My life is over.
Aw, don’t feel shame, feel happy that you’ve discovered one more cover song to add to your collection! We can’t all know everything. Fighting ignorance is a good thing, whether you’re the fighter, or the beneficiary of the fighting.
Yeah, just like I learned that Patti D’Arbanville and Patti Boyd are different persons right here in this thread. 
I’m pretty sure when the song 'Goodbye to You’ first came out, sung by Patty Smyth of the band Scandal, I briefly thought “wow, Patti Smith sure went mainstream!” 
ETA: Oh, duh, BTW…breakup song! (how ya like the way I deftly pulled that hijack back on track 
)
Hey, what about a song about a breakup from a band, does that also count? I’m just listening once again to Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps”, and “Thrasher” comes up. Man, how I love this song, and what a scathing reckoning with CS&N it is.
They had the best selection
They were poisoned with protection
There was nothing that they needed
Nothing left to find
They were lost in rock formations
Or became park bench mutations
On the sidewalks and in the stations
They were waiting, waiting
So I got bored and left them there
They were just dead weight to me
Better down the road without that load
This bittersweet song is a duet by Frank Blank and his soon to be ex-wife Violeta Clark.
Loved the movie too.
Woah…‘Rust Never Sleeps’ was my favorite album at 14-15 years old and I played the heck out of it. Thrasher was one of my favorite songs on the album, and I loved the poetic, oblique lyrics, but I never really figured out any meaning or context for them. Thanks for that info!
It checks out. In a December '95 interview with Neil:
Thrasher was pretty much me writing about my experiences with Crosby, Stills & Nash in the mid-'70s.
Now, can you tell me what that white boat coming up the river in Powderfinger was all about? What was their beef, anyway?
I’ve had this fantasy for nearly 50 years that I will someday stumble upon a historical account that jibes with that song.
I just realized there is a breakup song that isn’t listed in his thread or the one linked above. And it is a breakup song written specifically to break up a musical team (According to Dolly, after she played it for him, Porter Wagoner said she could go if his record label could be the one that released the song). I guess Whitney’s bombastic hit cover masked the core meaning of the song too well.
Two of my favorite break up songs are sorta opposites.
CeeLo Green’s Fuck You
And Green Day’s much gentler Good Riddance.
OMG! I tried all the tricks I know to get the videos to link and it just would not let me. I tried even just posting the links but the board hates me right now.
I can’t help either, but my theory has always been that the song’s protagonist’s family lived a sort of criminal life hidden away out in the woods, maybe bootleggers, and that the white boat is the law coming for them.
See this thread. It’s really very easy to avoid the youtube embedding bug:
Oh good one! Have you seen The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas? Dolly sings it to Burt Reynolds.
Thanks but those are the tips and tricks I tried to use! Even read that very thread. It was like I did it wrong at first because I’m old and forget that here is different from other places I post and once I got the forbidden warning, nothing made it stop.
Oh well, back to down doobie do down downing.
My working theory has been that the protagonist’s family owned that patch of land for generations, farming, hunting, fishing and generally living off the land. Poor, but proud. Then one day a corporation comes by, wanting to buy the land to build a hunting lodge & resort or some other rich folks’ nonsense. But the land is all they have! Why, Emmy Lou’s grave is just over yonder! Can’t let them just pave over it. What are they going to do with a little bit of cash-- get a crappy apartment in the city?
So they resist the corporation’s offer until the evil corporation sends a gunboat full of hired goons up the river, and the rest is tragic rock song history. As a small positive footnote, I like to imagine the protagonist’s love (mentioned in the last line of the song) eventually becomes a lawyer, suing the corporation for tens of millions in damages (lawyers, not bullets, being a much more effective fighting tool), setting up Mama, Big John (now sobered up) and the protagonist’s brother for life.
Do you have a thread on this subject? I love finding out about songs I didn’t know were covers.
I do not, alas.
And many of my collection were obtained during the wild, wild Napster days, plus an amazing (now defunct) website dedicated to cover songs.
They are pretty much all illegal copies. So I am not going to share them or any more detail.
Thank you, but I didn’t mean you had to share info like that. Do you ever post any covers (from memory) in existing threads? Just the names of the songs and artists, you don’t have to post the actual songs.