I originally heard this week's tune on a Fort Wayne, Indiana radio station as I drove around town looking for a job in 90 degree weather with a car that lacked air conditioning. It was my first summer in the Fort and I'd just left a city I loved (St. Louis) for one I hated and I was missing my kids something fierce. Here's where I'm supposed to write about how the song made it all a little better, but honestly it didn't--it was just a great song. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times...."
Every now and again when I do my half-assed research on the weekly tune, I come across an artist whose bio is boring as shit (obviously relative, as this week's artist's life has been infinitely more interesting than mine), and such was the case this week with Moby. I was amazed that he'd written two autobiographies--can't imagine how sad your life would have to be to have read both of those as I had to put toothpicks between my eyelids just to stay awake for a fifteen minute Wikipedia entry. So to keep it short and sweet, he's released 18 studio albums (one of which cracked the top ten), and 72 singles, only one of which charted on the Billboard Hot 100 (though he's had numerous hit singles on the dance charts and overseas). Moby continues to record and perform live, and despite my limited interest in his life is considered one of the greatest electronica artists of all-time, and my guess is will probably end up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at some point.
Fun Fact: ...would be that despite a rather wordy bio, I was unable to come up with a Fun Fact that was interesting enough to share. Usually it's the tremendously short ones that leave me without an intriguing tidbit.
"Natural Blues" was the fifth single released from Moby's seminal (he writes though he's never actually heard the album in its entirety) album, Play. The song was originally released in the U.K. where it reached #11 (and #1 in Iceland--so many cool kids in Iceland), but never charted in America. As for the album, although it would eventually sell twelve million copies, it only peaked at #38 on the Billboard 200.
I suppose the big takeaway this week is that even though an artist may only be of limited interest to you, it's still possible for said artist to record a song that just blows you away. I'd be the first to admit that a large part of my being blown away with "Natural Blues" has to do with the fact that Moby patched it together with samples from an old folk song by Vera Hall called "Trouble So Hard." As regular readers (both of you) know, emaycee loves him some folk and female vocalists, so the song has the best of both worlds for me. Hall's performance (which Moby heard from a box set of archived folk tunes) is so spiritual that it almost makes me wish I believed in God, and Moby gave the background music just enough of a role so that it doesn't overwhelm Hall's vocals and let's the original song's beauty shine to a fine sheen. It's a nice mix of some music history and an ambient melody that makes for a heavenly recording--in more ways than one.
Lyric Sheet: "Oh, Lordy/Trouble so hard/Oh, Lordy/Trouble so hard/Don't nobody know my troubles but God/Don't nobody know my troubles but God..."
Enjoy:
The Republican Party Is Now a Fascist Cult Just Like Nazi Germany
Peace,
emaycee
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