So, what are you listening to these days?

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Sea Shanties. Particularly this one. Warning...waaay too catchy.


 
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Love this new version of the old Bee Gees song Too Much Heaven, featuring Barry Gibb with Alison Krauss. They go together very well.

 
From the same album, possibly my favorite Bee Gees tune featuring the band Little Big Town and Aussie guitar player Tommy Emmanuel. Nice to hear Barry putting some new polish on some of the great songs he and his late brothers put out.


 
Oh wow. And those led me to this gorgeous cover of another Bee Gees great. This is Aussie country star Keith Urban at a Bee Gees tribute concert.

 
Another oh wow. Words is a gem of a 3 minute pop song already. Dolly Parton nails it with some help from Barry.


It is, of course, not Dolly's first time singing a Bee Gees song. She and the late Kenny Rogers had a hit with Islands in the Stream, written by the Gibbs and co-produced by Barry for one of Kenny's albums.
 
As mentioned in the Netflix thread, I have been watching the series Russian Doll, starring Natasha Lyonne (who is also an executive producer and co-creator of the series). One thing that really works in the series is the soundtrack. Not all of the songs are ones I would normally listen to, but the soundscape fits the show perfectly.

This old Harry Nilsson song plays a very important role in the show, appearing in the very first scene and in multiple scenes thereafter.

 
The magnificent Dutch rock singer Floor Jansen dropped this yesterday. It's a cover of a song from a Tom Cruise movie, but I have not sought out the original yet. It's a good song for Floor's voice and style. Metal band Nightwish, Floor's regular gig, has now postponed their world tour (in support of their last album, which had the misfortune to drop just before COVID) until Fall due to the pandemic so I expect we'll be seeing more solo work from her this year.

 
Let me introduce you to Black Violin.....so first a bit about them:


And after touring for years with their amazing music, they are now nominated for a grammy for their album "Take the Stairs|". They are classicly trained but have updated their performances to include Hip Hop. And also changing the stereotype of who violinists look like.

 
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As I get into Nordic metal bands like Nightwish, I find it interesting that they mostly sing in English. Obviously, it lets them reach a wider audience than if they sang in their native tongues (Nightwish, for instance, is Finnish with a multilingual Dutch lead singer). So, it is kind of cool to see one singing a traditional sounding song in their own tongue. This is Sabaton, a Swedish metal band who do a lot of work based on history. Their last album was focussed on the world wars, for instance. In this case, though, they are delving into their own country's history with a celebration of the Swedish Royal Guards regiment, which has a 500 year history. So, they decided to sing it in Swedish.


FYI, I found Sabaton through Nightwish. Sabaton's drummer Hannes Van Dahl is married to Floor Jansen, the aforementioned Dutch lead singer of Nightwish (their 4 year-old daughter has the very Swedish name of Freya). So we have a Dutch singer for a Finnish band married to a Swedish drummer and mostly singing in English. That's modern Europe in a nutshell, I think. :D
 
Weird note: The Wiki on Hannes van Dahl says he and Floor are "in a relationship" (which could mean married but often does not) while Floor's clearly calls Hannes her husband. I suspect the one on Hannes is poorly worded or out of date. I know for a fact they are married because I've seen them interviewed as a couple.
 
Another band in a similar vein to Nightwish is Epica. In fact, Epica's founder Mark Jansen was in a band with Nightwish lead singer Floor Jansen many years ago (no, they are not related).

The female singer with the great pipes is Simone Simons, who you can hear in a conversation with Floor over in the International Women's Day thread. The guy doing the growling is Jansen.

Here's a sampling of their new album, launched just last month.



 
Wow. Keyboardist Akie Bermiss sings a duet with vocalist Rachael Price and it is fantastic. They need to get him singing more. Great R&B/Soul voice.

 
U2 continues releasing remasters of their classic 80s and 90s videos. Today it was "All I Want is You" from 1989's Rattle and Hum. The album was a mix of live versions of older songs and new studio material. This one is one of the studio tracks and it is gorgeous. Bono's vocals and The Edge's guitar playing are near perfect. And the video is a lovely, if tragic, riff on old circus dramas. There's good reason why this band stands up as one of the best, if not the best, of their generation of musicians and this song shows it in spades.

 
And what happens when one of the greats of blues guitar, and a pioneer of rock'n roll, teams up with one of the best of his artistic descendants? Oh yeah, music happens. Also from Rattle and Hum, here's U2 teaming up with music legend B. B. King.

 
The album before Rattle & Hum was The Joshua Tree, which ranks for me as possibly the best album of the eighties and certainly one of the band's best. This song was the first single and the video, with its scenes of the disruption the shoot caused in LA, is full of life and energy, showing us a great band at the peak of their power.


That guitar riff is so distinctive. I can't hear without the song coming to mind.
 
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