“Seventeen” – Sharon Van Etten. Still no new albums worth getting excited about. But next week is the first big push of new disks, including Sharon Van Etten’s newest. Of the early singles she’s released from it, this is my favorite. I love it’s rough edges and long, slow build.
“Sunday Driver” – The Raconteurs. The Raconteurs are back! Two lead singles from an untitled new album with no release date hit last week. This one sounds exactly like what you want a Raconteurs song to sound like.
“Crazy Now” – Ryan Adams. DRA has been teasing us for awhile. He dropped the excellent single “Baby I Love You” last Valentine’s Day and hinted for the rest of 2018 that he had a new album ready to go. So it brought of mix of both excitement and disappointment when he leaked this week that he will release three albums in 2019, although the first will not hit until April. The first single has got some airplay but has not seen an official, digital release yet. In it’s place, here is one of the better tracks from his 2017 Prisoner B-Sides collection.
“Easin’ In” – Edwin Starr. Another classic find from Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones series. Yesterday Breihan highlighted Starr’s most famous song, 1970’s “War.” But in the comments he also shared this amazing Starr track. I knew it from it being sampled many times over the years. Most notably to me was on Ice-T’s “High Rollers.” This is a jam.
A little something different for the video section this week: two different artists’ takes on the same song.
“Police on My Back” was recorded and released by the British band The Equals in 1968. The Equals were touted as one of the first multi-racial bands to reach the British charts. Their primary writer and vocalist was Eddy Grant, who children of the 80s know for “Electric Avenue,” “Romancing the Stone,” etc. This was a minor hit for them – their biggest and best song was the most excellent “Baby Come Back” – and largely faded from history. Until The Clash put on their 1980 triple LP *Sandinista.” Like so many songs that The Clash covered over the years, it was a perfect cover: respectful to the original but completely updated for the times and their sound.
Enjoy The Equals rather goofy video, from the German music show Beat-Club, and then The Clash performing it live in Japan.