Melissa Etheridge - Melissa Etheridge

Back in the day I had two of Melissa's albums: this one and her follow up Brave and Crazy. I was a rocker (at least I said I was, but I still liked Christopher Cross, so go figure) and not hearing anything as captivating as "Bring Me Some Water" I stopped listening to her stuff. It didn't help that the radio stations I liked didn't seem to play anything of hers so I just moved on.

Of course she'd go one to have one hell of a career I know little or nothing about. Despite me thinking her debut was as good as it got for her history tells another story. If you're a fan, I mean a REAL fan you know more than me. So I'm going to just listen to this one in a vacuum and contain my commentary to the ten songs on her debut. Seems like a reasonable compromise and it'll keep me contained and hopefully on track.

The album opens with "Similar Features" and man is it a great track - it still sounds so good. I bought the album because "Being Me Some Water" was jaw dropping. Looking at the track list the first side was all new to me. It was inevitable that I was going to be weighing everything I heard against the song on the radio. Even now as I get reacquainted with the album I find myself almost falling into the same trap I set for myself all those years ago. To be honest, when I found the record again I bought it again so I could get that one song ... call me a sucker.

Admittedly back then and even now It was a terrible way to listen to the record. I still inadvertently focused my attention on one song but I was determined not to miss out on a whole album worth of great songs. I had been looking through the wrong end of the telescope, I wasn't going to do that again. Having said that back in '88 I didn't dismiss the entire album but I had passed judgment early and moved on to other things before I was able to really let this one sink in.

It happens ... it still happens.

However, here I am decades later with another chance to revisit an album I always thought was good but still associated with a single track, and while after the dust has settled I still think the centre piece is "Bring Me Some Water" it is not the heart and soul of the record. It is a album that is at its best when listened to in a sitting ... in my case I played it over and over for a couple of days.

What stands out is the interplay between the core trio of Etheridge, drummer Craig Krampf and bassist Kevin McCormick who produced and arranged the tracks. Niko Bolas served as co-producer and also recorded and mixed the album. To help fresh things out they brought in Waddy Wachtel on guitar along with some others (they're names I don't recognize, but their contributions sounded great). However it is the core trio who anchor everything, and they ... are ... awesome, and the record sound so good.

I only had a couple of her albums and while I don't have a lot of knowledge with respect to her later output, this one will forever cement her place as one of the greats.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell

File under: TLDR Note to the reader. First sorry, second not really, but I am sorry I don't have the ability to edit. Oh happy Valentine's day. To celebrate let's take a gander at Meat Loaf's 1977 Bat Out of Hell. Over forty three million people disagree with me but for decades I thought this album was, and continues to be, one giant disappointment. I'll be the first to admit that despite decades of baggage the overwhelming power of nostalgia managed to erode even the hardest of convictions and I found that Bat Out of Hell was one of those albums I wanted to have in my collection, but I wasn't looking all that hard. It was an album I knew more about than I actually knew about. So at this moment in time I'm still holding firm on my long held opinion. But before I get into things, it's time for some meanderambling blurbage ... I remember seeing the cover when I was a kid and thinking it was the single greatest cover I had ever seen. What wonders were to b...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog