One of My Favorite Albums - The Trinity Session by The Cowboy Junkies

The Trinity Session was released in 1988, it was then and is now unlike anything I have ever heard. It was recorded into a single microphone in a church in Toronto.Due to the recording technique used, listening to the album is like being in the room during the recording session. It's about as real as it can get, you can hear every squeak of the guitar strings, every breath of singer Margo Timmins. At the same time, the sound of the recording is otherworldly. The best word I can think of to describe it is "magical."
The most well known song on the album is the ethereal cover of The Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane which was later used in the film Natural Born Killers.

The traditional Working On A Building, and the American classics, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry and Walkin' After Midnight as well as the medley Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis) are all highlights.  Junkies original, Misguided Angel is as good as anything on Springsteen's Nebraska, it's like a beautiful and sad black and white film.   Really, the whole album could be described that way.

There is actually a new version of the album recorded to coincide with the album's 20th anniversary. It has some guest stars like Ryan Adams, Natalie Merchant and the late Vic Chestnutt but I love the original album so much, I'm kind of hesitant to check out the new version, it just can't be an improvement.

New R.E.M. Video - Mine Smell Like Honey

R.E.M.'s new album, Collapse Into Now comes out March 8th but starting a month or two ago they started leaking songs from the album onto the internet. By my count, they've put out five songs ahead of the album's release, that is almost half of the album. Until today, I haven't listened to any of them. My thought process was that if I start listening to all the songs now, by the time the album comes out I will be tired of them or at least that the release won't be a big deal. I guess it doesn't matter. I don't want to go off about how "In my day, bands released one, maybe two 'singles' before the album came out and they played them on 'the radio' and 'MTV.'" All of those things seem so irrelevant these days. Is a single even a thing anymore? I'm not complaining, even though it might sound like I am, I like that any music I want is at my fingertips pretty much whenever I want it. I like that bands can just release something on the internet cause they feel like it. I'm still gonna wait for Collapse Into Now to come out so I can listen to it as a whole. I'm ok with how the internet has changed the music business but I am still an album guy. That being said, I am also a member of the MTV generation (they used to play music videos on MTV) so just now I watched the new R.E.M. video, Mine Smell Like Honey.

Here's the other R.E.M. honey song: