#2: "Walkin' is most too slow."

Naming your desert island discs (the 5 CDs you would take with you if you stranded on a deserted island) is always a fun game to play or a good argument-starter.  I've thought about it many times and, like most things, it'll evolve depending on my mood or what I happened to have been listening to recently.  But while it may not be my favorite album, I don't think I'd ever want to be stranded on an island and not be able to listen to Layla and Other Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos.

For those who don't know, "Derek" is Eric Clapton and it's the only album by the band he created after his time with the supergroups Cream and Blind Faith, then a short but important stint with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends.  Not only can you hear the more rootsy, even soul-inflected rock sound of Delaney & Bonnie in the Layla songs, but a number of members of that band eventually joined Clapton to form the Dominos.

The album itself is a mix of blues covers and original materials.  And it's a testament to Clapton and the band that the album maintains a very cohesive sound throughout.  It also helps that joining the band was perhaps the greatest rock slide guitarist ever, Duane Allman.  It's his slide, playing off what Clapton is doing that defines the style of the album.  Here's the best example of them going back and forth:



It's also, famously, a sort of love letter to Pattie Boyd, then wife of Beatle George Harrison with whom Clapton was in love.  Many of the songs on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs are of unfulfilled and unrequited love.  (I can already sense that this will potentially be a recurring theme through some of the things about which I'll be writing during this project.) Songs like "I Looked Away", "Bell Bottom Blues", "Have You Ever Loved a Woman", "I Am Yours", and of course the title track.

That mix--the intensity of the lyrical subject matter and the sort of distillation of the blues form by Clapton and Allman--that make the record essential to me.  It's a bit sloppy in it's own way, but every single note is felt.  And it's an album that can I can hear over and over again without it getting tired.



From the 2003 film, Tom Dowd and the Language of Music.