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...

For Record Store Day Black Friday 2022, an LP containing the Jefferson Airplane's full live set at 1967's Monterey International Pop Festival will be issued in a 2,500-copy limited edition, on the Monterey International Pop Festival Foundation imprint (catalogue number MIPF 1967-8). The LP was remastered from the original analog tape and pressed in "blue-smoke" colored vinyl. The Record Store Day website states: "In 1992, part of this set was released on a Rhino box set, on CD and cassette. This RSD Black Friday release marks the first appearance of this set on vinyl". First off, the "Rhino box set" they are referring to is the 4-CD (or 4-cassette) various artists set titled The Monterey International Pop Festival (Rhino 70596), which contained five of the eight songs from the Airplane's set at the festival. Secondly, while it may be true that the Airplane's Monterey set has never before been officially issued on vinyl in the U.S. ...

It's hard to believe that Van Halen's 2012 album A Different Kind of Truth , which was the long-awaited studio album resulting from the band's reunion with original frontman David Lee Roth, is already 10 years old. But what's even harder to believe is that the album has recently become commercially unavailable. As of late 2022, the album seems to be unavailable for purchase in physical or digital formats. This seems especially odd two years after the death of guitarist and co-founder Eddie Van Halen, and after the recent success of bassist Wolfgang Van Halen's project known as Mammoth WVH. A Different Kind of Truth was Van Halen's first studio release in 14 years, following the inauspicious 1998 album Van Halen III recorded with former Extreme singer Gary Cherone. After parting ways with Cherone , Van Halen suffered through nearly a decade of invisibility, punctuated by a disastrous 2004 reunion tour with second vocalist Sammy Hagar, and by Eddie Van Halen...

On Record Store Day Black Friday 2022, Omnivore Records will issue the first official release of a long-circulated bootleg recording. This recording, known as the "Typewriter Tape", was informally recorded in 1964 by a pre-fame, pre-hippie duo of Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonen. The Legendary Typewriter Tape: 6/25/64 Jorma's House will be limited to 3,500 vinyl LP copies, with liner notes by Kaukonen and sound restoration by engineer Michael Graves. The album will be released digitally and on CD on December 2nd. The Legendary Typewriter Tape was recorded on reel-to-reel tape at the then-23-year-old Kaukonen's house in Santa Clara, California, as the guitarist-to-be of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna was rehearsing blues covers with the 21-year-old Joplin, before she joined Big Brother And The Holding Company. The title refers to the occasional background noise made by a typewriter, which was being used by Kaukonen's late wife Marguereta to write a personal...

In 2012, punk icon Iggy Pop released an album titled Après only in France. Why was it only released in France? Because it was rejected by his American record label. Why? Because it was too wild and uncommercial? No. Because it was too mellow and uncommercial. Après was a covers album, featuring Iggy covering songs that you wouldn't imagine him covering, many of them romantic jazz ballads -- some of them sung in French! Certainly, Après would seem to be a radical departure for the former Stooges frontman, although it was similar to some of the tracks on his 2009 album Preliminaires , on which he also crooned some jazz tunes and a few French-language ballads. Even insolent punks grow up sometimes, provided that they live long enough. And besides, what better way was there for a 60-something-year-old Iggy to go against the grain than to record an album that was about as far away from punk rock as you can get? The Après album is finally about to see the light of day in the U.S. ...

The 53rd set of exclusive vinyl items offered by Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in September 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 subscribers every three months. The 53rd Vault package contained a boxed set of six 7-inch singles from the '90's alternative band Primus, titled The Revenant Juke: A Collection Of Fables And Farce . This marked the first time that this California-based, bass-dominated band had ever issued their music on 7-inch vinyl singles. Each single contained two tracks from one of Primus' '90's studio albums. All 12 tracks were previously released and are currently available in other media formats. Each single was pressed in vinyl of a dif...