With the Eclectic Playlist Series now in its 11th year (!), I still aim to populate each mix with a good number of artists who have yet to appear on a prior list. I shoot for seven or eight new artists every time; this month there are 12. Sometimes artists new to an EPS mix are people I’ve previously featured with an MP3 review (as, for instance, Becca Richardson this month, among others). Other times a debut artist here is someone relatively new to the music scene (Jenny Owen Youngs this time, as an example). Another category can be a seemingly random band from the past with a song I happen to feel like plugging into the mix; the British post-new-wave band Haircut 100 qualifies this time around. A long-ago figure from the jazz world can become another first-timer (see Gil Mellé, below). One last interesting (and less common) category is the massive pop star who sneaks in with a song that somehow fits into the EPS flow more than what they usually put out (enter, here, Beyoncé).
Unrelated reminder: for an overview of (almost) all songs featured to date in an EPS mix, you can check out the master EPS playlist that I update on Spotify every month. As I have noted in the past, Spotify does not host every song I place on every list–typically it’s missing one or two songs every couple of months (this month, for instance, “Once You Know” is missing). But there are at last count nearly 1,900 songs on the playlist. You don’t get the contexts of the original mixes with this master list, but you do get many hours of entertaining listening out of the deal–the equivalent of a very quirky radio station, without any announcers.
As for this month, here are the goods:
1. “Fallout” – Yo La Tengo (This Stupid World, 2023)
2. “A Bird in the Hand (Is Worth Two in the Bush)” – The Velvelettes (single, 1965)
3. “Nothing To Be Done” – The Pastels (Sittin’ Pretty, 1989)
4. “Free Ride” – Nick Drake (Pink Moon, 1972)
5. “Once You Know” – Le Reno Amps (LP, 2004)
6. “If I Were You” – k.d. lang (All You Can Eat, 1995)
7. “Alliigator Tears” – Beyoncé (Cowboy Carter, 2024)
8. “Etc” – Francis and the Lights (single, 2013)
9. “Ode to Billie Joe” – Sinéad O’Connor (The Help Album, 1995)
10. “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)” – Haircut 100 (Pelican West, 1982)
11. “Under Capricorn” – Gil Mellé (New Faces – New Sounds: Gil Mellé Quintet/Sextet, 1953)
12. “Avalanche” – Jenny Owen Youngs (Avalanche, 2023)
13. “On Top of the World” – Cheap Trick (Heaven Tonight, 1978)
14. “Mathematics” – Cherry Ghost (Thirst For Romance, 2007)
15. “Wanted” – Becca Richardson (We Are Gathered Here, 2017)
16. “It’s Wonderful” – The Rascals (Once Upon a Dream, 1968)
17. “Take Me As I Am” – October Project (October Project, 1996)
18. “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” – Roy Ayers Ubiquity (Everybody Loves the Sunshine , 1976)
19. “The Bike” – Amy Correia (Carnival Love, 2000)
20. “Stop Hurting People” – Pete Townshend (All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, 1982)
Stray commentary:
* If “A Bird in the Hand (Is Worth Two in the Bush)” sounds a little familiar–sounds, perhaps, a bit like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”–that’s because the two songs were both co-written by the Motown songwriter/producer Norman Whitfield. And this song came out first. If you think about it, the songs are similar not only in sound but in subject matter: in each case, the lead singer is saying “I love you more than that new person who says they love you.” The Velvelettes were yet another high-quality Motown singing group that seem to have deserved wider success than they ultimately achieved. Their best-known song, in retrospect, was “He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’,” which was a minor hit for them in 1964, and a bigger hit for the group Bananarama (re-titled as “Saying Something”) in 1982. The Velvelettes started as a quintet, and later performed as both a quartet and a trio. After dissolving at some point in the 1970s, the group was re-assembled in the 1980s and intermittently toured into the 2000s.
* Le Reno Amps was a good-natured, They-Might-Be-Giants-adjacent duo from Scotland, active between 2004 and 2011. They are not, as noted, to be found on Spotify, but you can discover their appealing, slightly skewed, DIY-ish pop on Bandcamp. (And, you can buy any of their albums there on a name-your-price basis.) An example of their general approach to things: the band’s name was devised as an acronym of the bandmates’ two surnames (Maple and Nero), with an added “s.” I featured “Once You Know” here back in 2005, and retain a soft spot for this one.
* Gil Mellé was an interesting cat. As a 19-year-old baritone saxophonist he was signed to Blue Note Records–the first white musician on that storied label’s roster. At the same time he was a visual artist, who created covers not only for his own albums but for albums by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk. After recording a series of albums between 1953 and 1957, he abandoned jazz performance for a long and busy career as a composer for film and TV; he wrote some 125 scores in all, including work for Ironside, Night Gallery, and Columbo. He was known in particular for being a pioneer in the use of electronic music in film and TV scores, building his own synthesizers and, by some accounts, the world’s first drum machine. Later in his career he returned his focus to visual art, working in the ’90s with computers to create widely-acclaimed digital paintings. He died in Malibu in 2004.
* For the uninitiated (which includes me), that is not a typo in the Beyoncé song title. All song titles on Cowboy Carter that have words with the letter “i” in them are spelled with double “i”s; the song titles are, furthermore, capitalized on the album, so each “i” looks like this: “II.” This is an inside reference to the fact that the superstar singer/songwriter considers this album to be “Act II” in a three-act sequence, which began with 2022’s Renaissance. Cowboy Carter presents a lot to sort through, and while not much of it has clicked with me so far, I felt drawn to “Alliigator Tears” right away, so here it is.
* As if we needed more evidence of the late Sinéad O’Connor’s majesty as a singer, give a listen to her commanding take on the Bobbie Gentry chestnut “Ode to Billie Joe.” O’Connor’s use of her breath as part of her vocal tone is all but heartbreaking. And don’t miss the choice she makes on the word “spring” about 45 seconds before the end. Big props here too to the minimal, eerie arrangement, which keeps a flowing, menacing undercurrent throughout. The song can be found on The Help Album, which was released in 1995 as a fundraiser for a charity called War Child, which provides assistance to people in war zones around the world. The artists featured on the album were all British or Irish, and included Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Oasis, Blur, and Paul Weller.
* As a single, “It’s Wonderful” was initially credited to the Young Rascals, but the band was about to officially become, simply, the Rascals by the time Once Upon a Dream came out. If remembered at all here in the history-challenged 21st century, the band has been pretty much reduced to their R&B-flavored hit singles “Good Lovin’,” “People Got to Be Free,” and “I’ve Been Lonely Too Long.” But as the Rascals evolved through the later ’60s they had more complex aspirations. Front man Felix Cavaliere was quoted in an interview at the time referring to Once Upon a Dream as “Sgt. Pepper-ish”; clearly the band was aiming for a previously unattained sophistication in the music and general presentation. The album was marked by some between-song effects and a number of tracks that flow together without pause–you’ll hear some of that both before and after “It’s Wonderful” if you listen carefully. I’m not sure how successful the whole thing is–it’s no Pet Sounds–but it is a worthy artifact of the time.
Fingertips 