
This girl can sing. Channeling Amy Winehouse, Duffy, and Florence + The Machine, Adele has created a superb album full of hits and soulful ballads. It makes sense she worked with both Rick Rubin and F+TM's producing team, because her voice is showcased throughout the entire 12-track release ( BUY ). The minimal piano, backup singing, and jazz percussion compliments Adele's style so perfectly. We've heard about a billion remixes of Rolling In The Deep , so check out these two gems on 21 after the jump. [...]

In a catalogue of songs with abstract meaning and near-indecipherable lyrics, UFO's "Dance Your Life Away," from their 1975 album Force It , has to be one of the strangest. The track, ostensibly about a dance contest ("In a dance band competition / Fox-trotting with my girl"), sits hidden among songs about blackmail ("Shoot Shoot") and washed up groupies ("Love Lost Love"). But as it hits the bridge, the song's meaning becomes clearer: "You try your hand at anything you know / Just to try to earn a dollar." At the risk of turning a rock [...]

In this age of iPods and iTunes and random singles, it's unusual to sit and listen to an entire album. This past week, though, I've been in the mood to put on an album (OK, a CD, whatever) and listen to the whole thing. Call it random song burnout, but I've gotten tired of hearing whatever comes up on "shuffle." I want control over my musical destiny. One of the disks I listened to this weekend was AC/DC's U.S. debut, High Voltage . I specify the U.S. debut, because that's the one I have, and also [...]

"Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die" isn't, by the strictest sense, a deep track. Actually the version I'm posting comes from one of two Jethro Tull greatest hits collections I have, so it's apparently considered by some to be in that category. Tull released Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young to Die! in 1976. It was written as a concept album with a plot involving a retired rock star named Ray Lomas. An aging Lomas wins money on a quiz show, but finds society has changed so much that, with [...]

Like many people "of a certain age," my earliest exposure to Warren Zevon was 1978's "Werewolves of London." It would be years before I learned that the witty lyricism of that pseudo novelty hit carried itself into much of Zevon's songwriting. A more recent (within the last few years, anyway) discovery for me was "Carmelita," a bittersweet song from Zevon's 1976 debut. The song is ostensibly about a heroin-addicted writer in love with a Mexican girl. There is, however, another school of thought that, in keeping with the album's leitmotif, "Carmelita" is actually about Los Angeles rather [...]

...and we're back. I thought I'd jump right in with a "deep track" post, something I haven't done in a long time. While driving out of town this past weekend, I listened to a lot of classic rock on SiriusXM and happened to hear a couple of tracks from Blue Öyster Cult, which put me in a mind for this post. I only have one Blue Öyster Cult disk, but I figured I could go deep with that as well as anything else. Spectres was BOC's [...]

I hate to even say this out loud, but my introduction to "This Wheel's on Fire" was via the 90s-era TV show Absolutely Fabulous, which used the song as its theme. Rather than the Band's version, though, AbFab used a poppy, sort of psychedelic version by Julie Driscoll. The original was a darker-themed dirge recorded by Bob Dylan and the Band during the legendary 1967 sessions at Big Pink. It would later be officially released on the 1975 The Basement Tapes album. Like many Dylan songs, [...]

I spent a lot of time today listening to SiriusXM's Deep Tracks channel. It's the first time in a long time I dedicated all day to that channel and, dammit, there's some good stuff there. Things I haven't heard in ages and even a couple of things I don't remember ever hearing. With the Deep Tracks channel in mind and admitting blatant influence from the Aquarium Drunkard "Sevens" series, I'd like to introduce a new and randomly recurring feature here at the Licorice Pizza: Deep tracks from [...]