Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

For Record Store Day Black Friday 2022. a limited edition 7-inch vinyl single was issued featuring Juliana Hatfield and Emma Swift covering two Neil Young songs. The single was limited to 1,500 copies, and one dollar from the sale of each record was donated to Casting for Recovery, a fly-fishing retreat program for women with breast cancer. For the A-side, American indie-rock veteran Hatfield covered Young's 1978 song "Lotta Love", which is best remembered for becoming a Top 10 hit for the late Nicolette Larson during that same year. Hatfield's version is based more on Young's original -- which is not a bad idea, although I would have liked to hear Hatfield render the song in the same style as her Olivia Newton-John covers album from 2018. However, Hatfield's rendition does not have the gentle folk sound of the original version which Young recorded with Crazy Horse. Instead, it's loaded with the type of electric guitar distortion that is more typical of...

The 54th set of exclusive vinyl items offered to members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in December of 2022. For those who are unaware, Third Man Records is the label owned by Jack White, who is the leader of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather, and is now a solo artist. The Vault service promises to deliver exclusive vinyl-only records (usually one full-length album and one 7” single) to its members every three months. The 54th Vault package contained a 3-LP live album from Jack White recorded in 2022, and a 7-inch single featuring two different versions of the song "A Tip From You To Me". The 3-LP set Live /// The Supply Chain Issues Tour contains numerous recordings from White's 2022 tour in support of the two studio albums he released that year. Those two albums showed two different sides of White's craft. The first of those albums, Fear Of The Dawn , was the work of Jack White the futuristic alternative...

As we approach the end of the year in which Kate Bush's 1985 song "Running Up That Hill" became a surprise worldwide smash hit 37 years after it was first released (thanks to its use in the Netflix series Stranger Things ), let's take a look at two Christmas-themed Kate Bush creations from long ago: a TV Christmas special which aired on British television in late 1979, and a non-album Christmas single released in 1980. On December 22, 1979, Bush starred in a BBC-TV Christmas special broadcast in the U.K. Simply titled Kate , the surreal 44-minute program featured Bush performing songs mostly drawn from her first three albums, as well as a new holiday song called "December Will Be Magic Again". That song was released as a non-album Christmas single in Europe and Australia the following year, in remixed form. First off, here is that 1979 Christmas special, which includes the original 1979 mix of the song "December Will Be Magic Again", and featur...