Pop Rock Nation

Blog

New Single! John Legend “Tonight (Best You Ever Had)” featuring Ludacris

From the ''Think Like a Man'' Soundtrack

He doesn’t wanna brag. And so what if he says he’s gonna be the “best you ever had” – it’s not bragging if it’s true, right? (Having seen him live when he was touring his debut album, I don’t doubt he’s got the goods. On stage, I mean. On stage.)

I love John Legend, and part of the reason is that he can say things like “I don’t wanna brag” – while bragging – and make it sound charming and sexy. (It helps that he doesn’t need any Autotune to get his point across.) Justin and Timbaland can talk about bringing the sexy back, but John Legend is the sexy. Obviously, there’s more to John Legend than his sex appeal: like his 70s soul forebears (particularly Marvin Gaye), he’s a deep-thinking, three-dimensional, socially/politically engaged artist (who – did I mention? – also happens to be totally hot) and he’s one hell of an entertainer. While we’re waiting for him to wrap up his fifth studio album, he’s serving up some sweet, sweet foreplay with this new single.

“Tonight (Best You Ever Had)”, from the soundtrack of the forthcoming movie Think Like a Man, is the first new music from the Ohio native since his 2010 collaboration with The Roots on a collection of covers of classic soul protest songs called Wake Up!. “Tonight” features a guest verse by Ludacris, which is okay, I suppose; more importantly it features a throbbing beat, a slinky “let’s-take-our-clothes-off” bassline, and John Legend doing a breathy falsetto on the word “tonight.” This sounds like a great live show opener. It also sounds like it could make it rain panties in a theater.

February 21, 2012
New Single! Taylor Swift featuring The Civil Wars “Safe and Sound”

Safe and Sound
Last Sunday, The Civil Wars made the most of 2 minutes of network airtime on the Grammy Awards as the “opening act” to Taylor Swift‘s performance of “Mean.” (They’d also been awarded two trophies of their own prior to the broadcast including Best Folk Album.) This week, the duo’s debut album Barton Hollow nearly tripled it sales from the previous week, almost exactly a year after its original release. Huzzah for The Civil Wars!

In addition to playing Taylor Swift’s opening act on the Grammy stage, singer-songwriters John Paul White and Joy Williams, who’d spent much of last year touring with Adele, co-wrote and recorded the song “Safe and Sound” with Swift and producer T-Bone Burnett for inclusion on the soundtrack to the forthcoming movie The Hunger Games. (The Civil Wars are also providing a song called “Kingdom Come”, sans Taylor, for the soundtrack.) This is a nice departure from Taylor Swift’s usual teenage study hall love letters and fairytale stuff. Have a listen:

February 19, 2012
Oldies Station: The Association, and “Darling Be Home Soon”

Waterbeds in Trinidad (1972)
I recently completed my collection of The Association‘s CDs when I discovered a reissue (from the British label Rev Ola) of their 1972 album Waterbeds in Trinidad!, their first and only record for the Columbia label following their departure from Warner Bros. with whom they’d had their biggest hits in the 60s – harmony-drenched songs like “Never My Love” and “Windy” and “Everything That Touches You”.

The group’s fortunes waned towards the end of that decade as their old fashioned vocal pop sound and earnest, collegiate lyrics fell out of fashion, but they continued recording into the 70s; their sound, which, with virtually every band member a singer-songwriter, was never entirely coherent anyway, evolving in a more country-pop direction.

The Association “Along Comes Mary” (1966)

It had been nearly four years since the band’s last real hit when Waterbeds in Trinidad! was released, and the move to a new label did nothing to revive interest public interest in their music. That’s unfortunate because it’s really a solid, confident record full of some of the group’s loveliest performances.

The Association “Come the Fall” (1972)

The album’s opener, a rousing singalong cover of singer-songwriter Ron Davies’s “Silent Song Through the Land”, remains one of my favorite Association songs, although as far as I can tell, it was never released as a single and, like the rest of the Waterbeds album, isn’t available commercially for download in the U.S. (The Rev Ola import CD is available at a fairly reasonable price though.) Click here to hear some of it.

Two singles were released from the album, “Come the Fall”, written and sung by the group’s own Terry Kirkman (who had also written and sung the group’s biggest hit “Cherish” in 1966), and a gorgeous cover of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1967 hit “Darling Be Home Soon” sung by the group’s resident psychedelic pop balladeer Jerry Yester. Both songs failed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 (the latter “bubbled under” at #104). That August, the band would lose bassist Brian Cole (that’s him doing the goofy band intro to “Along Comes Mary” above) to a heroin overdose.

The Association “Darling Be Home Soon” (1972)

Of course, doing a lovely version of “Darling Be Home Soon” is like taking a pretty picture of a sunset. The song is filled with so much quiet yearning, and it’s got a such a sweet, delicate melody, you’d almost have to try to mess it up. As such, it’s one of John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s most covered songs. And artists as diverse as Bobby Darin, Joe Cocker, and British glam rockers Slade have taken it on. Then again, while anyone can take a pretty picture of a sunset – and just about everyone has – how many of those pretty sunset pictures are memorable to anyone besides the photographer? I like to think that The Association took the definitive picture of this particular sunset.

John Sebastian “Darling Be Home Soon” (1970)

February 19, 2012