Monday, August 03, 2015

My Music Monday

Duets.

That is the August theme.  Erik "let" me pick. I went through a few options with him and this wasn't even one of them. We still might revisit the others, but after scrolling through my liberry, I started to freak out about some of the other themes and whether I could fulfill the month-long obligation.

I'm still not sure I can. I mean - I can - easily. But I'm not going for the low-hanging fruit and it seems nowhere in my liberry is Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson singing "State of Shock".

You can thank me now for that.

I'll start off with a left-of-center one - perhaps.  It might be dead-center for the likes of my readership, but you never know.

Laurie Anderson & Peter Gabriel.  Unless you bought the version on his album, then it's Peter Gabriel & Laurie Anderson.

"Excellent Birds".  Or "This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)", if you bought Gabriel's album.  Titled slightly differently for different albums.

I'm going with the Anderson version, well, because I knew her version first and like her version better. And yes - the songs are not only titled differently but they are different. Not majorly so, but enough. I think I like Anderson's better because it is different for her. Gabriel's just reeks of him. Not that it's a bad thing, with him, back in 1984 it was nothing new.

Anderson even said in a recent interview that not only was this her first collaboration with anyone, but that she and Gabriel could never agree on what the bass line was - and they operated on two different planes in regards to what they heard, which is why they took the bones of each recording and made the rest their own.

There is a video for Gabriel's version (with Anderson in it), but not one for her version. Both are very visual artists, but since I'm doing Laurie's take, you only get audio.


Laurie Anderson - "Excellent Birds"

1 comment:

Erik Rubright said...

I forgot how "painful" Gabriel's video was for this.