Mixtapes #2: Don Allred
The best of lists that pop up at the end of the year are often hobbled by chronology or genre. It suggests that listening begins in January and ends in December or that people are experts in only one kind of music. People never really only listened to that which was made in one year, and the modern rock crit area was birthed by professional nostalgists and crate diggers. In asking a variety of professionals to mark what they were really listening to while maintaining the concept of an annual I didn’t want to engage in that act of crate digging, but I really did want to get a sense of what people were listening to. Think of it as the games people play with mix tapes, if mix tapes where really about what people listened to in 2006. The entries, comments (if offered) and biographies (if offered) are written by the critics (with their own eccentricities) themselves and they are arranged by their arrival in my inbox.
Don Allred:
Don Allred writes for www.PaperThinWalls.com, www.Charlotte.CreativeLoafing.com, www.uweekly.com, and www.villagevoice.com
Seger's GHits 2:
The best non-2006 release I heard in 2006 is Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits 2. It was released in 2003, three years before his new album, Face The Promise. The original version of that was begun in '97, and eventually scrapped, but by '03, he was clearly learning something, in terms of shrewd self-evaluation, and Lightening up just a bit.
The key to GH2 might well be track 4, "Beautiful Loser." Little Brother Underdog stops worrying long enough to kid and look quizzically at his His Way of getting in even or especially the hard or anyway long way. And does indeed scoop up some beautiful losers, lost from the spotlight: prime but mere album tracks, not hot singles; hot but not overplayed singles; soundtrack contributions; covers/derivations; and stuff that would have been good on Face, but he'd ditched that and started over, knew he already had tons of stuff to chose from.
It all sounds great, in this context. Even track 1, "Understanding," from the Teachers soundtrack, though boring, is thematically apt, and leaves no bad (or other )aftertaste, as the continuity quickly kicks on. The Night Moves blues karma guy, who went back to "Mainstreet" on the great shining mausoleum of Greatest Hits One, is now sweating "Fire Down Below, " and needs to be reassured by the enlightened butt respecters of "Watch Her Strut."
Inspired derivations incl "Sunspot [Sahmspot] Baby," big sad eyes, drawls, draws for the bit o honey who's ripped off Underdawg. Savors the crime scene details of Broocian but dab hand "Manhattan," just showing the younger geezer how to write and sing one. Ditto the Waits-written but minimally mannered "New Coat Of Paint."
Wailing in the tick tock machine of Rodney Crowell's "Blame It On The Moon." (Hey, an actual hit on GH2; getting technical again, are we!) Self-writ duet with Martina McBride, "Chances Are," gloriously. (This is how it's done, Kenny Rogers.) On "Satisfied," he confides he needs some truth, some dignity, some beauty, "But meanwhile, I need a place to hide." On "Tomorrow," he can't tell you what happens when/if "neutrinos have mass," or about anything else up ahead, but suggests the utilization of "the sports section, the weather channel, a good battery."
Did all that, and now there's a new album after all! And almost as good as this, or close enough, if you've got both, and other good stuff.
