The two Grateful Dead-adjacent songs that have rather randomly wandered into this month’s mix happen, both, to be songs that are not available on Spotify. Let this serve as a gentle but important reminder of the value of owning your own music, the value of having songs and albums that are yours (even if “just” digitally). These, then, become songs that are yours regardless of how good a Wifi connection you have, yours regardless of the vagaries of licensing arrangements and other capitalism-generated obstructions that keep songs off of streaming services (any one of which may go out of business someday). I have a rather extensive digital music library and while it’s a (much) more unwieldy beast than my CD and LP collection were, and are, it’s still a roped-off, self-selected aggregation of music that is easily and directly accessible, without the pesky barriers of menus and suggestions that streaming services build, purposefully, into their interfaces. I can organize my library according to my own sense of order, and find things instantly. And, as a bonus, I’m not feeding the Big Tech data machine every time I click on something; within the bounds of my own library, I escape the implacable eyes of the algorithm, the relentless fog of the feed.
To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of abandoning Spotify or Apple Music. While I have (very) mixed feelings about the company, I still do lean on Spotify to check out music I’m curious about, either old or new. But then I buy the albums that move me. (I just this month picked up the Katie Von Schleicher album–see below–as an example.) And believe me, I know that one uninfluential person’s quirky behavior vis-à-vis the 21st-century music scene is not going to make a whit of difference to the way music is “consumed” (ugh, I hate that word) here in 2024. But so-called “influencing” in our world is a performative sham, a virtual maelstrom of thankless activity. I’ll settle for the idea that two or three of you out there are paying actual attention, and perhaps I’ve given one or two of you some food for thought, as opposed to facile images to “like” and immediately forget.
End of soapbox; meanwhile, the playlist!:
1. “For Emma” – Bon Iver (For Emma, Forever Ago, 2007)
2. “Overjoyed” – Katie Von Schleicher (A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night, 2023)
3. “Living on Borrowed Time” – Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (Express Yourself, 1970)
4. “Cemetery Gates” – The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead, 1986)
5. “Floating On A Moment” – Beth Gibbons (Lives Outgrown, 2024)
6. “Hold (Alternate Take)” – Nubya Garcia (Nubya’s 5ive, 2017)
7. “Martha My Dear” – The Beatles (The Beatles, 1968)
8. “Friend of the Devil” – Lyle Lovett (Deadicated, 1991)
9. “Undone” – Amy Cooper (Water/Fire, 2005)
10. “Since You’ve Been Gone” – Cherie and Marie Currie (Messin’ With the Boys, 1979)
11. “Barbara H.” – Fountains of Wayne (Fountains of Wayne, 1996)
12. “Balboa” – Eileen Allway (Love Water, 2024)
13. “Irrésistiblement” – Sylvie Vartan (La Maritza, 1968)
14. “Too Many Losers” – Bobby and the Midnites (Bobby and the Midnites, 1981)
15. “This Time” – Land of Talk (Life After Youth, 2017)
16. “Who Is It” – Björk (Medúlla, 2004)
17. “Something About You” – The Four Tops (Four Tops Second Album, 1965)
18. “4316” – Isobel Campbell (Bow To Love, 2024)
19. “Aimless Love” – John Prine (Aimless Love, 1984)
20. “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” – Warren Zevon (Warren Zevon, 1976)
Addenda:
* Pretty much everything Beth Gibbons sings sounds iconic. She just hasn’t been very widely heard in a long time: believe it or not it’s been 16 years since the last Portishead album, with the band performing only sporadically since then, and releasing only two stand-alone singles during that time. Although Gibbons did give us a non-Portishead album, in 2002, it was a collaboration with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, who performs as Rustin Man. And so the forthcoming album, Lives Outgrown, will be the 59-year-old Gibbons’ very first solo offering. The album’s 10 songs were recorded over the course of 10 years; it comes out May 17.
* Lyle Lovett’s plaintive take on the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” is impeccable, an all-time great cover. While there’s nothing wrong with the original, it sounds over-caffeinated and tossed-off by comparison. Lovett keeps the heartbeat moving but gives the song space to breathe; the spotless arrangement enhances the poignancy. This version can be found on the 1991 Grateful Dead tribute CD Deadicated, which was one of the earlier and more commercially successful tribute albums, of which since then there have been countless. And yet Deadicated is out of print and is not available on the standard streaming services, although of course is floating around on YouTube. The Los Lobos cover of “Bertha” is another highlight from that album.
* Amy Cooper was featured on Fingertips so far back in the day (circa 2005) that I can’t find the post: over the course of various site updates and platform changes, some items from the first few years here have vanished. No great loss, perhaps, but there are some excellent songs involved, including this, the lead track from Cooper’s debut album, 2005’s Water/Fire. Turns out Cooper is in general a bit hard to track down. She released the follow-up EP Mirrors in 2006 (or 2007, depending on your source), and that’s where the trail goes cold. (It doesn’t help that she shares a name with the internet-famous “Central Park Karen,” of bird-watching-related notoriety.) Some extra poking around led to the discovery that our musical Amy Cooper has more recently been part of a duo called Naked Hearts, a band that began in the early ’10s but with songs online as recently as 2020 (including the appealing “Only For You”; it’s nice to hear her again–check it out!). She should ideally link her disparate Bandcamp identities together, but I am in any case happy to see that she isn’t one of those talented singer/songwriters who simply faded without a trace.
* Sylvie Vartan is a veteran French superstar, associated most closely with the yé-yé movement of the 1960s. Born in Bulgaria, she’s had a long-lasting and wide-ranging career as both a singer and an actress. Her most recent album is 2021’s Merci pour le regard.
* Eileen Allway is an L.A.-based singer/songwriter that I featured here with an MP3/review this past November. While I have a long-standing policy of not featuring an artist more than once within a 12-month period when it comes to the review section, that doesn’t prevent me from following a review with a song on a playlist, especially when the artist in question has released an album as packed with excellent songs as is Allway’s 2024 album Love Water. “Balboa” calls to mind the incandescent Canadian singer/songwriter Jane Siberry, which is a high compliment in my book. I encourage you to check the whole album out on Bandcamp, and buy it too (it’s reasonable!).
* The other Grateful Dead-adjacent track in the mix this month is as noted another one that you won’t find on Spotify. This is the unusually riffy (for him) “Too Many Losers” from Bob Weir, fronting the ’80s band Bobby and the Midnites. They put out two albums, in 1981 and 1984, and went their separate ways. Interestingly, the band’s drummer was Billy Cobham, a renowned jazz/fusion musician who played with Miles Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and many other notables.
* Careful readers might remember a Katie Von Schleicher reference earlier this month (she produced the Max Blansjaar song featured in the last batch of downloads). I mentioned at the time that I had featured Katie as a singer/songwriter back in 2013. What I did not mention is that she continues to record wonderful music herself; a particularly fetching album is the one she released in October of last year, the archly titled A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night (look up the reference if you don’t recognize it). I had a hard time deciding which song to feature, so I encourage you to check out the whole thing over there on Bandcamp.
Fingertips 