Honest, I started this playlist last month, intending to upload it in October. But plans changed, and now the post-Election-Day timing renders the opening song all the more haunting. The tracks that follow may or may not relate; you decide.
And I will otherwise spare the hand-wringing; there’s enough of that going around, and I for one aim to keep the deranged manbaby from invading my headspace over the coming weeks, months, (sigh) years. I will just note this: the election of a convicted felon, cheater, and predator who had previously attempted to overthrow an election indicates that there is something terribly wrong with our basic, collective ability to inform, organize, and govern ourselves. And that something has everything to do with unregulated capitalism and its various discontents, most specifically the widespread inclination to prefer revenue to virtue. Things fall apart precisely from there.
Anyway, the music:
1. “When the Devil’s Loose” – A.A. Bondy (When the Devil’s Loose, 2009)
2. “Pinned” – Unknown Venus (single, 2024)
3. “That’s the Way” – Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin III, 1970)
4. “You Gotta Be” – Des’ree (I Ain’t Movin’, 1995)
5. “Cry Baby” – The Motels (Careful, 1980)
6. “Lorlir” – Kaki King (Modern Yesterdays, 2020)
7. “Play With Fire” – The Rolling Stones (b-side, 1965)
8. “Salt Eyes” – Middle Kids (New Songs For Old Problems EP, 2019)
9. “Black Star” – Gillian Welch (single, 2005)
10. “The Card Cheat” – The Clash (London Calling, 1979)
11. “Australia” – Manic Street Preachers (Everything Must Go, 1996)
12. “The Witch” – Kaia Kater, featuring Aiofe O’Donovan (Strange Medicine, 2024)
13. “Helplessness Blues” – Fleet Foxes (Helplessness Blues, 2011)
14. “Bring Back the Love” – The Monitors (Greetings!…We’re the Monitors, 1968)
15. “Half Asleep” – School of Seven Bells (Alpinisms, 2008)
16. “Cornerstone” – Richard X. Heyman (Cornerstone, 1998)
17. “In Between Days” – The Cure (The Head on the Door, 1985)
18. “Afraid of Everyone” – The National (High Violet, 2010)
19. “Swampland” – Alex Winston (Bingo!, 2024)
20. “I’m Going to Tear Your Playhouse Down” – Ann Peebles (single, 1973; I Can’t Stand the Rain, 1974)
Random notes:
* This is very likely the least classic-rock-y playlist on the internet that nevertheless manages to include songs from both Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.
* Gillian Welch’s incandescent cover of Radiohead’s “Black Star” is a classic, presenting the song in a totally different setting while retaining and enhancing its poignant essence. I’ve poked around a bit and still can’t determine how she came to record this and why it exists as a standalone single but she did and it does and it moves me every time I hear it. I don’t think I’ve previously featured a live recording on an EPS mix but this only exists in a live version and it’s pretty much perfect as is.
* I am not inherently a fan of instrumental tracks but I can’t help being ongoingly fascinated by what the experimentally-minded guitar virtuoso Kaki King has released over the course of her iconoclastic career. Her 2020 album Modern Yesterdays was recorded just as COVID-19 was identified and lockdowns beginning; everyone who worked on the album came down with it (and recovered, thankfully). The album itself arose as a side effect of a planned live project called Data Not Found, which got scrapped due to the lockdown. While Modern Yesterdays finds King finger-picking in the Fahey/Kottke lineage, the album also expands into evocative electronic soundscapes, incorporating alternative guitar sounds and spacious synthesizer beds created by sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson. “Lorlir” offers King’s brisk finger work on top of electronics so gentle that they seem, somehow, part of the guitar itself. While the song’s title is a mystery–I can find nothing that explains it–other titles on the album bring the listener straight back to that disastrous time (e.g., “Can’t Touch This or That or You or My Face,” “Sanitized, Alone”)–a time which, I might add, seems to have been forgotten by the misled half of the US population who voted to bring back the cruel and inept leader who tragically bungled the country’s response (and pretty much everything else). In this context an instrumental seems about right, as words become inadequate.
* There exists an all but endless trove of R&B tracks from the 1960s that were not hits but one wonders why the heck not. “Bring Back the Love” has the melodic drama, confident vocals, and sure groove of a classic Four Tops tune–perhaps not a complete coincidence, as one of the four songwriters credited here is Brian Holland, the music-oriented Holland of the famed songwriting trio of Holland-Dozier-Holland (his brother Eddie did the lyrics). Those three were responsible for some of the finest songs recorded by the Four Tops–not to mention the Supremes, and Marvin Gaye, and a number of other first-tier Motown acts. This one sounds like a winner, even if it wasn’t.
* Not a lot of information is available online about the singer/songwriter calling herself Unknown Venus, which is probably (given the moniker) how she wants it in this day and age of intrusive, overzealous fandom. (Perhaps there’s a new generation of musicians arising who intend to forge a road back to some semblance of reasonable privacy.) In any case, what she has revealed online: her name is Annie Lancaster, she is based in Los Angeles, plays the harp, and has released five singles to date, most recently “Pinned.” The song is at once dreamy and straightforward, complete with an actual instrumental hook by way of the distorted guitar line that we first hear in the introduction. Who does this anymore? Not enough people, that’s who. Not enough people make this sort of well-constructed, effortlessly melodic music either, but they’re out there and I always aim to find them. Hat tip to the Luna Collective’s weekly, off-the-beaten-path playlist for this one.
* There are a half-dozen or more well-known, widely-regarded songs from the Clash’s seminal London Calling, and then there’s “The Card Cheat.” A loping, keyboard-driven song, launching off a decisive Hal Blaine drumbeat, “The Card Cheat” is pleasingly enigmatic in a Dylanesque sort of way–vague characters speak, specific locations are cited, you sense something important is going on but you can’t put your finger on it. A little burst of horn adds to the mystique along the way, and Joe Strummer’s urgent/friendly voice holds it all together. Perhaps part of my attraction to the song has to do with the fact that it isn’t as well-known as the album’s other highlights, but for one reason or another it remains a big favorite after all these years.
* Richard X. Heyman made an appearance here last year when I pulled the Doughboys’ oddly endearing “Rhoda Mandelbaum” out of obscurity for EPS 10.8. Heyman, the band’s drummer, was a teenager during the Doughboys’ late-’60s, garage rock heyday, but re-emerged as a power pop-oriented singer/songwriter in the late ’80s. He got as far as signing a deal with the prestigious Sire Records label, which released one album of his then dropped him for lack of sales. He had to finance Cornerstone himself, and played most of the instruments on most of the tracks. Since then he’s been releasing albums regularly on his own label, most recently 2022’s 67,000 Miles an Album. The man has a preternatural knack for melodic rock’n’roll, an appealing baritone, and, unhappily, little to no commercial appeal. But maybe he’s okay with that, doing his own thing for his own audience in his own corner of internet. (Some of us are.) Note too that the Doughboys have had a second wind in the 21st century, reviving their garage rock sound–fine if you like that kind of thing but I’ll stick with Heyman’s solo albums, which I aim to investigate further in the days to come.
Fingertips 