Saturday, November 10, 2007

My ears! Ahhh!

Sometime last year... actually, just about a year ago now, the lovely and talented Matt Nathanson came to BU to play a show. He put on a great show, including reading excerpts from a soft-core porn novel, posing for pictures and signing autographs after the show, and was an all-around awesome guy. 

But the band he had opening for him - did. not. like. There weren't a huge amount of people at the show and frankly, I felt pretty awkward standing there watching this band that I thought sucked. It was a school event, so there was no bar to which I could steal away, and at one point, I freaked out, leaned over to my friend and whispered "I think the lead singer just made eye contact with me and that kind of weirds me out." Ah memories.

Anyway, I hadn't thought much about Carbon Leaf lately, as I really had no reason to have them on my mind. Until the other night. I was searching the Bruce Springsteen MP3 Bootleg Index (an excellent resource for any and all unreleased Bruce ephemera) for an MP3 of "Fire," a song that never made it onto any of his albums, when I came across a cover version of "I'm On Fire" by none other than.... Carbon Leaf.

At first I just laughed, but my morbid curiosity got the best of me and I had to give it a listen, which I knew was a mistake. I mean, Carbon Leaf doesn't really deserve all this wrath from me, but they're like Dave Matthews Band-lite, and that's just a vibe I can't get behind. Anyway, Carbon Leaf's version lacks the slow burning (burning... fire... get it) sensuality of Bruce's original. I mean, why cover a song like that if you're going to sing it like a robot?

Sigh. Some days, I really worry that I might end up a real-life female version of Rob, Dick, and/or Barry from High Fidelity, wasting my life away working retail, trying to feel better about myself by putting down others' taste in music. 

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