Listen Up: Ryan Adams' 70s-Rock Feel

Ryan Adams, "Destroyers"
The first track from Adams' forthcoming album Cardinals III/IV, which collects material recorded during the Easy Tiger sessions into "the Cardinals second double-album concept rock opera about the '80s, ninjas, cigarettes, sex and pizza," has more of a loose-limbed, '70s-rock feel. Not that this quality is necessarily a bad thing. (Adams' site also has some demos from that era available for download.)

OMD, "VCR"
Britain's New Wave stalwarts tip their collective cap to the next generation with this beautiful cover of a song by their much-buzzed-about fellow citizens the xx. This haunting track recalls the heights reached by the band's 1981 synthpop masterpiece Architecture & Morality. [Via]

Morose, "Tired"
The name of this band, and this song, will probably give you a good idea of just how downcast the music is. Thankfully, the misery the band wallows in comes off beautifully, thanks in part to a vocalist with a wail not unlike Morrissey's — and the three musicians who make up Morose figuring out a way to seamlessly segue autumnal shoegaze into a lovely pile of shimmering electropop.

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

More Song Stories entries »

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