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[mcq]

I have always adored Cat Power's very personal cover versions of her favourite songs.  She is very selective about what she sings, but her choices are unerring, and, at all times, you hear a profound respect and a sense of reverence for the song and she expresses this by producing something that is deeply personal.

Here is her take on Otis Redding's Remember Me.  What I hear in this performance is a gently probing intensity, which builds inexorably throughout the song.  There is an insistence here that is insidious, as she urges a restless lover not to leave.  There is a real sense of anguish here, a fear that she will be abandoned, and there is something also spiritual here, an impression of speaking to her God as well as to her beloved, an imploring that borders on the prayerful.  "We are all only here just for a little while."  I hear in this song a very gentle remonstrating with a loved one, that ends in weary hopefulness, that may well be delusional but which is all that she can cling to.  




I have posted this before but it's worth mentioning again.  Her cover of Who Knows Where The Time Goes has been haunting me for ages.  She takes immense liberties with the song, and you will find more grace and wisdom in Nina Simone's classic version, but Marshall finds an aching tenderness in her performance of this song which belies her intuitive understanding of its theme of melancholic reflection and a sense of someone who has been snatched away from her and is gone forever.  The sense of abandonment is painfully present also as her fickle friends, one by one, desert her but there is a hint here that she has driven them all away, preferring to pine alone.  Every word is carefully measured and lingered over and suffused with a deep longing as she appears to be inwardly reflecting on what this song means to her.  There are some songs I just obsess over and this is one of those special ones.  The more you hear it, the more you hear in it. 

[mcq]

I've been listening a great deal to Sharon van Etten's most recent album, Are We There.  This album has received somewhat mixed reviews in comparison to her 2012 album, Tramp, but, to me, represents an advance over the earlier album.  Tramp was one of the most painfully visceral song suites of recent years but van Etten has confessed in interviews that she felt her contributions were eclipsed by Aaron Dessner's production work and it was her intention to make Are We There a fuller, more rounded representation of her songwriting ability.  Van Etten strikes me as one of the most unsentimental and forthright songwriters performing at the moment.  Like many songwriters, all of her work is entirely personal but van Etten does not attempt to varnish or sentimentalise the intense emotions that she wishes to express.  There is a honest rawness to her lyrics and to her performances.  She has been criticised for the bluntness and occasional clumsiness of her musical arrangements and lyrics but she evidently feels that a smoother, more polished sound and more self-consciously literate lyrics would dilute the emotional message that she wishes to convey.  Listening to her work, I am reminded of John Cale and P.J. Harvey, both of whom have always made emotional authenticity their watchword.  Time and again, when I hear her voice, I hear the unaffected natural, very human quality that belie the influence of Linda Thompson and Kath Bloom.  The selections I have chosen are all solo performances which I believe showcase her at her most intensely emotional.  These are very private performances and you can tell from every involuntary smile, wince, shudder and reflexive cry just what these songs mean to her.










Finally, a very beautiful take on Nick Cave's People Ain't No Good.

[Ivor]

Me And The Devil Blues – Cormac Breslin aka CC Brez.

The Robert Johnson blues standard performed LAST NIGHT in Abner Brown’s Barbershop, Rathmines, Dublin.




some previous stuff from the man....

[mcq]

Extraordinary.  A 20 year old Laura Nyro at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 singing Poverty Train.  No finer footage exists of Nyro in her prime.  A stage presence that was transfixing and a vocal delivery that was passionate and fiery yet tender and intimate.  It seems hard to credit the fact that, despite the cries of "beautiful, beautiful" and the warm applause, she believed her performance was a failure and rushed off the stage in tears.  

[cybot]

Extraordinary.  A 20 year old Laura Nyro at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 singing Poverty Train.  No finer footage exists of Nyro in her prime.  A stage presence that was transfixing and a vocal delivery that was passionate and fiery yet tender and intimate.  It seems hard to credit the fact that, despite the cries of "beautiful, beautiful" and the warm applause, she believed her performance was a failure and rushed off the stage in tears.  

Extraordinary indeed.....

[mcq]

This is beautiful.  St. Vincent performing Jackson Browne's These Days at a show in San Francisco in 2009.  There is another moving version of this song that I've posted before from a studio session that she did back in 2007 but I really think that Annie Clarke has a special way with this song and it's always a pleasure to hear her perform it.  Delicately phrased and infused with a sense of weary resignation, she takes her time and lingers over the words, savouring each and every one and appearing to recoil inwardly at the invocation of past memories and past failures.  As much as I love her current live performances, I hope that one day she will find her way back to doing something so tender and intimate as this.  Performances like this really highlight just what a good singer and interpreter of songs she is.

[tony]

Another classic from the vaults of Youtube. I expect Nige to swot up on this for next week and pick his favourite track from this tour for testing!

[jkeny]

Just a little off-topic humour but I challenge you not to be remind of this send-up every time you see a politician on a TV debate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT5NwNiUW4o

[Derek]

Blackberry Smoke - Man of Constant Sorrow

[Fran]

Its probably been posted before, but this little girl is quite incredible... just hope she doesn't end up badly in years to come: