All posts tagged: John Hiatt

Saturday Soundtrack: Quarantine essentials

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Eleven years ago I posted a short series on More to Come entitled Five Albums for a Desert Island. It was a way to expand on a Facebook challenge at the time to list your five favorite albums. And while the original posts sound slightly dated, they nonetheless stand up pretty well in describing five albums that have shaped my musical interests. I thought about these albums again in this time of global quarantine. If I had to choose only five albums to have on my live-stream for a long period of sheltering-in-place, how would these do? Well, I think I could more than live with these five…I’d still very much enjoy them! Yes, I would miss not having Nickel Creek‘s self-titled 2000 album to enjoy. (Click the link to read the recent NPR article about the album: “How Nickel Creek made Americana the new Indie Rock.”) And I love The Best of John Hiatt. Nonetheless, with the original five I would not only survive, but would thrive. I’ll encourage you to go back and read the …

Saturday Soundtrack: John Hiatt

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One of my all-time favorite rock singer-songwriters is John Hiatt. Described as “a master lyricist and satirical storyteller,” Hiatt “weaves hidden plot twists into fictional tales ranging in topics including redemption, relationships, growing older and surrendering, on his terms.” Hiatt has been at this for a long-time, with 23 albums to his credit. His songs have been recorded by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt (Thing Called Love), Emmylou Harris, Iggy Pop, I’m With Her, Rosanne Cash (The Way We Make A Broken Heart), and New Grass Revival and the Jeff Healey Band (both for Angel Eyes). The acoustic Crossing Muddy Water shows how Hiatt can tell a sad tale of loss with beauty and depth. Perfectly Good Guitar about rock stars who smash their very expensive guitars onstage as part of their act is typical of Hiatt’s clever writing. This version from Austin City Limits has great leads with Mike Ward of The Guilty Dogs doing some awesome guitar shredding. My all-time favorite Hiatt song is Tennessee Plates, described by one of my favorite music bloggers …

Lovett Hiatt Tickets

The preferred Pre-Inaugural concert

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Earlier this evening, I joined a full house at Strathmore Music Hall as we made our choice for a different  pre-inaugural concert from that on the national mall. Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt are two of the best songwriters and (especially in Lovett’s case) song interpreters in the Americana field.  The beautiful sound and setting at Strathmore was perfect for their two-and-one-half hour acoustic set on Thursday evening. They played their hits.  They played unrecorded new songs.  They bantered.  They played songs by other songwriters. And they did it with such ease and obvious affection for each other that the time flew by. Hiatt’s voice is getting older and doesn’t hit the notes like he once did.  But that really didn’t matter in this setting. Here’s a video of a tune they played tonight, Lovett’s “She’s Not Lady.”  Enjoy! More to come… DJB Image: My ticket in the nose bleed section at Strathmore

Tennessee Plates – Music Fit to a T

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I’ve been thinking about Tennessee recently, as both Claire and I head there next week.  Claire’s high school choir is in Nashville for a series of concerts, and I’m heading to town later in the week for work and then to connect with Claire.  We’ll end the week with a short visit with family. With all that on my mind, it was appropriate that John Hiatt’s Tennessee Plates came on the iPod as I was heading over to school to pick up Andrew tonight.  I get a big kick out of John Hiatt, and I love this song. The original video I posted was a terrific acoustic version, but it has since been removed, so I encourage you to check out the version from the album.  To keep the good feelings going, I’ll make this the first in a series of “Tennessee” songs over the next few days.  I have a Facebook friend who is posting a series of videos entitled “Music in the Key of Joe” (as all the artists are named Joe).  So …

Five albums for a desert island: The Circle Album

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I still remember coming home sometime in 1972 — I was a junior or senior in high school — and putting Will the Circle be Unbroken on my stereo. I had started focusing on acoustic music (such as James Taylor) a year or two before, but I was soon exploring more of the roots of folk, which led me to the record bin on that fateful day when I found this record with the funny looking cover by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — a country-rock ensemble I had recently seen in concert. There was a little patter to start the record, which was unusual in and of itself in that era of over-produced rock albums, with Jimmy Martin commenting on John McEuen’s banjo kick-off by saying, “Earl never did do that….”  But then Martin, the Dirt Band, and their musical guests were off with a rollicking version of The Grand Ole Opry Song. Decades before O Brother Where Art Thou?, there was Will the Circle Be Unbroken when some long-haired hippies and rockers took country, bluegrass, and mountain …