Tbh, I'm a little disappointed that my joke in post #32394 got passed over. Took a bit of effort and imagination.
I've stuck with it! I think I know what's going on now (to an extent) even reading the episode blurbs on amazon has helped. I'm enjoying it more and more! Might have to add the book to my reading list if it's recommended?
SS, remember, people always told me be careful of what you do...I suppose that is the same with posting
The book is amazing. Seriously though, run with the episode blog in The Guardian website, it'll help you out big time without spoilers.
Don't know much about Neil Young but for the fans on this thread, here is a version of his "Harvest Moon" sung by Cassandra Wilson. The whole album is a gem.
Chilco Not heard the original before. Thanks for posting the link. Cassandra Wilson has ben around since the late 1980's when she arrived to great fanfare as part of the M-base scene but it took me a while to get into her music. The album was one of three she did where she used guitars in a mixture of country / blues / jazz influences whilst covering a lot of popular material including Joni Mitchell, U2, Monkees , etc as well as country blues artists. What was good about what she was doing in the mid 1990s was subverting material by white artists and giving them a more strident , Black identity so that material that most jazz musicians would consider to be corny was totally reimagined. I like the fact that the harmonies were made darker and more austere than the simple, triad harmonies you get in folk. If you are not used to jazz, even something like this can be a bit of a challenge but I like the idea of black artists using material by unlikely white artists and reinterpreting it. There is a history of this going back right in to the 1920s but I suppose the most famous exponent was John Coltrane who transformed "My favourite things" from the Mary Poppins original by reducing the tune down to a couple of scale . I think Wilson's is actually more sophisticated from a musical point of view and Young hits a few too many clinkers with his singing but it is a really, really good tune in my opinion.
Not sure what you mean by "clinkers" but I agree with your general point. Coltrane's "Favourite Things" is a masterpiece. I'll look into Cassandra Wilson a bit more. By the way, "Harvest Moon" is a very untypical piece from Neil Young, whose music generally has much more of an edge, but it's still a beautiful song.
I haaaaaaaaaate the current trend of detuning and slowing down classic tracks in a John Lewis style. There is so much of it about, and it's a massive nod to the lack of original creativity/trust in originality that we're faced with.
