“Borrowed Tunes” is one of my favourite albums from the nineties. It’s a two-CD set, featuring 37 Neil Young covers by Canadian bands. Like Young’s classic Rust Never Sleeps, the first half is acoustic and the second is electric.
There are so many good songs on this album. The Rheostatics and the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir do a wonderful, loosey-goosey cover of “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere”, Marc Jordan sings “Borrowed Tune” like it’s a lullaby and Crash Vegas kind of reinvents “Pocahontas”:
I forget exactly how (it originated with Cover Lay Down, an excellent blog of folky covers), but yesterday I learned that last year a second “Borrowed Tunes” was recorded, by a (mostly) new generation of Canadian artists. I have yet to hear any songs from it, but I’ll definitely buy a copy. Not from Amazon.com, mind you, where it’s listed as an import and priced at $47.99. Instead, I can get it at Amazon.ca for $21.99 or Chapters.Indigo.Purple.Monkey.Dishwasher.ca for $20.99. Or, I suppose, there’s always iTunes for a mere $14.99 (link goes to iTunes store).
I don’t really want the physical CD, and buying digital is greener. Unfortunately, I can’t find the album on eMusic or Zunior, so I may have to buy it from iTunes and convert the songs to MP3s.
Proceeds from sales of both albums (plus another earlier, more indie cover album) go to support The Bridge School, a California instution which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs. Both of Young’s sons have cerebral palsy and his daughter has epilepsy.
For the first time, Young’s entire collection of published media will be available for purchase, beginning today with the first of five volumes.
Young’s collected works after more than 40 years of making music and film would be a massive enough project - but the most interesting part of the announcement is that the media will be delivered on Blu-ray Disks that will check for updates when new content is available and download it to your local device.
That’s an interesting content delivery model. It’s a little surprising to me that physical media–Blu-ray disks, in this case–are involved at all.
I don’t follow the movie industry that closely, but I do tend to pay attention to major film festival buzz. The films that get talked about at Cannes, Sundance et al tend to be the films I want to see.
However, I’ve recently noticed a minor frustration with this process. I’ll read about a film getting positive reviews at a festival, and then try to find its trailer online. Often, I can’t. I remember this was the case with Teeth at Sundance last year. This year I have the same complaint about the new Neil Young tour documentary, CSNY Déjà Vu. It debuted at this year’s Sundance, I read an interview with Neil in Rolling Stone but can’t check out the trailer.
This is one of those rare times when I really want to look at an ad for a product, and I can’t. To use some marketingese, I’m ready to begin a relationship with this movie, but I can’t. More importantly, I’d be happy to post it to this website, favourite it on YouTube and so forth, but I can’t.
I assume there are some baroque politics around distribution deals and marketing control that prevents the trailer from debuting when the movie does, but it’s pretty silly. Movie marketers may think they’re creating desire by delaying the trailer, but I find I just forget about these movies. A trailer would, I think, help me remember. I can certainly picture moments from the Teeth trailer which I watched when it eventually came out).
