Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, Lenny Kravitz has a new album! Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah! Sorry, just got carried away there. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, I did.
The first single, “I’ll Be Waiting,” is actually rather pretty, though is it just me or did the melody in the first verse instantly make you think of his 1993 song “Believe”? Just sayin’.
I usually reserve this slot for new songs by relatively new bands, but since the music industry shuts down for a good two months at year’s end, we have nothing to promote but Christmas records from guys like Keith Sweat and Christopher Cross, neither of which I want to inflict on an unsuspecting public.
Instead, I am going to take a cue from our local modern rock station, which has unveiled the top 2008 “most requested” songs in its history. The songs they’re playing are awesome, but the order of these songs, in all objectivity, is freaking ridiculous. Today they played Crowded House’s “Mean to Me,” which ranked somewhere around 1,200 or so. Now, I love, love, love Crowded House, but I don’t buy for a minute that the station has received that many requests for Crowded House, not for a station that began in 1990. For starters, they almost never play the band, and when they do, they play “Don’t Dream It’s Over” just like everybody else. If they actually received that many requests for “Mean to Me,” you’d think that they play the song more than once a year. Second, they played Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” yesterday, and Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” the day before. Are they really telling us that they’ve received more requests for a Crowded House song, ANY Crowded House song, than they have for “Paranoid Android” and “You Oughta Know”? Not bloody likely.
Personally, I think they take the entire lineup from 101 to 2008 and shuffle them, and I’m perfectly fine with that. It makes the first week of the year the most enjoyable week of the year. Hell, I heard Shakepeare’s Sister’s “Stay,” the Lightning Seeds’ “Pure” and Elvis Costello’s “Beyond Belief” almost back to back. How the hell do you beat that? I can only imagine how awesome this station would be if they actually played those songs (or Robyn Hitchcock’s “So You Think You’re in Love,” which I heard yesterday afternoon) more frequently. But hey, they’re still pretty awesome as modern rock stations go (they don’t play Evanescence and they love Muse, Kaiser Chiefs and Hard-Fi), so take the good with the bad, I suppose.
But back to the video. The scene where Paul Hester points the trick gun to his head is more than a little disturbing now. Sigh.
…but kind of awesome to see how a guy like Nick Lowe can evolve from one of the most rockin’ guys of the ’70s new wave scene into one of the most respected singer/songwriters of his generation. Dig how, even almost thirty years later, “Cruel To Be Kind” can still make you smile…and not just because the music and video are running a second apart from each other.
Sheryl Crow has a new album (Detours), and the video for its first single, “Love Is Free,” is up on YouTube.
Crow said this about the song:
“The song ‘Love Is Free’ is inspired by New Orleans. What struck me about it is the stoicism of the New Orleans people, they are spiritually based. You can see it in their eyes that they aren’t going to give up, they are going to rebuild.”