Robert Plant – Music New to You from the Past and Present

Over the past few weeks, and continuing into the next couple of months, a host of big name rock and roll artists are releasing new albums. From Prince to the Foo Fighters, U2 to Weezer, and John Mellencamp to Jeff Tweedy, there is plenty already here or on the way.

A few days ago Robert Plant put out his first new album in four years, “lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar”. While there are official music videos out for a few tracks, Plant is at his most engaging on stage. Here are recent live performances of the album’s first two songs, “Little Maggie” and “Rainbow”.

In November Bob Dylan’s “The Basement Tapes Complete” will be released, apparently collecting every audible shred of material from the legendary 1967 sessions – a total of 138 tracks on 6 CDs. But possibly more interesting will be another November release, “Lost On The River – The New Basement Tapes”. In the fall of last year, producer T Bone Burnett received a stack of recently discovered, hand-written Dylan lyrics from Dylan’s publisher. They were written in 1967 during the time of the Basement Tape sessions but were never set to music. Burnett pulled together an all-star team including Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, and Grammy winning folk artist Rhiannon Giddens to write music for the lyrics and perform the songs for a new album. Of the album’s 20 tracks recorded in the space of only two weeks, videos for two have now been released, “Nothing to It” and “Married to My Hack”.

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Phil Everly, with his older brother Don the Everly Brothers, died on Friday in California. Famous for a string of hits that began with “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up Little Susie”, both released in 1957, the massive influence of the duo’s vocal harmonizing was recognized with inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 1986. Here are the Everly Brothers performing those hits.

Many of their hits were written by others, including the two in the videos above, but Phil wrote 1960’s “When Will I Be Loved” which also became Linda Ronstadt’s second highest charting single in 1974. Interesting note: Ronstadt was just elected to this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class.

Phil and Don also wrote “Gone Gone Gone”, covered by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on their 2007 collaboration “Raising Sand”.

Phil did live to see Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day and Norah Jones release “Foreverly” this past November, a song-for-song reinterpretation of the Everly Brothers’ second album “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us”. Here’s the first single released from that album.