1
Aug
these dreams, so beaten and so battered
(or: august 1’s honey from the hive)
posted at 7:45 am by brandon in sweet you rock and sweet you roll
Bette Midler — “All I Need to Know” (from No Frills
Years after the Divine Miss M tackled this chestnut, Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville reworked a couple of its verses, renamed it
“Don’t Know Much,” and won a boatload of Grammys (and reignited both of their careers, natch) with the resulting smash. But I’ll go ahead and cop to the fact that I’ve always preferred Midler’s rawer, more organic take on this material: stripped entirely of the attention-stealing bells and whistles that had marked her music to that point, Bette crawls inside these words and finds the naked power pulsing beneath them. An unjustly ignored classic.
