7 February 2013 – Love Will Keep Us Together (Day 38)

Let’s face it.  It’s become apparent I’ve started to select albums thematically to fit the blog entry I’ve decided to write on the day. Then there are other days, like today, where I take some albums, play stuff as the mood hits me and then try to make sense of my selections whilst in the act of writing the post.

I knew today wasn’t going to provide much opportunity as I had a number of commitments and meetings.  It could possibly explain why the two albums I did play were both albums where there is a sort of variety to the song selection.  No real point in playing a conceptually linked album or something that is designed to be consumed whole, is there?

But then I had to think of a title for the post.  Ideally, I try to link something to a song, album or band title or my own rituals such as delving into the plastic pending crate.  Nothing came for a while until I realised there was sort of a family connection, expect in one instance, the couple concerned are not married.  So I though some more and all I could come up with was the reference to the Captain And Tennille’s hit which seems quite perverse when today I’m writing about:

(110) Dave Rawlings Machine – A Friend Of A Friend

Rawlings is the musical and life partner of Gillian Welch.  Theirs is a true partnership; he plays on her albums and appears on her CD booklets, and she does the reverse.  They both co-write many of the songs that appear on their albums and play at each other’s shows.   Although this album is credited to the Dave Rawlings Machine, it is really a Rawlings solo album, or a Rawlings/Welch album in which Rawlings does most of the lead vocals.  (Why they don’t release all of their albums under a Rawlings/Welch or Welch/Rawlings moniker with each of them singing the numbers they predominantly wrote, a la using one totally inappropriate example, the Bob Mould/Grant Hart songs within Husker Du is totally beyond me.)  To me it is another excellent album with a great combination of bluegrass, Americana and country styled tunes. The Rawlings/Welch tunes are of their usual high quality, especially the opener Ruby which sounds like a great undiscovered song by The Band.   Other highlights are covers; Method Acting/Cortez The Killer welds a Bright Eyes track to one of Neil Young’s classics with a change in lead vocalist at the appropriate moment and To Be Young (Is To be Sad, To Be High) is Rawlings version of the song he and Ryan Adams wrote and performed on the latter’s Heartbreaker album.

(111) Martha Wainwright – Self Titled

This is the debut album by the daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and sister to Rufus Wainwright.  It is a great mix of soft rock, soul and folk.  It’s notable for two things.  First the sheer power of her voice that is clearly able to adjust to songs with varying degrees of difficulty. Anyone who can, on my version of the album, take a song in French such as Dis, Quand Reviendras-Tu? and make it her sound like own clearly has a talent.  (And, yes, being born and raised in Canada helps too!)  The other is the unforgettable Bloody Mother F***ing A**hole, a song reputedly aimed squarely at her father.