10 Songs: Tuesday, March 1st, 2016

1 – Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning – Blind Willie Johnson – I’ve been listening to this blues spiritual guy a lot over the past week, Tom Waits took his vocal affectations from, took em elsewhere, but took em. This is just acoustic guitar and two voices, but has all the power you’d imagine it has – A

2 – Motherless Children – Eric Clapton – For some reason I always assumed this was a Blind Willie song, it is actually a traditional though first recorded by him in 1927 and this is a superb version, from debatably Clapton’s greatest album – A+

3 – Motherless Children Have A Hard Time – Robert Pete Williams – Discovered in jail, this single finger picked masterwork is closer to the original though the guitar is very  fluid and yet angular., His voice was superb – A

4 – The Soul Of Man – Tom Waits – Waits gift here is his ability to remain true to his own dancehall handclapping self and yet completely honoring the original – A

5 – God Don’t Never Change – Lucinda Williams – AFter years, really all the way back to 1998 and her breakthrough, I’ve been cold to Lucinda, but her last two albums were excellent to my ears and she was fine on stage (I’d seen her perform a terrible set in the 00s). She turns this blues giant of a song into a country rock blues – A

6 – Dog On A Chain – Emitt Rhodes – Very tuneful Americana – B+

7 –  Summer In The City – The Lovin’ Spoonful – One of the best New York songs ever – A+

8 – Nashville Cats -The Del McCoury Band – This is kinda funny, Nashville cats playing about about Nashville cats – A

9 – A Change Of My Heart – The 1975 – Matthew Healy’s ode to Taylor Swift who dumped him for no reason, one of the best songs of the year – A

10 – Famous – Kanye West – One of the great songs of the year, featuring the Swift dis – A