the Byrds - Notes from Pig City

Emma Swift: Blonde On The Tracks

Perhaps it’s easy to forget, nearly 60 years into his career, that the songs of Bob Dylan were made famous by other artists with sweeter, more radio-friendly voices than the one David Bowie later described as a mix of sand and glue. Between 1963 and 1965, Joan Baez, the Byrds, Peter, Paul and Mary and many others all helped turn Dylan into the voice of his generation for people who couldn’t stand his voice.

Eventually his label, CBS, started marketing him with the phrase that “Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan”. Which is still true, even as that untutored yowl – through age, experience and more age – turned into a croon and, finally, a croak. Now, however, he may have a rival to his own title: nobody has ever sung Dylan quite like Nashville-based Australian singer-songwriter Emma Swift. And maybe nobody (other than Dylan) has ever sung him better, either.

Swift’s splendidly titled album Blonde On The Tracks is a collection of eight Dylan songs that she began recording in 2017 and completed earlier this year, when she became the first artist out of the gate to cover I Contain Multitudes, from Dylan’s new album Rough And Rowdy Ways.… Read more..

The Bats: same as it ever was

Music / January 22, 2017 / 4 minutes of reading

Robert Scott has just knocked off work, “down at the local kids’ school” in Port Chalmers just outside of Dunedin, the university town near the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island that, from the late 1970s, was the birthplace of punk across the Tasman. Now, he says, he’s home to do some interviews: a reflection of the permanent double life of a musician in his home country.

Scott was, and remains, one-third of the Clean, probably the most influential of all the bands to be released on the famed Flying Nun label. He is also the leader of the Bats, who have just released their seventh album, The Deep Set, in a career spanning over 30 years. Both bands have proven extremely influential, especially in American college rock circles, and still record and tour internationally.

But unless you’re a Finn brother, making a living off music in the Shaky Isles remains a near impossibility (another New Zealand band, the 3Ds, once turned down an offer to tour with Nirvana on the grounds that it would have cost them their day jobs).

The result for Scott is an ordinary, domestic life punctuated by bursts of artistic activity. “It’s a wee bit strange, because when you tell people you’ve got a day job, they can’t quite believe it – they figure I should be relaxing and living off royalties,” Scott says.… Read more..

The Bats: same as it ever was Read More »