Little Feat: Cold, Cold, Cold
[purchase]
What this blog needs is more Little Feat. And luckily, they've got just the tune for our frigid theme.
Published on the cusp of the Zeppelin seventies, this Sailin' Shoes deep cut starts with cold tapping iron and then crashes into a stark drumbeat and a sax-and-guitarfuzz riff that totally overwhelm the lyrics. Thanks to a jagged rhythmic offset between one and the other, and some carefully balanced production dynamics, the instrumentation comes off as less a full wall of sound than a set of frozen, disparate, distant elements, even when the chorus kicks in.
The resulting song is an epic representation of the heartbeat of the lonely and abandoned...or the deserted, penniless junkie in desperate need of a fix, if you choose to interpret the "woman" of the song as something bit more metaphoric.
Bonnie Raitt's late-nineties "cover", off an otherwise-solid Lowell George tribute, warms the song up unnecessarily, cranking the dial up past sentimental. But it's still worth inclusion, if only for contrast.
Bonnie Raitt w/ Little Feat: Cold, Cold, Cold
[purchase]