Category: Music

Sheila Atim Peforming “Tight Connection to My Heart” (Great Bob Dylan Covers)

Shiela Atim gave an outstanding performance of Bob Dylan’s “Tight Connection to My Heart” when she starred in the play “Girl from the North Country.”

Before making it to Broadway, the musical Girl from the North Country had its debut in London at the Old Vic and the West End. The play by Conor McPherson, in its various incarnations, featured a number of wonderful covers of Bob Dylan songs. One of those outstanding performances came from Sheila Atim in the 2017-2018 original London production.

In the play, Atim performed “Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love).” The song first appeared on Dylan’s 1985 album, Empire Burlesque. Although few rank the album among Dylan’s best and many criticize its 1980s production, I have always had a fondness for “Tight Connection to My Heart.” I recall it being one of the first Dylan videos I saw on MTV, and it was one of my favorite songs on that channel for some time.

Dylan’s “Tight Connection”

Dylan initially recorded an earlier version of “Tight Connection to My Heart,” then entitled “Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart,” while making his Infidels album. Despite attempting a number of takes of the song, Dylan decided not to release it on that 1983 album. One of the takes would appear on the 1991 box set The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991.

While I like the early incarnation of ths song too, I am especially fond of the Empire Burlesque version with its Gospel backing vocals and synthesizers. Not surprisingly, at least to me, Rolling Stone lists “Tight Connection to My Heart” among “20 Overlooked Bob Dylan Classics.”

Sheila Atim’s “Tight Connection”

And now I am a fan of Atim’s version. The play’s slower take on the song is perhaps more similar to Dylan’s original vision of “Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart” rather than the recorded version of “Tight Connection to My Heart.”

Taken from the Bob Dylan album and put in the context of the play, “Tight Connection to My Heart” becomes a heartbreaking epic in Atim’s voice. Unlike Dylan’s upbeat recording, the play’s version and music digs deep into the sadness of the lyrics. In choosing the song for the play, McPherson clearly recognized the cinematic aspect of the lyrics. Those lyrics fit well on stage, perhaps, because as Dylan scholar Michael Gray has noted, Dylan included several lines from Humphrey Bogart films in the song.

In Girl from the North Country, Atim played a pregnant woman abandoned by her lover. As The Guardian explained, “An arrangement for piano and double bass, with a choir of cast members providing gentle harmonies in support of Atim’s direct, unaffected and perfectly poised delivery, helps McPherson locate an essence that the song may never have known it possessed.”

Atim knew of Dylan’s music before working on Girl from the North Country. But, as you can see from her connection to “Tight Connection to My Heart,” she became a fan of Bob Dylan’s music, finding a deep connection, while working on the play.

Atim, who was born in Uganda and grew up in the United Kingdom, has had a succussful career on the stage. Additionally, she composes music and plays several instruments. In more recent years, she has made several television and film appearances. With her great talent, we look forward to whatever she does next.

Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Bill Cowsill & The Blue Shadows: “Deliver Me”

    Bill Cowsill’s career in music began at a young age as a member of the family band The Cowsills and took him on a crooked journey that included some great alt-country music in the short-lived 1990’s band The Blue Shadows.

    One of the wonderful alt-country bands from the 1990s that never achieved the success they deserved is The Blue Shadows. Unlike many bands starting out, though, The Blue Shadows was not just a group of young musicians. The Canadian band featured lead harmonies by Jeffrey Hatcher and Bill Cowsill, a former member of the 1960s family group The Cowsills.

    Bill Cowsill, born in Rhode Island on January 9, 1948, made a lot of people happy with the music he created throughout his life, but his own life and career involved a lot of bouncing around and difficult roads. As lead singer and guitarist for The Cowsills, he recorded a number of popular songs. The band became the foundation for the TV series The Partridge Family, with Bill and his brother Bob being the inspiration for the character Keith Partridge, played by David Cassidy. But during his youth with the band, Bill and other family members struggled under the abuse of their father, who was also the band’s manager.

    After leaving The Cowsills after a fight with his father, Cowsill moved around between a solo career, playing bars, reunions with The Cowsills, and various short-lived bands in Canada. One of those bands was The Blue Shadows, formed in 1992 before ending in 1996, largely due to Cowsill’s struggles with his long-term addiction to drugs and alcohol.

    The Blue Shadows featured Cowsill, Jeffrey Hatcher, J.B. “Jay” Johnson, Barry Muir, and band co-founder Elmer Spanier (who left while the band was making its first album). Their first album On the Floor of Heaven, released in 1993, was certified gold in Canada but failed to make a big splash in the U.S. due to Sony’s decision not to release it there at the time. The band followed that album with Lucky to Me in 1995. And that was it for the band.

    One of my favorite tracks by The Blue Shadows is “Deliver Me” from On the Floor of Heaven. In the song, written by Hatcher, the singer pleads with a lost love. On the road, the singer faces loneliness and regret. He recalls leaving his love and asks her to deliver the singer “from this night.”

    The song features Everly Brothers type harmonies and jangling guitars that makes it sound like a lost song from The Jayhawks, another 90’s era alt-country band (albeit one that found more success and longevity). Check it out.

    The Blue Shadows were both ahead of its time and behind the times. It preceded the success of alt-country bands like Whiskeytown (whose major label debut would be in 1997) while also featuring Byrds-like harmonies (and Hatcher’s Rickenbacker guitar) that echoed sounds from the 1960s. On the Floor of Heaven was eventually released in a Deluxe version in the U.S. in 2010.

    Following the demise of The Blue Shadows, Cowsill continued to work in the music industry and make music, including forming another band, The Co-Dependents. Cowsill also kicked his addictions not long after The Blue Shadows had ended.

    Despite failing health starting in 2004, Cowsill continued making music as he did all his life. He passed away on February 18, 2006 at the age of 58 at his home in Calgary. On that date, his former family band members of The Cowsills were attending a memorial for Cowsill’s brother Barry, who had died in New Orleans from drowning after Hurricane Katrina.

    But back in the 1990s, before failing to get the international record deal with The Blue Shadows, Cowsill could have believed in the possibility of impeding success. Maybe he would get struck by lightening a second time since recording with his family.

    Below, The Blue Shadows perform “Deliver Me” on a truck bed on the streets of Vancouver outside A&B Sound on August 7, 1993. As Cowsill and Hatcher sing the lines “How much longer / Could it be ’til it comes tumbling down,” you can still hear the hope in their beautiful voices, and Cowsill’s dedication to his art that remained until he died.

    What is your favorite song feature Bill Cowsill? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Chuck Jackson Was There Before Elvis: “Any Day Now”

    Before Elvis Presley’s classic recording, Chuck Jackson had a hit seven years earlier with “Any Day Now.”

    One of the many highlights of the great 1969 Elvis Presley album From Elvis in Memphis is “Any Day Now.” While that album yielded other hits, Presley’s “Any Day Now” was not even released as a single. But seven years earlier, someone else had scored a hit recording of the song. Singer Chuck Jackson had a top 25 hit with the song, sometimes listed as “Any Day Now (My Beautiful Bird).” The song was written by Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard.

    Jackson was born July 22, 1937 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After starting off with a gospel group, he joined the 1957 to sing with a gospel group. Later that year, he joined the Del-Vikings (also known as the Dell-Vikings) in 1957 before leaving the group in 1959 to start a solo career.

    Jackson’s biggest pop hit would be 1962’s “Any Day Now.” But he had other successes on the R&B charts like “Something You Got” and “Beg Me.”  The latter song featured  backing vocals by Whitney Houston’s mother Cissy Houston, who also later often sang back up for Elvis. Jackson passed away on February 16, 2023.

    “Any Day Now” is a somewhat unique pop song as it is not directly a love song and not about a break up. Instead it is about an in-between time, where the singer laments that his lover will soon leave him “any day now.”

    Any day now,
    When the clock strikes go,
    You’ll call it off;
    Then my tears will flow;
    Then the blue shadow will fall all over town;
    Any day now,
    Love will let me down;
    Oh, oh, oh.

    In the video below, a young Burt Bacharach, who passed away eight days after Jackson died, introduces Jackson to sing the song that Bacharach co-wrote. Check it out.

    As noted above, Elvis Presley’s version appeared on what was a “comeback” album for him in 1969, recorded at American Sound Studio. That album featured many outstanding tracks like “Suspicious Minds,” which partly explains why he never released “Any Day Now” as a single. But the song did appear as the B-side to “In the Ghetto.”

    Elvis’s version is very similar to Jackson’s, down to the introduction. Unfortunately, Elvis never performed “Any Day Now” in concert, although he came close. On August 12, 1972, he rehearsed the song in the Main Showroom of the Las Vegas Hilton before starting a run of shows there. But unfortunately, the song did not make it into the setlist. The song did, however, make it into the recent Elvis (2022) movie and soundtrack.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Cover of Bob Dylan’s “Brownsville Girl”

    In 2012 Bonnie “Prince” Billy gave one of the rare live performances of Bob Dylan’s great epic song “Brownsville Girl.”

    Bonnie Prince Billy Brownsville

    In my personal history of being a music fan, my great Bob Dylan awakening came in the 1980s. Perhaps it was not the best time to start out as a Bob Dylan fan. Yet I still have a fond attachment to albums like 1985’s Empire Burlesque. These were the Dylan albums I first heard with everyone else as they were released. Another album from that time was Knocked Out Loaded (1986), which I bought on cassette as it was released. I liked the album well enough, but like many others, I recognized “Brownsville Girl” as the standout masterpiece it was.

    “Brownsville Girl” started out as a song entitled “New Danville Girl,” inspired in part by Woody Guthrie’s song “Danville Girl.” Dylan recorded “New Danville Girl” during the sessions for Empire Burlesque. That version was not officially released until 2021 when it appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol. 16: Springtime in New York 1980–1985.

    For whatever reason, Dylan, though, was not satisfied with “New Danville Girl.” He enlisted playwright Sam Shepard to help add some additional lyrics, and he also added other instrumentation, including saxophone, to the new version, now called “Brownsville Girl,” released on Knocked Out Loaded. This new version has one of my favorite lines from any Dylan song: “The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter / Is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.” In the context of the song, I find it one of Dylan’s funniest lyrics but cannot explain why.

    Even for those who believed Dylan had entered a fallow period in the early 1980s starting with his religious albums, “Brownsville Girl” illustrated that the master was still a master. “Brownsville Girl” incorporates themes of memory, yearning, and lost love, building around images from across the country and the West, including throughout the song several references to a Gregory Peck Western film. The song makes one man’s memories seem as big and as important as the entire country.

    Well, there was this movie I seen one time,
    About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck;
    He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself;
    The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck.

    Dylan’s version of “Brownsville Girl” on Knocked Out Loaded is sophisticated and beautiful, even though some may prefer the rougher cut of “New Danville Girl.” Dylan scholar Michale Gray calls Dylan’s delivery on the Knocked Out Loaded version “faultless” and “astonishing. Not a false moment, not a foot wrong.” (Micheal Gray, The Bob Dylan Encylcopedia, p. 99 (2006). I agree.

    Because Dylan’s version reaches such heights, and perhaps because of the song’s length at more than eleven minutes, Dylan only performed the song live once. And also because of the song’s length, few artists have attempted to cover the song. For example, Reggie Watts did a shortened version for a 1980s era Dylan tribute album.

    One wonderful version emerged when Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham) performed the song at Actors Theatre in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky on November 11, 2012. Billy’s performance is part music and part acting, as he conveys the narrator’s feelings and memories. It took a major committment to tackle the epic song. And everything comes together beautifully as Billy is wonderfully backed up by Louisville’s Motherlodge band.

    In the video of the performance, the image is a little grainy and the sound quality is good but not perfect. Yet it is the next best thing to being there for a rare moving performance of a song as great as “Brownsville Girl.”

    And in a world with an endless number of covers of Bob Dylan’s songs, this cover performance by Bonnie “Prince” Billy with Motherlodge is really something special. Check it out.

    Well, we’re drivin’ this car and the sun is comin’ up over the Rockies;
    Now I know she ain’t you but she’s here and she’s got that dark rhythm in her soul;
    But I’m too over the edge and I ain’t in the mood anymore to remember the times when I was your only man;
    And she don’t want to remind me. She knows this car would go out of control.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Lisa Marie Presley and Elvis: “I Love You Because”

    Lisa Marie Presley carried the burdens of being a famous daughter but she also exhibited her own talents as a singer-songwriter.

    Many of us may first think of Lisa Marie Presley, who died on January 12, 2023, as a child and the connection we felt to her through her famous father Elvis Presley. Some younger people may first think of her famous marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. But Lisa Marie Presley was a talented musical artist in her own right, recording several albums as well as some “duets” with her father.

    I bought her debut album To Whom It May Concern when it came out in 2003. Presley wrote or cowrote all of the songs on the album, which was a solid debut.  I loved the fist single, “Lights Out,” featured in the video below. The lyrics seem extra powerful now that it has been announced that Lisa Marie Presley is going to be buried at Graceland.

    Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis;
    Ooh, that’s where my family are buried and gone (gone);
    Oh yeah;
    Last time I was there I noticed a space left,
    Oh, next to them there in Memphis, yeah,
    In the damn back lawn.

    In 2005, she released her second album, Now What. And her third and final album Storm & Grace was released in 2012.

    Through the years, she also released a handful of “duets” that incorporated her vocals with recordings made by Elvis. One of the touching duets she created was on “I Love You Because,” as song written and originally recorded by country music singer-songwriter Leo Payne in 1949.

    Elvis recorded “I Love You Because” in July 1954 at Sun Studio, at the same time he was recording “That’s All Right.” The recording occurred before Presley had become a star. Of course you can hear his talent in his vocals, but if you listen closely enough, you may hear a teenager who has no idea of how big of a success he will become.

    Lisa Marie Presley recorded her vocals and created a video for “I Love You Because” that was featured in the 35th Anniversary Elvis Concert on August 16, 2012. The video featured never-before-seen family photos, not only of Elvis and his daughter, but also of Lisa Marie and her children: her twin girls Finley and Harper, along with her son Benjamin and daughter Riley (who has since become a talented actress).

    As the obituaries about Lisa Marie Presley point out, not only did she and her father die at a relatively young age, but her son Benjamin also died tragically. When we think about these deaths, they of course bring a lot of sadness. And not long before her own death, Lisa Marie wrote a touching and thoughtful essay about grief and about losing her son to suicide.

    But also as seen in the video for “I Love You Because,” there was a lot of love in the family. The video is a reminder that although life inevitably brings many tragedies and losses to our lives, there also can be a lot of joy and love at times. The sadness and tragedies may hinder our view of much of life when we look in the rear view mirror. But it also is important to stretch our necks a little to try to see the moments of grace and joy that are there too.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.