Rod Stewart – Every Picture Tells a Story The inclusion of Jethro Tull’s Fat Man is required because you can find a mandolin on tons of their tracks. In fact, where Goldeneye uses the strings and horns, is where Osborne utilizes the mandolin. Ok, so perhaps a bit more adult contemporary rock, but still, it does rock, especially for those of us of a certain age.Īlso in the ’90s, Joan Osborne hit the scene as well, but this GoldenEye-esque song from the same year as Tina Turner’s Bond theme features a mandolin from the same album that brought her fame with One of Us. And it genuinely is folk and rock, not just folk with a beat. Besides that main riff, it’s just a few plucks here and there in the background, but it works as one of the classic ’90’s folk-rock hits. Shawn Colvin’s hit Sunny Came Home features the mandolin playing the main riff throughout the song. And to similar effect and success.Īnother Heart honorable mention is Sylvan Song. Not all mandolin is ominous, and Dream of the Archer by Heart is an example of the mandolin transporting us back to another period of time, farther from the electric guitars and back to a time of minstrels, that’s on par with Led Zeppelin’s use of the mandolin as well. The song might work without the mandolin, but it would be so sonically different without the ominous acoustics of the mandolin that it would basically be a different song. It can add to the larger sonics.Īt times the mandolin can be sonically ominous, and nowhere is that more apparent than Styx’s Boat on the River. This establishes that the mandolin can blend well in appropriate settings, instead of just being its own sound. Speaking of charts, Steve Earle’s country rock hit Copperhead Road, charted on the Billboard Rock chart, and needed to be included, because not only was it a country-rock song that crossed over to the regular rock charts, but country artists use the mandolin as well, and while it’s not my usual cup tea it merits inclusion nonetheless.ĭavid Grisman’s mandolin on Friend of the Devil is another layer to make a fuller sound, as opposed to just adding the mandolin in for a different piece of acoustic accouterment. I include Ho Hey, because as the mandolin goes, this song that spent some time at the top of the charts, features a mandolin, and is part of the folk-rock resurgence that brought the sounds of the sixties back to the charts with a modern feel, despite the retro sonics. That said, if the mandolin can rock for Zeppelin, it rocks for me.Īnd let me also add “ Going to California” as an honorable mention here. Led Zeppelin’s Battle of Evermore is commonly thought to be Tolkien inspired, and while that is apparently argued to the ends of the earth on the internet, I have to tell you that the acoustic guitar and mandolin mix to make the ethereal Middle-Earth of Tolkien’s fiction come to life with the voices of Robert Plant and Sandy Denny. When you break down certain folk songs, the acoustic guitar is, at times, as percussive as any drum, and in Little Ghost, The White Stripes have applied that principle to the mandolin, and it works, with the acoustic guitar that is doing a similar percussive strum. And in that way, it’s such a great representation of how a mandolin can work within the construct of a rock band alongside, guitar, bass, and drums. as a band that wasn’t bound by conventions of what people expected, only what they wanted to create. being good until they found the mandolin, but Losing My Religion is iconic because of the mandolin, and it helped to establish R.E.M. So in defense of the mandolin, here are some tracks that include and even feature the little instrument that could.įirst on the list is the song that inspired this post in the first place. It was entirely unprovoked and someone needs to stand in and defend the mandolin from Matt’s attacks on Our Liner Notes.Īnd apparently, I have decided that I am that person. This blog post was written as a response to a podcast, where the mandolin was unfairly and viciously attacked because, well, there was no reason.
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