Bloggerhythms

Kudos to Neil Young for sticking it to Spotify . I'm quite sure that the rock superstar doesn't care what I write or that he'll even know what I post, but as a salute to him for doing the right thing I'm featuring a Young song for this edition of  Almost Hits . "Cinnamon Girl" is the opening track on Young's second solo LP, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere . It's one of the elite albums in his catalog because it also has "Down By The River" and my favorite from it, "Cowgirl In The Sand." "Cinnamon Girl" is also the first song he released using Crazy Horse as his backup band. Most people are more familiar with the album version that differs slightly from the single. The guitar outro is eliminated - making a it a little shorter for radio - and Danny Whitten's vocals are more pronounced in the mix, making it sound more like a duet. Whitten sings high harmony while Young takes care of the bottom end. Also, the 45 RPM is in...

Most classic rock fans know who Robert Lamm is, but it's less likely they're familiar with Jim Peterik. Peterik was the leader of The Ides of March - a horn band like Chicago - who had a #2 hit with "Vehicle" way back in 1970. He had additional success later as one of the founders of Survivor  - a band that turned "Eye of the Tiger" into a big hit after recording it for Rocky III in 1982. In the sadly closed-down year of 2020 Peterik wrote the lyrics to a Robert Lamm track that sounds somewhat like the pop side of Chicago's long-gone, 70s jazz-rock. Lamm enlisted help from some of his newer bandmates using file sharing instead of bringing them together to record the single "Everything's Gonna Work Out Fine." By the mid-70s Chicago decided to become a more mainstream band. "Everything" represents the four lane highway many of their original fans wish they merged onto in the 80s instead of the muddy, rutted, dirt road to nowhere the...

Under The Covers, Volume 1 is the first of three such albums by Matthew Sweet and former Bangles singer and guitarist, Susanna Hoffs. This set covers fourteen songs from the 60s and one, "Run To Me," was an early 70s Bee Gees' single. The duo's next two collaborations featured songs they love from the 70s and 80s. Both Sweet and Hoffs do a fine job on all three albums but my favorite is this one on which they recorded both big hits and more obscure fare that prevents the album from sounding like warmed up leftovers. If you're a person who wants a complete reworking of someone else's original song perhaps you'll be disappointed because many of the tunes are quite faithful to the records we know well. A prime example is The Beatles' "And Your Bird Can Sing." It's cool that Sweet and Hoffs chose a song by the Liverpool quartet that was never a single, so it's possible that not everyone is familiar with it. This John Lennon track is one o...

Bridge Over Troubled Water is the fifth and final album Simon and Garfunkel made together. The eleven song record is quite eclectic. It's considered to be the gem of gems in the duo's catalog. It was released in January 1970 and they parted ways just a few months later. While they would get together in the future for a few concerts and a live album - plus a one-off single, " My Little Town ," that appeared on a solo album for each one - this marked the end of their time together as true collaborators. All of the songs, except for a cover of The Everly Brothers' "Bye By Love," were written by Simon and the title track is often considered the best song the two ever produced together. The single that gave the album its name soared all of the way to #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 and stayed there for six weeks. It won Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. Simon wrote it for his partner to sing although Garfunkel originally insisted that ...

Paul McCartney has repeatedly turned down requests to write his autobiography. Instead, he said we can get a good accounting of his life through " my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life."   In his own excellent foreword to his newly published, voluminous anthology the seventy-nine year old icon wrote , " Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do."  The result is  The Lyrics , a huge, two volume book set that discusses 154 songs McCartney wrote throughout his life -  from 1956 to the present -  with The Beatles, Wings, and as a solo artist. There is also an introduction written by Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, who helped edit and assemble the book for McCartney. Muldoon is not his ghostwriter, the prose all belongs to the talented man listed as the author.  Song...