Author: jeremyfingertips

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.

So that it doesn’t seem as if I’m trying to pull a fast one on you–slipping a Taylor Swift mega-track into one of my humble, left-of-center playlists in hopes that no one might notice–I will instead call attention to it up front. Yes, there’s “Anti-Hero,” six songs in. And yet I will claim that the playlist is as left-of-center as ever; the concept here isn’t to banish songs that happen to be very popular, it is rather to present quality songs in a context the internet normally deprives us of–which is to say, a thoughtful, multi-genre, multi-decade context. I don’t hear a lot of current pop that I would tag with the word “quality” (“formulaic,” “over-processed,” and “social-media-obsessed” are more likely to apply), which is the main reason for 21st-century pop’s typical absence from the Eclectic Playlist Series. But occasionally something good slips in. In any case, I somehow doubt a Taylor Swift song has anywhere else appeared sandwiched between Portishead and Mary Margaret O’Hara. And while I didn’t do it for shock value–I do very much like how this unlikely trio works together–I guess I don’t mind knowing it might jar if not the ears then the intellect, a bit. And, it keeps me one step ahead of the algorithm, yes?

All that aside, I hope you find this month’s mix stimulating, with its unusual blending of the well-known and the rarely-heard, with one particular, recently-minted treasure stashed in the middle: the Innocence Mission’s gorgeous “On Your Side,” from 2020. It was a Fingertips download feature at the time and surely deserves another bit of appreciation. It kind of breaks my heart that a song this dazzling and heartfelt can fall through our cultural cracks without any celebration or even notice, but that’s the sort of culture in which we are ensconced, with its bombastic, attention-seeking public figures on the one hand and (do I sense a vicious cycle?) super-short-attention-spanned consumers on the other.

The playlist as always has 20 songs, all worthy, but you’ll definitely need a bit of an attention span to make it through to the end:

1. “Shotgun” – Soccer Mommy (Sometimes, Forever, 2022)
2. “On Automatic” – Michael Penn (Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947, 2005)
3. “Put Yourself in My Place” – The Elgins (single, 1965)
4. “Any Danger Love” – The Starjets (God Bless the Starjets, 1979)
5. “All Mine” – Portishead (Portishead, 1997)
6. “Anti-Hero” – Taylor Swift (Midnights, 2023)
7. “To Cry About” – Mary Margaret O’Hara (Miss America, 1988)
8. “Undertow” – Katy Vernon (Suit of Hearts, 2019)
9. “Nardis” – Bill Evans Trio (Explorations, 1961)
10. “Home at Last” – Steely Dan (Aja, 1977)
11. “Crystal” – New Order (Get Ready, 2001)
12. “On Your Side” – The Innocence Mission (See You Tomorrow, 2020)
13. “Sunlight” – The Youngbloods (Elephant Mountain, 1969)
14. “Money” – Slowdim (single, 2012)
15. “I Say Nothing” – Voice of the Beehive (single, 1988)
16. “In a Little While” – U2 (All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2000)
17. “Go Down” – Sam Phillips (Cruel Invention, 1991)
18. “Mystic Voyage” – Roy Ayers Ubiquity (Mystic Voyage, 1975)
19. “Set Me Free” – Utopia (Adventures in Utopia, 1980)
20. “My Terracotta Heart” – Blur (The Magic Whip, 2015)

Stray comments:

* My abiding fondness for the British band Blur has never, somehow, translated into a lot of listening time. I have no idea exactly why, but as such, when 2015’s The Magic Whip appeared, 12 years after the last album bearing the Blur name and 16 years after the last album featuring all the original members, I let it come and go with barely a passing glance. This, it turns out, was a big mistake. On the heels of a new Blur single and the announcement that another somewhat unexpected album is coming out next month, I went back to The Magic Whip and much to my delight found a splendid and thoughtful listening experience waiting for me. I’ve pulled out “My Terracotta Heart” as a wistful closing track here, but do yourself a favor and dive into the whole thing. (And by the way that new single, “The Narcissist,” is also excellent. I promise to pay more attention to the new album when it drops.)

* With its classic Motown swing, Holland-Dozier-Holland pedigree, and the enticing vocals of Saundra Mallett Edwards, “Put Yourself in My Place” is another one of those “why-wasn’t-this-a-big-hit?” songs that seem to overflow in the Motown archives. The song was a b-side to the single “Darling Baby,” which was itself a modest hit. The Elgins were formed when Berry Gordy decided to place Edwards (at that point a struggling solo artist) at the front of a trio of vocalists who had previously been in an undistinguished doo-wop group called the Downbeats. The combination worked nicely, and resulted in a couple of minor hits before Edwards decided to leave the industry a few years later. If “Put Yourself in My Place” sounds like something the Supremes should be singing, there’s good reason for that: H-D-H wrote it for the more well-known group but were convinced to give it first to the Elgins; perhaps it helped that one of the Elgins was Brian Holland’s barber. The Supremes did end up recording it anyway, the next year.

* The widely-praised Steely Dan album Aja is filled with familiar, painstakingly crafted songs, but the one that has long been my dark-horse favorite is Becker and Fagan’s impressionistic take on The Odyssey, “Home at Last.” The mind-boggling precision on display is counter-balanced by an ineffable sense of poignancy conveyed via the shuffling rhythm, the question-and-answer horn refrain, lyrics at once vivid and elusive, and a chorus highlighted by a split-level melody, suspended chords, and an ambiguous conclusion. I will never tire of this multifaceted masterpiece.

* New Order, meanwhile, is not a band to study too often for their lyrical insight, and the insistent “Crystal” is no exception. Much better to ride the strength of the indelible bass leads and the grinding grit and drive of the arrangement than to fret over lines like “Here comes love, it’s like honey/You can’t buy it with money.” Um, whatever. Get Ready was released after an open-ended eight-year hiatus, the album itself as unanticipated as the reorientation of the band’s sound back towards guitars there in 2001. Solid stuff all around, and while the radio edit of “Crystal” is less meander-y, there’s something about the full-length track’s unhurried opening and determined brio that carries a listener willingly along for the extended ride.

* If you’ll indulge a bit of what we in the US call “inside baseball,” I’ll note that the exemplary singer/songwriter Sam Phillips is now tied with David Bowie for most appearances in an Eclectic Playlist Series mix to date, with nine. Of those right behind with eight only Radiohead and Kate Bush have yet to make an appearance in 2023 so either one or both might end the year tied in that top position. (I anticipate both things happening but you never know.) The other artists with eight appearances are Elvis Costello, They Might Be Giants, and Björk. These numbers relate to the policy here that no one artist may appear in a playlist more than once in a calendar year. Out of the 20 artists in this month’s mix, eight are here for the first time. I always aim to have at least seven or eight “newcomers” every month. Each month also, usually, features a few songs that were previously posted in a review here on Fingertips. This month there are three: “Undertow,” by Katy Vernon, “Money” by Slowdim, and the aforementioned Innocence Mission track.

While there is an ongoing policy here never to feature the same exact song by the same artist twice, however many years go by, there is no restriction about featuring the same song recorded by different artists. This month, in fact, there are two such entries, about which more below. There are a few other cover songs mixed in here as well, including Cassandra Wilson’s astonishing transformation of an operatic, potentially cheesy Neapolitan classic into a haunting, immaculately arranged marvel. The best cover versions perform the magic trick of revealing something fresh and unexpected while maintaining the familiar core. I’d say the Watson Twins’ Cure cover qualifies as well, as does The Flaming Lips’ overhaul of “Borderline.”

I should note that having a policy is one thing, maintaining it is another: I have twice, to date, featured the exact same song by the same artist in two different mixes, by mistake. The answer to this particular trivia question: “Are You With Me Now?” by Cate Le Bon, and “Fat Man and Dancing Girl” by Suzanne Vega. Oops.

As previously noted, this month marks the 20th anniversary of the first tentative posts on Fingertips. So I guess it’s only appropriate that They Might Be Giants is in the mix this month. (It’s their eighth time here, for those keeping score at home.) But they’re one of only five artists this month who have previously been featured on a playlist, ranging back nine-plus years. So, a particularly eclectic bunch to mark year 20, as follows:

1. “Alex Chilton” – The Replacements (Pleased to Meet Me, 1987)
2. “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind” – Vashti Bunyan (single, 1965)
3. “Security Check” – Sophie Hunger (Halluzinationen, 2020)
4. “I Don’t Wanna Cry” – Ronnie Dyson ((If You Let Me Make Love To You Then) Why Can’t I Touch You, 1970)
5. “The Sad Sound of the Wind” – Jules Shear (The Great Puzzle, 1992)
6. “Just Like Heaven” – The Watson Twins (Fire Songs, 2008)
7. “I Bet High” – Pop and Obachan (Misc. Excellence, 2016)
8. “Second Choice” – Any Trouble (Where Are All The Nice Girls, 1980)
9. “She Cracked” – The Modern Lovers (The Modern Lovers, 1976 [recorded 1972])
10. “Helen Reddy” – Trembling Blue Stars (The Seven Autumn Flowers, 2004)
11. “The Fairest of the Seasons” – Nico (Chelsea Girl, 1967)
12. “O Sole Mio” – Cassandra Wilson (Another Country, 2012)
13. “Taillights Fade” – Buffalo Tom (Let Me Come Over, 1992)
14. “Don’t Let’s Start” – They Might Be Giants (They Might Be Giants, 1986)
15. “Just Look at What You’ve Done” – Brenda Holloway (single, 1967)
16. “Runaway” – Dwight Twilley (Twilley, 1979)
17. “Blood and Butter” – Caroline Polachek (Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, 2023)
18. “The Queen of Hearts” – The Unthanks (Last, 2011)
19. “Comedy” – Shack (H.M.S. Fable, 1999)
20. “Borderline” – The Flaming Lips (with Stardeath and White Dwarfs) (Covered, A Revolution in Sound: Warner Bros. Records, 2009)

Stray comments:

* Dwight Twilley will be forever be linked to the power pop standard “I’m On Fire,” recorded by the Dwight Twilley Band on the 1976 album Sincerely. But the Tulsa-born singer/songwriter has an extended back catalog as a solo artist, following the breakup of his relatively short-lived band–including, seemingly, more “rarities” and offbeat cover projects than proper album releases at this point. (Among other things, he has recorded two full albums of Beatles songs.) For all the pile-up of music available for the committed aficionado, not everything can be found on the major streaming services; one flagrant missing release is his 1979 solo debut, simply entitled Twilley. So you won’t find the earworm-y “Runaway” on Spotify but it’s yours to enjoy here.

* Ronnie Dyson’s impassioned “I Don’t Wanna Cry” offers up a rhythmic (and grammatical) revision of the Chuck Jackson original, “I Don’t Want to Cry,” from 1961 (as heard in Eclectic Playlist Series 7.01, from January 2020). The Jackson version, interestingly, was the lead and title track of an album on which all songs were about crying. While Jackson’s recording had an attractive whiff of late-autumn doo-wop about it, Dyson’s take, from 1970, is something of a proto-disco number. Dyson, for his part, had an occasionally notable (if unfortunately short) career, hitting the big time at 18 as a featured performer in the Broadway musical Hair; it was his voice that iconically opened the show, singing “Aquarius.” (“When the moon is in the seventh house…”) Dyson soon after landed roles both in the movies and on stage and recorded a debut album, entitled (If You Let Me Make Love to You Then) Why Can’t I Touch You?; the title track was a top-10 hit in the U.S. “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” the follow-up single, hit number 50, and that was as high as any of his subsequent releases charted. He died at age 40 in 1990.

* The other song previously featured here but by a different artist is “Borderline,” which was Madonna’s first top-10 hit (see Eclectic Playlist Series 3.02, February 2016). The song arrived during that short moment when her music was considered “alternative” (mostly just because she had been signed to the new-wave-oriented label Sire Records). I’ve always been partial to “Borderline” for its multi-faceted musicality: there’s the instrumental hook, the melodic shifts, the two-part verse plus the pre-chorus (those “Just try to understand” chords get me every time), and then the nuanced chorus with its one-word first line. The song was written by Reggie Lucas, who produced most of the debut album. A guitarist who played with Billy Paul and Miles Davis, among others, Lucas started producing and writing with partner James Mtume in the late ’70s; the Madonna debut, in 1983, was his first solo production. According to the internet, Lucas and Madonna had a strained relationship as the recording unfolded. But he did give her what is arguably the album’s best song–a song so solid it delightfully survives unpacking and repacking by the Flaming Lips, a version the band recorded for an offbeat Warner Bros. compilation album released in 2017. The album commemorated the label’s 50th anniversary and featured currently-signed Warner artists covering songs by legacy Warner acts. It’s a motley collection both in terms of songs and artists but it culminates marvelously with this slow, increasingly furious Madonna cover. The Norman, OK-based band Stardeath and White Dwarfs, along for the ride here, has collaborated a few times with the Flaming Lips; among the band’s members is Dennis Coyne, nephew of Wayne.

* I love how effortlessly the Watson Twins transfigure the Cure’s boppy, late new-wave hit into a plaintive C&W-inflected ballad. You’ll find “Just Like Heaven” on their 2008 album Fire Songs; it also appeared on the HBO series True Blood. The twins–who are in fact actual twins–have a new album due out next month entitled Holler, which is their first release in five years.

* Brenda Holloway recorded for Motown in the ’60s, but never quite hit it big, despite the quality of her singles. At one point poised to step into Mary Wells’ shoes as Motown’s major female solo artist, Holloway also was one of only a handful of Motown artists who wrote their own songs. Issues arose between her and the label, leading to her departure from Motown in 1968; the next year, she sued Berry Gordy, who had made some minor changes to her song “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and gave himself a writing credit on the song, which became a huge hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears. She recorded a few times post-Motown, including a gospel album in 1980, but eventually left the music business. She is one of many lesser-known artists to have found her early work embraced by the Northern Soul scene in the UK; she re-emerged as a recording artist in the 1990s, releasing three albums between 1990 and 2003. “Just Look What You’ve Done” was co-written by Frank Wilson and R. Dean Taylor, each with colorful and convoluted histories of their own; I’ll let the internet fill you in if you are interested.

* I am still getting my musical arms around the phenomenon that is Caroline Polachek, who arrives from outside my comfort zone in terms of her wholehearted embrace of sounds associated with 21st-century pop. And yet she clearly is using that vocabulary for intriguing artistic purposes. Her new-ish album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is a grower–The New Yorker has called it “a spellbindingly deranged collage”–compelling re-listens even as I’m not sure, always, how to absorb what I’m listening to. “Blood and Butter” is one of the songs I clicked with first, thanks to the instantly engaging pre-chorus (the “And what I want is…” part). One of Polachek’s defining attributes is a powerful voice that she has trained to flip registers in such a way as to imitate what Auto-Tune can do artificially. While I remain intuitively skeptical of Auto-Tune I can’t help but approach with an open mind a gifted vocalist who finds something aesthetically satisfying in the effects it can produce. Clearly she is also processing her voice intermittently. Note that I’ve never ruled processed vocals out of my realm of interest, I just generally find Auto-Tune’s robotic tinge unpleasant and its mindless employment irritating. But Caroline Polachek I listen to, finding in her approach and vibe a worthy successor to Kate Bush as a singer/songwriter trafficking in unabashed, auteur-like pop drama.

* As usual, this month’s mix features a handful of songs that were previously featured as MP3s here on Fingertips. May’s “alumni” class: Pop and Obachan, The Unthanks, and, going way back to 2004, the London-based collective Trembling Blue Stars. Follow the links if you’re curious on the details.