“Draped in monotony / What's my life gotten me?”
You literally can not go wrong with Smokey Robinson opening your song. It’s a scientific fact, like the 5 second rule when you drop food on the floor. In the case of this week's featured track courtesy of The Avalanches: "We Will Always Love You", it’s a sample from “I’ll Take You Any Way That You Come”. For those unfamiliar (like I was), it's an underexposed banger from The Miracles. Do yourself a favor and take a listen. But I digress…the opening sample serves up a perfect appetizer for the “just enough” main course: a verse from Blood Orange.
Blood Orange deserves more of a write-up than this post will allow. If you like what you hear I urge you to check out his Negro Swan album. He is an “IPA Artist”: either you love him or you don’t understand the hype. For those with limited palates, his contribution here is straightforward, before super-producers The Avalanches transition straight to the dessert with, yes, another brilliant sample (The Roches “Hammond Song”).
“Nighttime, I'm fine dreaming of another life”
The Avalanches are a DJ/producing duo, and this track is mixed and produced in true DJ fashion, blends, mixes and effects to make the whole better than the sum of its parts. Ethereal and cosmic, something you’d hear at 4am at an outdoor music festival, when you’re not sure if you’re dreaming. The sounds take you on a lyrical journey, driving blissfully into a dead end, only to find a last-minute escape, in an Inception kind of way. “We Will Always Love You”: perfect for this playlist.
You can learn more about The Avalanches here:
You can learn more about Blood Orange here:
About the Curator - Ben Young:
Ben Young lives a life of polarity. He has split his life between the coasts: half his life on the West (California) and half on the East (Georgia and Virginia). He has pursued careers in the art world (film school graduate) and the corporate world (executive with Fortune 500 companies). And he is Biracial, the personification of being two things at once.
Ben’s musical influences were formed by music loving parents, raised in a world of John Coltrane and John Lennon, James Taylor and James Ingram, Huey Lewis and the News and Prince and the Revolution. Saxophones, electric guitars, synthesizers, and breakbeats filled the air Ben breathed from birth. And being born one year after the birth of Hip Hop, Ben has been joined at the hip with the genre his entire life.
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