Thursday, October 29, 2020

There's A Girl Over By The Water Fountain...

and she's asking to be mine. 

For the lapsed Catholic I am, the irony of my favorite song on the new Springsteen album, Letter to You, being "If I Was The Priest", is far too delicious to not embrace.  

Although the version of it that appears on the album is the first full-band rendition of it I have ever heard, its origins are found in a long ago and far away iteration of Springsteen's songwriting...  

 Well sweet Virgin Mary runs the Holy Grail saloon,
For a nickel she'll give you whiskey and a personally blessed balloon.
And the Holy Ghost is the host with the most and he runs the burlesque show
Where they let you in for free and they hit you when you go.

-If I Was The Priest
Bruce Springsteen




I was already overdue for Cheyenne.

-AK 

4 comments:

  1. I love both 'old' songs having only heard bootlegs for decades.
    I realized listening to them that I really like the 'wordy' Springsteen, the 'new Dylan' version, from back in the day. Hope he treats us to more in the new year.

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  2. Agreed 100%. On Sirius the other day he mentioned that he decided to record them with the band when he came upon them as part of his original John Hammond audition tape for Columbia Records, which he was listening to as part of a "Tracks II" project.

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  3. I hadn't realized how much I enjoyed him as a wordsmith until I heard the two tracks and now have both Greetings and Wild & Innocent in the car CD player.

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