Some of you may know about the master playlist I keep over on Spotify, which in theory houses all the songs featured to date on these monthly 20-song playlists, going all the way back to EPS 1.01 in December 2013. The Spotify playlist currently features 1,733 songs; so, it doesn’t take a degree in mathematics to figure out that this is not a multiple of 20. Songs are missing for the simple reason that the Spotify library doesn’t have every song I’ve featured. By extension, this means that it doesn’t have every song someone might want to listen to. For me, as a music fan, this is one main reason I recommend maintaining your own music library even while enjoying some of the benefits of streaming. Streaming services libraries are incomplete.
In Spotify’s case, the missing songs sometimes result from artists conscientiously removing their music from service (Joni Mitchell and Neil Young being prime examples; and I understand this is a decision that is much easier for long-established artists to make). But there are all sorts of other arcane, contractual, and/or licensing issues behind why a song may not be available on a streaming service. This month, as an example, Michelle Shocked’s lovely “Memories of East Texas,” from her incisive debut album Short Sharp Shocked, is unavailable on Spotify. None of her music is there, in fact, so I’m guessing it might be a political stance being taken by Shocked, long a progressive activist. Another recent Spotify example, from May, was the unavailability of Dwight Twilley’s 1979 album Twilley, which was missing despite other Twilley albums being in Spotify’s library. On average I’d estimate that once every two or three months at least one song from a playlist ends up unavailable on Spotify. Thus the indivisible-by-twenty song total.
Let me note as I have in the past that I remain conflicted about Spotify–I like the service, dislike the company and its CEO–and so continue to think seriously about migrating to Apple Music, which I think is at least slightly less distasteful an environment. But in the end, there’s no getting around the incompleteness of what’s available on the streaming services. The best defense I can figure out, as a music fan, is to buy the music you love, preferably from a service like Bandcamp that respects artists. But in any case direct purchases give more back to the musician than streams do. And, if you own the music, whether in a physical format or a digital file, it’s there in your library. All those Joni Mitchell songs I’ve featured here (six to date)?: they’re nowhere to be found on Spotify but I can play them whenever I’d like to hear them from the comfort of my own library.
On to the latest playlist, all of which can be heard via the Mixcloud widget, regardless of where things stand with Spotify or anyone else:
1. “Wild Tales” – Graham Nash (Wild Tales, 1974)
2. “Scabs” – Speedy Ortiz (Rabbit, Rabbit, 2023)
3. “Love’s Gone Bad” – Chris Clark (single, 1966)
4. “How to Be Invisible” – Kate Bush (Aerial, 2005)
5. “The Farmer’s Daughter” – Fleetwood Mac (Live, 1980)
6. “Out of My Head” – Fastball (All the Pain Money Can Buy, 1998)
7. “No Vacancy” – Ruby Gilbert (single, 2021)
8. “Get Set For the Blues” – Julie London (About the Blues, 1957)
9. “Somewhere New” – Inara George (Dearest Everybody, 2018)
10. “Darling” – Stories (About Us, 1973)
11. “Lisa Anne” – Bill Lloyd (Feeling the Elephant, 1987)
12. “Come Tomorrow” – Patti Scialfa (Rumble Doll, 1993)
13. “My Love Grows Deeper” – Clydie King (single, 1965)
14. “Pure Love” – Flock of Dimes (single, 2022)
15. “You’re Not the One” – Sky Ferreira (Night Time, My Time, 2013)
16. “Guitar and Pen” – The Who (Who Are You, 1978)
17. “Memories of East Texas” – Michelle Shocked (Short Sharp Shocked, 1988)
18. “Welcome, Ghosts” – Explosions in the Sky (All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, 2006)
19. “Five Days” – Fossa (Sea of Skies, 2014)
20. “Dreamer” – Astrud Gilberto (The Astrud Gilberto Album, 1965)
Stray comments:
* The first song, “Wild Tales,” starts with a very quiet instrumental bit, lasting six seconds or so. There’s something there but it’s hard to hear. It kicks in soon enough but it might unsettle the impatient.
* Fleetwood Mac need no introduction but this little nugget might: it’s the band covering a Beach Boys deep cut, originally less than two minutes long, recorded spur of the moment backstage (or perhaps at a soundcheck?) on tour in Santa Monica and included as the last track on the 1980 double album Live. Lindsay Buckingham was the creative force here, and the ease with which he found a classic Fleetwood Mac groove inside a chugging, harmony-saturated surf-rock oldie is a pleasure to behold. The tender group-sing is especially enchanting. Trivia fans note that the Beach Boys song, track two on the 1963 album Surfin’ U.S.A., was originally called “Farmer’s Daughter,” no “The.” I can find no explanation for the added article and am tempted to chalk it up to someone misremembering somewhere along the pipeline between performance and album production. Interestingly, there was an unrelated TV series that premiered six months after the Beach Boys album came out, also in 1963, called The Farmer’s Daughter. Based on a 1947 film, it ran for two years and a half years and would likely have been lost to time were it not for the internet, where I learned all about this, and YouTube in particular, where you can find all the episodes. Rabbit hole, anyone?
* Bill Lloyd’s Feeling the Elephant was an unexpected piece of melodic pop rock from a guy who soon became far more well-known as half of the slick country duo Foster and Lloyd. Turns out the album was aggregated from a batch of demos and released on a soon-to-be-defunct indie label in Boston in 1987, the same year Lloyd and Radney Foster released their debut album, so small wonder it slipped through the cracks. (Note that Lloyd’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention his solo work.) In any case, the mainstream country sounds of Foster and Lloyd bear no relation to the nimble power pop that characterizes Feeling the Elephant. I’ve picked out the appealing “Lisa Anne” but there are a lot of worthy songs on the LP, which was re-released in a remastered and expanded version in 2021.
* California native Chris Clark released her first Motown single in 1965, a Berry Gordy composition called “Do Right Baby, Do Right.” Neither that one nor a remixed re-release that same year gained any traction. “Love’s Gone Bad” was her second single, this one written by the mighty Holland-Dozier-Holland team, and it cracked the U.S. R&B chart, but not by much. Like many great, unheralded mid-century soul tunes it’s had a second life via several generations of Northern Soul fans. By the ’70s, Clark had drifted out of music but maintained a connection to Motown. In 1972 she co-wrote the screenplay for the Motown-produced Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues, and from there moved into a variety of executive positions in the Motown organization through the ’80s. According to her web site, she remains active as a screenwriter, photographer, and singer, although has not recorded an album since the 1960s.
* Inara George has the sort of warm, inviting voice that I find irresistible. Following stints with two short-lived bands, George has recorded four solo albums and nine albums as part of the duo The Bird and the Bee, with musical partner Greg Kurstin. “Somewhere New” is a track from her most recent solo release, 2018’s Dearest Everybody. The daughter of Little Feat founder Lowell George, Inara is, interestingly enough, married to director/producer Jake Kasdan, who is the son of famed screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan.
* A problem with the oft-used term “one-hit wonder” is the implication that the artist in question didn’t do anything else except hit it big with that one song. But it’s actually true that many bands who scored only one big hit have a lot of other worthy material recorded. Not everything good becomes popular, as we well know. (And not everything popular is good, as we also well know.) And so consider the Austin band Fastball, whose top-five hit “The Way” was a huge commercial success, and led to the album All The Pain Money Can Buy selling a million copies. The winsome “Out of My Head” became another top-40 hit from the album. Since then, the band’s commercial impact has been negligible, but that doesn’t mean that the durable trio haven’t remained a viable ensemble, making quality music. They released three solid albums in the ’00s, two more in the ’10s, and one, now, in the ’20s–The Deep End, which came out last year, and is worth a good listen. Anyone still mourning the loss of the great Adam Schlesinger might do well to dive into Fastball’s catalog, as they mine some of the same musical and lyrical territory as the dear, departed Fountains of Wayne. (Bonus trivia point: Schlesinger himself produced two songs on Fastball’s Keep Your Wig On album, from 2002.)
* The gentle, sultry bossa nova singer Astrud Gilberto died last month at the age of 83. Known for her indelible recording of the worldwide hit “The Girl From Ipanema,” Gilberto performed and recorded only sporadically after a spate of successful albums in the ’60s and early ’70s. Rather famously from Brazil, given her bossa nova stylings, she actually lived in the United States for most of her life, emigrating in 1963. She sung mostly in English, but reportedly spoke four other languages, in addition to her native Portuguese. Retreating from public view, she lived and raised her two sons in suburban Philadelphia in the ’70s and ’80s, moved to New York City for a while, before relocating to Philly in 1999, where she lived quietly, even anonymously, in a Center City apartment, until her death this year. Her last album, Jungle, was released on a small Philadelphia label in 2002; it is not on the streaming services and appears to be difficult to find.
* Segue fans: check out “Pure Love” into “You’re Not the One.” You’re welcome.
Fingertips 