So, once again I'm updating on a Thursday, though I have decent knowledge of the releases this week and what came last week. Last week's singles by Revolution Saints and Daughtry with Lzzy Hale were among the best for singles tied to projects aimed to be released this year thus far; Joel Hoekstra delivered a stellar guitar performance for the Saints and Deen Castronovo powerfully sang beautiful lyrics about the need for mutual connection and for us to stop hating and work together. Lzzy and Daughtry presented a Heavy Metal version of Journey's "Separate Ways," interestingly, woman-led metal band Eva Under Fire covered the same song last year and it ended up one of my favorite releases of the year. It is likely this will do the same, checking many of the same boxes that one did.
Iggy Pop had good tracks on his album with guest appearances by Stone Gossard and the late Taylor Hawkins, and Duff McKagan's bass playing was powerful on the tracks he played on, but it was ultimately a release I can wait until March to buy tracks from. My February budget has been trainwrecked by an unexpected charge from Entertainment Earth. The good news is that I'm getting an action figure of Street Fighter's Chun-Li as a Power Ranger two months early. The bad news is this put me in the red so bad I have to stall buying Paramore tickets and most, if not all, MP3s until March. Part of the problem was attempting to pre-purchase albums by Ronnie Romero, Paramore and Miley Cyrus, which are due out the end of this month, early February and early March. They are paid for, but it wasn't worth it in hindsight.
As this is music-based, I must take time to discuss this week's tragic loss. I remember last year a Twitter page asked what my favorite Jeff Beck songs were. I don't know the large gamut of his discography, and my distaste for some of the characters he spent time with prevents me from going to far, but I said, "You Shook Me with Rod Stewart, Train Kept A-Rollin' with Steven Tyler and Patient Number 9 with Ozzy Osbourne." Those still are my absolute favorites, but in the last year, I got to be exposed to him on "A Thousand Shades" with Ozzy Osbourne and a live medley of "The Jean Genie" and "Love Me Do" he did with David Bowie, which were among my favorites of the year. This morning, I had to note how talented he was at playing "Amazing Grace," the vocal line to "Immigrant Song" as Jimmy Page played the riff and an instrumental of The Beatles' "She's A Woman" with occasional talkbox. I don't know if he'd crack my top 10 guitarists, number 10 is Vic Johnson, the guitarist for Sammy Hagar and the Circle who can play most Van Halen and Led Zeppelin riffs, but he is comparable to names like that, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Slash, Randy Rhoads, Mike McCready, Allen Collins, Joel Hoekstra and Eddie Van Halen. His frequent collaborations with just about anyone remind me especially of Slash, in particular, who does the same.
This week, Black Stone Cherry released a killer song that entered my favorites of this year (time will tell if it stays). Steve Vai also has a single from his Vai/Gash project, and I wouldn't be surprised to see something from Ronnie Romero. Paramore and Miley Cyrus announced singles for this week and I want to try out the Beyond the Black album as I like women-fronted metal.
I want to give a special thank you to Yuri Lowenthal, Sarah McKnight, Tara Platt, Dave Scherer, Abby Trott and my brother for their compassionate Twitter presence during my last post. I have been waking up to enormous fear and mental pressure due to my lonely situation. My building is a great place to live, but several of my neighbors believe in scary far-right lunacy that is scary because it says I will be in an argument that I cannot win because they have built a wall around their mind and heart I cannot talk through, made of hateful ideals I cannot understand, black and white rigidity that does more harm than good and a desire for a theocratic dictatorship that may carry out genocide. It is why we are so distant now, when they lost to Obama, Palin and Glenn Beck stoked in them a rigidity that stonewalled rationality and made us "Satanic Communists" in their eyes. The Tea Party changed them into a hate group desiring an anti-LGBTQ+ genocidal dictator for life and Trump fit the bill so well they called him Christ. So, forever, my conversations with them will be this, "How about the Mariners?" with the hope we don't stray from sports.
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