Tag Archives: M. Donnelly
Sounds Good: Old 97’s@Crossroads TONIGHT!; Blitzen Trapper@Riot Room; Bela Fleck & Bruce Hornsby@Crossroads
Have you ever written a song before?
If you have, you probably thought it was really great at first, really original and profound. Maybe you got the balls to play it for a friend, and then tried to gauge their reaction. But inevitably, their reaction didn’t match your high opinion of the artistic merit.
“What do they know about music?” you thought.
Then a few days later you went back to it and realized what a sappy, derivative, huge piece of shit your song is, amiright?
Now imagine that your friend is Bob Dylan. And you are re-writing the lyrics to one of his most iconic songs.
This is not going to go well.
That is, unless you’re Rhett Miller, the boyish front man of the Old 97’s, who sat silent and nervous while Bobby D himself read Miller’s new words to the classic, “Desolation Row.”
“He turns down, he says, a hundred requests like this out of hand every day,” Miller recently told Dan Weiss of Village Voice. “I had to type out the lyrics and let Dylan sit there and read my lyrics. The next day I got the call that Dylan likes it, and he likes it enough to give us half the publishing on it, which we didn’t even ask for.”
