Whiskeytown: The Missing Bridge....

Because i only briefly talked about Whiskeytown on my very first installment of the Ryan Adams Spotlight, i've decided to periodically jump back and mention them as i see fit.

i'll admit that i was not cool enough back in the day to know about Whiskeytown while they were still a band - in fact, i had even listened to Ryan Adams for about a year before i snooped around and found out about them. But that was a long time ago, and i now consider myself quite sapient on the matter.

So what's the point of all this......?

A while back, a friend of mine called me and began to sing a small piece of music he couldn't quite place:

"Baby I want you

Honey I need you

I know you want to

I can feel you cry"

i immediately recognized it as an obscure bridge from a song i knew.

Slowly i pinned it as Ryan Adams, then Whiskeytown specifically.

After singing it to myself a few more times than necessary, i was almost certain that the snippet was the tempo-changed bridge from "Crazy About You" off Pneumonia. But as i listened to the song in iTunes, the bridge was nowhere to be found.

At this point i became very intrigued to find an answer.

i pulled out my copy of Pneumonia - no bridge

i looked for any copies available on The Hype - no bridge

i was sure i wasn't crazy and had heard a version of the song with the bridge included - and i was pretty sure that i owned a copy somewhere.

So i pulled out my old brick of an mp3 player and went through my Ryan Adams folder.

There it was - Crazy About You with a running time :38 longer than the album version.

Crazy About You (album version)

Crazy About You (extended with bridge)

It kicks in at 2:13 if you wanna skip right to it.

But the enigma is still not completely solved as i haven't found anything else on the web about it. AnsweringBell.com says the song made an 'unofficial appearance' on a Pre-Release of Pneumonia and includes the bridge in the lyrics, but nothing more is said.

i'm fairly positive i picked up the extended version off of some file sharing network back in the day.

i've listened to both versions intently and have yet to find a difference other than the bridge addition. It's hard to tell whether or not they recorded two cuts of it. My idea is that Lost Highway may have cut the bridge in order to save the up-tempo feel when they obtained the rights to Pneumonia.

So this is where you come in. Look through your libraries and pull out your copy of Pneumonia (if you don't own the album.... change that).

Tell me which version you have and when you got it.

---------------------------------------

In other Pneumonia-related news, i just received a copy of The Kites' John Logan covering Whiskeytown's Under Your Breath. Really good.

Under Your Breath

It's a simple home recording, but the vocals are silky-smooth.

More Kites here.

---------------------------------------------

continue with the Ryan Adams Spotlight==>