Beat The World Records
2009
Are Sound
About This Album
The Dandy Warhols opened their 2003 album, Welcome to the Monkey House, with a brief, snide dig at record industry greed and illogic that ran, in part: "When Michael Jackson dies, we're covering 'Blackbird.'" The line was obviously intended as a flip reference to Jacko's control of the Beatles' publishing rights -- of course, "Blackbird" is a rather fitting song to record as a eulogy, though it's doubtful that the Dandys considered that at the time. But fate had some amusingly ironic, if insignificant, tricks in store when, six years later, Jackson's unexpected death occurred mere weeks before the release of an alternate version of that same album -- a version whose initial release had been prevented by the Dandys' own industry woes, and which featured all of the same songs except for the sadly newly relevant titular ditty. The story is that the bandmembers took the tracks (which they had co-produced with Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes) to be mixed in New York by Russell Elavedo (D'Angelo, Common, the Roots), but the results were rejected by Capitol Records and shelved in favor of a new version mixed (apparently without the band's involvement) by British pop engineer Peter Wheatley (Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Sophie Ellis-Bextor), which was released to mild but vaguely disappointing success and ended up as their second to last album for the label.
Track List (try tracks 3 and 6)

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