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A great, great album that came out a couple months ago. Here's what I wrote about it for my blog:
Songs for Sixty Five Roses is a beautiful record for a great cause. John Plymale’s daughter was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Plymale turned his personal trauma into something positive by enlisting the aid of musicians he knows to make an anthology of covers of songs by North Carolina musicians performed by North Carolina musicians. The proceeds go to cystic fibrosis research.
I’ve had my copy 24 hours now and listened to it half a dozen times. So far two tracks stand out.
Eric Bachmann does a version of the old Let’s Active standard “Every Word Means No.” The original version is a shiny happy pop song, with bunny rabbits in the video and occasionally used as party background music in episodes of Friends. This version is, um, stark. Recorded in an Outer Banks hotel room. You can almost smell the isolation and desolation. Just a guy with a couple instruments sighing: “Watching . . . for a sound to lead me to where ever you are; I can’t help it, I will always want you.”
Just makes me want to go far away and hide from the world.
Then there’s Will McFarlane doing James Taylor’s “Shower the People.” I was prepared to dislike this song. Like so many mid-80s hipsters I believed in the gospel of Lester Bangs. The anthology of his writing Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is the most dog eared book in my collection. It has a magnum opus on James Taylor and how his psuedo-sentimentality is a corrosive element on society, along with some rather morbid fantasies about how JT should be punished. Besides, I was sick of the constant playing of “Carolina In My Mind” at every UNC orientation event I attended in 1985.
But I opened my mind and heart. This version is done by McFarlane, someone I had never heard of but who was Bonnie Riatt’s long time guitarist. There’s a subtle difference between this version and Taylors. McFarlane’s voice has just an element of damage, like he’s smoked a few too many cigarettes. He’s just a little wounded which makes it perfect for this song.
The lyrics are clichéd but, well, as much as I hate to admit it, James Taylor did have a point. “Shower the people you love with love and show them the way you feel. Things are gonna work out fine if you only will.” It sounds like something I’d say to get laid back in my college days. But it’s true. One of the hardest things to do is tell people you love them and admit that you need help, at least for me.
Fortunately, Plymale is stronger than I am. He asked for help and his many talented friends responded. Now I have the pleasure of listening to one of the most beautiful records I’ve ever heard.
Thanks John. Thanks to everybody else involved in this project.
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