This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Danny Michel is probably one of the greatest songwriters you’ve never heard.
Which makes it kind of interesting that on his latest disc Loving The Alien, he celebrates one of the greatest songwriters everybody’s heard: David Bowie. But this isn’t some exercise in slavish genuflection. On many of these 11 cuts, the creaky-voiced Michel wipes away the sequins and gloss of Bowie’s glammy approach, the better to behold the natural beauty of the Thin White Duke’s melodic craftsmanship. Young Americans sheds its funky duds for the comfy clothes of lazily shuffling folk-blues; Ashes To Ashes is reborn as a woozy acoustic-guitar strummer, and so forth. And along the way, we get new appreciation for two of the greatest songwriters around.
