Author: jeremyfingertips

I fell a little behind in playlist production in 2024; here’s another one emerging a month or so later than intended. But, better late than really really late. And I guess it’s good that I hadn’t been making an overtly holiday-related mix. I did leave in a song associated with Christmas but in this version it feels more winter- than holiday-oriented, so still quite appropriate, if only for the title alone.

Otherwise, hello. Happy new year? We can always dream. Getting right into the music, this month’s mix features 10 artists who have not previously found their way onto an Eclectic Playlist Series playlist, even as we are now in year 12. I do strive to keep the newcomers coming in, while always enjoying the opportunity to mix them in with favorites old and not too old. And it is January, which, according to house rules, means that the library resets, rendering any previously featured artist now available. (The house rule, for the uninitiated, is that no artist may be featured in an EPS mix more than once in a given calendar year. The slate is wiped clean each January and we start again.) Three particular, all-time favorites are making an early appearance; newsletter recipients will know exactly who they are. (Have I ever mentioned that the newsletter version of this comes with bonus notes? Now you know!)

And here’s what you’re in for here in this particularly bleak midwinter:

1. “Earn Enough For Us” – XTC (Skylarking, 1986)
2. “Girl Don’t Make Me Wait” – Bunny Sigler (Let the Good Times Roll & (Feel So Good), 1967)
3. “But Not Kiss” – Faye Webster (Undressed at the Symphony, 2023)
4. “The Outsiders” – R.E.M. (Around the Sun, 2004)
5. “Sweet Little Truth” – Tasmin Archer (Bloom, 1996)
6. “Love is a Stranger” – Eurythmics (Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), 1982)
7. “You Probably Get That a Lot” – They Might Be Giants (Join Us, 2011)
8. “Now is the Time” – Norma Tanega (I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile, 1971)
9. “On The Wrong Side” – Lindsey Buckingham (Lindsey Buckingham, 2021)
10. “Appalachia Waltz” – Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor (Appalachia Waltz, 1996)
11. “Somebody Hurt You” – A Girl Called Eddy (A Girl Called Eddy, 2004)
12. “Stay” – David Bowie (Station to Station, 1976)
13. “I Belong In Your Arms” – Chairlift (Something, 2012)
14. “I See the Rain” – Marmalade (There’s a Lot of it About, 1968)
15. “Dragonfly” – Samantha Crain (single, 2024)
16. “Days” – Television (Adventure, 1978)
17. “Above the Treeline” – Jane Siberry (Jane Siberry, 1980)
18. “Buildings & Mountains” – The Republic Tigers (Keep Color, 2008)
19. “In the Bleak Midwinter” – Polly Scattergood and Maps (single, 2014)
20. “Better Git In Your Soul” – Davy Graham (Folk, Blues & Beyond, 1965)

Random notes:

* “In the Bleak Midwinter” is a Christmas song, but stripped here of its religious content, the song functions more broadly as a statement of seasonal resolve– we hear ongoingly of the “bleak midwinter,” the electronics provide a blizzardy whoosh, and singer Polly Scattergood, nearly but not entirely overshadowed, holds her ground. Scattergood here works with James Chapman, who does musical business as Maps; the two British musicians also had a one-off go-round as a duo, known as On Dead Waves, releasing one album in 2016. Both have been individually featured on Fingertips, Scattergood in 2013, Chapman even further back, in 2007. Scattergood’s most recent record is 2020’s In This Moment, while Maps released Counter Melodies in 2022.

* It’s possible that “Stay” is my favorite David Bowie song.

* “Appalachia Waltz” is calm and quiet and clearly unlike songs typically featured here. I invite you to slow yourself down to adapt to its pace and vibe. If you do, you may find that the composition works some kind of magic on your state of being, the deliberate, cycling and recycling melodies melting any resistance you might have to this kind of thing– whatever “this kind of thing” actually is. Once you meet the piece where it is you may find that, at 5:47, rather than seeming too long, it ends up seeming not long enough.

* Smoky-voiced singer/songwriter Erin Moran has been recording as A Girl Called Eddy since 2004. The records have been sporadic to say the least: there have been only three full-length albums to date, most recently 2020’s Been Around. An air of bygone songwriting styles and arrangements floats through Moran’s work; her professed love of the great Burt Bacharach audibly informs what she writes and sings. “Somebody Hurt You” comes from her debut self-titled album, released in 2004. Hat tip to George at Between Two Islands for the recommendation.

* As both a singer and guitarist, Lindsey Buckingham has an iconic sound, which was on full display on his most recent album, recorded in 2018 but due to the ongoing drama that forever is and was Buckingham and/or Fleetwood Mac, not released until 2021. The self-titled album got strong reviews but didn’t seem to muster a lot of attention. But, expertly crafted, catchy as hell, and intermittently odd, it’s just about everything a late-’70s/early-’80s Fleetwood Mac fan would want from a solo record of his. The artist’s conflict-filled history aside, this album is well worth a listen.

* Before she became a left-of-center indie pop diva, Caroline Polachek was co-founder of the band Chairlift. Chairlift began as a duo in Boulder, Colorado before moving to Brooklyn, expanding to a trio, and then shrinking back to a duo with the new guy replacing the first guy. (First guy had been Polachek’s boyfriend, then not.) “I Belong In Your Arms” comes from the band’s second album, Something, released in 2012. They would release one more album–Moth, in 2016– before going their separate ways. Polachek’s solo work has twice previously been featured in an EPS mix, in February 2022 and May 2023.

* Davy Graham was a pioneering figure in the history of British folk music. Known for his fingerpicking (also known as fingerstyle) guitar work, Graham introduced sounds from outside the UK (including the Middle East and India) into his arrangements and compositions. He is sometimes credited with inventing the folk guitar instrumental; his song “Anji” (sometimes spelled “Angi”) became something of a model and inspiration for a new generation of guitarists, including Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. You may in fact be familiar with it via Simon & Garfunkel, who put the song on their Sounds of Silence album. “Better Git In Your Soul” is Graham’s arrangement of a Charles Mingus song; it closes his 1965 album Folks, Blues & Beyond.

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.

Summer may be over, but tell me if there isn’t a dark-ish, summer’s-over feeling coursing through the Santo & Johnny version of the Gershwin classic “Summertime.” The famed sibling instrumental duo, from Brooklyn, turned a song that typically evokes languid sunshine into something introspective, spooky, intermittently discordant, and, somehow, maybe, autumnal. In any case, I didn’t manage to get a playlist up in August so here it is one way or another.

There are two other evocative covers in among the mix this month, and one fake cover: the Concretes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” is not the Motown nugget but its own incisive thing. The real covers are discussed below, along with many other things, so I’ll keep the intro short this time. For those who don’t like surprises, here’s what’s on tap in 11.07:

1. “Becoming All Alone” – Regina Spektor (Home, Before and After, 2022)
2. “Revolutionary Kind” – Gomez (Liquid Skin, 1999)
3. “The Riddle” – Nik Kershaw (The Riddle, 1984)
4. “Cathedrals” – Cry Cry Cry (single, 2018)
5. “La Bambola” – Patty Pravo (Patty Pravo, 1968)
6. “Big Tears” – Elvis Costello & the Attractions (b-side, 1978)
7. “You Can’t Hurry Love” – The Concretes (The Concretes, 2003)
8. “Coast” – Kim Deal (single, 2024; Nobody Loves You More coming 11/24)
9. “Every Shining Time You Arrive” – Sunny Day Real Estate (How It Feels To Be Something On, 1998)
10. “Everybody Plays the Fool” – The Main Ingredient (Bitter Sweet, 1972)
11. “Any Way You Want It” – Clem Snide (Clem Snide’s Journey EP, 2011)
12. “Annie” – Kirsty MacColl (Real, 1983; released 2023)
13. “Get Yourself Together” – Small Faces (Small Faces, 1967)
14. “Not a Job” – Elbow (Cast of Thousands, 2003)
15. “What Now” – Brittany Howard (What Now, 2024)
16. “Life is Sweet” – Natalie Merchant (Ophelia, 1998)
17. “Amor Fati” – Washed Out (Within and Without, 2011)
18. “You Never Come Closer” – Doris (Did You Give the World Some Love Today Baby, 1970)
19. “Summertime” – Santo & Johnny (Santo & Johnny, 1960)
20. “Middle Cyclone” – Neko Case (Middle Cyclone, 2009)

Random notes:

* Clem Snide front man Eef Barzeley has proven over the years to be a master of rock’n’roll covers. Nowhere was the skill in more evidence than in his specially-released 2011 EP, Clem Snide’s Journey. A tour de force of transformational interpretation, the all-Journey EP was inspired by his version of the song “Faithfully,” covered as part of the intermittently wonderful AV Club Undercover series. I featured this song at the time, and stand by my characterization of the man as some sort of mad genius. These days the EP is available to his Bandcamp subscribers only, with no playback options. However, three of the six songs are available to listen to on Spotify, including “Any Way You Want It.”

* The Swedish pop singer Doris Svensson was a curious case. Billed by her first name only, she released one solo album in 1970 and pretty much retreated from performing after that. The album initially was a commercial flop, but a re-release in 1996 captured the attention of hipsters, and hip-hop artists, and brought the album back into the cultural flow. The album is an idiosyncratic mix of pop, soul, funk, psychedelia, and jazz, with a Dusty Springfield-esque vibe–well worth a listen if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s not only available on the streaming services, the whole thing can be downloaded for free via the Internet Archive. Svensson died last year at the age of 75. Thanks to the blog James Writes Stuff for the head’s up on this one, which I otherwise hadn’t heard of. And yes it’s very ’00s of me, offering a hat tip to another blog, but James like me has a very ’00s thing going over there, with his observant, personal, well-written album reviews; his blog is a relatively rare example of an algorithm- and commercial-free web site just doing its thing here in the corrupted, over-stimulated world of internet 2024.

* The brilliant Kirsty MacColl was taken from us, tragically, some 24 years ago. But it was only last year that we saw the long-awaited release of an album she had recorded in 1983 that was shelved by Polydor, her then record company; they felt it wasn’t commercial enough. It would have been her second album. She and Polydor parted ways after that. She had a UK hit single in 1985, with a dazzling version of Billy Bragg’s “A New England,” recorded for Stiff Records, but soon it got complicated: Stiff went bankrupt, there were contractual complications and personal complications, leading to a lot of session work–including her indelible star turn on 1987’s “Fairytale of New York”–but no record deal. The song “Annie,” from Real, was one of three songs from the ill-fated LP that Polydor saw fit, in 1985, to tack onto a re-released version of her debut album. A handful of other songs from Real surfaced years later on a posthumous 2005 compilation album. I’m not sure what took quite so long for Real to emerge as its own thing, but I’m glad we finally have it–it’s not a classic but a treasure for Kirsty fans nonetheless. The album is available on its own digitally; for the devoted fan, all the album’s tracks are on CD as part of the lavish, eight-disc, 161-song box set called See That Girl 1979-2000, released by Universal Music in a limited edition last year. But good luck finding it: I don’t see any for sale in any of the usual places at this point.

* “Cathedrals” was something of a radio hit for the North Carolina band Jump, Little Children back in 1998. The dormant singer/songwriter trio Cry Cry Cry ended a long hiatus in 2018 with a cover of the song, and they did three helpful things in the process. First, they removed the strings, which had added a bit too much saccharin to a song teetering already on the edge of schmaltz (if I may mix my food metaphors). Second, Dar Williams sings lead, transforming the somewhat overwrought original into something more pensive and substantial. Lastly, the stellar harmonies provided by band mates Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell lend warmth and depth that the original’s vocal performance lacked. Oh and as a bonus, the Cry Cry Cry version is 20 seconds shorter, almost always a good thing.

* I’ve put Elvis Costello songs on a playlist more or less once a year here, but I’ve been leaning in the direction of his 21st-century output. I’ve done that consciously, because I feel his later-career stuff is relatively overlooked–wide-ranging musically, his 21st-century albums are maybe harder to pin down than the “angry young man” material of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and so over the years they’ve kind of piled up into a corner that his loyal fans have pretty much to themselves. So I like to give the newer songs some sunlight here. That said, I haven’t meant to entirely ignore his seminal work from back in the day. But as ever I tend to avoid the obvious. You don’t need me to give you the likes of “Pump It Up” or “Watching Detectives,” but maybe slipping a muscular B-side like “Big Tears” into the mix is a fine idea every so often. The man is surely one of the great songwriters of our time; I wish this were more universally recognized, but it remains one of those “if you know, you know” things.

* “Coast” is such an effortlessly confident song: quirky, inscrutable, and mysteriously catchy, with smile-inducing horn charts and the lackadaisical charm of a one-off jam session. Kim Deal, as you likely know, was an original member of the Pixies and the front woman for the Breeders. While she has released a few solo singles, “Coast” is a song that will be on her debut solo album, called Nobody Loves You More, which is due out in November.

* Patty Pravo is the stage name adopted long ago by the Italian singer Nicoletta Strambelli. Pravo, now 76, was in her heyday in the late ’60s through the late ’70s. One of her signature songs, “La Bambola” was number one on the charts in Italy for nine straight weeks. To my ears, it retains its energetic appeal these many decades later. Pravo has had a long and idiosyncratic career, not to mention personal life, including a stretch where she lived in the United States and recorded a new wave adjacent LP in the early ’80s. Her most recent album, Red, came out in 2019.

* The mighty Neko Case closes us out. I guess I like quirky and inscrutable songs; this one’s power comes from its restraint, its poignant turns of phrase, and Ms. Case’s ever potent voice. Her most recent album of new material remains 2018’s vibrant Hell-On. She’s got a memoir coming out in January, entitled The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, and, apparently, a new album on the way shortly thereafter.