NovaMenco are five brothers who began their recording career after moving to San Diego in 1995. They created a fusion of flamenco guitar styles of Europe and North America, riding the so-called New Flamenco wave that crested in the 1990’s with acts like the Gipsy Kings and Ottmar Liebert.
Unfortunately, I’ve come across no video of NovaMenco performing this particular tune.
I did, however, find videos of numerous cover versions, including this one by a man named Leon Eduardo:
Philadelphia quartet Wanderlust had a brief flirtation with major label status in the waning days of alternative rock’s radio domination, and their lone RCA album Prize from 1995 is highly regarded (and featured elsewhere within this blog).
Despite the critical success of that record and opening slots on tours by The Who and Collective Soul, the band were dropped by RCA before they could release a follow-up.
In the time since, front man/main songwriter Scot Sax has found success writing for major artists, including the Grammy-winning Faith Hill-Tim McGraw duet “Like We Never Loved at All”, while guitarist Rob Bonfiglio released numerous solo albums, established himself as a respected L.A. studio musician and toured with the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson’s band.
Then in 2020, Sax discovered a DAT tape of demos he’d written for a follow-up to Prize. Realizing the potential of the songs, he reconvened the foursome to give the material a proper band treatment.
Sax relates, “I feel like a young Cameron Crowe, with a story about a band that fell victim to its own insecurities in the bright lights — and with the big wigs — of the music business, circa 1995.”
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“Now, the same four guys find an old cassette of songs never recorded, long forgotten in their fall from grace. So what do they do? They make the album that never was.”
The band each laid down their parts separately from home during the pandemic–which is why the above video from the single “Corduroy Moon” doesn’t show them actually performing together.
The results lean less toward the heavy 90’s rock sound of their debut and instead bring a plethora of power pop and melodic rock notables to mind: The Raspberries on “2 Million Pieces”. Big Star and the Jayhawks on “Corduroy Moon”. Sloan and Joe Walsh on “Trick of the Light”. And Badfinger in the chorus of “I Can Be Moved”.
I recently saw A Complete Unknown. Bob Dylan is one of my favorite artists, and I actually got to meet and work with Pete Seeger (in fact I visited his log cabin that Dylan spends the night in early in the film, and I can attest that they got those details right) so I was excited to see those two icons acknowledged in our current popular culture and introduced to a new generation. Judging from reactions to the film on social media, the movie was a resounding success on that front (though Joan Baez seems to be the artist depicted in the film who’s really resonating with the younger generation.)
There is no such thing as a perfect biopic that will satisfy both the people who know the history going in and those for whom the film acts as an introduction to the subject. I knew the film would take liberties, and that my reaction would be colored by my own feeling of connection to the period and milieu it depicts. The movie opens in 1961, the year Dylan arrived in New York at age 19, and also the year I was born on Long Island approximately 35 miles east of Greenwich Village. 31 years later I moved to New York and I played at some of the same clubs Dylan played in and got to meet icons like Pete, and Alan Lomax, and Theodore Bikel. I figured that’s the world I would be obsessed with upon exiting the film.
But instead I left the film thinking about another artist I am obsessed with but had never previously associated with this universe: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Actually I thought about TWO Mozarts: the real one and the one dreamed up by the demented Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play and screenplay Amadeus.
Both Amadeus and A Complete Unknown are about immature genius savants who produce art that contains a deep well of wisdom and humanity completely lacking in their social personalities. The main characters are almost supporting players in their own stories, because what they’re really about are the people who try to connect with them but just can’t make sense of the profound disconnect between the sublime music and the selfish brats that produced it.
Bob Dylan’s journey from provincial Minnesota to exciting New York is remarkably similar to Mozart’s escaping Salzburg for Vienna. They were both young, hungry, probably on the neurodivergent spectrum, had a justified confidence in their own abilities that made them both impatient with those who didn’t “get” them and distrustful of those who did, craving attention but unwilling to follow the established protocols necessary to cultivate their reputation and status within the industry – though they intuited that their rebelliousness actually helped their celebrity status even as it aggravated those managing their careers…
Every Moment Has A Song 