This Bird Has Flown is a tribute album of The Beatles' Rubber Soul on the 40th anniversary of its release. Includes covers by Ted Leo, The Fiery Furnaces, and Sufjan Stevens.
I heard the Sufjan cover a long time ago, and despite by abiding love for both SS and the Beatles, I didn't like it much. Rubber Soul's one of my favorite albums and a lot of those musicians are fantastic, but this seems sorta gimmicky to me.
It's about half "that sounds like the original but worse" and half "what song is this supposed to be again?" So pretty much the same as every other tribute album.
Yonder Mountain String Band is amazing and I've heard that they just played their version of "Think For Yourself" for the first time in concert last week. I'm personally really excited to hear Yonder, Dar Williams, Mindy Smith and the Cowboy Junkies to cover these. Incidentally, Dar Williams does a superb cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" on her new album (and it's fucking awesome).
There's a fine art to doing cover tunes (especially those that are recorded in-studio). Some versions can be very similar to the original, whereas some others can be an artist's unique view of the tune (like Michael Hedges' cover of "All Along The Watchtower" or Yonder Mountain String Band's version of Ozzy's "Crazy Train").
:) Yeah, at some point maybe they should just leave the past in the past....
R2000
Oh, God...please...no more tribute albums. Please.
I think the only tribute album I ever kept (and probably one of the very few I ever purchased) was The
Bridge: A Tribute To Neil Young. In '89 these albums hadn't yet become gimmicky and the music still
holds up well today (Sonic Youth, Nikki Sudden, Pixies, Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr, Nick Cave).
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
