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“Conquering Kangaroo” – Aaron Hunter Dennis

Arcane but good-natured

“Conquering Kangaroo” – Aaron Hunter Dennis

With its acoustic groove and delightfully arcane lyrics, “Conquering Kangaroo” nestles into an agreeable Guided By Voices meets Sufjan Stevens vibe, with a perhaps unexpected nod in the direction of Lindsey Buckingham. The song has two strong, competing characteristics: Aaron Hunter Dennis’s good-natured story-telling voice, and lyrics that tell no discernible story whatsoever. Many songs succeed either because of or in spite of unintelligible story lines; this is an especially successful one, a few tart phrases standing in for narrative clarity: “baseball cap but no team name”; “the pills have been helping, too”; “a company run by brutes.”

And while I mentioned the “acoustic groove,” careful listeners will note there’s more going on here than strummy acoustic guitars. There are scratchy high-necked guitar accents, wordless vocal flourishes, and a chorus in 7/4 time; the abstract (and sometimes unintelligible) lyrics further disrupt any idea of this being just a mellow toe-tapper. Probably my favorite recurring moment is the lovely way the verse melody resolves into the end-of-verse rhyme (first heard around 0:22) only to partially disconcert the ear with those 7/4 measures that follow in the chorus. Keeping the ear off-balance is a potent maneuver if a song likewise delivers some counter-balancing comfort. A parallel tactic: Dennis gives the cryptic lyrics an intelligible, if idiosyncratic, structure, in which the last word of each verse all rhyme (or slant-rhyme, to be more precise). This also underlines the idea that the songwriter knows exactly what he’s doing, even if the listener remains slightly bamboozled.

As for what the phrase “conquering kangaroo” means or refers to, all that pops in my head is a cartoon concept of a kangaroo with boxing gloves on. Is this a metaphor for the human condition, us poor souls stuck fighting battles we shouldn’t even be involved with? Your guess is as good as mine.

Aaron Hunter Dennis is a singer/songwriter based in San Diego. “Conquering Kangaroo” is his first single as a solo artist. He was previously in the 2010s band Tan Sister Radio, which had a song of theirs placed on the Showtime series Shameless; the royalty check funded a makeshift studio for Dennis, who there began to record his own material. Thanks to the artist for the MP3, which came courtesy of Tennessee Kamanski. Kamanski is half of the engaging duo of Allen LeRoy Hug, who have been featured here both in review and playlist. Kamanski and Dennis are engaged to be married. He’s played and recorded with Allen LeRoy Hug, she’s now helping with promotion, and so sent me the song, and here you are. Occasionally it’s that easy.

“Francine” – Brandon De La Cruz

Hushed and minimal

“Francine” – Brandon De La Cruz

Fingertips veteran Brandon De La Cruz returns with another of his intimate and tremulous gems. Possessing a whispery, minimalist style that can veer in an ill-fated direction in less capable hands, De La Cruz quietly mesmerizes, transcending the seemingly straightforward setting.

“Francine” launches off a classic folk-guitar riff, swinging gently into a subdued tale of (I think) long-distance love. De La Cruz’s minimalism extends to his storytelling: he’s short on concrete details, long on suggestive phrases. And, as I can’t help but continue to mention, the man is a master of using simple words to skip at the surface of deep meaning; here, the entire song, besides the name “Francine” and two exceptions (“between” and “apart”), is composed of one-syllable words. This is not as easy as it may look, and works with the gentle music to create a trance-like vibe. (De La Cruz’s Bandcamp bio notes an interest in Japanese haiku, which makes sense.) One telling, self-referential line comes near the beginning: “Words don’t say what I mean.” And yet they’re all we have to go on, to quote Tom Stoppard.

In and around the hushed and humble setting you may notice some stray sounds in the background. Towards the beginning, underneath the finger-picked guitar, an echoey string effect (0:12) hints at the tweaks to the audioscape that De La Cruz uses to ever so subtly distort the vibe. Throughout most of the song, if you listen for it you’ll hear a low ambient rumble that gives the impression of his playing in an empty warehouse or maybe an amphitheater. There’s a sound resembling a backward guitar loop beginning around 0:54 and continuing softly from there. Later, a couple of unexpected voices, with a “found sound” character, float in and out of the mix. De La Cruz reports that his inspiration in this case is rooted in his time working part-time at Mississippi Records in Portland, which puts out a lot of folk and country reissues; he sees the sampling as a creative way to collaborate with artists who are long gone from the world. The end result to my ears has the collage-like feel of something you might encounter in an art gallery.

“Francine” is a track from De La Cruz’s new album, Two Kilos of Blue, which was recorded in New Zealand in 2020, and released last month. De La Cruz was in New Zealand visiting friends when the pandemic broke out; he ended up stuck in there for a year. However inconvenient that might have been personally, it seems to have been amenable artistically–Two Kilos of Blue is the second album he recorded while marooned, and is a collection of songs he’d written over the previous ten years. De La Cruz is based in Portland; this is his third full-length album, coming after four previous EPs, the first recording dating back to 2010. He has been featured on Fingertips in 2011, 2013, and 2020.

Some things just don’t get through

Eclectic Playlist Series 10.8 – August 2023

Seems only fitting that I’m breaking the rules this month for Sinéad O’Connor, who was something of a rule-breaker herself during her eventful and sadly troubled life. I’m breaking two interrelated rules, in fact: the rule I have about not featuring an artist more than once in a calendar year (I’d already placed “John I Love You” in a playlist in April this year), along with the rule about not featuring an artist more than once in any given playlist (which of course breaks the first rule too). As you’ll see, I open and close this month’s mix with the late great Irish singer/songwriter, and it’s surely not enough of a tribute to the artist and human being that she was. The abrupt news of her death late last month prompted a lot of salutes that one can only wish had happened more thoroughly and supportively while she was alive. She had more than her share of challenges during her years on Earth but in some important ways she was a pure and searching spirit; and boy oh boy oh boy could she sing. Here’s what I wrote in April:

Sinéad O’Connor has one of rock’s most indelible singing voices, and this tender but intense song off her somewhat disregarded Universal Mother album shows it off brilliantly. Spiritually and psychologically complex, she has for decades presented as someone neither critics nor the mainstream public quite know what to do with; her career has in any case ricocheted through any number of controversies. But that voice. And let’s not overlook her capacity for writing some mighty tunes. Last year she announced her retirement from the music industry. And yet (there’s always more with her) this year she surfaced with a new version of “The Skye Boat Song,” which has been the theme song for the show Outlander; O’Connor’s impressive version will be heard during the upcoming seventh season of that popular TV series.

I stand by what I said but for one sad detail: it turns out that there was not, tragically, much more with her, or from her. But that voice: it would move me every time I heard it; it may well be my favorite singing voice in the history of rock’n’roll, which I know is saying a lot. But to my ears, she was that great. And an underrated songwriter to boot. Which relates to this: among the tributes I read, nothing dealt in any detail with her 21st-century output–everyone seemed stuck on “Nothing Compares 2 U” (a landmark recording to be sure) and the SNL/Pope photo episode (she was cancelled decades before that was even a thing). Usually the narratives merely made passing reference to how her albums didn’t sell well after that, which is such a reductive and stupid way to summarize the work of an actual artist. Me, I find Faith and Courage (2000) and I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss (2014) to be really satisfying, the latter in particular, coming entirely out of the blue, with Sinéad as confessional and pointed as ever, but also a bit cheeky (check out that album cover). Most of the songs on both albums were well-built and approachable. Music critics seemed not to like it when her music was too accessible, which is elitist nonsense as far as I’m concerned.

RIP Sinéad O’Connor. And the cliché in this case is very true: we really did hardly know you.

But yes there are 18 other songs here between the two Sinéad offerings. It’s a bit of a journey, as usual. Notes on a few of the songs can be found below the widget. Here’s what you’re in for:

1. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” – Sinéad O’Connor (I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, 1990)
2. “Little By Little” – Radiohead (The King of Limbs, 2011)
3. “24 Hours” – The Chefs (single, 1981)
4. “I’ll Always Love You” – The Spinners (The Original Spinners, 1967)
5. “Sinner” – The Last Dinner Party (single, 2023)
6. “Fall At Your Feet” – Crowded House (Woodface, 1991)
7. “Birmingham” – Randy Newman (Good Old Boys, 1974)
8. “Many Miles Away” – Kenny Drew (Kenny Drew and His Progressive Piano, 1954)
9. “Boots” – Noe Venable (Boots, 2003)
10. “Get Up Jake” – The Band (B-side, 1969)
11. “Do You Really Wanna Know” – Papercuts (Fading Parade, 2011)
12. “Terry” – Kirsty MacColl (single, 1983)
13. “California Baby” – Carrie Biell (We Get Along, 2021)
14. “Rosemary” – Suzanne Vega (Tried and True: The Best of Suzanne Vega, 1998)
15. “Tuesday Heartbreak” – Stevie Wonder (Talking Book, 1972)
16. “Small Town Crew” – The Brunettes (Structure & Cosmetics, 2007)
17. “Rhoda Mendelbaum” – The Doughboys (single, 1967)
18. “O Pamela” – The Wake (Testament, 1985)
19. “I May Not Be Your Kind” – Garland Jeffreys (Ghost Writer, 1977)
20. “Trouble of the World” – Sinéad O’Connor (single, 2020)

Stray comments:

* Apologies for that first segue; there was no good way–I tried and tried–to transition between track one and two even as I liked, more generally, how the one followed the other. I’ll ask you to overlook that particular clunker, even as it happens right at segue number one.

* There’s another song honoring a recent passing in here, and this was not planned: I had “Get Up Jake” slotted in the playlist a week or two before the startling news broke of Robbie Robertson’s death. I would not necessarily have picked this song as the one to stand in for his brilliant career, but then again it’s perfectly characteristic of the Band’s classic sound. It was recorded for the eponymous second album, but ended up not included, and released as a B-side. I think it’s a fine little song–better, perhaps, than a couple of the songs that made it onto the album. Don’t miss the excellent, twangy guitar work from Robertson.

* Speaking of fine songs not included on an album, check out Suzanne Vega’s “Rosemary,” which to my ears stands with the very best of her work. Hers is another voice I have always loved dearly–the plainspoken beauty of her tone combined with the acuity of her lyrics can be all but mesmerizing. And I’m particularly taken with the way she aspirates her “wh’s” (listen here for the word “why” around 1:38), which reinforces how clearly she enunciates her lyrics. “Rosemary” was released as one of two non-album tracks on 1998’s Tried and True: The Best of Suzanne Vega, which is an unusually top-notch “best-of” album. The record company released a similar album a few years later, entitled Retrospective, which updated the collection with a few songs from her 2001 release, the excellent Songs in Red and Gray. Either one is a great place to start if you’re unfamiliar with her music and might be curious.

* The Brunettes were an appealing duo from New Zealand, active between 1998 and 2009. Their 2007 album, Structure & Cosmetics, was released by Sub Pop here in the U.S. It didn’t seem to help their career too much in the long run but it brought them to my attention; “Small Town Crew” was featured on Fingertips in December 2007, back when reviews were presented in weekly threesomes. Other songs this month that have appeared here previously in a posted review are Noe Venable’s “Boots” (2005), “Do You Really Wanna Know,” from Papercuts (2011), and “California Baby,” from Carrie Biell (2021).

* AllMusic identifies the Scottish band The Wake as “painfully obscure but highly influential.” Sure enough, I’ve only bumped into them recently. I see that they are a band with a long and relatively complex history, and while their recordings date back to the post-punk ’80s, a re-grouped version of the band came back in 2009. Their most recent album is 2012’s A Light Far Out; a single entitled “Clouds Disco” came out in 2015 as a Record Store Day release. “O Pamela” has a forlorn, hypnotic momentum that keeps it engaging for me despite its length; the song opens 1982’s Here Comes Everybody, a keeper of an album for those in the know. But painfully obscure for everyone else.

* Randy Newman is pretty well-known on the one hand but, in my opinion, radically underappreciated on the other. His fluffy compositions for the Toy Story movies are one thing; the deep and quirky songs he’s written for his own albums are entirely another thing. He has specialized over the years in songs featuring unreliable narrators; his 1974 masterpiece Good Old Boys was full of them, including the jaunty, vaguely aggressive fellow who addresses us in “Birmingham.” Two other striking things about Newman, as a composer, are on display here: his unrivaled flair for orchestration; and his gift for mining a sound that hits the ear as unquestionably “American,” a gift he shared with a small handful of classical composers, including John Phillip Sousa and Aaron Copeland. And even his piano parts present like orchestrations; listen to the way the verses finish lyrically but feel incomplete until the piano swings into its run towards resolution. No rock music or pop music songwriters write like this; I don’t think they would know how. The song is a casual miracle.

* The Doughboys are another obscure band with a long and involved history. They hailed from central New Jersey and started as a garage unit doing covers of British bands like the Kinks and the Animals. They released two singles of original material during their initial run from 1965 to 1968, one of which was the curiously appealing “Rhoda Mendelbaum.” The band has had an unlikely second life since 2000, releasing seven 21st-century studio albums to date. Their most recent is 2019’s Running For Covers, on which they cover songs from other bands as well as their own; the version of “Rhoda Mendelbaum” found on Spotify is this much newer rendition. The version you hear on this playlist is the original. I should note that front man Richard X. Heyman has had a extensive solo career, including over a dozen albums to date, the most recent coming in 2022. He veers towards power pop on his own; some of the albums are well worth seeking out if you’re a fan of that durable genre.

* The Sinéad O’Connor song that closes the mix, by the way, is a cover of an old American spiritual, made famous by Mahalia Jackson when she sang it in the Douglas Sirk movie Imitation of Life, in 1959; the scene is available (of course) on YouTube. O’Connor recorded her version in 2020, to support the Black Lives Matter movement. She was quoted as believing the song to be hopeful rather than bleak, but it does take on an eerie resonance here in August 2023.

“The Aaron Waters Show” – Midwestern Dirt

Instrumental-forward journey

“The Aaron Waters Show” – Midwestern Dirt

At once brisk and pensive, “The Aaron Waters Show” keeps a steady pulse even as it diverts through a series of instrumental breaks between verses, along with a one-plus-minute interlude between the third verse and the ensuing bridge, and a one-minute instrumental coda. The song has no chorus, which I think contributes to its restlessness, a sense of looking for something that isn’t arriving. The unusual amount of instrumental time does that too; the vocal sections, together, carry a purposeful undertone of wishing somehow they could do more than they get to do. And they don’t do anything that isn’t laid out first by an instrumental part.

The song’s main riff (first heard at 0:21)–a gently descending guitar line finished with a decisive two-note upturn, the piano and bass joining in–repeats four times in the introduction before it becomes the verse melody at 0:47. Patrick Kapp, reminiscent of Nils Lofgren (anyone?), sings sweetly, with character; he makes the most of the relatively limited time he has to sing. The instrumental breaks keep trying to upstage him–each break following a verse features a different guitar sound. And then comes the long instrumental break after the last verse, which delivers a subtle shift via a new chord pattern introduced between 2:35 and 2:47. It repeats once and then becomes the foundation for the bridge when the vocals resume at 3:02. The lyrics at this point slow down, aiming towards some kind of resolution, even as the background cadence remains, driven by a bass line grown increasingly hyperactive. The vocals wrap by 3:57, and the song proceeds for nearly another minute, finally relaxing the tempo for the last 30 seconds. There’s a strong sense of a journey coming to an end, or maybe at least some kind of adventure ride. Which maybe makes sense given the song’s provenance: the title is a pun on the annual Air and Water Show held every summer in Chicago. The song, says Kapp, was inspired by the way each summer he is initially unnerved by the war-like noise of the aerial practice that precedes the show, only each year to remember it’s only the show, everything is more or less okay.

Midwestern Dirt began as a studio project for Kapp while he was living in Brooklyn, with recordings fleshed out with the help of family and friends. After he returned to Chicago in 2019, and then after the worst of the pandemic, the project became a full five-piece band. “The Aaron Waters Show” is a song from the album Twilight at a Burning Hill, coming out next month.

“Sorry I Can’t Stay” – La Faute

Whispery vocals, echoey arpeggios

“Sorry I Can’t Stay” – La Faute

Echoey piano argeggios lead us into Peggy Messing’s up-close, whispery vocals and how can you not be captivated? The melodies are lovely, the mood bittersweet, reinforced by the repeated titular phrase in the chorus. As a series of words, “Sorry I can’t stay” is both strikingly conversational and evocatively ambivalent, the former accentuating the latter. When we talk we are rarely as conclusive as songwriters might often portray us to be.

The arpeggios, in constant motion, contribute to the song’s watery insistence, which in turn presents in conflict with lyrics that seem to reinforce the main phrase’s equivocation. Perhaps the most plaintive lyrical moment comes with this hushed request, in the delayed second verse: “I know what you always say/ But can you say it again?”

At 1:26 a semi-discordant synthesizer offers a slow-motion solo, laying bare the song’s hidden waltz rhythm, after which it haunts the soundscape with distant, roomy sounds; these become somewhat more audible and outer-space-y around 2:15. The synthesizer touches stand in for how, in general, Messing does so much with not a lot of different elements. She seems to like offering up moments that contribute so subtly they don’t necessarily even register, such as the vocal harmonies which delicately adorn the chorus. I can’t help but relate this to the incisive way she identifies, on social media, as “an undersharer and overthinker.” (Side note: there are more of us out here than people may realize.)

Messing, originally from Winnipeg, does musical business as La Faute (“the mistake”). A visual artist, multi-instrumentalist, and singer-songwriter, she released her debut album Blue Girl Nice Day towards the end of May. Check it out via Bandcamp and buy it if you like it, which is very possible. You might in particular want to check out her cover of Paul Simon’s indelible “The Only Living Boy in New York,” which closes the album.

“Let Me Know When It’s Yes” – Smug Brothers

Jangly, catchy, concise

“Let Me Know When It’s Yes” – Smug Brothers

Against the odds, power pop survives into the 2020s, often perpetuated by the kind of good-natured, low-drama outfits such as Ohio’s Smug Brothers, who have been plying their quirky wares since 2004. “Let Me Know When It’s Yes” falls unmistakably into the classic power-pop soundscape, with its jangly guitars, catchy but bittersweet melodies, and concise song structure. Interestingly, what is concise for many bands is an extended track for Smug Brothers, since the majority of songs in their ample discography clock in not merely under three minutes but often under two minutes, or even one. Singer/songwriter Kyle Melton says the short songs are largely a side effect of the small notebooks he carries around to write down his ideas. “Let Me Know When It’s Yes,” by contrast, was written on a computer, with more room to spread out lyrically. Be that as it may, there are good songwriting instincts at work here, as super-short songs have a different structural logic to them than songs of a more standard length. “Let Me Know When It’s Yes” grounds itself in two succinct, interrelated melodies, a situation which counterintuitively requires more time to absorb as a listener than a more complex melody that you only get a passing chance to get your arms around.

Which is to say, with a super-short song, you don’t as a listener, consciously or not, expect something to seem familiar as it unfolds. The songwriter, consciously or not, might as well make it intricate because it’s not really going to sink in on first listen in any case. But it’s nice and short so you are theoretically being invited to listen a few times. A three-minute song, on the other hand, with a simpler, recurring melody scheme, allows the listener to get more readily comfortable, a comfort level enhanced, ideally, by potent motifs and a strong sense of resolution, both of which Smug Brothers smartly deliver. I’m half thinking that what might seem to be the chorus here may simply be the final, resolving line of the verse (“Give me a call and let me know when it’s yes”). This is a structure that pays homage to folk ballads and is, relatedly, a ploy Bob Dylan has often used (think “Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm”). Tangentially, I wouldn’t call Kyle Melton’s voice Dylanesque per se, but he’s got something of Dylan acolytes Roger McGuinn and/or Tom Petty in his tone.

Smug Brothers have been through a variety of lineup changes over the years; founding members Melton (who also plays guitar) and Don Thrasher (drummer) remain at the core. Kyle Sowash (bass) and incoming lead guitarist Ryan Shaffer round out the quartet; two of the four are in Columbus, the other two in Dayton. Former lead guitarist Scott Tribble was with the band through the recording sessions for the latest album, which is called In the Book of Bad Ideas and is coming out in September. That’s where you’ll find “Let Me Know If It’s Yes.” You can check out the semi-voluminous Smug Brothers discography via Bandcamp. MP3 courtesy of the band. Note that Smug Brothers were previously featured on Fingertips in 2019.

On the edge of the labyrinth

Eclectic Playlist Series 10.7 – July 2023

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.

“True Religion” – Couch Prints

Fuzzy and buzzy

“True Religion” – Couch Prints

“True Religion” is a coherent tornado of fuzz and buzz, its swirling noise counterbalanced by unexpectedly sweet lead vocals and a concise structure. So, a question: are we starting to experience ’00s nostalgia? Between the terror attack and the economy bottoming out it wasn’t that much fun to live through but hell compared to watching democracy teetering on the edge of fascism, an ideology-crazed Supreme Court eager to treat more than half the population like second-class citizens, and social media continuing to fray our political and social fabric, the ’00s have an oddly innocent glow about them in retrospect. “True Religion” in any case gives me a 2000s feel, with its fizzing amalgam of droning electronics, bagpipe-y guitars, and disembodied vocal samples, guided from above by the feathery soprano of Jayanna Roberts.

I find it interesting to follow the percussion on this one. For the first half or so you might not think so–I’m no expert but the drumming sounds pretty programmed up to that point. All percussion clears out at 1:35 for the first iteration of the chorus, featuring just voice (Roberts in her lower register), guitar, and bass. At 1:49 we get the chorus repeated, an octave higher, with the drums kicking back in. And–again, I’m no expert–but I’ll be darned if the drumming doesn’t sound live now versus programmed. A big hint happens at 2:03, when the drum skitters through a few beats in an agreeably unexpected and (what sounds like a) three-dimensional sort of way. The drumming from this point onward hits the ear as somehow more grounded (listen in particular to the cymbal sounds), so either it’s a human drummer or the program was altered. In any case, all percussion exits abruptly at 2:36 in favor of a brief coda of noise and more of those disembodied speaking voices. Everything wraps up in just under three minutes, which is frequently a sign of a job well done.

Couch Prints is the NYC duo of Roberts and Brandon Tong. “True Religion” is the first single available from their forthcoming debut album Waterfall: Rebirth, which is due out this fall.

“Lover, Don’t Leave Me” – Bocce

Swoony early rock vibe

“Lover, Don’t Leave Me” – Bocce

Speaking of drumming: while you won’t, precisely, hear rock’n’roll’s seminal “Be My Baby” beat here on “Lover, Don’t Leave Me,” that bedrock rhythm is feinted at near the song’s beginning (0:18-0:26). (Listen for the first three signature bass-drum hits; while we never get the climactic fourth wallop you almost can’t help filling it in yourself in your head). The beat underlies the rest of the song even if it’s never spelled out, and goes a long way towards lending a swoony late-’50s/early-’60s vibe to the darkly charming “Lover, Don’t Leave Me.”

The song’s opening moments set the tone, with a whistly synthesizer (or maybe just a whistle?) describing a melody ever so slightly askew; if there’s something of a looney-bin vibe to it I don’t think that’s accidental. Nine seconds in, we go directly to the chorus, which sums matters up in one succinct, repeated couplet: “Lover, don’t leave me/Lovin’ ain’t easy”–the eternal push-pull of a passionate relationship. Singer Sarah Shotwell leans into the part with her honeyed, unhurried phrasing, which includes some muted melismas on the two contracted verbs (don’t/ain’t), adding a delicate achiness that reinforces the song’s echo of early rock’n’roll.

While the lyrics proceed to allude to physical torture, I’m reading them as metaphorical, mirroring the emotional torture baked into the experience of love in all its connective messiness. We even of all things get a quote, in Italian, from Niccolo Machiavelli (2:58) to wrap matters up, which, translated, means, “The insults must be done all at once”; Shotwell adds a bittersweet “caro” (“my dear”) to the sentiment.

And just when you think you’ve heard everything the song has to offer, along comes a background chorus of men’s voices singing, if I’m hearing this right, “Ba ba-ba-ba/Ba ba” (3:43). It’s a goofball touch at just the right moment, shepherding the proceedings to a gratifying conclusion.

Bocce is the trio of Shotwell, David Provenzano, and Christopher Keene. Shotwell and Provenzano worked together previously in the band Fialta. “Lover, Don’t Leave Me” is a track from Bocce’s debut album, Good For You, released earlier this month. MP3 via the band.

You think you’ve heard this one before

Eclectic Playlist Series 10.6 – June 2023

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.