The Beatles - Abbey Road Video Album

 The Beatles - Abbey Road Video Album - Part 1

 The Beatles - Abbey Road Video Album - Part 2

Side One

Come Together (4:19)
Something (3:02)
Maxwell's Silver Hammer (3:27)
Oh! Darling (3:27)
Octopus's Garden (2:51)
I Want You (She's So Heavy) (7:47)

Side Two

Here Comes the Sun (3:06)
Because (2:46)
You Never Give Me Your Money (4:03)
Sun King (2:26)
Mean Mr. Mustard (1:07)
Polythene Pam (1:13)
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window (1:59)
Golden Slumbers (1:32)
Carry That Weight (1:36)

The front cover image of the Beatles on the Abbey Road crossing has become one of the most famous and imitated in recording history. The crossing is a popular destination for Beatles fans, and a webcam has operated there since 2011. In December 2010, the crossing was given grade II listed status for its "cultural and historical importance"; the Abbey Road studios themselves had been given similar status earlier in the year.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession. The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a barefoot corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an impostor, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Road's commercial success in the US.[140] Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
The cover image has been parodied on several occasions, including by Booker T. & the M.G.'s McLemore Avenue (1970), Kanye West's Late Orchestration (2006) and by McCartney on his 1993 live album Paul Is Live. On the cover of its October 1977 issue, the satirical magazine National Lampoon depicted the four Beatles flattened along the zebra crossing, with a road roller driving away up the street. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' The Abbey Road E.P. parodies the cover, with the band walking near-naked across a similar zebra crossing. In 2003, several US poster companies airbrushed McCartney's cigarette out of the image without permission from Apple or McCartney. In 2013, Kolkata Police launched a traffic safety awareness advertisement against jaywalking, using the cover and a caption that read: "If they can, why can't you?" Yesterday (2019) is about a musician who suddenly finds himself as the only person who remembers the Beatles and becomes famous for performing their songs. One of the film's posters depicts him walking on a similar zebra crossing, alone.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey_Road

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Abbey Road
1 George Harrison was sitting in the garden of Eric Clapton’s country house when he began writing “Here Comes The Sun.”
2 All four Beatles were together in the recording studio for the last time on August 20, 1969, when they finalized a mix of Abbey Road.
3 According to George Harrison, the guitar parts on “Sun King” were inspired by the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s big hit single, “Albatross.”
4 The word “pataphysical,” as heard in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” came from the French avant-garde writer Alfred Jarry, who died in 1907. Paul became interested in his writing and discovered “pataphysics” (defined by Jarry as the “science of imaginary solutions”) in one of the writer’s later works.
5 “Come Together” was banned by the BBC in 1969 because it mentions Coca-Cola and the company had a policy against product placement in songs broadcast on the radio.
6 “Octopus’s Garden,” written by Ringo Starr, was inspired while he was on board Peter Sellers’ yacht in the Mediterranean. The boat’s captain told Ringo how octopuses gather stones and shiny objects from the sea bed to build gardens.
7 According to John Lennon, he asked Yoko Ono to play the chords to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” backward to create “Because.” This is not entirely accurate, but it is very close to the overall sound of The Beatles’ song.
8 As Ringo explained, the idea of the Side Two medley was born out of necessity: “John and Paul had various bits, and so we recorded them and put them together. A lot of work went into it. That last section is, for me, one of the finest pieces we put together.” Paul embraced the idea enthusiastically. “It gave the second side a sort of operatic structure, which was quite nice because it got rid of all these songs in a good way.”
9 “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window” was inspired by an incident when one of the Apple Scruffs (the girls who hung about outside The Beatles’ office) climbed in to McCartney’s house via the bathroom window. She then let in some of the other girls, who stole photos and clothes.
10 Some of the lyrics for “Golden Slumbers” are based on “Cradle Song,” a poem and lullaby from Thomas Dekker’s 1603 comedy, Patient Grissel. McCartney saw the sheet music, left by his stepsister Ruth, on the piano at his father’s home in Liverpool. 
From: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/beatles-abbey-road-streets-ahead-time/

Black Sabbath - Never Say Die - Side 1

01 - Never Say Die
02 - Johnny Blade
03 - Junior’s Eyes
04 - A Hard Road

If ever an album title was proved false, it was this one. Following the sacking of Ozzy Osbourne in 1979, Never Say Die! ended up being the last studio album made by the original Black Sabbath. And so it remains, given Bill Ward’s absence from the band’s comeback album 13. 
Having briefly quit Sabbath in 1977, Ozzy was by his own admission, rather worse for wear during the recording of Never Say Die! "Everybody was fucked up," he said. "But no matter how fucked up I was, I’d still be up early in the morning because I’ve always had this sleeping disorder. So I’d be up at 7 o’clock and out of my mind by 11, drinking and getting fucked up.
"The rest of Sabbath wouldn’t get up until late because they’d been doing their drugs, or whatever it was, all night. They’d turn up and jam, but by that time I’d lost the spark, you know? Even to this day I don’t know the details, but I assume – and I’m very likely wrong – that Tony wanted me out of the band."
But even when carrying their singer, Sabbath still produced flashes of brilliance on the album’s explosive title track, slow-rolling boogie A Hard Road, and the beautiful, jazz-influenced Air Dance, featuring Don Airey (Rainbow/Deep Purple) on piano. And amidst all the trauma, Never Say Die! may be one of Sabbath’s most underrated album.  From: https://www.loudersound.com/reviews/black-sabbath-never-say-die-album-of-the-week-club-review

 

Tommy James - Draggin' The Line

Draggin’ The Line was originally released on James’ second solo album, Christian Of The World. Draggin’ The Line wasn’t considered to be released as the single, and was ultimately was the B-side of the Church Street Soul Revival single. After DJs began playing the song, James went back into the studio to remix the record and add the horn charts.
Tommy James: “It’s almost like the bass guitar was speaking. And it just seemed to say ‘draggin’ the line’ to me. It’s weird. But we had the track before we had the song, and it was like the bass was speaking. The line of ‘hugging a tree’ in there became kind of a slang expression for people who are interested in the ecology. ‘Tree Hugger’ came from that song.”
From Songfacts: In our interview with Tommy James, he explained: “‘Draggin’ The Line’ I wrote up at my farm in 1970, and it was with Bob King. My farm was in upstate New York, I had a couple hundred acres. It was a song I probably couldn’t have written in the city. We just kind of toyed with it. We wrote it, and it was a very repetitious track, and a very sort of hypnotic track. We had the track before we had the song. We went into the studio and just laid down, I don’t know, eight or ten bars of track. We looped it and looped it and looped it, and created the hypnotic rhythm. Bob played bass, Russ Leslie from Neon played drums, and I played guitar. And so we just created loops of tape based on this little riff, and when we had three-plus minutes of it put together we stopped, and then we wrote the song around the track. Second time I had ever done that – first one was “Mony” actually. ‘Draggin’ the Line’ just meant working every day. Nothing really very mysterious about it.”
Regarding the lyrics, “My dog Sam eats purple flowers,” James says: “I did have a cat named Sam – not a dog named Sam. He was a white Persian cat. That was just finding words that fit together (laughing) on a very mellow night, if you get my drift.”
Like many famous songs, this was not considered a hit at first. Says James: “The interesting thing about ‘Draggin’ the Line’ is it was originally the B-side, it was the flip-side of a record called ‘Church Street Soul Revival’ that I had out in 1970. And we put the record out, and the B-side got as much airplay as the A-side, and then finally more airplay. And so we could tell that radio wanted to go with ‘Draggin’ The Line.’ So we went into the studio and threw horns on it, and remixed it with more emphasis on the groove, and re-released it then as an A-side in 1971.  From: https://powerpop.blog/2020/01/30/tommy-james-draggin-the-line/

Poeta Magica - Ederlezi

Poeta Magica was founded in 1992 and is one of the leading medieval folk and world music bands in Europe. Poeta Magica stands for a wide range of popular and independent music, expressive interpretations of traditional Scandinavian and Bretonic music, contemporary interpretations of medieval music from all over Europe and original compositions inspired by Nordic mythology, such as the Icelandic saga “Edda”.
The music of Poeta Magica incorporates archaic sounds of the North as well as playful melodies from the travelling musicians of the Middle Ages and a variety of intoxicating rhythms from Orient to Occident.
The exceptional selection of instruments played by Poeta Magica comprises among others hurdy-gurdy, Celtic harp, lute, shawn, nyckelharpa and various types of bagpipes and percussions. Poeta Magica performs live all over Europe and has published numerous CDs and contributed music to several tv productions.  From: https://soundcloud.com/poetamagica 

Sam & Dave - I Thank You / Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody / You Got Me Hummin'

 Sam & Dave - I Thank You

 Sam & Dave - Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody

 Sam & Dave - You Got Me Hummin'

I Thank You was written and produced by the Stax Records mainstays Isaac Hayes and David Porter, who were Sam & Dave's main songwriters. The song finds the duo so lovestruck they want to shout it to the heavens - throughout the song they thank the special lady for giving them that feeling and making them understand what their friends mean when they say they've been "turned out" by love.
This was recorded at Stax Recording Studios in Memphis with the Stax house band: Booker T. & the M.G's. Note the drum pattern: Al Jackson accents every third hit of his snare. This was David Porter's idea, although it wasn't easy for him to explain what he was looking for. Porter asked Jackson to play "the sound of horses," and he delivered the beat.
Steve Cropper added a dirty guitar sound, and Isaac Hayes played the clavinet (the instrument Stevie Wonder used on "Superstition"). Background vocals were provided by another Stax group, Ollie & the Nightingales.  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/sam-dave/i-thank-you

Rasputina - Leechwife

Melora Creager is the force of Rasputina. She is the singer, writer, and designer doing all the artwork for the albums and their website. This is all her with the assistance of bringing her singular vision to life from her ever-revolving band mates. I imagine it is a pretty tightly run ship over there. I guess you would describe this as Chamber Rock or Cello Rock. The original band was formed when Melora wrote an editorial in her local NY Village Voice paper while also looking for players for her "electric cello" band. They built something of a cult following playing in NYC bars that landed them a record deal. I don't love their first album, although it does have a few notable tracks, mainly the stellar "Any Old Actress." But one of the songs on the record, "Transylvanian Concubine" which had a bit of an industrial rock element to it would get them attention from Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez who would join up with them to record a follow up EP called Transylvanian Regurgitations that was remixed by Manson and Ramirez. They would also tour with Manson and get some additional notice from a larger fan base as a result. On this second studio album, they were assisted in production by Chris Vrenna. Ironic that I am finding this album again randomly after just reviewing Tweaker yesterday, I had no idea he was even involved in this at all until just now listening to it and reading the credits on Amazon Music. That is probably why this is so much more focused than Thanks For The Ether was. Musically, they are very gothic. They would also dress gothic and perform in Victorian era garb. Melora, a self-proclaimed historian, had a fascination with old lore and history, and the majority of her songs are based on some historical event or person. Everything from the pilgrims to the Donner party. They have a good amount of industrial rock flavor mixed into their work, but the cello is the star, and some extremely beautiful pieces of music are composed over the course of their significant discography. I haven't listened to new stuff (I didn't realize they were active as long as they had been), but I think I am going to dive. The industrial rock-tinged stuff used to be some of my favorite songs, but relistening now, I find that they are not quite as powerful to me as they once were. I am gravitating more to the extremely emotionally resonant cello pieces. Melora's voice is a bit exasperating at times. She has a great voice, but does this strange warble that I think can be off-putting but is also charming and compatible with the music in its way.  From: https://musicboard.app/mattattherecordstore24/review/album/how-we-quit-the-forest/rasputina/ 

Scott Walker - Phrasing

Footnotes are useful, and yet, possibly because they are relegated to the bottom of the page, often overlooked – or at least under-appreciated. This is a shame because much can be gleaned from them in order to increase our understanding of the text in question. A close relative is the hand-written note in the margin, although its presence is solely down to a previous reader, rather than carrying any authorial or editorial voice. I inherited a copy of poetry by T.S. Eliot which is full of official footnotes, and pencil scribblings of my father’s translations of the Greek quotations and whatnot. They are equally useful in trying to unpack T.S.’s meaning.
It’s possible that in a few years copies of the lyrics of Scott Walker‘s Bish Bosch will be handed around covered in lightly pencilled markings as well, to go alongside Walker’s own handy explanations of his words. Well, some of his words. For the most part they are obtuse and fractured, spread out across the lyric book like an e.e. cummings poem and using the most alliteration I’ve seen outside a James Ellroy novel. Walker starts with the words and builds the melody around them, but he can be, at times, impenetrable and it is tempting to enjoy just the shape of the phrases he sings rather than deciphering any meaning. The lengthy “SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)” has probably the longest set of notes for a lyric I’ve ever seen, covering everything from Attila the Hun to Louis B. Mayer and certainly clarifies things a bit. But not enough to penetrate the mystery: ‘Grostulating-Gorbi requires fresh packing’, for example, is a phrase that retains its secrets. But perhaps a song that takes us from soothsaying to the discovery of a cold star via some fairly coarse imagery and a bunch of yo’ mama jokes doesn’t really need the listener to sit there and try to join the dots, and rather – at least for now – just enjoy the ride.
As might be expected from a writer of Walker’s intensity, there is enough thought and craft behind both music and lyrics to make in-depth study of it worthwhile, but not to the extent that one stops enjoying the experience of listening. The whispered ‘Pow-pow’s on The Drift‘s “Jesse” can be unpacked numerous ways – and a couple of extra ones have been revealed by Scott recently – but it’s a gradual discovery that takes place over time, rather like watching a movie on several occasions and picking out different themes and characters each time – or, if you’re feeling ambitious, attempting to ‘read’ the whole film as a text. It’s no coincidence that Scott is a avid film buff, given the amount of cinematic imagery that filters through his work – most obviously, “The Seventh Seal” from Scott 4, but also the Pasolini-referencing ‘Paolo, take me with you’ line from Tilt‘s “Farmer In The City” – and it’s an interest that is present in the bracing opening track of Bish Bosch, “’See That You Don’t Bump His Head’”, which rests on a quote cut from the movie From Here To Eternity.
We’ll come back to the lyrics later, for A Closer Listen is really about the music and for all the inspection of the words, it’s what Bish Bosch sounds like that will be the clincher. Those of you who have been at least moderately aware of Walker in the past decade or so will know that one of the more arresting music-making images of recent memory is that of percussionist Alasdair Malloy punching a side of meat in order to get that certain sound that Scott was after – the other image being of Scott’s baseball cap shading his eyes to avoid unnecessary contact. The promotional video for the album (at the bottom of the page) doesn’t quite match that for an image but does have men blowing into long ripply horns, marbles in a dustbin lid and various effect boxes. Oh, and machetes. Mustn’t forget the machetes. Perhaps a go-getting young band out there will seize the initiative and hack up a dead pig with a sword for their next album.
Much of this is what Scott calls ‘dressing the songs’ (a phrase he attributes to Jarvis Cocker), which means, in effect, adding little bits of sound where the lyrics demand it, rather than keeping a consistent musical accompaniment throughout which is what most songwriters stick with. It’s a bold concept, and one can understand why many musicians don’t follow that approach because it effectively means operating with fewer hooks for the listener and relying on the vocals to carry the song; effectively, the audience is being asked to do a bit of work, rather than just sit there and experience it, which is generally why avant-garde music hasn’t tapped into the mainstream in the way contemporary art has. You can look at a piece of modern art for a few minutes at most in a gallery and then move on to the next, whereas you have to sit down and engage with the music, when most people listen to music to soothe, rather than challenge. In addition to the arrangements, Walker has changed his singing technique for his last three albums, seeking to escape the expectations that his velvety croon carries with it in favour for moving up the scale. The contrast at first was stark, particularly for those who went straight from the heroic introspection of Scott 2 into Tilt (much like spending the night carousing on tables in all the bars around town, then spending the next day shivering through the come-down in the corner of a darkened room).  From: https://acloserlisten.com/2012/12/09/scott-walker-bish-bosch/ 

 

The Witches Of Elswick - The Saucy Sailor

The Witches of Elswick were an English a cappella folk quartet comprising Becky Stockwell, Gillian Tolfrey, Bryony Griffith and Fay Hield. Much of their material came from traditional music of the British Isles, including ballads such as "The Two Sisters," "Lord Randall," and "Daddy Fox". They also performed more contemporary folk material, such as "Once Lived In Service" (Peter Bellamy), "Soldier, Soldier" (Peter Bellamy, based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling), and "Bring Us A Barrel" (Keith Marsden). The Witches took their name from Elswick, Tyne and Wear, where they shared a flat, and is a play on the novel and film The Witches of Eastwick.
Tolfrey (from Jarrow) and Stockwell became "drinking buddies", when Stockwell moved to Newcastle from Broadstairs in Kent. Griffith (from Huddersfield) became friends with the two of them when she moved to the area, to be with her boyfriend, a dancer in a traditional dance team, who practised at the local pub. They then started living in a flat together. When Hield (from Keighley) starting a degree course (a BMus in Folk and Traditional Music) in 2001, at Newcastle University, she moved into the flat, and the group formed later that year.
The group formed part of WitchNotes, a seven-part a cappella group, with folk musicians Grace Notes. Griffith also sings and plays fiddle in folk group The Demon Barbers, which also includes her brother Ben Griffith on drums. Their final gig at the Cumberland Arms, Newcastle upon Tyne took place on 24 November 2007.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witches_of_Elswick

The Band - Caledonia Mission / Chest Fever

Given that Music From Big Pink came out in the turbulent summer of 1968, it’s tempting to frame the album as a set of soothing sounds for troubled times. Don’t believe it. The Band‘s debut LP was quietly radical. In a period when the musical landscape was overrun with psychedelic whimsy, their synthesis of country, blues, gospel, Western classical, and rock was enriching and inspiring. While Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Who split eardrums with overdriven amplification, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel turned down the volume, revealing the intricacies of their arrangements and complexity of their lyrics. While the Beatles and the Brian Wilson sought studio laboratories where they could achieve technical excellence, the Band holed up in a dank concrete cellar in the wilderness of the Catskills to find their muse. Everything about their stripped-down sound and style seemed to violate fundamental rules of the industry.
“We were rebelling against the rebellion,” Robbie Robertson reflected years later. “If everybody was going east, then we were going west and we never once discussed it. There was this kind of ingrained thing from us all along. We were these kind of rebels with an absolute cause. It was an instinct to separate ourselves from the pack.”
The quintet managed the seemingly impossible task of escaping their reputation as Bob Dylan‘s backing band purely on the strength of their writing and playing. “These guys weren’t teenagers. They were seasoned veterans whose debut album sounded more like a band in their prime,” producer John Simon observed in 1993. “The songs were more like buried treasure from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists.” Those who tuned in simply to hear the Dylan-penned “I Shall Be Released” – as well as “Tears of Rage” and “This Wheel’s on Fire,” both of which he co-authored – were stunned by the depth of original compositions like Robinson’s “The Weight,” which emerged as the album’s standout track.
The idea of moving out to the country has become a rock & roll cliché, but the Band did it first – and they did it best. “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks,” Al Kooper wrote in his five-star Rolling Stone review. “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.” But according to Levon Helm, Music From Big Pink wasn’t quite met with universal acclaim. “Our local paper in Woodstock, by the way, said the album was OK but we could have done better.”
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the landmark album – and the upcoming release of an expanded box set featuring outtakes and other rarities – here are 10 facts you might not have known about the Band’s debut.

2. Music From Big Pink wasn’t recorded at Big Pink.
Contrary to its name, Music From Big Pink was not actually tracked at Big Pink, and neither were a number of songs from the legendary Basement Tapes. Though the timeline for the ad hoc Basement Tapes sessions can be hazy, the recordings began in earnest around the early spring of 1967 at Bob Dylan’s Byrdcliffe home, Hi-Lo-Ha, before shifting to the famous basement at the start of summer. Once Levon Helm returned from his two-year hiatus that October, the house began to feel cramped and the four Big Pink residents sought new accommodations. Helm and Rick Danko moved into a home on Wittenberg Road, which became the new center of recording operations, while Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel shacked up at a place on Ohayo Mountain Road, and Robbie Robertson remained at his own homestead with his soon-to-be wife.
After the band joined forces with freelance producer John Simon following a fortuitous meeting at Howard Alk’s birthday party in the fall of 1967, Albert Grossman secured financing for the group to record at A&R’s Studio A in NYC – the barn-shaped 10,000-square-foot facility located on the seventh floor of 799 Seventh Avenue. When sessions began in the early weeks of January 1968, Simon asked the band how they wanted the music to sound. “Just like it did in the basement,” was Robertson’s succinct reply. “Playing in the basement taught us that going into somebody else’s place, where they don’t go past six o’clock, there are union rules and everybody is watching the clock – that’s not the way to make music,” Robertson told Uncut in 2015. “We said we need to bring the situation so it fits us, rather than vice versa.”
Engineers initially tried to use standard studio configurations with the group, cordoning them off with sound baffles to prevent leakage. But after months of playing eyeball-to-eyeball among cinderblocks, the separation was unnerving. “We said, ‘We can’t do this. We’ve got to get in a circle like the basement, we’ve got to play to one another. We’re speaking a language. This doesn’t work,'” Robertson recalled. Technicians were skeptical, but the band were thrilled by the fruits of these first sessions, which included “Tears of Rage,” “We Can Talk,” “Chest Fever,” and “The Weight.” Executives at Capitol Records, who signed the band in early February, were so pleased that they sent them to Los Angeles to take full advantage of the state of the art 8-track studio located at the famous tower headquarters on Vine Street. The album was mostly completed here, though the group would make a short excursion to Gold Star Studios, where Phil Spector pioneered his Wall of Sound. In his memoir, Helm recalls cutting a version of Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway” at Gold Star, but this song, and seemingly all others from those sessions, did not make the final album.

From: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-bands-music-from-big-pink-10-things-you-didnt-know-666161/

Rhiannon Giddens - Underneath the Harlem Moon

The original version of “Underneath a Harlem Moon” was an appalling racist piece of crap by Mack Gordon from 1932 that was, of course, incredibly popular because people are horrible. (Randy Newman recorded the song in 1970 for the express purpose of making people uncomfortable, at which he succeeded.) But Ethel Waters, an African-American woman, decided to change the lyrics up and reclaim them magnificently. She first performed her version in 1933 in the short film Rufus Jones for President, and the great Rhiannon Giddens dug up Waters’s version and put it on her Factory Girl EP, and continues to sing the song live.  From: https://decandido.wordpress.com/2020/06/19/friday-fanfare-underneath-a-harlem-moon/ 

Ritual King - No Compromise

Over in sunny California, Ripple Music is nearing its tenth birthday and seems to be celebrating appropriately by signing a ton of interesting new bands. With Ripple, you can be almost certain that you’re going to get plenty of riffs, either of a heavy metal or stoner rock variety, and their newest signing Ritual King doesn’t disappoint. Hailing from Manchester, they’re self-styled as a Heavy Blues/Stoner Rock trio, and for once I’m not going to take issue with the band’s description of their sound. The Self-Titled album is their first, having previously released two EPs, the second on When Planets Collide.
Where to begin? I suppose for starters it’s worth noting that Ritual King actually sound like a trio – there’s minimal multi-tracking on the guitar – and the six-string isn’t tuned all the way down to hell’s basement so you can hear all three instruments nice and clearly. What it lacks in outright heaviness, Ritual King more than makes up with a live, organic feel. Also, every time I’ve listened to this album (which is a good few times) I’ve always come away thinking of it as essentially instrumental. There are vaguely Ozzy-esque vocals on every track, bar the one genuine instrumental, but with the exception of closing track Black Hills they’re used so sparingly that the tracks feel more like instrumentals with a spot of singing, rather than actual songs.
Opener Valleys is quality track; built around a simple repeating bass riff it really travels, encompassing tasty guitar solo work, up-tempo head-nodding passages, and sparse but effective vocals. I’d say that second track No Compromise is even better, interspersing mellow, almost jazzy sections with stomping stoner rock goodness. Headspace follows this pattern and runs with it, juxtaposing textured mellow sections based around another tasteful bass riff with the heaviest moments on the album.
602, the only genuine instrumental track on the album is, conversely, a bit more straight-forward and ups the tempo within a simple but effective structure. Next up is Dead Roads, which is the one track I’ve found popping into my head in between lessons. Although you could argue that the vocal section is a pretty standard Stone Rock fare, it’s very well done and the lengthy instrumental digressions definitely add another layer of interest. The closing two tracks follow a similar path, being perhaps a bit more vocally-focused than the others but still offering plenty of room for Ritual King’s excellent musicianship to shine.  From: https://thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/review-ritual-king-ritual-king/

The Oh Hellos - Cold

Radio: Tell me a little bit about the process of you guys coming up with the ideas for and making these four winds Ep’s that you’re working on right now.

Tyler: Sure. I remember that it started almost as a solo project of mine in between records. And it wasn’t at the time anything to do with four Greek wind deities. It was more like the four seasons. It was a project that, because it was a solo album for me, it was probably going to go nowhere. But a lot of the musical motifs and even just the general sound of a lot of the stuff that I was doing was interesting enough that when Mag and I came back together after our long break after finishing writing Dear Wormwood that we thought, well, we could use this. But people have done the four seasons so we asked, what else could we do?

Maggie: And when we started trying to put lyrics to it and trying to think what it was we wanted to write about, we realized we were more interested in talking about the changing of the seasons than the actual seasons themselves and how when in your life you can feel the wind turning and a time of your life coming to an end and a new one coming towards you. That can be a very scary sensation. But that is literally what our life is comprised of over and over again and trying to figure out how to deal with the change and not knowing what it’s going to be turning into. So from that, we decided, well, let’s focus more on the change and as we do, delve way deep into really obscure mythology.

Tyler: I mentioned we’re nerds.

Maggie: We found out about the Greek gods of the four cardinal winds and how their whole job was to usher in the new seasons. Like Notos would bring the winds in from the south that would cause really turbulent thunderstorms and stuff like that. They were basically the reason why the different gods of the seasons had their time and place.

Tyler: Greek mythology in general is one of the more easily grasped – or, like, everyone in America knows at least a little bit about the Greek pantheon and Greek mythology, which means it’s more of a shorthand. It’s a quicker way to get to what we’re trying to talk about that people will understand, which it’s fortunate that we have that kind of easy access.

Radio: As I was writing these questions, I was thinking about how all of your music is inspired by different parts of literature and mythology. And it’s interesting because when you do this, when you’re inspired by people like C. S. Lewis or Greek mythology, you’re engaged in a conversation with this literature and with history. So do you guys have any thoughts on that or your relationship with this and creating music?

Tyler: That made me laugh because we have described our Dear Wormwood album — which is loosely or conceptually based on C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, as opposed to a direct book to album transcription — we have described that as fanfiction.

Maggie: Glorified fan fiction.

Tyler: So the idea that this is a conversation we’re having with this author makes me think that this author would probably hate us. But that was my thought. “Oh no, what must they think of us?” I had never really considered that and basically that thought is terrifying to me.

Radio: Related to that, how has growing up in Texas, as y’all have, affected your songwriting or where these ideas come from and influences? If you have any ideas on that.

Maggie: I guess, most directly, with this current bout of music –

Tyler: I like that you said bout. Like it’s an illness we have to purge from ourselves.

Maggie: We tried to evoke a lot of imagery from our personal experiences growing up really close to the Gulf Coast. We lived about an hour south of Houston so every year we had to map out an evacuation route and keep an eye on the news.

Radio: I grew up in The Woodlands so I completely understand.

Tyler: There was at least one hurricane that we had to evacuate from. We didn’t really get a choice.

Maggie: So I guess that’s the most direct way. For me personally, I listened to a lot of old country crooners growing up. Which, the older I get, I’m realizing that has really influenced the way that I think of performing. But there’s also something so sweet about old classic country that no matter when you listen to it, it’s going to feel – whether you necessarily like it or not – it’s going to feel timeless.

Tyler: I was going to say, I feel like you’ve got a pretty positive relationship to it. Then for me it’s like, oh, here we go. This again.

Maggie: But also, our grandmother moved here from England when she was about 17 and our grandparents lived in the Pacific Northwest, on the other side of our family, so we had an, I don’t know, big bag to draw from. What am I trying to say?

Tyler: I don’t know but it’s probably not “big bag to draw from.”

Maggie: A wide pool maybe?

Tyler: Yeah, we were exposed to a lot of different – not necessarily really different, wildly different – but we were exposed to different parts of the country growing up, even different parts of the world, given that our grandmother was from England. I feel like musically, there’s a lot of imagery that we’re trying to evoke. Especially on the first record, we were, in part, trying to make it feel like the Pacific Northwest where we spent our summers with our grandparents. But there are other summer memories I have in Texas that I was looking for too, especially on “Constellations” or “Planetarium Stickers [On the Bedroom Wall]”, I was imagining night time, not somewhere else, but that warm, Texas summer heat but with stars overhead.

Radio: I know that well. That good old Texas heat. There’s nothing like it out there. Going off of that, again talking about influences and where some things come from, y’all are brother and sister and a lot of your band is made up of other friends and family. How does that affect the songwriting and performing experience for you guys?

Tyler: I would say that one of the comments we get a lot of the time, that I find really gratifying, honestly, is “Y’all look like you’re having so much fun up there.” Which fortunately has never been said in a tone that’s like “Well, at least y’all look like you’re having fun up there.”  I think people can tell that we all really enjoy performing together and that there’s a lot of comradery between us during the show and during life. It’s a big group of friends, basically. Mag and I essentially reached out in our early days of trying to put a touring band together to everyone we knew who could hold an instrument because we had written these big, dense, 20-pair-of-hands kinds of songs and had to figure out how we recreate this live. And so the people we reached out to were the people we had grown up with and people we’ve gone to school with. Some of them were siblings themselves. There’s a lot of, I would say, closeness. It is also kind of like a family on a road trip in that occasionally you get squeezed together for too long and start to butt heads. But I feel like it’s one of those things where at the end of the day, everyone is trying to be on each other’s’ team and come out on the same side.

Radio: I can understand that. And it’s visible on stage, like you were saying that other people said. Something that I heard about on some other interview that I thought was interesting is the story of how you guys got your name, The Oh Hellos.

Tyler: It’s, originally, at least from our perspective, it originated as an inside joke within our family. Mag and I and our parents took a family vacation to Ireland, I think summer of 2010. We got there early in the week, like I think on a Monday. So all of our exploring and touring and going to pubs at night was all happening during the week. It wasn’t until a weekend, a Friday night, that the actual nightlife started and we realized, oh, we’ve been getting a very different version of the evening experience that the locals do. Point being, we left a folk concert that ended at 7pm and walked down a main street in a little town and passed a pub that was considerably rowdier than it had been before. And a man stumbled out and saw Maggie, and our dad moved her quickly aside, as the man’s expression was a certain expression. And then he saw our mom and his first words to her were “Oh, hello. Will you have a drink with me?” And our mom said, “No, thank you” and he said “Why not?” and she said, “Well, I’m with my family” and she gestures to the rest of us. He apparently didn’t a care about that because his next words were, “Oh, please?” And so we thought that was hilarious and when we needed a name under which to release music on the internet, which we kind of thought no one would ever hear – we thought this is a zero stakes game here. No one will ever care about this. It doesn’t matter what we call it. What about this? This looks funny. So we called ourselves The Oh Hellos and now we’re stuck with it.

From: https://radioutd.com/30566/feature/interviews/oh-hellos-interview/ 

 

Harlow Lake - Bell And Jewel

With 15 years in the music industry (give or take), Shane O’Leary is no stranger to the stage and music scene. Touring extensively throughout the UK, Ireland and Sicily with Jezery and Lamp, as well as supporting Ten Past Seven, Three Trapped Tigers and Adebisi Shank, O’Leary has experience many emerging artists would give their left arms for. Now, O’Leary is blasting onto 2021 as Harlow Lake with a different style, sound and approach.
Combining elements of alternative rock, progressive rock and grunge, O’Leary’s solo project Harlow Lake is building a reputation for engaging lyrics atop moving melodies. Featured on Indie Buddie, Alternative Fruit, Demars Magazine, Echo Live and Babylon Radio (to name a few), Harlow Lake is gaining coverage on an international level. We have the honour of reviewing his prog-rock single ‘Bell and Jewel’.
One of the more popular songs on his sophomore solo album Valley of Teeth, ‘Bell and Jewel’ is a compelling fusion of dynamic guitars and steady drums. Using a distinctive finger-picking style, O’Leary adds an experimental edge to the track; however, this eclecticism is only furthered with the interspersed “urban” style underlying the progressive rock design. I find this change in pace and tempo extremely interesting as it showcases O’Leary’s innovativeness and versatility as an artist.
I mention O’Leary’s eclecticism and innovativeness within the song, but this is nothing compared to the album as a whole. An immersive album, Valley of Teeth is a conglomeration of various styles and sounds with no one track sounding like another. O’Leary elegantly traverses 90s grunge to folk-rock and synth-filled soft rock; however, I digress because we are here to discuss ‘Bell and Jewel’ and not Valley of Teeth.
While ‘Bell and Jewel’ is greatly guitar-driven, the prominent vocals and strong drumming add robustness to the track. Plunging you into a simplistic soundscape, but with a kaleidoscopic harmony between the various elements, ‘Bell and Jewel’ is a soul-stirring song. Despite the joviality of the track, there is a seriousness in the melody which aligns with the deep lyricism showing O’Leary is more than a pretty face.
Penned during a time when O’Leary was “doing a lot of intensive meditation practices and having very intense weird experiences through his normal day”, ‘Bell and Jewel’ has an otherworldly with a lingering haunting over the quick-paced melody. Touching on existential truths and human existence, the single explores aspects of anxiety, insecurity, desperation but with a slick of self-empowerment. According to O’Leary, “the song’s about learning to be aware of all the different parts of myself – the good, the bad and the ugly”.  From: https://www.theothersidereviews.com/harlow-lake-bell-and-jewel-2021/

Medollic - Dollhouse

Once upon a time there was a girl with a guitar and a vivid imagination who lived at the bottom of the world in the Land of the Long White Cloud. She painted pictures, she wrote songs, poems and stories, she took photographs and built her world in the space between her dreams and real life as she knew it. One day upon her travels she met two boys, one with a room filled with wondrous musical instruments and hands that knew how to play them all, and the other with a simple pair of wooden sticks with which he could spark a rhythm that made the world turn in time. She laughed at them, because she thought they were both wonderful! She began to talk to them of ‘melodic’ things, but in haste her lips tripped on the word, and what came out instead was ‘Medollic’... Medollic is Lix Bacskay, James North and Steve Pope.  From: https://www.abc.net.au/triplejunearthed/artist/medollic/ 

Spooky Tooth - I Can't Quit Her (Blood, Sweat & Tears cover)

One of the more intriguing components of the blues-rock movement was Spooky Tooth. They differed from other bands in that they utilized two very distinctive, talented vocalists (Mike Harrison and Gary Wright) and they featured an ominous yet potent organ sound.
By 1968, they had broken through commercially in England and were on the verge of releasing their most popular material. It was at this time that they performed on several editions of BBC’s radio program Top Gear.
Six of the nine tracks presented on BBC Sessions are taken from those appearances and showcase a band poised at the brink of big-time success. An aural snapshot of a well known band at that juncture of its recording career is very rare.

A new dawn broke in England in 1966-67 and it was a blues-rock dawn. Bands like Cream, Free, Ten Years After, The Rolling Stones and even Fleetwood Mac were blending their blues roots with the insistent beat of rock and gaining commercial success from it. and during the late 1960s, Spooky Tooth was one of a contingent of new British rock bands inspired by the first British Rock Invasion of acts like The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and The Animals.
Spooky Tooth took Europe and America by storm; alongside their Island Records label mates Traffic, Free and Jethtro Tull. From 1967 through 1974, they released seven albums. After the band's demise, all of the members went on to careers as solo artists or members of other successful bands.
Part of the Spooky Tooth legacy is that they were always great at covering songs by then-unknown writers (Elton John, Robbie Robertson) and at recording songs by established writers and making them their own (Lennon/McCartney, Al Kooper, Bob Dylan) in the inimitable Spooky Tooth style.

From: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Europe-Spooky-Tooth/dp/B00005IAHH 

Joan Osborne - Crazy Baby

You don’t expect the woman who wrote and sings “Right Hand Man,” a morning-after salute to a night of sex, to be reticent about much of anything, but in this case, Joan Osborne isn’t going all the way.
The 33-year-old Kentucky native has been talking about her song “Crazy Baby,” in which she encourages a suicidal friend to stick around.
“If I hadn’t been through some really dark, depressing times and come out the other side, I would not know how it feels to feel like you can’t even move a muscle because you’re just paralyzed with your own doubt and indecision,” Osborne explains, sitting in the small back room of her tour bus a few hours before her show at the Palace.
“It was a really crummy part of my life. Just being poor and alone and in a chaotic place. New York has got that kind of really dark energy, and if you’re in a dark place with yourself personally it can be the worst possible spot to be.”
Suddenly Osborne seems to catch herself in uncomfortable territory. “I just would rather not go into it,” she says, politely but firmly. “I don’t feel it’s all that relevant to people hearing and understanding the music, which is the reason I do this.”
If Osborne is hesitant to reveal herself in an interview, her willingness to let it all hang out, so to speak, in her music has helped make her one of the year’s most prominent pop-music arrivals.
Her major-label debut album, “Relish,” has sold nearly half a million copies since its release in March, and she has become a solid presence in the new surge of female artists, singing alongside longtime booster Melissa Etheridge on the latter’s VH1 “Duets” show, and joining Alanis Morissette in the embrace of both alternative and mainstream radio.
Osborne has drawn comparisons to Morissette on the cutting-edge side and Bonnie Raitt on the traditional, and she does often occupy a zone somewhere between the two, bringing an experimental spirit and confessional approach to a soul-blues foundation.
Right now, radio is playing a lot of her single “One of Us,” a song written by Eric Bazilian that imagines God as “a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus.” Osborne’s own lyrics range from the cinematic narrative of “Pensacola,” in which she makes a disillusioning visit to her estranged father, to the juxtaposition of religious mysticism and gritty street life in “St. Theresa.”
And then there’s “Right Hand Man,” a bawdy celebration based on a Captain Beefheart riff that will be released as her next single in January. The song opens with the provocative lines:
Lemme use your toothbrush.
Have you got a clean shirt.
My panties in a wad
At the bottom of my purse.
“I remember when I wrote those lines,” she says. “I mean, that’s a moment that I’ve had, but I just felt like, ‘I could never put this in a song, it’s too real, there’s something too embarrassing about it. But I kept it in mind for a few days, and as I read it over and over again, ‘Well, why not? It is something that is probably understandable to a lot of people, so why not?’ ”
Osborne’s blue nail polish and an eyeball ring are the only signs of flamboyance as she sits and talks in her bus. But in a couple of hours the soft-spoken singer will be transformed into a tambourine-shaking, hip-swinging performer, playfully manipulating the Palace crowd and earning whoops of approval for her raw, intense vocals.
It comes easily now for Osborne after years of seasoning on the East Coast bar-band circuit--a scene she stumbled across while attending film school at New York University in the early ‘80s. It was her dark time, and the music was a rescue line.
“I discovered a community of bands and musicians and clubs, and that was probably the strongest reason in the beginning to be doing it--to be involved in that community,” says Osborne, who grew up in a suburb of Louisville. “It was just so much fun. There were so many cool bands and I wanted to meet the players and hang out with them. I just wanted to be part of it.”
As Osborne established herself as a performer, she began handling the business side of things as well, and in 1992 she released a live album, “Soul Show,” on her own label, Womanly Hips Music. She followed it in 1993 with “Blue Million Miles,” an EP of three studio-recorded songs.
Her heavy performing schedule eventually paid off when she came to the attention of record producer Rick Chertoff, who signed her to his Mercury-affiliated Blue Gorilla label. Chertoff, guitarist Bazilian and keyboardist Rob Hyman--a team best-known for its work on Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 debut album, “She’s So Unusual”--convened to shape the sound and songs of “Relish.”
“We were ready to experiment,” Chertoff says in a separate interview. “We wanted to keep it what I call for lack of a better description, blues-friendly. Not a traditional blues record, but something inspired by the blues and gospel and the kind of Appalachian modal stuff that she and I both love.”
While the album has been praised as innovative, Osborne--whose early favorites were such artists as Gladys Knight, the Spinners, the Temptations and the O’Jays--doesn’t see it that way. She sees herself as simply part of a tradition, one that has been blessed with several engaging female performers.
“I think it’s maybe just taking that energy and putting it in a more modern perspective or maybe a more white-world perspective or whatever. Maybe it’s just reaching an audience that hasn’t been aware of it before,” she says.
After getting a signal that it’s time to gather with her band for the pre-show sound check, Osborne pauses to complete her thought about her goals and her tradition.
“The people who I was really trying to emulate, especially in the beginning, were the soul singers and R&B; singers who had that ability to be very real, be very human, be vulnerable and maybe foolish, but at the same time very strong and very sexy,” she continues.
“To me that was very impressive. They had all this power but they weren’t these perfect, Hollywood, airbrushed kind of people. They were very real and able to lay it down and sing songs about really intimate personal struggles and be somehow lifted up by singing about them. It’s the basic reason that people do music in the first place I guess.”  From: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-12-10-ca-12344-story.html

 

The Lost Dogs - No Ship Coming In

Songfacts: With the Lost Dogs there are so many great songwriters in the group. I'm surprised that you don't do more songwriting as a group. Have you ever tried to sit down with Mike [Roe] and Steve [Hindalong] and Derri [Daugherty] and write songs as a group?

Terry Taylor: Well, when you're dealing with any hookup with other writers, you're dealing with their own sets of pace, what's comfortable to them. And the more you add to that group... I think it's too many cooks sometimes. I've seen hit songs where you see like four guys involved with the song, but I'm doubtful with something like that that they're all in one room together. It's probably somebody coming in later and going, "Oh, you should change this to that," or whatever.
So with the Dogs, usually my particular pace in writing is a little bit overwhelming to my comrades. I don't know why this happens, but when it's time to write, when a project is looming, for some reason that is catalyst for passionate songwriting on my part. I'm not bragging about it, I'm just saying it's part of my nature. Randy, for instance, has said to me that he is intimidated by the blank page, that it's sometimes dreadful for him to have to write songs. Which is really interesting. I think Mike might be a little bit like that to some degree.
And so you have to take in all these different modes of operation with each individual and weigh them and find the most comfortable way to work. For me it's sort of like riding a wave. The muse creates this wave and you ride it to the end. And I tend to work almost obsessively writing songs. I can't expect to get everybody on that bandwagon. 
Steve Hindalong and I have in recent years been able to hook up more and more. He and I are similar in our approach. He's sort of like that as well. He's a guy that will work till 3 o'clock in the morning right along with me to either write a song or record a part or whatever. And that puts everybody off a little bit. But he's a wild man when it comes to passionately putting himself to work and working till something is forged from the effort. So we're kindred spirits in that way. Mike is much slower, and that's not a bad thing, because Mike writes incredibly wonderful songs. But he works at a much slower pace. And Derri is really a music guy, he's not a lyric guy. He'll show you basic chord progression and he'll hum a melody, and he'll maybe insert a few lines here and there, maybe a title to the song. If he's got an idea of what the song is trying to say, then he'll take that and run with it. And more often than not, it's not with him in the room, but it's taking what he's essentially gotten, going in a different room and working those ideas out. So you're just dealing with a lot of different approaches to songwriting, and you have to weigh those in how you choose to hook up with one another.  From: https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/terry-taylor-of-daniel-amos-and-lost-dogs

Maria McKee - Scarlover / This Perfect Dress / I'm Not Listening / Everybody / Smarter

Life Is Sweet is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Maria McKee, released on March 26, 1996, by Geffen Records. The album consists of 12 tracks, including "Scarlover," "This Perfect Dress," and the title song "Life Is Sweet," and runs for approximately 52 minutes. Produced by McKee alongside Bruce Brody and Mark Freegard, it features contributions from musicians such as David Nolte on bass and Ric Kavin on drums. McKee, born on August 17, 1964, in Los Angeles, California, rose to prominence as the lead vocalist of the roots rock band Lone Justice in the 1980s before launching her solo career with a self-titled debut in 1989. Life Is Sweet represents a significant stylistic shift from her earlier country-rock influences, incorporating progressive rock elements with complex, layered arrangements of strings, guitars, and keyboards, alongside confessional and often cryptic lyrics exploring themes of emotion, sin, and redemption. Critics noted its ambitious blend of bombastic prog rock in the first half and introspective songwriting in the second, though it received mixed reception for its departure from her roots and did not achieve commercial success, leading to its eventual out-of-print status. Despite this, the album showcases McKee's strong songcraft and vocal intensity, earning praise for its artistic risks.
Life Is Sweet is Maria McKee's third solo studio album, released in 1996, following her 1993 effort You Gotta Sin to Get Saved and building on her earlier career with the roots rock band Lone Justice.[5] McKee had established herself in the Americana and country-rock scenes through Lone Justice and her initial solo releases, but by the mid-1990s, she sought to break free from these genre constraints to pursue broader artistic expression.[6] The album's conception stemmed from McKee's growing dissatisfaction during the tour for You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, where she felt confined by the Americana style, describing it as "bore rock" and a "straitjacket" that limited her emotional depth and creative challenges. Motivated by personal artistic growth and frustration with commercial expectations from her label Geffen, which pushed her toward a Bonnie Raitt-like image, McKee decided to pivot toward alternative and progressive rock influences, rejecting the "cowpunk avatar" role to reconnect with her theatre and punk roots.[5] This shift was intensified by the deaths of Kurt Cobain in 1994 and Mick Ronson in 1993, events that profoundly affected her and inspired a raw, experimental approach amid personal turmoil including mental health struggles.[6][5] Songwriting drew on literary influences such as Dante's Vita Nuova for themes of unrequited love, alongside the social scene at the Viper Room in West Hollywood, where McKee was part of the entourage around the club's opening in 1993.  From: https://grokipedia.com/page/life_is_sweet_album 

The Doobie Brothers - Eyes Of Silver / Black water

Patrick Simmons recalled that he chanced on the basic guitar lick for "Black Water" while at Warner Bros. Recording Studio (NoHo) for the recording sessions for the Doobie Brothers' 1973 album The Captain and Me: "I was sitting out in the studio waiting between takes and I played that part. All the sudden I heard the talk-back go on and [producer] Ted Templeman says: 'What is that?' I said: 'It’s just a little riff that I came up with that I’ve been tweaking with.' He goes: 'I love that. You really should write a song using that riff.'"
Simmons completed "Black Water" during a subsequent Doobie Brothers' sojourn in New Orleans; a lifelong aficionado of Delta blues, Simmons had first visited New Orleans for a 1971 Doobie Brothers gig: "When I got down there it was everything I had hoped it would be...The way of life and vibe really connected with me and the roots of my music." Simmons cites the song's opening section as "my childhood imaginings of the South from reading Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer". The lyrics subsequent to the first chorus draw on his experience of New Orleans: "going down to the French Quarter as often as possible and going into the clubs and listening to Dixieland".
The lyric Well if it rains, I don't care/ Don't make no difference to me/ Just take that street car that's goin' uptown was jotted down by Simmons while riding through the University District on the St. Charles Streetcar Line en route to the Garden District in Uptown New Orleans to do laundry. He recalled that "the sun was shining while it was pouring rain the way it does down there sometimes. And the lyrics just came to me there [on the streetcar]."
"Black Water" is distinguished by its melodious a cappella section, whose lyrics are the song's prevalent hook lines: "I'd like to hear some funky Dixieland/ Pretty mama, come and take me by the hand." These lines are also featured in the Train song, "I Got You" (from Save Me San Francisco) on which Simmons received a co-writing credit. Producer Ted Templeman said of the a cappella section of "Black Water": "I stole the idea from my old producer", referencing his stint as lead singer of sunshine pop act Harpers Bizarre whose 1967 hit rendition of "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" had featured a harmonic a cappella section (Harpers Bizarre had been produced by Lenny Waronker). "Black Water" also features a viola performance by Ilene "Novi" Novog credited mononymously as Novi.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Water_(song)