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Thursday, 03 November 2005
Bettye LaVette : great comeback for a great lady
It's only been 24 hours that I've decided to publish this blog in English, and one of the first things I wanted to do was to translate a former post about Bettye LaVette.
The story of the life of Bettye LaVette gives us a bitter taste of regrets and frustation : this is the story of a great, so great soul diva, whose career unfortunately never reached the success her talent really deserved, among the pantheon of Aretha, Ella or Tina...
Starting her long career with a tiny hit in the 60's, let me down easy, she's alway been on stage, standing in the shadow of the big stars with whom she was connected at certain moments : Otis Redding, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Smokey Robinson...
On this album, Bettye was helped by a bunch of women, from everywhere, like Sinead O'Connor, Fiona Apple or Dolly Parton... The result is full of soul, much inspired by rough blues than gospel. You hear a burning emergency, Bettye sings as she should die tomorrow, and at the same time as it was the first time...
An essential album, and I hope it will be the occasion to rediscover her whole discography. By the way, I must mention one have the opportunity to buy a signed copy of this album on her website! I received mine so fast, don't hesitate : www.bettyelavette.com
10:35 Permalink | Comments (1)
Wednesday, 02 November 2005
So what?
Well, you can't not have noticed that this blog is now English-speaking... well at least it tries to be! Looking at the visitors stats, I found it was a lot of work to keep this blog up to date, for very few visitors... So this is a try : English could help me to reach people from everywhere, as long as they can read my poor English...
What do you think of that?
23:00 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0)
Alicia Keys : a goddess, no more, no less...
Yeah, I know... When it comes to Alicia Keys, many of you cats look condescending : too commercial... May I just ask if you consider Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin to be too commercial as well? Anyway, I must admit I wasn't a real Alicia Keys fan so far : the lady's got a great voice, but for me it was just one among the R&B divas crowd...
Then I discovered this Unplugged album, and it was like a smack on my face : Alicia Keys is definitely a real soul singer, and she really knows how to move the crowd. She sings with lots of warmth and sincerity, and that takes her definitely out of the R&B divas I've just mentioned... The arrangements are great, her voice is so full of heart and soul, and the duet with Adam Levine from Maroon 5 on the cover version of Wild Horses is just brilliant actually.
Sit back and relax to listen to this great moment of soul music... and try to forgive the hip-hop-style "Uh" that kind of make me sick...
22:50 Posted in Sounds of today | Permalink | Comments (0)