Slide: Slide Away

purchase [ other stuff from Muzai Records ] (The label for Sunken Seas)

The <slide> theme was deliberately left nebulous enough to allow for slide guitar entries or some pedal steel, and if you happen to follow my personal tastes, you'll know that my favorite musicians include masters of that style: Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Bonnie Raitt, Lowell George.

As I often do, I scratched out a couple of starting lines heading down that path with the intention of letting the idea stew for a couple of days before settling on one of the slide masters. As we are now at the end of the <Slide> theme calendar, it looks like that one will have to wait for our traditional November <Leftovers> theme because (Baby, Baby, Baby ....) I'm out of time.

Yet, as that idea sat on the desktop, I also began work on a song or two with <Slide> in the title. This would have been last week, some time before the Video Music Awards earlier this week. Pure coincidence, since I had no way of knowing the song list for this week's Video Music Awards.


Bono, Oasis, The Verve, Noel Gallagher ... they've all got songs named <Slide Away>. Bono doing the vocals on a Michael Hutchence composition. And Oasis doing the Noel Gallagher song of the same name. And then Miley Cyrus this past week. And then, as a last minute bonus, yet another Slide Away from a group on Muzai Records called Sunken Seas. There's probably more out there.
Not knowing much of anything about any of these, I guessed that they were likely variations/covers of someone's original.

I can't think of too many other song titles of exactly the same name that are distinctly different songs. At the same time, you could surmise that the conceit behind the song name is obvious enough that any could hit on the title for an original: I guess it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise ... how often does love end in one party slip/sliding off down a different path? Slide Away is a quite natural occurrence - whether as an act IRL or as a title for a creative work. The song stories are all "love songs" in one form or another. The Gallagher/Oasis and the Verve's are more centered on sliding away together; Cyrus' and Hutchence's are more about being away.

The Verve:

 

Oasis:

Hutchence/Bono:

Cyrus:

Sunken Seas:

Wine: Champagne Supernova

[purchase]

Another Champagne song, but what the hell is a “Champagne Supernova?” They are words that make no sense together, and even Noel Gallagher, who wrote the damn thing, has no idea what the song means. (Strangely, I’ve recently written elsewhere about an album titled Kilonova, which is not as bright as a supernova, but is still kind of a big deal, despite not being wine related).

Nevertheless, the Oasis song is a great singalong, as the best Oasis songs are, but I’m not posting that version. Instead, the video above is a cover by Scala & Kolacny Brothers. Scala is a Belgian girls choir conducted by Stijn Kolacny, and arranged and accompanied on piano by his brother Steven Kolacny. Starting in the early 2000s, they decided to move away from the classical repertory and into rock covers, garnering way more fame than would be expected from a Belgian girls’ choir singing rock covers.

Their cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” was used in the trailer for the movie The Social Network, and other songs were used in trailers for Downtown Abbey, and for other movies and in TV shows. They have released a bunch of albums, mostly of covers of songs from pretty much every genre, in English, French and German, and, of course, a Christmas album (which includes a cover of one of my favorite holiday songs), so, if this kind of thing interests you, I’m sure you can find something that turns you on.