What are you listening to right now?

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Paranoid Dot Calm

Council Member
Jul 6, 2004
1,142
0
36
Hide-Away Lane, Toronto
Hey Rick van Opbergen (I enjoy Anouk's vocals)
I'll leave the link here awhile

Losing My Religion (Live At Oosterpoort)
This Link Is No Longer Active:
http://www.pair-annoyed.com:9090/!DL/Anouk-LosingMyReligion-LiveAtOosterpoort.mp3

Anouk

Bio

Active Decades: '90s and '00s
Genre: Rock
Styles: Euro-Rock

Dutch rock singer Anouk has become not only one of the most successful performers in her native The Netherlands, but has also managed to duplicate her success in much of Europe. Born on April 8, 1975 in The Hague, Anouk's mother was a singer in a blues band. By the time she was 18, Anouk had joined a local R&B band, but it was a short-lived union as she left soon after, having been accepted and subsequently attending the Rotterdam Music Academy. In 1995, Anouk started her own band, but it is at a music festival that same year that she gets her big break. She joins Barry Hay of Golden Earring on stage, singing several songs, and impresses the lead singer of the legendary Dutch band. With Golden Earring guitarist George Kooyans, Hay writes "Mood Indigo for the young singer and it is released in the fall of 1996 through Dino Records. It is a year later, though, that Anouk's career truly takes off with the release of the single "Nobody's Wife." The song is a lead-up to her debut, full-length record Together Alone, which is released in late '97. Driven by the impact of "Nobody's Wife." the album tops the charts, quickly reaching platinum status in The Netherlands. The album spawns two more hits with "It's So Hard" and the Top Ten "Sacrifice," and earns Anouk three Edison Awards, including Best Dutch Female Vocalist, in 1998. The follow-up release, issued in 1999, found Anouk incorporating ska into the first single, "R U Kiddin' Me," as well as exploring hip-hop and funk on tracks like "The Dark" and "Don't." It too is hugely successful and, in addition to strong sales, garners the singer two more Edison Awards. In 2001, Anouk released Lost Tracks, a collection of unreleased material that had been culled together. It proved to keep Anouk as one of the highest-profile musicians in The Netherlands, giving her yet another chart-topping album.
 
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aupook

Nominee Member
Dec 8, 2004
59
0
6
Starbucks
The ghost of electricity, the hum of the fan in the tower. Ask me what I am reading, the art of war by sun tzu. I am also snapping the edge of my auto-destruct card.....thinking.....thinking..thinking about insertions, looking for slots..any little crack I can find in the machine.
 
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Paranoid Dot Calm

Council Member
Jul 6, 2004
1,142
0
36
Hide-Away Lane, Toronto
Beth Hart - L.A. Song (Out Of This Town)
This Link Is No Longer Active:
http://www.pair-annoyed.com:9090/!DL/BethHart-LASong-OutOfThisTown.mp3

Bio
Active Decades: '90s and '00s
Genre: Rock

Los Angeles-based blues-rocker Beth Hart began playing piano at age four, later attending L.A.'s High School for the Performing Arts as a vocal and cello major. By 1993 she was a regular fixture of the local club circuit, by 1993 collaborating with bassist Tal Herzberg and guitarist Jimmy Khoury; with the addition of drummer Sergio Gonzalez early the following year the Beth Hart Band was complete, and after signing to Atlantic's Lava imprint the group issued its debut album Immortal in 1996. Screamin' for My Supper followed three years later.
 
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Paranoid Dot Calm

Council Member
Jul 6, 2004
1,142
0
36
Hide-Away Lane, Toronto
Bettye Lavette - Let Me Down Easy

Bio

Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: Jan 26, 1946 in Muskegon, MI
Genre: Rock
Styles: Soul, Urban, Northern Soul

A perennial cult favorite in northern soul circles, singer Betty Lavette was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on January 29, 1946; raised primarily across the state in Detroit, at 16 she cut her first sides for the local Lupine label, with a test pressing of the disc making its way to Atlantic Records. After signing with Atlantic, she scored an R&B Top Ten hit out of the box with her debut single "My Man--He's a Loving Man," only to fail to reach the same commercial heights again. After one more Atlantic release, 1963's "You'll Never Change," Lavette moved back to Lupine for her third record, "Witchcraft in the Air"; after a stint as a featured vocalist with the Don Gardner & Dee Dee Ford Revue, she recorded the long-unreleased "One Thin Dime" for Scepter before resufacing on Calla with the 1965 lost classic "Let Me Down Easy," her only other record to crack the R&B Top 20. Two more Calla efforts -- the fine "Only Your Love Can Save Me" and "I'm Just a Fool for You" -- preceded a shift to Big Wheel, where after just one single, "I'm Holding On," Lavette again moved along, this time to the Karen imprint for "Hey Love."

Following stays at Silver Fox ("He Made a Woman Out of Me," "Do Your Duty"), SSS International ("Take Another Piece of My Heart") and her own TCA imprint ("Never My Love"), Lavette returned to Atlantic, signing to their Atco division for 1972's Neil Young cover "Heart of Gold." An LP, Child of the 70s, was also recorded at Muscle Shoals Studios, but Atco opted against its release after the failure of the single "Your Turn to Cry." After joining the touring company of the Broadway musical Bubbling Brown Sugar, Lavette briefly signed to West End for a disco effort, 1978's "Doin' the Best I Can"; she did not record again until 1982, landing at Motown and rechristening herself "Bettye." However, despite a heavy promotional push neither the LP Tell Me a Lie nor the single "Right in the Middle (Of Falling in Love)" proved her long-awaited chart breakthrough, and outside of a handful of recordings for Motor City during the 1990s, she focused primarily on live appearances in the years to follow.
 
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Paranoid Dot Calm

Council Member
Jul 6, 2004
1,142
0
36
Hide-Away Lane, Toronto
Hi! SJ007

It seems that your intent on covering all the messages or threads with your nic or reply. But, it makes it difficult for people to follow new thread content. When you post minute-by-minute.

You leave most of us "readers" having to check the actual time of the last post by you in order to know if we've already read it or not.

Do yuh get my drift?

Calm
 
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Paranoid Dot Calm

Council Member
Jul 6, 2004
1,142
0
36
Hide-Away Lane, Toronto
Leonard Cohen - Undertow

Bio

Active Decades: '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: 9/21/1934 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Genre: Rock
Styles: Singer/Songwriter, Folk-Rock

One of the most interesting and enduring, if not the most successful singer/songwriters of the late '60s, Leonard Cohen retained a substantial following for decades to come, along with the attention of critics who long since ceased worrying about new works by most of his contemporaries.

Cohen was born nearly a decade earlier than the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and a year before Elvis Presley, but his personal, social, and intellectual background couldn't be more different from any rock stars of any generation; nor can he be easily compared even with any members of the generation of folk singers that came of age in the 1960s. He didn't start performing or recording until he was in his mid-30s, after he had already written several books. As an established novelist and poet, his literary accomplishments far exceed those of Bob Dylan, though as a performer, his rather monotone voice is less appealing than Dylan's singing.

Leonard Cohen was born into a middle-class Jewish family in the Montreal suburb of Westmount. His father, a clothing merchant, died when Cohen was nine years old. Cohen was raised in a progressive environment, and was encouraged to express himself at an early age. He took up the guitar at age 13, initially as a way to impress a girl, but within a year or two was singing his own songs at local cafes. He majored in English at McGill University, and despite average grades, won the McNaughton Prize in creative writing before graduating in 1955. His first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, was published the following year, and became a critical success. Two more books of his poetry followed, along with an attempt to join the family business and a stint at Columbia University, but primarily Cohen wrote; his work was popular enough to pay him a modest royalty which, when coupled with government-sponsored literary grants and a family legacy, allowed him to live comfortably. He also lived a very free lifestyle, involving many women, experiments with LSD when it was still legal, and travels around the world. Cohen became almost as well-known in Canada for his iconoclastic behavior as his writing, and only seemed to benefit from these extra-literary activities, in terms of recognition, especially in America.

Two novels, The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), solidified his reputation in mid-decade. He had written songs ever since his mid-teens, and even these began attracting attention. Judy Collins, one of the top folk talents to emerge during the mid-'60s, cut a version of Cohen's "Suzanne" that proved extremely popular, garnering considerable radio airplay and becoming one of her most popular numbers; and she persuaded Cohen to join her on the folk song circuit. He made his debut during the summer of 1967 at the Newport Folk Festival, followed by a pair of sold-out concerts in New York City and an appearance singing his songs and reciting his poems on the CBS network television show Camera Three. At around the same time, actor/singer Noel Harrison brought "Suzanne" onto the pop charts with a recording of his own.

Cohen was signed to Columbia Records, and in early 1968 his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released. Despite its spare production and melancholy subject matter -- or, very possibly because of it -- the album was an immediate hit by the standards of the folk music world and the budding singer/songwriter community. College students by the thousands bought it; in its second year of release, the record sold over 100,000 copies. The Songs of Leonard Cohen was as close as Cohen ever got to mass audience success. His next album, Songs From a Room (1969), was characterized by a similar spirit of melancholy, but was less well-received commercially and critically. The album did have a pair of tracks, "Bird on a Wire" and "The Story of Isaac," that became standards rivalling "Suzanne." Cohen's third album, Songs of Love and Hate (1971), showed a slackening of interest in his work, as his following retreated to well-established cult status, despite the presence of the acclaimed songs "Joan of Arc" and "Famous Blue Raincoat." Leonard Cohen: Live Songs was released in 1973.

Despite the critical misgivings about his vocal abilities, Cohen always had enough of a following to justify another long-player every other year or so. Meanwhile, in 1973, his music became the basis for a theatrical production called Sisters of Mercy, conceived by Gene Lesser and loosely based on Cohen's life, or at least a fantasy version of his life. A three-year lag ensued between Songs of Love and Hate and Cohen's next album, and most critics and fans just assumed he'd hit a dry spell. His 1974 release New Skin for Old Ceremony seemed to justify his fans' continued faith in his work. The new songs were still depressing and bleak, but also surprising in the language and their revelations. Columbia Records released The Best of Leonard Cohen in 1975. In 1977, Cohen reappeared with Death of a Ladies' Man. Cohen's most controversial album, Death of a Ladies' Man was produced by the reclusive and enigmatic producer Phil Spector and suffered from the worst attributes of Cohen's and Spector's work; it was overly dense and self-consciously imposing in its sound, and it virtually bathed the listener in Cohen's depressive persona, still limited in presentation to a monotone delivery.

Cohen's next two albums, Recent Songs (1979) and Various Positions (1985, Passport Records), attracted relatively little attention despite their strong respective song lineups. I'm Your Man (1988, Columbia), however, benefitted from the release a year earlier of Jennifer Warnes' Famous Blue Raincoat, a collection of Cohen's best work presented by a singer with a very attractive voice; it sold very well and served to remind the public of the worth of Cohen's music. Cohen rose to the occasion with I'm Your Man, introducing humor (albeit rather black humor) to his mix of pessimism and poetic conceits, with the result that the album was his best-selling record in more than a decade. Four years later, Cohen released The Future, an album that dwelt on the many threats facing mankind in the coming years and decades. Not the stuff of pop charts or MTV heavy rotation, it attracted Cohen's usual coterie of fans, and enough press interest as well as sufficient sales, to justify the release in 1994 of his second concert album, Live.
 
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