"(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay" is one of my all time favorite songs. Otis Redding recorded it twice in 1967, including just three days before his death in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. Austin does a very nice version of this song. His voice suits the older style songs.
Austin had been singing this song for years. There is a video on YT of him singing it on board a cruise ship, when he had been promoted from the production numbers to bar singer (changing the lyrics to "to make this boat my home"). His voice is stunning, you're right, but to me this is not quite as successful as other covers he's done. The song is about despair, sung by someone who doesn't see things ever getting better. Otis Redding's great success with the song lay in his conveying all that while giving a great vocal performance. Austin sings from the heart and I don't feel his heart is in it. He's just having too good a time! This was a very happy period of his life and the despair he might have been able to convey a couple of years before just isn't there. It's very unusual for Austin not to hit the mark! Technically of course it's perfect. To hear Austin conveying unhappiness you might check out Love Me Like That with Home Free, preferably the live version. It's very autobiographical, about the breakup of his 5 year relationship, and it's heartbreaking. At the other extreme, you would enjoy Everlasting Ground, written for his wife Amberly. Not so country as a lot of his songs and none the worse for that.
I've always loved the late Otis Redding's classic and I think Austin does it justice. If you haven't seen some of his originals on his channel, "If I Met You Now", "Real Talk", "Take the Night Off" & "Off the Grid" among them, they're all terrific.
"(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay" is one of my all time favorite songs. Otis Redding recorded it twice in 1967, including just three days before his death in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. Austin does a very nice version of this song. His voice suits the older style songs.
Austin had been singing this song for years. There is a video on YT of him singing it on board a cruise ship, when he had been promoted from the production numbers to bar singer (changing the lyrics to "to make this boat my home").
His voice is stunning, you're right, but to me this is not quite as successful as other covers he's done. The song is about despair, sung by someone who doesn't see things ever getting better. Otis Redding's great success with the song lay in his conveying all that while giving a great vocal performance. Austin sings from the heart and I don't feel his heart is in it. He's just having too good a time! This was a very happy period of his life and the despair he might have been able to convey a couple of years before just isn't there. It's very unusual for Austin not to hit the mark! Technically of course it's perfect.
To hear Austin conveying unhappiness you might check out Love Me Like That with Home Free, preferably the live version. It's very autobiographical, about the breakup of his 5 year relationship, and it's heartbreaking. At the other extreme, you would enjoy Everlasting Ground, written for his wife Amberly. Not so country as a lot of his songs and none the worse for that.
I've always loved the late Otis Redding's classic and I think Austin does it justice. If you haven't seen some of his originals on his channel, "If I Met You Now", "Real Talk", "Take the Night Off" & "Off the Grid" among them, they're all terrific.
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