MP3 Monday: May 8, 2006

Welcome back for the second episode of MP3 Monday. As always, songs will be available for download for a week.
1. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” by Nina Simone. From Silk & Soul (1967).
How can you not love Nina Simone? Truly an individual, in her vocal tone, in her politics, and in her general orneriness. (I mean, she shot people. That’s pretty ornery.)
Her voice always sounds to me like a war between restraint and passion, and you can see that in this song from the civil-rights era. She starts out reserved, almost blase. But as the volume turns up, the horns join in, and that bass drum starts to double-thump, she seems to wake up. Lyrics are here.
I found this on a compilation I really can’t recommend highly enough: Stand up & Be Counted: Soul, Funk, & Jazz from a Revolutionary Era. It’s all politically-charged stuff from the late 1960s and early 1970s — James Brown, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, and a lot of folks you probably haven’t heard of. Terrific stuff. Here’s another amazing track from it: “Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey)” by The Impressions. (That’s Curtis Mayfield on vocals. To my knowledge, this song is the first ever use of semen as a unifying metaphor for blacks and whites.)
2. “Just A Thought” by Gnarls Barkley. From St. Elsewhere (2006).
Gnarls Barkley, the It Band of the Moment, is the merger of DJ Danger Mouse and singer Cee-Lo. (You may remember Cee-Lo from 1990s ATL rap act Goodie Mob. You should remember Danger Mouse from his Beatles/Jay-Z mashup The Grey Album and his project with MF Doom, The Mouse and the Mask, previously pimped here on crabwalk.com.)
The first single off the album is the terrif “Crazy,” which you can hear streaming on their Myspace page. But the rest of the album — which comes out tomorrow in the U.S. — is just as strong. Danger Mouse remains a very accessible producer, with big primary-color beats. And I looooove Cee-Lo. The man doesn’t rap here — he’s really a soul singer of the old school, a la Al Green or the aforementioned Curtis Mayfield. I love me some hip-hop, but I do regret that its prominence has pushed black male soul singing out of the mainstream.
“Just A Thought” is one of the tougher-minded, darker tracks, with a little flamenco guitar underneath the cymbal-heavy thunder drums. As I said in that previous post about the MF Doom project, Danger Mouse makes hip-hop even people who think they don’t like hip-hop can like.
Bonus track: a live version of “Crazy” taken from BBC’s Top of the Pops on April 16. The sound quality’s not amazing, but the slowed-down orchestral take is interesting.
3. “Care of Cell 44” by The Zombies. From the album Odessey and Oracle (1968).
It’s happened to all of us at one time or another: Your girlfriend gets sentenced to 5 to 10 years hard labor. And sure, there’s always the hope of “good behavior” and flirting with the old guys on the parole board — but it still sucks. This song sums up that feeling.
Odessey and Oracle is a largely forgotten psychedelic classic, sort of a midpoint between Merseybeat and Brian Wilson. Trivia: The misspelling of “Odyssey” was the bassist’s roommate’s fault. And the Velvet Crush singles compilation, A Single Odessey, name-checks it. (Although they were closer to being a Byrds cover band than a Zombies one.)
Bonus tracks: this cover version of “Care of Cell 44” by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. It’s on their surprisingly good new album of 1960s covers, Under the Covers, Vol. 1. (The drummer is the great Ric Menck, founder of the aforementioned Velvet Crush.)
And here’s another cover version, this time from Elliott Smith, recorded at The Black Cat in D.C. on April 17, 1998.