Blind Love. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. 1991. Capitol.

 For their cover of Tom Waits’ Blind Love, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band recreate a version of country music both satisfyingly ersatz and authentic. Its authenticity comes courtesy of Seger’s remarkable ear for American music, its nuances and boldness, its ability to measure the breadth of your expectations against its capacity to surprise and excite. Seger’s choice of styles—replacing Waits’ idiosyncratic studio arrangements with familiar recording studio conventions—not only reconfirms Waits’ stature as American songwriter but also weds to traditional country a contemporary rock sensibility that makes commercial sense without deadening the vitality of either genre. In Cocteau’s great film, Orpheus, from 1950, we see the title character, portrayed by Jean Marais, fastidiously working the control knob of a car radio (the Rolls Royce lent to him by a suborder of Death, played by the steel-eyed and beautiful María Casarès) that secretly, mysteriously, broadcasts the poetry that will secure his reputation as the greatest living poet. The scene is the finest metaphor on film that captures, with brilliance and glamor, our fixation with 20th century radio, its power upon our imagination, and our utter willingness to be anesthetized into its electromagnetic, aerial dream. In the mid-seventies, after years of trial and error, Seger became a fixture of American radio, its classic rock variant, with his talent for fashioning durable song formulas about troubled lovers who nourish their lives’ losses with a rueful, clear-eyed awareness as free of cynicism as it is of hollow, shopworn sentimentality; he’s like the Eagles with a far more manageable taste for cocaine and therefore a keener sense of accomplishment and limitations. And he has a gift for utilizing the talents of female backup singers with an elegant finesse unlike anyone else.

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