Month: March 2020

Willie Nelson’s rough and ready reputation as a country music outlaw was thrown into stark relief when the Red Headed Stranger reinvented himself as balladeer on 1978’s Stardust. A songwriter as gifted as Nelson doing a record of covers was considered unusual and perhaps Stardust was not intended to be the tour de force that it became but nevertheless this collection of standards produced by Stax Records legend Booker T Jones transformed Willie from country music icon to international pop-star overnight. Perfectly augmented by his band’s restrained presence, Nelson’s emotional reimaginings of classics like Georgia on my Mind and Unchained Melody helped to distinguish him as one of the finest musical interpreters of his generation. These days a standards album evokes the lounge-lizard croon of artists in their twilight years trying to reinvent themselves, but Nelson’s career was white hot when he made Stardust. It was a bold move, and a smart one too, allowing his smoky drawl to make an indelible mark on the American songbook.

Born to Run is the record that made Springsteen into a bonafide star – like Kerouac and James Dean rolled into one, the Boss injects a cinematic sense of the romantic into this portrait of the working class Jersey Shore of 1974. Alive, in love and punch drunk on the possibilities of youth, freedom and rock n’ roll, the universal language of Born to Run makes you feel nostalgic for a world you have never known. Springsteen’s poetry and unflinching sincerity are so inscrutable that Born to Run doesn’t feel like a trope heavy concept album for a second – it possesses a strange quality that absolves you of cynicism the moment the needle drops, immersing you in tales of young love, tough guys, motorcycles and the American dream for thirty-nine minutes and twenty-three seconds. Scoring the festivities, of course, are the almighty E Street Band. Able to turn time to slow motion with the tap of a glockenspiel or make the hairs on your neck stand up with the rumble of Clarence Clemons’ iconic saxophone, the E Street Band flesh out Springsteen’s world and almost make it materialise before you. Born to Run is up there with Springsteen’s – or anybody’s – finest work. It doesn’t get much better than this! Just put it on your turntable, “roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair. The night’s busted open. These two lanes will take us anywhere.”

After the Gold Rush sees Young develop further as a visionary songwriter after the rich successes of his previous LP Everybody Knows this is Nowhere. Although the simmering guitar jams of the previous LP return (Southern Man, When You Dance I Can Really Love), the heart of this record is in Young’s lyricism. Songs like the surreal title track and Don’t Let it Bring You Down highlight Young’s ability to blend darkness and light into the same lyric and see him shifting gears toward the more folk oriented Harvest. Only Love Can Break Your Heart is demonstrates Young’s gift for heart-string-pulling balladry and Southern Man with it’s condemnation of bigotry in America’s south earned itself a huge clap back in the form of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama. After the Gold Rush can be seen as a transition between the rockin’ Crazy Horse assisted Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Harvest but I find it to be a perfect blend of the two, capturing Neil at his most creative and vital.