Bob Seger inspired Prince to write Purple Rain

...as this article explains (it also explains a lot of other fascinating stuff about Purple Rain).

Joe writes: So here are my two favourite Bob Seger songs.

We've Got Tonight - you can hear how this might have inspired Purple Rain:

and Still The Same, which my dad used to sing all through my childhood, but didn't own, so I didn't hear the Bob Seger version of it until years later:

and here's Purple Rain which is even better than the best of Bob Seger:

Bob Seger

Joe writes: Writing about Tonight by Tanya Stephens below reminded me of We Got Tonite by Bob Seger - one could almost be an answer record to the other.

Like John Mellencamp, Bob Seger is sometimes denigrated as being a poor man's Bruce Springsteen, which is a bit like denigrating The Kinks for not being as good as The Beatles.

Here's another Seger favourite, Still The Same. I must have heard my dad sing this a hundred times before I ever heard Bob Seger's version (I think my dad had lost his copy), but in the internet era Bob's version is of course at my fingertips. I love the internet.

Road Songs #1

Phil writes: The Guardian's '1000 songs everyone must hear' has already reminded me of a few I meant to post and hopefully will now get round to. Road songs is not one of their fairly arbitrarily chosen seven categories - understandably - but there are a good number of these songs and this is surely one of the most memorable, by a neglected artist who has written several outstanding songs.



Bob Seger - Roll Me Away (Amazon)