Friday, August 04, 2006

Karen Dalton Revisited

I bought the Karen Dalton reissue "It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best" yesterday, and played it for the first time when I got back after work tonight. "She sure can sing the s*** out of the blues," says Fred Neil (who famously once payed Bob Dylan one dollar for a gig), on the back of the cd; and he's right. Her voice is rich, mellow, smokey, heartbroken and beautiful. After she'd finished, I couldn't put another cd on or turn on the television because I didn't want the air she'd purified by singing to be polluted by an inferior sound.
The cd comes with a dvd of performances by Karen from 1969 and 1970.

2 comments:

Sharon Auberle said...

Bruce, i think i'd buy that cd just for the title alone..
love your music reviews, now i'm gonna have to go out and find this one..

Bruce Hodder said...

Sharon,let me know what you think of it if you can track it down. I think she's got one of the best voices I've ever heard, comparable in beauty to Billie Holiday, or Emmylou Harris. The English pressing is on Megaphone Music, and the serial number (or whatever you call it) is CD Mega 10--though this'll quite likely be different in the US.
I became a fan the first time I heard her sing.Caught, forever, the moment Karen opened her mouth.