The Goodbye Look – Donald Fagen
Love Overboard – Gladys Knight & The Pips
Fallin’ – Alicia Keys
Run-Around – Blues Traveler
Society’s Child – Janis Ian
Pretty Good – John Prine
Spirit In The Night – Bruce Springsteen
Pray For Me – The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaauFMbk10c
Listening to my iPod while out for my walk Tuesday morning, I was
struck by the following pair of lines:
The disappointment
of success
Hangs from your
shoulders like a hand-me down dress
And, shortly thereafter, by the second iteration of the chorus:
So look into the
mirror do you recognise someone
Is it who you always
hoped you would become
When you were young
When I got back home, I wound up deciding, for the first time, that the
complete lyrics deserved to be enshrined in my blog. (Thanks to LyricFind.) Interesting note – this tune
only ranked #14 when I put together my list of favorite songs from one
of the most underrated rock bands of all time.
Look at the fool you
have been
They drained the
pool while you drowned in the dream
They bought your
beauty and your soul
Then softly sold you
back what they stole
So look into the
mirror do you recognise someone
Is it who you always
hoped you would become
When you were young
The disappointment
of success
Hangs from your
shoulders like a hand-me down dress
And down nostalgia's
rocky road
You watch your
former lovers growing old
So look into the
mirror do you recognise someone
Is it who you always
hoped you would become
When you were young
Sometimes your lack
of sympathy gets hard to explain
So on your mask of
make up just paint
A little parody of
pain
So I look into the
mirror and I recognise someone
It is who you always
hoped you would become
When you were young
Despite the name of their superlative 1993 compilation (which happens
to feature four songs recorded live at The Barns At Wolf Trap), Los Lobos is
much more than Just Another Band from
East L.A.
If I had it to do over again, this album would definitely have found
its way into my top 25. For me, this is their masterpiece, so much so that it
was painful for me to decide which tracks NOT to include in my list of
favorites. There’s one traditional Mexican number, and three cuts by Cesar
Rosas, whose tracks add some raw grit (and often some up-tempo fun) to the band’s
LPs. The rest of the songs are co-written by Louie Perez and David Hidalgo (with
help in one case from co-producer T-Bone Burnett). Hidalgo is one of the most
underrated guitarists around; one
observer has described his work as follows: “Blues bends, smoky R’n’B, the
rattle of country-swing and rock’n’roll – he’s a master of (almost) all styles,
bending them and twisting them to make his own.”
A strong sense of social consciousness permeates the Hidalgo/Perez
compositions – it’s no accident that Just
Another Band from East L.A. contains a great live version of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s
Going On”. While they display a sharp eye for individual stories on “One Time
One Night” and “The Hardest Time”, they also show (in “The Mess We’re In”) that
they understand the bigger picture:
We've got no money
But we've got our
lives
A voice that's
louder than any picket sign
Don't take away what
is ours to keep
This very land that
lies beneath our feet
Don't know about
this mess we're in
Fortunately, there’s hope at the end:
The smoke is
clearing and we see a light
Coming together for a
different fight
All of us looking,
finding our way again
Out of this mess
we're in
Favorite tracks:
Is That All There Is?
My Baby’s Gone
The Mess We’re In
Set Me Free (Rosa Lee)
River Of Fools
