Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain

Artist: Bob Dylan

Song: Buckets Of Rain

Album: Blood on the Tracks

A tender folk ballad with dobro guitar and a suggestive stanza by a master singer-songwriter with an unrivaled resume of over 700 songs. If you consider Blood on the Tracks in its historic period, a wistful Viet Nam War perspective didn’t much fit into surrounding disco craze, but it was Bob’s best album in years.

THE ALBUM’S FINAL SONG, bucket full of rain, seems conciliatory in tone. The simple brief lines help Blood on the Tracks end of a positive note, and there’s even a bit of imagistic language – little red littlered bike – that resembles william carlos williams famous poem “The Redwheelbarrow”. The concluding word are shooting: “Life is sad...”

Dylan said about lp “You’ve got yesterday today and tomorrow all in the same room”

From Michael Gray’s excellent book, the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, about Buckets of Rain (from Blood on the Tracks):

The closing track on the Blood on the Tracks album, this is an immensely likeable, modest song of barbed sanity ACUTO BUON SENSO. A blues- structured work, it also neatly NETTAMENTE METTE INSIEME conflates other old song titles within its lyric, as when Dylan sings

‘Little red wagon, little red bike / I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like’.

In a genre so riddled ENIGMATICA with sexual innuendo INSINUAZIONI and double entendre as the blues, it’s sometimes hard to know whether a phrase or a line belongs in the nursery ASILO NIDO or the porn shop, and this is a good example. One long-term Dylan collector was told years ago that the phrase ‘little red bike’ was a blues term for anal sex: which certainly puts a different perspective on Dylan’s lyric. But it is not a common blues term: there isn’t a single ‘little red wagon’ in Michael Taft’s Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance.

‘Little Red Wagon’ is, however, a recording by the pre-war blues artist Georgia White, and by a happy coincidence the very next track she laid down at the same session is called ‘Dan the Back Door Man’.

I’ll never hear that song quite the same again.

From the official Bob Dylan lyric site:

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I’m takin’ you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

Buckets of rain
Buckets of tears
Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears.
Buckets of moonbeams in my hand,
I got all the love, honey baby,
You can stand.

I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke.
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear,
If you want me, honey baby,
I'll be here.

Like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your lips.
I like the cool way you look at me,
Everything about you is bringing me
Misery.

Little red wagon
Little red bike
I ain't no monkey but I know what I like.
I like the way you love me strong and slow,
I'm takin' you with me, honey baby,
When I go.

Life is sad
Life is a bust
All ya can do is do what you must.
You do what you must do and ya do it well,
I'll do it for you, honey baby,
Can't you tell?

Nada Surf - Whose Authority

Artist: Nada Surf

Song: Whose Authority

Album: Lucky (2008)

Nada Surf's new Jonathan Krisel-directed video for "Whose Authority," from the forthcoming Lucky, stars Michael C. Maronna, who you should all remember as the elder Pete from The Adventures Of Pete and Pete. Classic. Here, instead of dealing with his pain-in-the-ass kid brother or doing those sensitive wise-beyond-his-teenage-years voice overs, he's working as a bad-ass bicycle messenger delivering packages around Manhattan after leaving his Brooklyn crib. En route he disrupts pigeons, chats with other two-wheeled friends, kicks over traffic cones, knocks on buses, and narrowly escapes collisions with taxi doors before heading back over the Wiliamsburg bridge and calling it a day. Yes, home to that cool place MTV told us about. Gosh we hope Kyp says hi this time.

review

“There are some particularly luminous moments here, including the back-to-back punch of "Whose Authority"” - Allmusic

Everyone’s right and no one is sorry
That’s the start and the end of the story
From the sharks and the jets to the call in the morning

Everyone’s right and no one is sorry
That’s the start and the end of the story
From the sharks and the jets to the call in the morning
And life is just bits anyway

Look alive see these bones
What you are now, we were once

Try as they might, no one’s immune to
Misfiring and acting on the wrong clues
And thinking it’s time to redo redo

I feel rain in the movies and the talk before the screen lights
I hear strings in the park
I don’t like to call her right unless its too late at night
I mostly just think in the dark

Look alive see these bones
What you are now, we were once
But just like we are
You’ll be dust
And just like we are
Permanent

You were too tired to eat
Too hungry to sleep
Just imagine the speed
It’s just what you need

Look alive, you see these bones
What you are now, we were once
And just like we are

You’ll be dust
And just like we are
Permanent

The lights in the city are more or less blinking
Which side of the story decides what you’re thinking
We’re a moans and cold faces
We’re squinting, we’re hurrying
We take inventory
We’re digging, we’re burrying

Do you remember when the lines blow?
Do you remember when it failed
Do you remember when we went to your house?
Remember ringing the bell?

Look alive, see these bones
What you are now, we were once
Just like we are
You’ll be dust
And just like we are
Permanent

The lights in the city are more or less blinking (look alive)
Which side of the story decides what you’re thinking (see these bones)
We’re moans and cold faces (what you are now)
We’re squinting, we’re hurrying (we were once)
We take inventory
We’re digging, we’re burrying

Do you remember when the lights low?
Do you remember when it failed?
Do you remember when we went to your house?
Remember ringing the bell? [2x]

Look alive see these bones [2x]

Memory Tapes - Bicycle

Artist: Memory Tapes

Song: Bicycle

Album: Seek Magic (2009)

Moniker-crazed one-man-band Dayve Hawk splits the difference between his Weird Tapes project (dancey, electro) and his Memory Cassette project (hazy, wistful) with Memory Tapes (dancey, yet wistful!). After the incredible, New Order-style single "Bicycle", we now get news of the debut Memory Tapes LP, dubbed Seek Magic and out in a very limited edition September 29 via Acephale.

To start, the record is primarily being released on vinyl-- first run records will be light blue with some special "white/blue haze" LPs thrown in just in case you didn't get the idea that this shit is fucking hazy. (Pitchfork)

‘Bicycle’, the album’s first single, is a retro-minded collision of propulsive beats, layer upon processed layer of Hawk’s hauntingly soft vocals – like The Knife producing Neil Young – and a closing guitar solo, lifted straight from the grooves of New Order’s Technique, which cranks an already celestial song into some kind of dark-hearted disco supernova. more

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Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Bicycle Boogie

Artist: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee

Song: Bicycle Boogie

Album: Key To The Highway, Sittin In With Sessions (2007)

music

Cool Kids - Black Mags

Artist: Cool Kids

Song: Black Mags

Album: The Bake Sale (2008)

Part of the mid-2000s hip-hop movement that found kids in all-over prints rapping about their shoes and their favorite forms of transportation (which often weren't cars), the Cool Kids proved to be both an Internet and live show phenomenon. The duo of Mikey Rocks(born Antoine Reed) and Chuck Inglish (or Evan Ingersoll) met in mid-2005 after Mickey came across some of Chuck's beats online and liked what he heard. They met up in their Chicago-area homes (whereMikey was born and raised; Chuck lived in Mount Clemens, MI, about 30 miles north of Detroit, until he was 11) with the intention of making beats to sell to other artists, but soon realized their own measured, ... Read More...

The Bake Sale is the critically acclaimed EP by American hip hop duo The Cool Kids. It has sold over 50,000 copies in the U.S

review

Verse (Chuck):

I got this 89-90, Pistons champ flat/ bill black starter cap with the hologram tags/
White Mag rims, red rubber tires/
Chain, frame, pegs, grips, shift to my supplier/
Dope man attire, gimme bout an hour/
And I'll have it clicking, ticking, gliding, flying like McGuyver/
I'm a Murder Club, dope pedal rider/
Nigel said I'm good to get that ink on my bicep/
I gets, busy as a bee on my bike grips/
If I catwalk this, I walk, I can fly this/
Bitch and I'm fly, and it's tied to the side/
that's the flag that I'm flying/
Add to the fact that it all coincides with these wheels that I'm riding/
3pt Mags make you think that I'm gliding/
... Shiiiit nigga I aint lying/
I got a long rap sheet that'll say that I'm tied in/

Chorus

Verse (Mikey):

I hit chuck on the pager yo, I'm kinda bored/
And got class til later so, open garage/
And I don't really know which way to go, I aint tryna skate it though/
And my bikes illegal, so they send for the law/
But I don't care joe, I just keep on pedalin/
Ride past shorty light skinned with no melanin/
Shirt look like somebody stuffed two melons in/
Had to stop, so I could preach like revered/
I grip on the handbrake and say "Whatup?"/
I skip on the handshakes, I'm straight. What else? /
I got two pegs on the back, and you got two legs under your skirt/
So ho, we head/
To the Dope Pedal Headquarters/
You would be there if you could/
Chuck got the red wheels and the white mags, but it's all good/
Got the gold hundred spokes like Boys in the Hood/
With the lime green frame, dollars on the bike/
Seat, handlebar grips, is the same as my Nikes/
In the mold, the gold I use for my spokes/
And the frame, the same as I use for my chain/ Out!

Chorus

Mikey Rocks and Chuck Inglish (myspace.com/gocoolkids) in their first video adventure. while GL-Joe (myspace.com/GL_Joe) directed and Jake Z (www.lookatrubbish.com) filmed it.

Corinne Bailey Rea - Girl Put Your Records On

Artist: Corinne Bailey Rea

Song: Girl Put Your Records On

Album: Corinne Bailey Rea (2006)

"Put Your Records On" is a song by English soul singer–songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae from her debut album, Corinne Bailey Rae (2006). Written by Rae, John Beck, and Steve Chrisanthou, it was released as the album's second single in February and early March 2006 throughout Europe and as the lead single in North America. The track received two nominations at the 2007 Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, losing both to Dixie Chicks' "Not Ready to Make Nice".

Three little birds, sat on my window.
And they told me I don't need to worry.
Summer came like cinnamon
So sweet,
Little girls double-dutch on the concrete.

Maybe sometimes, we've got it wrong, but it's alright
The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same
Oh, don't you hesitate.

Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.

You're gonna find yourself somewhere, somehow.

Blue as the sky, sunburnt and lonely,
Sipping tea in the bar by the roadside,
(just relax, just relax)
Don't you let those other boys fool you,
Got to love that afro hair do.

Maybe sometimes, we feel afraid, but it's alright
The more you stay the same, the more they seem to change.
Don't you think it's strange?

Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.

You're gonna find yourself somewhere, somehow.

'Twas more than I could take, pity for pity's sake
Some nights kept me awake, I thought that I was stronger
When you gonna realise, that you don't even have to try any longer?
Do what you want to.

Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.

Girl, put your records on, tell me your favourite song
You go ahead, let your hair down
Sapphire and faded jeans, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, let your hair down.

St. Vincent - Bicycle

Artist: St. Vincent

Song: Bicycle

Two years ago, Annie Clark’s recorded debut as St. Vincent, ‘Marry Me’, gave immediate notice that a dizzying new talent had emerged from the flatlands of Texas. Critics from all points of the cultural compass—from Pitchfork to Spin to the New York Times Magazine—were entranced by the album’s precocious arrangements and elegant lyrics, and the steadily growing crowds at St. Vincent’s live shows were astonished by Clark’s gargantuan musical chops and her magnetic stage presence. No small number of St. Vincent fans took the title of ‘Marry Me’ literally, had their hearts duly broken, and wouldn’t have had it any other way. The record was heralded as a remarkably successful entrance and Clark capped a year of international touring by winning the Plug Awards’ Female Artist of the Year. more

Bicycle is the b-side of the single “Actor Out of Work”..

music

You stole my bicycle so i had to walk 20 city blocks in the rain
You took my tennis shoes so i took the train to avoid the rain
You saw me on the street you offered me a seat then when i blinked you w