WILT_2024-03

A playlist of songs that intrigued me from Sunday to Saturday. Week of 7 Jan 2024 to 20 Jan 2024.

1. Rock Lobster (Live at the Pavilion, The Woodlands, TX, 1990) – The B-52’s
2. This Is Us – Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris
3. Red Staggerwing – Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris
4. Rollin’ On – Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris
5. Love and Happiness – Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris
6. High Sierra – Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris
7. Do I Ever Cross Your Mind – Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris
8. After the Gold Rush – Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris
9. The Blue Train – Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris
10. Tears of a Crown – Joel Culpepper
11. CRY – Jon Batiste
12. Ain’t Givin’ Up No Ground – Ohio Players
13. Can’t Hide It – Curtis Harding
14. Find My Way – Paul McCartney, Beck
15. Less Is More – Lamar Williams Jr., The New Mastersounds, Eddie Roberts
16. Culture or Vulture – Shirley Davis, Silverbacks
17. 1000 Light Years From Here – Prince
18. Haunted Love – Tal Wilkenfeld
19. Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers (Live) – Jeff Beck
20. Brothers In Arms (Live At The Royal Albert Hall) – Mark Knopfler

Hyperlink to Spotify playlist: WILT_2024-03

Notes

This week’s curation is rather disparate but at least I’ve been taking mental notes.

I thought the week would go the route of more off-kilter alternative inclinations the likes of The B-52’s, but I ended up continuing my love affair with Emmylou Harris, Mark Knopfler, and also re-visited the works of Tal Wilkenfeld through Prince and Jeff Beck.

It all started with coming across a performance of Rock Lobster by The B-52’s, whom I was only familiar with their radio hit, Love Shack. However, Rock Lobster demonstrated that they had a quirky and more expressive approach to music that I was originally going to explore more of, but then the collaboration between Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler got recommended to me through YouTube and I was smitten.

All The Roadrunning is a sophisticated and earnest recording that showcases the talents and sensitivities of both artists, yet it also has them having fun and demonstrating a chemistry born of their collaboration. Red Staggerwingdemonstrates some of this fun, and I am choosing to interpret the lyrics as cheeky. It is also heartening to envision two middle-aged world-class artists professionally flirting with each other. 

While exploring more of Harris’s career, I also came across her collaboration with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, both amazing artists and singers in their own right and how this collaboration was something of a Marvel team-up in its own right as they were all on different labels in the first collaboration and no business representation would budge to make a collaboration happen earlier. 

Still, what a blessing that we get to witness the trio’s recorded works. On Do I Ever Cross Your Mind, the voices are angelic and longing as Parton takes the lead while supported by Ronstadt’s and Harris’s deft touches, particularly emphasised with the fiddle linking everyone’s emotions through its happy-sad notes while being peppered by the mandolin’s flourishes.

And then in the mid-week, I came across this interview with Tal Wilkenfeld on the Lex Friedman podcast and through it discovered that she had recorded on the Prince album, Coming 2 America. As it ran its course, a number of songs got recommended through the recommendation algorithm and I added the ones that I liked. However, I was finally able to watch one of her earlier performances with Jeff Beck on YouTube, and I included Cause We Ended As Loevrs as the performance to check out. 

We end off with a live performance of Brothers In Arms by Mark Knopfler to celebrate his virtuosity on guitar and as I’ve come to appreciate recently, the quality of his voice and the sensitivity of his songwriting and delivery.