Eric Clapton - Pilgrim - Alternate Version (1998)

Sometimes, a musician you really like makes an album that's seriously flawed, and there's nothing you can do about it. But in this case, I did something about it. :)

Eric Clapton's album "Pilgim" was widely criticized when it came out in 1998. Most of the critiques focused on the production more than the songs. For instance, Wikipedia's article on the ablum quotes Allmusic critic Stephen Erlewine, who gave the album two out of five stars, and said:

"The problem lies in the production, which relies entirely on stiff mechanical drumbeats, gauzy synthesizers, and meandering instrumental interludes. These ingredients could result in a good record, as 'Change the World' demonstrated, but not here, due to [the album's] monotonous production. ... Clapton doesn't want to shake things up – his singing is startlingly mannered, even on emotionally turbulent numbers like 'My Father's Eyes' or 'Circus'. Even worse, he's content to take a back seat instrumentally, playing slight solos and fills as colorless as the electronic backdrops."

Wikipedia quotes a bunch of other critics who say similar things, and I have to agree. I'm a big fan of Clapton, but I only kept a couple of songs from the album in my music collection, mostly because I couldn't stand the production.

Luckily, I recently came across a couple of Clapton concert bootlegs where I noticed Clapton played many of the songs from the album, and the bootlegs had great soundboard quality, with almost no crowd noise. More importantly, Clapton played the songs in a very different way in concert. With a small band, there was no way to duplicate the overproduced sheen of the album. Hearing them in a different way is a revelation.

So what I've done is I've tried to duplicate the album as much as possible, including the same song order, but replacing the studio versions with live versions. I only kept on song from the album ("Fall like Rain") both because it was the one song that had decent production and because it apparently was never played in concert. I dropped three songs completely ("Sick and Tired," "Needs His Woman," and "Inside of Me") because they just weren't very good songs (and I couldn't find any live versions that might redeem them).

In coming up with alternate versions, I had to throw chronological consistency out the window. Some of these versions come from as early as 1992 and as late as 2005. But Clapton's sound has stayed almost exactly the same during that time, so you won't notice.

I debated whether to use a full band version of "My Father's Eyes" or the very different acoustic version done for the "Unplugged" acoustic show in 1992 (but not included on most versions of that album). I decided to go with the band version, but I stuck the acoustic version on the end of the album, so the listener can have both.

"Pilgrim" is a long album - over 70 minutes. My revised version ends up being basically the same length, even though I removed three songs and added one.

If you gave up on this album, give it another try. This really is something different, and a lot better. This is how the songs were meant to sound.

For the song "Born in Time," the only live version I could find was a duet between Clapton and the author of the song, Bob Dylan. That was fine with me, because I love Dylan, but there's one section of the song where Dylan takes over lead vocals, and there are a number of flubs, including the band hitting some very wrong notes. So I edited that part of the song out. There are still some parts where the dual lead vocals are sloppy due to Clapton and Dylan not being in sync, but even so, it's significantly better than the studio version.

01 My Father's Eyes (Eric Clapton)
02 River of Tears (Eric Clapton)
03 Pilgrim (Eric Clapton)
04 Broken Hearted (Eric Clapton & John Mayer)
05 One Chance (Eric Clapton)
06 Circus (Eric Clapton)
07 Going Down Slow (Eric Clapton)
08 Fall like Rain (Eric Clapton)
09 Born in Time (Eric Clapton & Bob Dylan)
10 She's Gone (Eric Clapton)
11 You Were There (Eric Clapton)
12 My Father's Eyes [Acoustic Version] (Eric Clapton)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15260154/EricC_1998_PlgrmAlternate_atse.zip.html

I used the same basic cover of the album, except I found a rare version where the text was much larger, and the background image is cropped differently. Since this is the alternate version, I figured it was only fitting to use the alternate cover.