home. Later, they became invaluable documents tracing the development of blues and roots music.

For black artists, cutting race records offered cash upfront but no royalties. They served as over-the-airwaves ads, hopefully paying off in bigger earnings on the streets and stages. Columbia rated Johnson’s popularity highly enough to pay him $50 per “usable” side—above the norm, and several times the $10-15 Robert Johnson would get for his recordings a decade later, during the Great Depression.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5HaHVKRouo

The label’s bet paid off: his debut single  “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed b/w I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole outsold their leading race records star, Bessie Smith. Over the next three years, he’d cut 30 tracks in Texas and Louisiana hotel rooms.

But the Depression dropped the bottom out of that market. Johnson’s three-year career as a recording star ended abruptly in 1930, though he continued to perform on the streets of Texas towns and cities into the 1940s. By 1945, he had his own church, the House of Prayer in Beaumont.

Despite the fact that Johnson did not record after 1930, he continued to perform on the Texas streets during the ’30s and ’40s. Unfortunately, in 1947, the Johnsons home burned to the ground.  Unable to afford repairs, he lived in the wreckage until he contracted malarial fever from exposure. His second wife told Charters no hospital would admit him—either because he was black, or because he was blind. He caught pneumonia shortly thereafter and died in the ashes of his former home approximately one week after it was destroyed. His second wife Angeline went on to work as a nurse during the 1950s.

His second wife told Charters no hospital would admit him—either because he was black, or because he was blind. When he died that September, his death certificate listed syphilis as a contributing factor to his demise.

Maybe the travelling preacher-musician found women besides his wives for company on the road. He’d be far from alone among gospel singers, whose history is ironically checkered with sexual scandals.

Whatever Johnson’s human foibles, one story suggests the effects he could have.

In December 1929, in front of the New Orleans Customs House, Johnson delivered a performance of “If I Had My Way” . The song, which would become a much-covered classic, narrates the tale of Samson and Delilah, and turns on the refrain, “If I had my way, I would tear this building down.” Apparently Johnson’s intensity so moved the crowd—and so frightened the cops—that he was arrested for inciting a riot.

This chilling track, inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011, marks a pinnacle of Blind Willie Johnson’s art. His keening guitar and wordless moans pulse with imminent fear and dread the Pale Rider of the Apocalypse as a blind black guy armed with a guitar. In 1977, astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s NASA team included it among the 27 pieces of music on the Voyager probe’s Golden Record, intended to help extraterrestrials understand who we are.

Ry Cooder has always named Johnson as a foundational influence. You can hear it any time he plays guitar, but especially on the soundtrack for Paris Texas, where he channels Blind Willie with an eerie timelessness that’ll make your scalp crawl.

Jesus Is A Dying Bed Maker

Blind Willie Johnson was far from the first to play a version of this, which can be traced back to Isaac Watts’ famed 1707 hymnal. Charley Patton, Father of the Delta Blues, was hardly a religious paragon, but included this variant song in his repertory.
 Bob Dylan’s 1962 debut album included a version patterned on White’s; the liner notes claim he used his girlfriend’s lipstick to play slide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDOFFO9Bx3k

Led Zeppelin did—what else?!—an 11-minute version, for which they—what else?!—claimed writing credit.

 Irma Thomas, The Soul Queen of New Orleans, had her first hit,  Time Is On My Side, immediately covered by the Rolling Stones. By this time, her already rich vocals matured to even richer depths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4bF_Iy4K0c

Deeply studied in roots music, Tom Waits has transformed it into something all his own. John The Revelator.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ZFV3wCTi4

Son House was a young preacher who hated the blues as “devil’s music,” started drinking and whoring and playing bottleneck guitar, and then served time at Parchman Farm for murder. He became the musical link between his friend Charley Patton and younger bluesmen Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPmacnYVb6A

Nick Cave’s dark outlook chimed with the blues, thanks to the idiosyncratic Hal Willner, who produced this live performance. of John the Revelator. Here Tom Waits mixes the blues, ghostly choirs, and typically bizarre sounds

Nick Cave singing ‘John the Revelator’ by Blind Willie Johnson. This is from one of the classic Hal Willner concerts that took place in 1999 and 2001. This can be found on The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited box set

Taj Mahal, an amazingly wide-ranging, versatile musician, was a key mover in the 1960s folk revival, along with his former Rising Sons bandmate Ry Cooder.

 Reverend Gary Davis started as a street performer and rose to become a leading light of the 1960s folk revival—and arguably Johnson’s greatest interpreter. His ferocious fingerpicking and gruff vocals sport an engaging looseness that belies their complex interaction. He switched back and forth between preaching and salacious blues with apparent impunity.

Blind Willie Johnson’s “mother’s” became “motherless” in most subsequent versions.

BOB DYLAN – ” The Freewheelin Bob Dylan ” Released this Day 27th May in 1963

Posted: May 29, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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bob dylan freewheelin

Released on this day in 1963, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan! The album that established Bob Dylan as a leader in the singer-songwriter genre and a spokesman for the youth-orientated protest movement. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is filled top to bottom with iconic songs, including “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Masters Of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

Easily the best of Dylan’s acoustic albums and a quantum leap from his debut—which shows the frantic pace at which Dylan’s mind was moving.You can see why this album got the Beatles listening. The songs at its core must have sounded like communiques from another plane  I think it was the first time I ever heard Dylan at all… And for the rest of our three weeks in Paris, we didn’t stop playing it.”  John Lennon (about The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)

Dylan had already moved on to other songs when his first masterpiece was released. Contrary to his first album, this album mostly has songs penned by the man himself.  With songs like Girl From The North Country, Masters Of War that are still a big part of Dylan’s concerts half a century later,

https://vimeo.com/10724030

Recorded on April 24th–25th, July 9th, October 26th, November 1st and 15th, December 6th, 1962, and April 24th, 1963 at Columbia Records Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York City

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on May 27, 1963 by Columbia Records. Whereas his debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, Freewheelin’ represented the beginning of Dylan’s writing contemporary words to traditional melodies. Eleven of the thirteen songs on the album are Dylan’s original compositions. The album opens with “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which became an anthem of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary soon after the release of Freewheelin’. The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as amongst Dylan’s best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene. Dylan’s lyrics embraced stories taken from the headlines about civil rights and he articulated anxieties about the fear of nuclear warfare. Balancing this political material were love songs, sometimes bitter and accusatory, and material that features surreal humor. Freewheelin’ showcased Dylan’s songwriting talent for the first time, propelling him to national and international fame. The success of the album and Dylan’s subsequent recognition led to his being named as “Spokesman of a Generation,” a label Dylan repudiated.

Bob Dylan In 1963

Track listing:

All songs written by Bob Dylan, except where noted:

Side one
1. “Blowin’ in the Wind” – 2:48
2. “Girl from the North Country” – 3:22
3. “Masters of War” – 4:34
4. “Down the Highway” – 3:27
5. “Bob Dylan’s Blues” – 2:23
6. “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” – 6:55

Side two
1. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” – 3:40
2. “Bob Dylan’s Dream” – 5:03
3. “Oxford Town” – 1:50
4. “Talkin’ World War III Blues” – 6:28
5. “Corrina, Corrina” (Traditional) – 2:44
6. “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance” (Dylan, Henry Thomas) – 2:01
7. “I Shall Be Free” – 4:49

DECLAN McKENNA – ” Brazil “

Posted: March 21, 2016 in MUSIC
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17-year-old British boy Declan McKenna’s label Columbia Records has said they haven’t been this excited about an artist since Adele. Yeah, you read that right. ADELE. Though his career is just beginning, Declan McKenna’s tracks are mellowed out guitar driven masterpieces. Stay tuned because a star is born with this one.

WET – ” Weak “

Posted: January 17, 2016 in MUSIC
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Columbia Records is proud to announce Don’t You, the long-anticipated album from the trio of friends known as Wet. An astonishingly lucid and heart-wrenching collection of 11 tracks, the album is slated for a Fall release. The lead single, “Deadwater,” debuted on Annie Mac’s influential BBC Radio 1 show

“Deadwater” is the first musical offering from the forthcoming project and the follow up to their auspicious debut, the Wet EP.  Wet, comprised of singer-songwriter Kelly Zutrau, and multi-instrumentalists Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow, make songs that resist easy categorization and invite every listener to bask in its intimate glow.

But despite their wide-ranging sensibilities, Wet never compromises its core: sturdy pop songwriting and piercing lyrics.

The album, almost entirely self-produced, was written during a period of solitude in a rented house in Western Massachusetts last year. Wet works together as a trio on every aspect of the album; Joe and Marty work on all aspects of the album’s instrumentation; they take Kelly’s demos and arrange them to perfection.

The trio met through mutual friends as college students in New York City in 2007. After a few years of informal dabbling, they began officially making music as Wet during the summer of 2012, an especially aimless and emotionally turbulent period.. After releasing a few songs on SoundCloud — like “Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl,” a weak-kneed but strong-headed breakup ballad — they quickly began attracting attention, sometimes from unexpected places before releasing their critically acclaimed debut EP Wet in May 2014.

“Weak” from Wet’s upcoming album ‘Don’t You’

JEFF LYNNE’s ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA – ” When I Was A Boy “

Posted: December 19, 2015 in MUSIC
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Music video by Jeff Lynne’s ELO performing “When I Was A Boy”, Electric Light Orchestra mastermind Jeff Lynne’s life flashes before our eyes in the video for “When I Was a Boy,” a single off the group’s upcoming new record, Alone in the Universe. The piano ballad finds the frontman reminiscing about the hopes he had for the future when he was young. As he narrates his life story, imagery of kids playing, a band loading up a van and a Lynne-like teen staring at the group’s UFO insignia pass by. Eventually, it shows the singer-songwriter himself playing a climbing guitar solo.

Jeff Lynne explained the origins of the song in a recent interview. “My interest in music grabbed me when I was a boy,” he said. “I used to go under my bed listening to the crystal set [radio]. There weren’t many good stations back then. You only got about an hour of pop music and that was on a Saturday night. That’s what led to the song, which was one of the quickest I’ve ever written lyrically and musically.”

 

BULLY – ” Too Tough “

Posted: December 18, 2015 in MUSIC
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Bully Feels Like

The members of Nashville’s slacker rock group Bully could not be more emotionally detached and dismissive than they are in a new video for the song “Too Tough.” Fronted by singer Alicia Bognanno, the band members plod their way through the song in a nondescript suburban living room, completely distracted and disinterested in their own performance. Drummer Stewart Copeland intermittently grows bored and stops playing all together.

The whole scene oozes sarcasm. “Calling me but you can’t come clean,” sings Bognanno. “I had to hear it from family, hear it on the answering machine.” Not a lot happens in this world, but it’s oddly captivating to watch, in part for Bognanno’s penetrating gaze into the camera.

“Ever since the record has come out,” Bognanno tells us via email, “I am constantly being asked about the intensity and honesty of the lyrics and whether or not I regret putting them out there. This video is a friendly reminder that, yes, obviously we care, but we don’t need to be taken so seriously 100% of the time.”

“Too Tough” is from Bully’s debut full-length, Feels Like, released earlier this year on Columbia Records.

LEON BRIDGES – ” The River “

Posted: December 18, 2015 in MUSIC
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Leon Bridges went from washing dishes in a Texas hole-in-the-wall to the forefront of soul revivalism. Straight-laced and classic in every aspect of the word, Bridges favors tailored ’50s suits in restrained colors and scooped doo-wop beats to frame his truly spectacular crooning. His debut album for Columbia, Coming Home, contains one barn-burner, though: Final track “River” taps into deep, fiery spiritualism. Neo-soul can be bent in many shapes, and it will be even more telling to see where Bridges heads when he outgrows home.

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