Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section members Roger Hawkins and David Hoo.
When it got to Paul Simon, that’s when it really developed. That was the first time we cut a true pop act. Of course the reason he came down was to get a black sound. He liked what we got on the Staples’ ‘I’ll Take You There’. We cut ‘Mardi Gras’ in thirty minutes, so he pulls out six more songs and asks which ones we wanna cut. We said, ‘This is it, if we don’t jump on this one, we’re losing our chance.’” Barney Hoskyns, Sonic Boomers
Originally Published: 06/15/2009, Rock’s Backpages
“The music on the record is built around the familiar fiddles, mandolins and harmonies of rural Appalachia, and yet there’s no regionalism to speak of in Ms. Jones’s supple, loamy alto. She sings of the hard times, murderous urges and chilling loneliness that haunt the old Anglo-Celtic ballads but, with one exception, sets her plain-spoken narratives resolutely in the present. She approaches the mountain-ballad tradition not as a curiosity or antique but as a renewable vernacular that’s just as capable of speaking to the human condition now as it was 80 years ago.” BILL FRISKICS-WARREN, New York Times
“Some writers sit down every day for two or three hours, at least, to write, whether they are in the mood or not. Others wait for inspiration. Dylan scoffs at the discipline of daily writing.
“Oh, I’m not that serious a songwriter,” he says, a smile on his lips. “Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together.”
He sometimes writes on a typewriter but usually picks up a pen because he says he can write faster than he can type. “I don’t spend a lot of time going over songs,” Dylan says. “I’ll sometimes make changes, but the early songs, for instance, were mostly all first drafts.”
He doesn’t insist that his rhymes be perfect. “What I do that a lot of other writers don’t do is take a concept and line I really want to get into a song and if I can’t figure out for the life of me how to simplify it, I’ll just take it all — lock, stock and barrel — and figure out how to sing it so it fits the rhyming scheme. I would prefer to do that rather than bust it down or lose it because I can’t rhyme it.”
Themes, he says, have never been a problem. When he started out, the Korean War had just ended. “That was a heavy cloud over everyone’s head,” he says. “The communist thing was still big, and the civil rights movement was coming on. So there was lots to write about.
“But I never set out to write politics. I didn’t want to be a political moralist. There were people who just did that. Phil Ochs focused on political things, but there are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all. We can feel very generous one day and very selfish the next hour.”
Dylan found subject matter in newspapers. He points to 1964’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” the story of a wealthy Baltimore man who was given only a six-month sentence for killing a maid with a cane. “I just let the story tell itself in that song,” he says. “Who wouldn’t be offended by some guy beating an old woman to death and just getting a slap on the wrist?”
Other times, he was reacting to his own anxieties.
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” helped define his place in pop with an apocalyptic tale of a society being torn apart on many levels.”Robert Hillbum, LA Times
“Mr. Waits was a vivid and unusual presence in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when he began recording for Dacid Geffen’s label Asylum Records, home to performers like Jackson Browne and the Eagles. He was the antihippie, a saloon singer who wore greasy ties and pointed shoes, anything but laid back.
“He was never going to be,” as one observer puts it, “the fourth member of Crosby, Stills and Nash.”
How much of Mr. Waits’s wino-dirtball routine, Mr. Hoskyns wonders, was an act? Where did Tom Waits end, and “Tom Waits” begin? Mr. Hoskyns suggests that the persona may have been an around-the-clock bit of performance art that simply became his reality.”
“Mr. Hoskyns quotes one admirer who asks: “Who needs alcohol and drugs when you have Tom Waits?”” Dwight Garner, New York Times
Jamey Johnson: In Color (Live at David Letterman Show)
“Johnson, 33, has recently found success as a performer – winning the Academy of Country Music Song of the Year award for “In Color,” a classic story-song literally and figuratively full of black-and-white imagery from “That Lonesome Song” – but he’s been a respected songwriter in Music City for several years.” The Boston Globe
“Bob Marley was a gamble. I gave him £4,000 up front to make the first album. Everybody said I was mad and I’d never see the money again. The Wailers had a reputation for being total rebels and being sort of impossible to deal with. It was simply because they had been treated unfairly. I took the risk and trusted Bob and it paid off many times over. They took me to the studio and played me some of the songs – “Slave Driver”, “Concrete Jungle”. I was looking for rebel, militant music. Reggae at that point was known as novelty music. I wanted to work on the record to make it more palatable for the rock audience. Jimi Hendrix was a model, I felt Bob could be that big. I moved things around, I added rock guitar, synthesisers, and expanded into solos. I needed to polish it to bring in the rock audience and to get them accepted as a black rock group. “Catch A Fire” only sold about 14.000 copies in its first year, but got great reviews.”" Chris Blackwell
“Island is now part of the Universal Music Group but retains such a cachet that its logo still adorns releases by Amy Winehouse, Keane, Scott Matthews and Paul Weller. Next month, Island celebrates its 50th anniversary with a week of concerts at the Shepherds Bush Empire in London, the publication of Keep On Running – The Story of Island Records, a coffee-table book edited by Chris Salewicz, and a photo, artwork and memorabilia exhibition in London, prompting its former supremo to comment: “It was always my intention at Island to make records that stood the test of time, and I’m proud that Island is still a potent force in music 50 years since that first release.”"Pierre Perrone, The Independent
Elvis Presley: Little Sister (Live at MGM Studios)
“Bill Flanagan: This Dream of You has this wonderful South of the Border feel, but at the same time, I detect echoes of Sam Cooke, the Coasters, the Brill Building, and Phil Spector. Were those records from the 50’s and 60’s important to you? Did you try to capture some of that flavor in This Dream of You?
Bob Dylan: Those fifties and sixties records were definitely important. That might have been the last great age of real music. Since then or maybe the seventies it’s all been people playing computers. Sam Cooke, the Coasters, Phil Spector, all that music was great but it didn’t exactly break into my consciousness.
Back then I was listening to Son House, Leadbelly, the Carter family, Memphis Minnie and death romance ballads. As far as songwriting, I wanted to write songs like Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. Timeless and eternal. Only a few of those radio ballads still hold up and most of them have Doc Pomus’ hand in them. Spanish Harlem, Save the Last Dance for Me, Little Sister … a few others. Those were fantastic songs. Doc was a soulful cat. If you said there was a little bit of him in This Dream of You I would take it as a compliment.” Bill Flanagan, The Telegraph
Neil Young: Behind the Wheel (from his new album Fork in the Road)
“Neil might be writing records as quickly as a blogger these days but musically stuck in the past, never letting go of his chunky Les Paul and candied folk harmonies, embracing his status as an old crank so enthusiastically he happily presents himself as a crazy old coot on the album’s cover.” Allmusic Blog
“Young’s latest is a concept album about his LincVolt project, a zero-emissions auto technology that will reduce dependency on oil, and by extension war, environmental destruction, etc. Worthy? Yes. Interesting in theory? Sure. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, the ten-song record comes off as enthusiastic but hasty, and the pretext for writing most songs far more involved and involving than the songs themselves.” PopMatters
“Much like Young’s 2006 “Living With War” album, which he assembled in startlingly short order, “Fork in the Road” feels like the outcome of midnight-oil writing and recording sessions by a man on a mission. Among the titles: “Off the Road,” “Hit the Road,” “Get Behind the Wheel.” You get the idea.” LA Times
