There’s a new album out, a tribute to the late great Tom Petty, called Petty Country: A Country Music Celebration of Tom Petty. Below is my favorite cut on the album, Rhiannon Giddens, the Silk Road Ensemble, and Benmont Tench doing a lovely version of “Don’t Come Around Here No More.”
In 1992, Mary-Chapin Carpenter released her wonderful album Come On, Come On, and one of the tracks was a nifty little bluegrass cover of Dire Straits’s “The Bug.”
I recently got the big-ass Dire Straits multi-CD collection Live 1978-1992, which has a ton of live material, some of it previously released, but also with some new and obscure stuff. One of the latter is the Encores CD released with three live performances on it. Here’s one, of one of my favorites of theirs, “Solid Rock.”
I had never heard of Florence + the Machine before I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. When I rewatched the movie for this past week’s great superhero movie rewatch, I was once again taken with how perfect their song “The Dog Days are Over” was for the absolutely joyous closing scene where first Groot, then Rocket, then all of Knowhere dance happily to the tune.
Here’s the original recording with the official video from F+tM from 2010 as well as the actual scene from GotG3.
The late Robbie Robertson’s 1998 album Contact from the Underworld of Redboy is the perfect next project, as it feels like it brings together elements of Robbie Robertson, Storyville, and Music for the Native Americans. Again, way too many good songs to choose from here, especially “In the Blood” (which I’m constantly conflating with “Can’t Let Go” by Caught a Ghost, which is used as the theme song for the TV show Bosch) and “Rattlebone,” but ultimately the one I love to listen to most is this mix of spoken-word blues, R&B, hip-hop, and jazz, “Take Your Partner by the Hand.”
In tribute to Robbie Robertson, who died earlier this week, I’m going to be doing some of his music, both on his own and with The Band. We start with the song that Robertson wrote for Richard Manuel after he committed suicide in 1986, “Fallen Angel” on the Robbie Robertson album from 1987, which has lovely backup vocals by Peter Gabriel.
In 1989, Billy Joel released “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which was a rapid-fire look at the major events in his own lifetime, from the end of World War II to what was then the present day.
When ToniAnn and I saw Joel in concert in 2019, he performed the song, and I found myself disappointed that it hadn’t been updated — it was a time capsule, really, just from the end of the 1940s to the end of the 1980s. I was hoping there’d be, like, one additional verse that brought the song up to date.
Well, apparently Fall Out Boy heard my plea, as they just released a new version of the song that covers the years from 1989 to 2023. Unlike Joel’s song, the stuff isn’t in chronological order, but it’s still an impressive summary of a piece of what happened in the world over the past three-and-a-half decades….
Here’s both the original and the new one. Thanks to ToniAnn for letting me know about the new one.
A glorious performance from one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction concerts of the Chuck Berry classic “Sweet Little Rock and Roller,” featuring (at least) Kid Rock, Steve Winwood, Tom Petty, and tons more (it’s just billed as “Kid Rock and the Rock Hall Jam Band,” which is less than helpful).
Today begins Farpoint 2023, and as per usual, my band the Boogie Knights will be performing a concert on Saturday morning. In honor of the occasion, here’s the band ten years ago at Farpoint 2013 performing “Brewing in Elsinore,” a Hamlet-themed spoof of John Fogerty’s “Looking Out My Back Door.”
Today I’m driving down to Maryland to rehearse with the Boogie Knights for our concert at Farpoint next weekend. Here’s one of my favorites of our songs, “House on Pooh Corner,” a tribute to A.A. Milne’s books to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun.”
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