The reading of Carolyn Franklin's "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)," with its female backing chorus, is right up there in the red it's got the elegance and exuberance of the original, but McCain's gritty approach takes it to another place. The horns are killer as they move up against the whomp of chunka-chunka guitar chops. Ike Turner's "Grits Ain't Groceries (All Around the World)" contains all the driving, greasy funk of the original, while McCain's vocal touches on both Ike's and Joe Cocker's, yet remains firmly his own. The set opens with a Southern gospel take on Holland-Dozier-Holland's "Can I Get a Witness," which feels like something Delaney Bramlett would have recorded and arranged in his prime. It's raw on the edges and warm in the middle.Īs to the song selection, one can simply say that McCain has cajones: anyone can cover any song, but to be able to take classic soul tracks that have been well defined already and interpret them as if they were your own and/or new songs, while bringing out what made them special in the first place, takes a special kind of audacity, and his song choices are remarkable and terrific. Produced by veteran Tor Hyams, the approach and mix are loose, dirty, and woolly the sound Hyams gets here is very immediate and present, nearly live sounding - and yes, that's a very good thing. Guitarist Steve Cropper and singer Joan Osborne both make guest appearances. McCain used most of his road band and some ringers for the date, including the nearly ubiquitous drummer Eddie Bayers Ivan Neville on various keyboards such as the B-3, Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, clavinet, and backing vocals and Doug Moffett and Quentin Ware on horns. These covers come from the roots of McCain's raising in Greenville, SC: Southern soul and funk. Nobody's Fault But Mine is his first all-covers record and it's solid top to bottom. In fact, McCain and his band are diverse enough to be able to pull 500 songs out of the hat at any given time. He's also played many different kinds of music, from rootsy, jam-based rock & roll, to introspective solo acoustic shows, to barnstorming Southern R&B dates that are big on covers and crowd-pleasers. Yet, he's consistently recorded and toured no matter the economic or critical circumstances. Ten years after his big hit, "I'll Be," appeared on Atlantic's Lava imprint, he's been all over the map and all but lost musically.
0 kommentar(er)
