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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 11/27/2022: Take 2 [1]

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Date: 2022-11-27

I happened to see a video on YouTube of Elvis Costello singing The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, on CBS Sunday Morning in 2015. He brought a completely different interpretation to the song from the 1977 original, and it made me think, hey, that would be an interesting KTK! The trouble is, how do you look for that?

Here’s what I started with. (Throughout, links on the song titles in my text are to the original recordings on YouTube.) [3:02]

I knew I’d heard other examples of this, but when I started trying to think of them, I had a lot more luck thinking of artists covering others ’ songs in a style different from the original, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I knew I’d heard Sting treat Roxanne differently, so that was my next stop.

This is a performance in Los Angeles, not sure when. I bet you didn’t know Roxanne had an intro! Me neither. [4:13]

So then, I just started trying to think who would do such a thing, and then poking around their videos. It has to be someone with a long enough career to feel like taking another pass at an old song, and someone whose long career is really a going concern, not just someone who’s played nothing but their greatest hits since the end of the 70s and doesn’t dare depart from that.

I knew I had seen Paul Simon, in his farewell tour, do some songs with young classical-ish ensemble yMusic, which obviously changed those arrangements. He appeared on SNL after the tour ended, with yMusic, and sang Bridge Over Troubled Water. [5:26]

I knew David Byrne of Talking Heads would have something different, and indeed, he had so many different things, I could hardly choose one. This is a 2001 performance of Life During Wartime in Austin, recording his album Live from Austin, TX. He’s joined by the tango string sextet Tosca, doing a whole different thing from our previous string ensemble. [6:36]

So then, what about Joni Mitchell? She was always doing something different. Here is a 2008 appearance of hers with Herbie Hancock, singing River. [5:27]

This is Roger Waters’ recent take on Comfortably Numb, which he styles “Comfortably Numb 2022”. He toured with it, and I looked for a live performance, but they’re fan videos and basically, it’s the band on a darkened stage with this video projected on gigantic screens behind them, so I figured it was better to cut out the middleman and not have guys with popcorn buckets crossing in front of the video.

Text from the YT page: “Before lockdown I had been working on a demo of a new version of ‘Comfortably Numb’ as an opener to our new show ‘This Is Not A Drill’. I pitched it a whole step down, in A Minor, to make it darker and arranged it with no solos, except over the outro, where there is a heartrendingly beautiful vocal solo from one of our new sisters Shanay Johnson. It’s intended as a wakeup call, and a bridge towards a kinder future with more talking to strangers, either in ‘The Bar’ or just ‘Passing in the Street’ and less slaughter ‘In Some Foreign Field.’ Here it is. Love R. The video is by Sean Evans. The mix is by Gus Seyffert.” [8:52]

David Bowie performed this version of Let’s Dance in Paris in 2002. It eventually drifts back into something more familiar-sounding, but it takes a very interesting path, as one might expect from Bowie. [5:59]

It’s hard to imagine Neil Young’s Like a Hurricane without the guitar solos. But for his Unplugged special in 1993, he played it, unaccompanied, on pipe organ and harmonica. (I know the video says “piano version”, but if you watch it, you won’t be fooled. I nonetheless picked this video out of several because it’s the only one that opens with Young calling for “more power” from Scotty.) [7:13]

Sometimes it takes sitting in with someone else to work a stylistic change. If you get tired of Melissa Etheridge’s introduction, you can slide it forward to the 2-minute mark, where Bruce Springsteen comes out to sing Thunder Road with her. This is from her 1995 Unplugged special. [7:33]

In this 1993 Letterman appearance by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, they play Friend of the Devil in Garcia/Grisman style. As a bonus, the last three minutes is audio only of their subsequent commercial-break jam on As Tears Go By with Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra, with solo turns for each of them. [7:40]

Superficially, Steve Winwood’s performance of Rainmaker from his 2017 live album Winwood Greatest Hits Live is pretty similar to the 1971 original he played with Traffic. Except! The Traffic song was essentially a waltz, and this version has a reggae beat under it. I couldn’t find a live recording of a live performance, so had to settle for an album version of a live performance. [8:05]

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/27/2138526/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-11-27-2022-Take-2

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