Burl & Bylan - Pearly Shells and Nashville Skyline

Thank you for your patience. We here a Bottle of Beef pride ourselves on our selection of hold music. Please continue enjoying Baja Marimba Band, have a glass of strawberry wine, and bottle will be with you shor....

Hello! Sorry for making you wait. I've got two more albums for you tonight, but this time the connection is completely musical. I'll get to that in a second.

On paper, i should like these two records the other way around. The one i hate is the one i'm supposed to like. The reason is actually quite simple. I learned how to play every song on the second album from a transcription without ever hearing the originals. I know it sounds trite and condescending, but the version in my head is so much better than the actual thing that it's really uncomfortable to listen to it.

On paper, there's no reason why i should like Burl Ives. So, i'm gonna pull out my "i don't need a reason" card. Burl Ives is great, end of story. I'd go as far as to say there's something wrong with you if you don't like Pearly Shells, or any of the other favorites on DL 4578, played at 33 1/3. Like the mythical phoenix rising from the ashes, F(x) is it's own derivative, i mean the album itself contains all the standard vinyl speeds. That's one of those complicated inside jokes from a high school math textbook that might strain even Sam Mauer 's memory. Side a ends with a hanging for murder, but the real murderer's telltale heart finally broke him, so they hanged him too. And some high school english to boot!

What was i talking about? Oh yeah, the pedal steel solo on Pearly Shells ends with the same melody Dylan uses for the lyric "no light will shine on me" from One More Night off Nashville Skyline. It's a common melodic ending, but i can't stop myself from making the connection. The only thing worse than normal Dylan is Dylan actually singing. They say it was Dylan letting Nashville have a stab at making a Bob Dylan album, but blech!

Not to confuse you, every song on Nashville Skyline is great, but anybody else singing would be better. Maybe i can trick my brain into hearing Burl Ives sing it. That'd be cool. Short of that, i'll just go back to my internal memory of learning the songs from sheet music.

I'm not intentionally looking for a nostalgic tour of my younger days, but to quote a very familiar song from my earlier mention of Baja Marimba Band that you probably didn't know was originally by Burt Bacharach and Hal David (admit it, you thought some 80s pop band wrote it), there's always something there to remind me.

In practice, you might prefer listening to them the other way around, as i very much wish i had done.

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