Leonard Cohen wrote one of the most beautiful -- and frequently covered -- songs of all time, "Hallelujah." He recorded two versions of the song, the original version from Various Positions and a version I like better, longer, edgier, more modern, with very different lyrics, from Leonard Cohen Live In Concert.

Given that there are ten thousand versions or so of this song out there, it's hard to believe that there's only one video of Cohen performing it on YouTube -- and it's the original 1985 version -- and sadly, it's not very good, just a European television appearance lip sync.



Some of the best and most interesting of the many other versions, under the jump -- John Cale, Allison Crowe, kd lang, Jeff Buckley, Brandi Carlile, and Bono.

Via blogger Lyle Masaki at MTV/LOGOonline.com's AfterElton.com:

In Britain, Kirsty MacColl (who died seven years ago today) and The Pogues' Christmas-themed song "Fairytale of New York" is an annual tradition. The tune gets the kind of play "All I Want for Christmas is You" does in the States. (I. Am. So. Envious.) However, after twenty years of annual airplay, BBC 1 Radio has begun playing an edited version of the popular song.

If you're unfamiliar with "Fairytale of New York," MacColl and Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan play a raucous couple who spend their Christmas bitterly fighting with each other over broken dreams and wasted opportunities. Amid the many insults the couple throw at each other, MacColl sings "You scumbag, you maggot/You cheap lousy faggot/Happy Christmas your arse/I pray God it's our last". This year, BBC Radio is playing an edited version which, according to a BBC spokesperson, had the word "faggot" faded down, taking it out of the song.

With the song being an annual tradition, the change is controversial. The late MacColl's mother, Jean, called the alteration "ridiculous" while a Pogues spokesperson said that the band found the change amusing, considering that the song has been heard for so long without incident. Fans, meanwhile, are making the predictable cries of "It's political correctness gone too far!" as can be seen in the comments of this BBC Radio blog. (One comment interestingly notes that "slut" was also edited out, though the controversy entirely focuses on the f-word.)

An update to the entry says the BBC has backed down and gone back to the original and completely brilliant version. Video of the song, in all its filthy holiday glory, after the jump...

So I was wandering the Internets looking for something completely different and came across this little gem of a blog entry over on, of all places, the website of Mother Jones -- the progressive news and political magazine. Who knew they had a music blogger? Who knew said music blogger was basically extremely very enormously funny?

The topic? The just-released "Best of 2007" lists from Rolling Stone and Spin magazines:

Spin, America's Snottiest Mainstream Music Ragâ„¢, and Rolling Stone, America's Grumpy-Old-Man-iest Music and Whatever Else They Damned Well Feel Like Publicationâ„¢, just posted their best albums and best singles lists, respectively, and there aren't really too many surprises. Spin goes out on a limb with their #1 slot, awarding Against Me's New Wave "Best Album" honors. It's a good CD, but the choice smacks of a certain "we're down with the mall-rat Hot Topic punk-rock haircut emo kid crowd, please buy our magazine" desperation that Spin, in their insecurity, descends to a lot of the time. Other than that, you couldn't get a more same-old, same-old two through ten.

The whole juicy thing, including both mags' lists, is here.

I'm no Scrooge. I love the holidays, love presents and shopping and holiday parties and trees and lights and wreaths.

I also love Christmas music, and if that means Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas," I'm there. My favorite Christmas recording ever is probably "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" by Harry Belafonte.

Not so much with top 40 pre-packaged holiday songs for me, though -- I prefer either straight-up traditional or a little bit alternative, something with an edge or a twist.

I'll post my iPod's "Holiday" playlist after the jump, but first, a new CD of holiday music by Mindy Smith was released last month, and it's got that slight edge mixed with tradition that I love best this time of year.

My Holiday isn't alt and edgy in the kind of way that means your parents will cry if you play it during Christmas dinner. It also isn't so sweet and bland that you'll go into a diabetic coma after the pumpkin pie, either. The fact that it treads that line is entirely due to its spare production and the warm beauty of Smith's voice. Smith is is generally considered a folk/country singer and the CD claims it's folk, but this holiday CD is more like alternative supper club music with hints of jazz, pop, and country weaving through.

There's both original material and classics, with a taste of her Nashville roots on the standout track "Follow the Shepherd Home" (amusingly typo'd on the CD's track listing as "Follow the Shepherd Dog"). Alison Krauss sings along on a delicate "Away in a Manger," the country-tinged "Silver Bells" actually manages to stand out from the other 45,679 versions of this song that have been recorded over the years, and her poppy (and I mean that in the pure 60s girl singer way) "I'll Be Home for Christmas" is probably my favorite cut.

So, what's on my iPod Holiday playlist? It's under the jump....

Well, they say competition is good for consumers.

I checked out the Amazon.com mp3 store a week or two ago, and wrote about it here. I believe I said it was entirely possible Amazon could be the iTunes slayer:

(T)he tracks are recorded at 256 kpbs rather than 128 kpbs (which means much better sound quality), they are free of the restrictive Digital Rights Management software that means you can't play them on anything but an iPod or your computer, and ... Amazon had a lot of music iTunes didn't -- although the reverse, he said, is also true, given that iTunes has 6 million sings and Amazon, so far, only 2 million.

So I went to Amazon and checked it out. And I found that:

With the installation of a tiny little helper program, the download is incredibly easy and pops the songs right into iTunes for you.

The sound quality is much, much better.

The files play on anything, my iPod, my computer, can be burned onto a CD, and can be played on any other kind of MP3 player, made by Apple or not.

The songs cost either less, or the same, as iTunes -- and you don't pay extra for unrestricted tracks, likeyou do on iTunes; that's all Amazon sells.

And it was all done with one click, using my pre-existing Amazon account.

I guess iTunes thought they were looking like a threat, too, because today they sent me a little note letting me know there'd be some changes 'round the ole iTunes store:

We've lowered the price for iTunes Plus songs to 99¢ and expanded our selection to more than two million songs, including new albums from Iron & Wine, Band of Horses, Sharon Jones, José González, and more. With high-quality 256-Kbps AAC encoding and no DRM (digital rights management), the iTunes Plus catalog is the largest DRM-free catalog in the world. And that means you can play iTunes Plus music on any iPod or other digital music player and an unlimited number of computers.

Okay, Amazon.... your turn!

I haven't had Annie Lennox's Songs of Mass Destruction long enough to really give it an in-depth review yet, but it's currently blowing my head off.

I wasn't quite as excited at the first single, "Dark Road," as other folks were, so I wasn't in a particular hurry to get the CD, and yet I picked it up Tuesday when it came out. It's been playing in my mind, I mean, excuse me, on my iPod, since then. "Dark Road" grew on me, but "Sing," "Womankind," and "Coloured Bedspread" are doing for me what the best of 80s Eurythmics and Diva-era Annie did, which is to say... some of my personal favorite music ever. Some of it's synth-y, some of it's just full-on diva-esque singing by one of the era's best voices, some of it's maybe just a bit too AOR for my taste, but still... it's snappy, it's smart, it's got tons of heart, and much of it's even got enough of an edge to make me realize why it was that Annie Lennox made me break my "I hate synthesizers" rule back in the 80s in the first place.

Lots and lots of beauty here. Give it a listen.

I was wandering around the Internets as I often do, and I was reading one of my personal favorite bloggers, Machinist, who mentioned that he loved Amazon's new beta music download store and thought it was much better than iTunes. He pointed out the tracks are recorded at 256 kpbs rather than 128 kpbs (which means much better sound quality), they are free of the restrictive Digital Rights Management software that means you can't play them on anything but an iPod or your computer, and that Amazon had a lot of music iTunes didn't -- although the reverse, he said, is also true, given that iTunes has 6 million sings and Amazon, so far, only 2 million.

So I went to Amazon and checked it out. And I found that:

With the installation of a tiny little helper program, the download is incredibly easy and pops the songs right into iTunes for you.

The sound quality is much, much better.

The files play on anything, my iPod, my computer, can be burned onto a CD, and can be played on any other kind of MP3 player, made by Apple or not.

The songs cost either less, or the same, as iTunes -- and you don't pay extra for unrestricted tracks, likeyou do on iTunes; that's all Amazon sells.

And it was all done with one click, using my pre-existing Amazon account.

So I sat around and looked at the pretty shiny iTunes store where I've spent so many happy hours, downloading songs and TV shows and feeling a little thrill every time I pressed the button to buy something. I petted my iPod, which I love more than I've loved any other inanimate object except perhaps the black leather, high-heeled lace-up boots with red, turned down perforated leather cuffs that Prince would have killed for in the 80s, and I thought: Machinist is right.

Amazon's gonna kill iTunes. Check it out here.

Just a little heads-up about some free stuff over on iTunes:

Bruce Springsteen's new single "Radio Nowhere," from his forthcoming album with the E Street Band, Magic (due out Oct. 2), is available free for one week -- and according to his official site, it's only available on iTunes. Download. Rock out.

On Saturday, I told a friend I'd been to the Rufus Wainwright concert the night before.

"Who," she asked, "is Rufus Wainwright?"

I looked at her for a minute, not comprehending the question. "Well..."

I paused. How do you answer that question, exactly?

He's a singer, a songwriter. A performer. He's the son of folk/rock singer/songwriter Loudon Wainwright III and folksinger Kate McGarrigle. He's Canadian. He's gay. He's been called the best songwriter of this generation by Elton John, and was Rolling Stone's Best New Artist of the Year in 1998 -- and his first album, Rufus Wainwright, was their Album of the Year, too.

I'm not entirely sure how anyone could not have heard of him, but then again, my boss said something to me the other day about Lindsay Lohan and I was all like, who? I had to Google her. I mean, apparently there are gaps in everyone's cultural awareness and that's just something we have to accept.

Anyway, back to my friend. I ran the Rufus bio by her, and she nodded. "What kind of music does he do?"

And here we go again, because in the dictionary next to sui generis is a picture of Rufus Wainwright. Er, folk rock cabaret alternative torch song? What do you want from me?

At the August 3 show at San Francisco's Masonic Auditorium, Rufus brought it all. He opened with "Release the Stars," the title cut off his new album, with the thousand lights of a giant disco ball raining sparkles all over him, the stage, and the audience. He played guitar and piano, and ran through four costume changes, and a two-hour set (at least – it might have been longer but I lost all track of time), with enough genre-hopping to overwhelm a less gifted artist. He sang rock, folk, an un-miked Irish ballad, Judy Garland classics, and all of it with complete abandon and the passion he’s justly renowned for.

He served up most of the cuts off Release the Stars: “Going To a Town,� “Sanssouci,� “Rules and Regulations,� "Between My Legs," and probably some others I was too dazzled to remember. He sang “Harvester of Hearts� and “Art Teacher," and an a capella version of the Irish standard "Macushla."

And of course, he let his famous inner Judy Garland run free, giving us “A Foggy Day in London Town� and “If Love Were All," and a blistering hot version of "Come On, Get Happy."

Opener Sean Lennon was amusing and charismatic when chatting with the audience, and came out and did a dazzling rendition of "Across the Universe" with his and Rufus' combined bands.

If you're like my friend and don't know Rufus, fix that. Soon.

The free single of the week on iTunes is a mixed bag of good and bad, and this week it's two kinds of good: Just plain good music, and Canadian musician Matthew Good, a favorite of mine. I don't even have words to tell you what I think about his song "Weapon."

The free single is called "Born Losers" and it's off the dark, darker, darkest album Hospital Music. Amazon will tell you it's not yet released, but it is... they'll start shipping Monday. In the meantime, go download "Born Losers." And if you don't have iTunes, it's free too... although if you don't have an iPod, playing it on other mp3 players can be a challenge unless you buy one of the (so far few) DRM-free files.