Sunday Music

In this blog's previous incarnation every, (well most), Sunday I would post 6 covers. The posts were called, descriptively but not imaginatively, Covers for Sunday. They were by far the most popular posts I did. Even today, 3+ years on from the final Covers for Sunday, the most viewed post ios an old Covers for Sunday.

I don't want to do Covers for Sunday again. I want the blog to be different now, and searching for 6 different covers every week is surprisingly time consuming. I do, however, want to post some music every Sunday. So the plan is every Sunday I'll post at least 3 songs and at least one of them will be a cover. Those are the only rules I'll impose upon myself.

Here are this weeks songs:

Firstly a cover. You may or not like folk, you may or may not like Springsteen. You may not even like music and have happened upon this looking for film talk. Regardless, you owe it to yourself to listen to this cover, truly one of the best covers I've heard in years. It is Hayward Williams covering Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road:

I've posted Fela Kuti before, one of the most interesting people of the second half of the 20th century in my opinion and a great musician. Not enough people have heard his music, because everybody should have heard it. If you haven't heard any of his music here's your chance to change that. Fela Kuti with Lady:



Let's have another cover, and this one too is a folk cover. Anais Mitchell covering Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. There's not much to say about this except it's an exceptional live cover. The type that makes you wish you'd been in the room to experience it in person:

Someone else I've posted about before is Christian Scott. In the comments for this video someone describes it as jazz for the 21st century. I think that sums it up perfectly. This track comes from the album Anthem, which you really should own. Christian Scott Quintet performing Litany Against Fear:

It's no secret that The Velvet Underground are my favourite band so it's only fitting they should be featured here. This is from their third album, The Velvet Underground and was the only single released from that album. What Goes On by The Velvet Underground:

Finally, a live version of Karmacoma by Massive Attack. Already a great song, this version manages to make it even better:

Thinking about directors

Recently I've been involved in a project to rank the Top 50 directors of all time. I'm not claiming the list has any authority but it was fun to do and made me think about what it is I like in a director and really if my favourite directors aren't just the same as the directors who made the most films I enjoyed. I'm going to do a series of posts about the directors I picked, why I picked them and talk about the films of theirs I love. Today though, I'm just going to tell you who I voted for and where they ranked overall on the list and go into a little bit about why I picked the list I did. I won't go into the complete list, although I will post the final group list.

My top 10 was (In brackets is the final place in the group ranking):

1) Akira Kurosawa (6th)
2) Alfred Hitchcock (3rd)
3) Stanley Kubrick (1st)
4) Werner Herzog (33rd)
5) Sergio Leone (26th)
6) Ken Loach (NR)
7) Quentin Tarantino (5th)
8) The Archers (NR)
9) Mike Leigh (NR)
10) John Ford (NR)

Other directors that came close to making the list:

Ingmar Bergman
Martin Scorsese
David Lean
Stephen Frears
John Carpenter
Robert Bresson

Unfortunately I messed up while I was trimming my list of possible into the actual Top 10 and somehow forgot Martin Scorsese. Really he should be 4 instead of Werner Herzog. So that would make my actual list:

1) Akira Kurosawa
2) Alfred Hitchcock
3) Stanley Kubrick
4) Martin Scorsese
5) Sergio Leone
6) Ken Loach
7) Quentin Tarantino
8) The Archers
9) Mike Leigh
10) John Ford

It's silly to be bothered about this, especially as this list certainly isn't set in concrete and could, and doubtless will, change in the future. However, it is a type of silliness I'm prone to indulge in, I wouldn't be writing blogs about my favourite directors if I didn't.

One final quick note before I call it a night. I've only seen one movie from both Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal) and Robert Bresson (Diary Of A Country Priest). I loved both of these movies but one great movie wasn't enough to put them on my top 10 list and won't be enough to get them a blog in this series. I do plan on eventually watching more of their films and I'll probably blog more about them then.

Shaking off the dust

I knew it had been a while since I'd last blogged anything but still, I'm shocked that it's been over 3 years. I've been toying with the idea of restarting the blog for a while now. I was going to do a Lou Reed tribute post when he died but, obviously, that didn't happen. Too many times I've put restarting the blog off. Ultimately it's easier to put things off but much less satisfying. The balance tipped from easy to dissatisfied enough to make me write this. To tie it back to the blog's title, I'm ready to move back from thought to expression.

So, what now? The blog will be different. It won't feature mp3s anymore, unless bands/artists ask me too, but it will still feature music. I'll use it to talk about other things that interest me too. Books, films, comics and I'm sure other things that I can't think of right now.

Of course a blog is written to be read but I'm under (almost) no illusions, I'm writing this for me mainly. I hope visitors do come along and do enjoy what they read but I'll be writing what I want to write, what I want to talk about. I think my first few posts will be talking about some of my favourite film directors, what I love about their films, why I love them. I'll be doing some general housekeeping as well. I want to change the look of the blog, make it lighter. And find a new picture for the header.

This is enough for now, I think. See you soon.