If Bettye LaVette were white instead of black, and had lived in obscurity for decades instead of trying to make it right under our noses, with only a tiny bit of success, she’d be the new Susan Boyle.<\/p>\n
Or let me put it this way…\u00c2\u00a0 If Susan Boyle’s album had come with a free copy of Ms. LaVette’s, Bettye would be on a sold-out concert tour at this very minute.<\/p>\n
I know you’ve seen the hype.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s all been in print, where baby boomers lie, but since so many of them still buy CDs, or no music at all, they’ve not heard "Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook".\u00c2\u00a0 But if they did, they’d tell everybody they knew about it, it would be this year’s Norah Jones.\u00c2\u00a0 You know, the debut, that infiltrated the public consciousness slowly, but ended up selling in excess of ten million units.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, nothing can move that amount of product anymore, but that doesn’t mean something can’t become ubiquitous, with so many places to hear music, to experience it, like YouTube.<\/p>\n
On the surface, it’s a covers album.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s not.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s more akin to those Joe Cocker takes, like "With A Little Help From My Friends", where you know the originals, but what’s coming out of the speakers is different.\u00c2\u00a0 This ain’t "American Idol".\u00c2\u00a0 These are not covers, they’re interpretations!\u00c2\u00a0 Incredibly intriguing.\u00c2\u00a0 As great as Ringo Starr’s "It Don’t Come Easy" is, Bettye’s take is equally good, well close, and hits you in a completely different way.<\/p>\n
Hell, Ringo should cancel his All Starr Band tour and go out with Ms. LaVette.\u00c2\u00a0 As should all the other writers\/performers of these classic tracks.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s something we want to see.\u00c2\u00a0 At least make it a PBS pledge break show.\u00c2\u00a0 Or how about July 4th, fuck the fireworks, put on the real explosion, music!<\/p>\n
If you’re over forty, buy this album sight unseen.\u00c2\u00a0 Just log on to iTunes and lay your money down.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ll thank me.<\/p>\n
If you weren’t alive when these songs made it to begin with, if you’re under twenty five, you’ll love this album too. Not experiencing the originals in real time, there’s no issue of sacrilege, these numbers sound brand new.<\/p>\n
If you’re over twenty five…\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re wearing skinny jeans and living in Brooklyn, salivating over bands with weak singers and weak sounds, you’re gonna pooh-pooh this.\u00c2\u00a0 And ain’t that just the point…sometimes something’s so mainstream that it’s just right.\u00c2\u00a0 So simple, you slap yourself in the forehead and say "I could have had a V8!"<\/p>\n
This is as important as Tina Turner’s ’84 comeback "Private Dancer".\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s 2010, twenty five years later, and we haven’t had an overlooked star deliver something so right in the interim.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody’s focusing on image, social marketing, but almost unknowns went into the studio and created this gem, that I can’t help but tell you about.<\/p>\n
It don’t come easy.\u00c2\u00a0 I can’t imagine today’s kids, needing fame, wanting to get paid, hanging on half a century to finally reach their time, but that’s what Ms. LaVette has done.\u00c2\u00a0 And we’re the beneficiaries.<\/p>\n
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If Bettye LaVette were white instead of black, and had lived in obscurity for decades instead of trying to make it right under our noses, with only a tiny bit of success, she’d be the new Susan Boyle. Or let me put it this way…\u00c2\u00a0 If Susan Boyle’s album had come with a free copy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-M4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2980"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2981,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions\/2981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}