Word: clapton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...37th annual Grammy Awards. Among the nominees announced today: Tony Bennett, 68-year-old crooner and a Generation X darling of late, received a nomination today for album of the year for his "MTV Unplugged." (He'll go up against "The 3 Tenors in Concert 1994," Eric Clapton's "From the Cradle," Bonnie Raitt's "Longing in Their Hearts," and Seal's self-titled album "Seal.") Frank Sinatra, whose first albumful of digitized duets with rock stars such as U2's Bono was released one week too late to qualify for last year's Grammys, earned a nomination...
Music: Neil Young and Eric Clapton sound fresh...
This sort of silly reflection often follows in the wake of great success, and so it has been with Clapton. The sales of his last album, Unplugged, with its heart-rending and (for a time) inescapable single Tears in Heaven, all seem to have counted against him this time in the eyes of critics. And it is true that on From the Cradle, which comprises 16 classic blues numbers ranging from the Willie Dixon war-horse Hoochie Coochie Man to Lowell Fulson's Sinner's Prayer, Claptons playing lacks fire. But in its place he brings a great worldliness, something...
Blues Before Sunrise begins the album and sets the tone. It's a wary, weary kind of blues, and Clapton puts it over like a man groggy from an overdose of bad luck. By the time he reaches the album's midpoint, James Lane's Blues Leave Me Alone, Clapton has navigated the shoals of despair and is heading for very deep waters. There was a time when he practically lived at those longitudes,but like some explorer using charts from his first voyage, Clapton now tacks with more assurance. He knows the winds, and he's been through...
That feeling of a sure and steady hand is what some have mistaken for complacency. But Clapton takes nothing for granted. You can hear him bend the low-key bravura of It Hurts Me Too into a plea as strong but uninsistent as a prayer. There may be something cosmopolitan about the blues on From the Cradle, but that quality doesn't come from spurious sophistication. It originates, rather, from some wider experience of the world and a consequent deeper sadness. It does not snarl. It whispers, the sound of a hard traveler halfway along a dark road...