Category: playlist

The extra day this month allows me to sneak February’s playlist in under the wire, if just barely. Running out of time here, I’ll keep the introduction to a minimum. Here’s what you’re in for this month:

1. “Sometimes, I Swear” – The Vaccines (Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations, 2024)
2. “Love is Gone” – Carlene Carter (Carlene Carter, 1978)
3. “Alpha Shallows” – Laura Marling (I Speak Because I Can, 2010)
4. “Miami” – Randy Newman (Trouble in Paradise, 1983)
5. “I Don’t Know What to Do” – Richard Anthony (single, 1965)
6. “The Turning Ground” – Tara Clerkin Trio (On the Turning Ground, 2023)
7. “Holland, 1945” – Neutral Milk Hotel (In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea, 1998)
8. “Firewalker” – Liz Phair (Liz Phair, 2003)
9. “Anna (Go To Him)” – Arthur Alexander (single, 1962)
10. “Greatest Dancer” – Nadine Shah (Filthy Underneath, 2024)
11. “Strange Angels” – Laurie Anderson (Strange Angels, 1989)
12. “Rod’s Song” – Shelagh McDonald (Stargazer, 1971)
13. “I Don’t Want to Let You Down” – Sharon Van Etten (single, 2015)
14. “Walk a Straight Line” – Squeeze (Play, 1991)
15. “Someone Great” – LCD Soundsystem (Sound of Silver, 2007)
16. “Goodbye” – Dusty Springfield (originally unreleased, 1970; much later available as a bonus track on Dusty in Memphis)
17. “Charlotte Anne” – Julian Cope (My Nation Underground, 1988)
18. “Poem for Eva” – Bill Frisell (Good Dog, Happy Man, 1999)
19. “Our Time” – Dear Euphoria (single, 2019)
20. “Carpet Crawlers” – Genesis (The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, 1974)

Random notes:

* Short anthemic rock’n’roll is still occasionally being delivered here in the 2020s, and few late-stage rock bands are as adept at it as the London-based Vaccines. Their new album, Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations, released last month, is a candy box full of reverby nuggets of succinct catchiness (longest track time here is 3:49). Check the whole thing out, and buy it if you like it, at Bandcamp. I particularly like “Sunkissed” and “Another Nightmare” as well.

* I’ve said it before but it always bears repeating: no one in rock history has written songs like Randy Newman. Above and beyond a fluky hit single or two, his albums over the years are sprinkled with offbeat musical treasures that have been largely forgotten by now, including “Miami,” from the 1983 album Trouble in Paradise. “I Love L.A.” was that album’s big hit, and is surely fun, but “Miami” is the real pièce de résistance. The arrangement alone is stunning, a wonderful match for a song that masks its complexity via effortless melodicism. The structure eludes easy explication–there’s a verse, and a sort of secondary verse, and then also maybe a pre-chorus, leading to a chorus that cuts the rhythm abruptly in half and offers one of Newman’s great instrumental countermelodies–a musical gift that no one in the non-classical world would even think to do, never mind have the arrangement chops to pull off. He’s so good at it that he even uses this instrumental refrain as the basis for musical joke later in the song, when the motif delivers a false entry into the chorus at 3:00.

* A somewhat indescribable ensemble from Bristol, the Tara Clerkin Trio traffics in atmospheric jazzy folk, or maybe folky jazz, with elements of electronic music and, even, classical music thrown in for good measure. “The Turning Ground,” hypnotic and captivating, is from their five-song EP On The Turning Ground, released last year. I found this one via Said the Gramophone’s annual list of favorite songs, always an enlightening read.

* Liz Phair has I think (I hope) had the last laugh regarding her self-titled 2003 album. Lambasted by hipsters at the time for how it supposedly abandoned her lo-fi roots, the album 20 years later sounds like a pretty wonderful batch of well-produced songs. And, sheesh, doesn’t anything she sings sound great? That voice. The one thing that stands out in retrospect about the haters is that the idea of “selling out” was apparently still something you weren’t supposed to do back in 2003. Times have surely changed.

* The young Shelagh McDonald was either an early fan of the young Joni Mitchell or was tuned into a similar wavelength over there in Scotland; in any case, “Rod’s Song” is a wonderful, energetic, Joni-like creation (think “Chelsea Morning”). McDonald’s is an odd story: she released two albums in the early ’70s, when she was in her early 20s, and seemingly a rising star on the British folk-rock scene. In the middle of recording her third album, in 1971, she disappeared. As in left the business, no contact info, whereabouts unknown. Fast forward forty-some years, to 2005, when a reissue of her first two albums prompted some newspaper coverage, which she eventually saw. She decided to tell her story to a Scottish newspaper, revealing that her departure from the music scene was due to the after-effects of a bad LSD trip. It wasn’t until 2013 that she at long last released a new album, but it was sold only at her concerts, and isn’t available digitally. Another album was reported to be in the works around 2017, but has yet to see the light of day.

* I used to think I didn’t like LCD Soundsystem’s music, but I finally realized I mostly just haven’t connected to how unnecessarily long James Murphy’s songs tend to be, at least to my ears. I just don’t think one needs quite so much repetition if you’re not on MDMA in a club at three in the morning. So when I stumbled on a sub-four-minute version of the song “Someone Great,” I could enjoy it without getting to where I’m just waiting for it to end. An excellent song, when properly lengthed.

* As a FYI, the well-known Genesis song that closes out the mix here has been alternately titled “Carpet Crawlers” and “The Carpet Crawlers,” at various points of release, re-release, and re-recording. There was, among other things, a new version recorded in 1999 as “The Carpet Crawlers 1999.” And while it was (sort of) fun to hear Peter Gabriel reuniting with Genesis, and sharing lead vocals this time with Phil Collins, the cover, with its series of small but annoying changes, was entirely unnecessary, to my ears. Stick with the awesome original, which appeared without the “The” on the 1974 double LP.

The year 2023 didn’t come and go with much that resembled joy but let’s at least recognize that it was a pretty darned good year for music. Then again, independent of the dreadful news that afflicts our global community month after month, one year to the next, music seems always to deliver–which is to say, every year turns out to be a pretty darned good year for music. (We receive at least that consolation, and it’s no small one.) Note that I am speaking from neither the thoroughly mainstream nor the rigorously avant garde; I’m talking about quality music that rises up somewhat but not entirely left of center. Music that’s accessible but thoughtful, engaging but interesting, music that hasn’t given up on the organic involvement of human bodies and human consciousness. That kind of music. You may not see in the “What’s Hot” playlists but it’s out there, thriving artistically (if not financially).

All of which is a roundabout way of acknowledging the presence of four 2023 songs in this first playlist of 2024. Typically, in seeking balanced chronological distribution among the 20 songs, I aim not to have more than three songs from any given decade in each playlist. So much, this month, for that rule. In and around the new-ish music you’ll encounter the usual admixture of decades and styles, a 20-song journey that hangs together, however elusively, from start to finish.

As discussed last month, the artist roster resets in January–any artist featured in 2023 (or before) is free again to populate a playlist in 2024. Even so, for what it’s worth, this month’s mix hosts 12 artists who never previously had a song featured in an EPS playlist dating all the way back to 2014. Here is what’s in store to start the new year; extra notes as usual below the widget:

1. “She Moves On” – Paul Simon (The Rhythm of the Saints, 1990)
2. “All Night Long” – Peter Murphy (Love Hysteria, 1988)
3. “Cars and Parties” – Edith Frost (Wonder Wonder, 2001)
4. “Monticello” – The Monty Alexander Trio (We’ve Only Just Begun, 1972)
5. “XO Skeleton” – La Force (XO Skeleton, 2023)
6. “Talking Backwards” – Real Estate (Atlas, 2014)
7. “You’re Gonna Make Me Love You” – Sandi Sheldon (single, 1967)
8. “I Love You Honey, Give Me a Beer” – Blondie (demo, 1980)
9. “Hudson” – Allison Miller (Rivers in our Veins, 2023)
10. “Make You Better” – The Decemberists (What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, 2015)
11. “Nearer Than Heaven” – Delays (Faded Seaside Glamour, 2004)
12. “To Cry You a Song” – Jethro Tull (Benefit, 1970)
13. “Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba ” – Fito Páez feat. Mon Laferte (EADDA9223, 2023)
14. “6 Underground” – Sneaker Pimps (Becoming X, 1996)
15. “My World is Empty Without You” – The Supremes (single, 1965)
16. “Hard to Explain” – The Strokes (Is This It?, 2001)
17. “Someone to Talk To” – The Police (B-side, 1983)
18. “Our Town” – Iris DeMent (Infamous Angel, 1992)
19. “Spanish Dancers” – Bob Welch (Rebel Rouser, 1979)
20. “Requiem” – Allison Russell (The Returner, 2023)

Random notes:

* The above-mentioned artist reset gave me the opportunity to find a slot for a great, lesser-known Blondie song just a couple of months after the band’s last appearance here. I have a giant soft spot for Blondie, a band that seems to me underrated despite the mass popularity of a few of their biggest hits. The song here is a demo version of something that was re-envisioned and re-titled before making it to an album–as “Go Through It,” it landed on 1980’s Autoamerican. The lyrics were fiddled with and a semi-gratuitous, Mexican-style horn section was added on the LP version; the demo version is punchier, looser, and happily reminiscent of some of the band’s earlier recordings. I have nothing against trying new styles and directions, but was happy to discover how Blondie could sound like a classic version of themselves even in a time frame in which they were beginning to re-imagine themselves into nonexistence.

* While the unusually literate music blog Said the Gramophone has gone dormant as a regular source of posts for a number of years now, the site’s founder, novelist Sean Michaels, still assembles at year-end his annual list of favorite songs. Each year there are 100 of them, and they veer towards the 21st-century hipster’s characteristic mix of the blatantly popular and the inscrutably offbeat. The descriptions are singular, worth the trip alone, and even as most of the songs listed edge beyond the range of my own peculiar musical taste, I always locate 10 or 15 among them that transform into favorites of mine as well. One of which, now, is “XO Skeleton,” from the Canadian singer/songwriter Ariel Engle, who does musical business as La Force. Michaels calls it “a tune about mortality and care that flexes, shimmers, iridescent as a beetle.” Engle is also a current member of the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene. Note that only one song featured on Fingertips in 2023 made the STG list, but it was up there at number seven: Debby Friday’s “So Hard to Tell.”

* Fito Páez is an acclaimed and popular Argentinian musician; his profile here in the U.S. is decidedly lower. He peaked commercially with his 1992 album El Amor Después del Amor (“Love After Love”), which sold some 750,000 albums in Argentina, but he has nevertheless had a long and busy career since then, with more than two dozen studio albums to his name to date. He’s won a number of Latin Grammy Awards over the course of his career, and in 2021 was given a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, he released the album EADDA9223, which is a song by song re-recording and re-vamping of his previously mentioned hit 1992 LP. Paéz has been quoted as saying that this project aimed to prove “that there are no sacred, untouchable albums.” The new version of the album–I’ve yet to discover where the album’s title comes from–features a variety of Spanish-speaking guest musicians, among them Ángela Aguilar and Andrés Calamaro, and also Elvis Costello. (Costello had previously worked with Paéz on Spanish Model, Costello’s 2021 Spanish-language version of This Year’s Model. That album features all the original Attractions backing tracks, topped by new vocals sung in Spanish by Spanish-speaking artists. Paéz sings “Radio, Radio.”) The vocalist sharing the spotlight with Paéz on the single “Sasha, Sissí y el Círculo de Baba” is the Chilean-born, Mexico-based singer/songwriter Mon Laferte, a musical star in her own right.

* Andy Summers sang only four or five lead vocals while with the Police; “Someone To Talk To” was one of them, and it was only a B-side to the 1983 single “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” (The piquant and more outre “Mother,” another Summers composition and lead vocal, did make it onto the Synchronicity album that year.) A skilled and inventive guitarist, he had had a busy career, largely as a session player, before joining the Police in 1977, replacing the band’s original guitarist, Henry Padovani. Since the Police’s hiatus in 1984 and effective dissolution by 1986, Summers has released 13 solo albums (all instrumental except for the first), along with eight albums in collaboration with other musicians. His most recent is 2021’s Harmonics of the Night.

* There is a music industry cliché about the so-called sophomore slump; the often expressed idea is that a musician has 20-odd years to make their first album, and six months or so to make their second. Thus, in theory, the lesser quality. Whether generally true or not, Allison Russell has easily escaped the trap, following her sparkling 2021 debut, Outside Child, with an equally impressive second album in 2023, The Returner. Spanning the emotions from the mournful to the jubilant, the album features a good number of songs that sound like instant classics, so sturdy are the melodies and arrangements. The timeless and uplifting title track is a particular triumph, but I’m also partial to the closing track, “Requiem,” which I’ve likewise employed as a closer this month. And by the way if you happened to miss Outside Child, you might want to correct that oversight.

* A reminder that you can have this delivered to your inbox every month if you sign up for the newsletter–details to the right in the sidebar. The email version features a couple of bonus notes each month, for the information hungry.

I’ve curated one holiday-related song into my December playlist, and it’s right there at the top. On the one hand, there are plenty of other places to go for a more generous helping of holiday tunes, if that’s what you’re craving. But I also wanted attention paid to this most humane of seasonal compositions, that it shouldn’t get lost in a candy-coated flow of generic Christmas-ing. “The Christians and the Pagans” by Dar Williams comes to us in 2023 like a long-lost if slightly time-addled friend, a song about personal connection and tolerance, told with open-hearted humor, that reminds us how much these qualities have been shoved aside by the social-media-fueled, extremist-friendly madness that has ruled our collective lives for the past decade. On the one hand, this a straightforward story song with a subtle emotional wallop. (For whatever reason, when Dar sings the line “It’s Christmas and your daughter’s here” I get a lump in my throat, every time. And I’m Jewish.) On the other hand, I read the scene with my 2020s perspective and get a bigger, more intrusive lump in my throat, feeling into the song’s implicit innocence and hopeful fellowship. No one at the dinner table was irrationally angry, no one unwilling to consider another point of view; not unrelatedly, no one at the table was looking at their iPhone, if only because they didn’t exist. Meaning, no one in that world was busy taking pictures of themselves, or insulting strangers from a distance, or blatantly ignoring the people they were sharing space with. I grieve the loss of that world when I hear this song. Whatever improvements we have made together since the 1990s seem not necessarily worth the tradeoff.

Beyond the first track, and perhaps the second, there isn’t any holiday material here, although one can always read between the lines. These mixes, as you know, never arrive to present an overarching theme or particular destination; the ongoing intent is, rather, the (ideally) nimble amalgamation of songs from different eras, a willful stream of divergent sounds towards the goal of one inclusive listening experience. This is the year’s last mix, which means that my self-imposed restriction–no artist featured more than once in a calendar year–will reset the next time we meet. At the same time, I’m always seeking to bring in artists each month that haven’t previously been heard here. This month you’ll encounter nine artists who are entirely new to the Eclectic Playlist Series, not featured at all in any mix dating back to 2014.

Here’s the lineup for December; extra notes below the widget:

1. “The Christians and the Pagans” – Dar Williams (Mortal City, 1996)
2. “Thank God the Year is Finally Over” – Paper Route (Thank God the Year is Finally Over EP, 2009)
3. “Townie” – Mitski (Bury Me at Makeout Creek, 2014)
4. “Whole Wide World” – The Rolling Stones (Hackney Diamonds, 2023)
5. “You’ve Been in Love Too Long” – Martha Reeves & The Vandellas (single, 1965)
6. “Getting Away With It” – Electronic (single, 1989)
7. “Cybernaut” – Tonto’s Expanding Head Band (Zero Time, 1971)
8. “Limbs” – Emma Pollock (Watch the Fireworks, 2007)
9. “Fotzepolitic” – Cocteau Twins (Heaven or Las Vegas, 1990)
10. “Broken Wing” – Lowpines (In Silver Halides, 2018)
11. “All I Can Do” – Carpenters (Offering, 1969)
12. “The Book I Read” – Talking Heads (Talking Heads 77, 1977)
13. “Everything Reminds Me of My Dog” – Jane Siberry (Bound By the Beauty, 1989)
14. “Video Game” – Sufjan Stevens (The Ascension, 2020)
15. “Empty Chairs” – Don McLean (American Pie, 1971)
16. “I Remember” – The Roots (Undun, 2011)
17. “Retour a Vega” – The Stills (Wicker Park original soundtrack, 2004)
18. “Take Good Care of Me” – Rachel Sweet (Protect the Innocent, 1980)
19. “Jeff Goldblum” – Mattiel (Georgia Gothic, 2022)
20. “Astral Weeks” – Van Morrison (Astral Weeks, 1968)

Random notes:

* Mitski is a compelling singer and songwriter, fully inhabiting a variety of sonic landscapes. Her first two albums, in the early ’10s, were recorded as school projects while at SUNY Purchase, and veered mostly towards quiet, off-kilter compositions, some piano-driven, others more idiosyncratically scored. For her 2014 label debut, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, she picked up a guitar for the first time and the music in some cases went in new directions. “Townie” is crunchy and catchy and may take you aback a bit if you’re more familiar with her more recent, silkier (but still idiosyncratic) output.

* I like how the Rolling Stones sound on this new record–snappy, interested, even vibrant, with Mick in fine voice. I’m less in love with the songs themselves; with a couple of exceptions, the songwriting strikes me as humdrummy as some of the generic-sounding song titles (“Depending On You,” “Mess It Up,” “Tell Me Straight”). “Whole Wide World,” however, has a bit of musical sparkle to it, to my ears. The riff-based groove is at once clean and dirty, as Stonesy as they come; on the heels of that, the unexpectedly melodic chorus is a bit of a delight. I salute these guys for still making it happen.

* When visiting the various decades, I often seek to find songs from different years in each decade, for variety’s sake. But sometimes two songs from the same year can be just as illustrative of a decade’s variety. Case in point: “Cybernaut” and “Empty Chairs,” both released in 1971, but would one ever suspect? They seem to be coming to us from different planets, never mind different years. “Cybernaut” is the lead track on one of rock’n’roll’s earliest synthesizer albums, while “Empty Chairs” is a warm and organic song featuring only acoustic guitar and voice. “Cybernaut” is forward-looking, mesmerizing groove, “Empty Chairs” evocative nostalgia. Merriam-Webster, by the way, claims that the first known use of the word cybernaut came in 1989. They are apparently not fans of pioneering electronic music outfits, never mind devotees of the classic British spy show The Avengers, the third episode of the fourth season of which was called “The Cybernauts,” and aired in 1965.

* Most people are familiar with the Carpenters for their run of soft-rock mega-hits in the early 1970s, and perhaps also for Karen Carpenter’s tragic trajectory. But before they became chart-toppers and household names, they had recorded an album called Offering, and were credited as Carpenters (no “the”). The LP went nowhere commercially, but was re-released the following year as Ticket to Ride, after their single “Close to You” went to #1 in the summer of 1970. Offering/Ticket to Ride is notable for being performed largely by Karen and Richard themselves (she on drums, he on keyboards) and for featuring Richard on lead vocals on half of the tracks. As you can tell from “All I Can Do,” the sound is rather different from the vibe they presented as the hits started rolling in that next year.

* While there is nothing at all wrong with Bonnie Raitt’s well-known cover of “You’ve Been in Love Too Long,” the Martha Reeves & The Vandellas original is unbeatable.

* The Stills’ song “Retour a Vega,” sung in French, was an early Fingertips favorite, featured originally here in 2004. The band, formed in Montreal in 2000, were something of a big indie deal back in the ’00s, but called it quits in 2011. The song appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Wicker Park, which featured a purposeful lineup of happening indie bands of the moment, including Death Cab for Cutie, Broken Social Scene, and Snow Patrol.

* I am not normally on board with long, repetitive and/or meandering songs, and furthermore have little patience for Van Morrison’s self-important improvisational shtick. And yet, “Astral Weeks”: somehow it all comes together here–the offhand, inscrutable lyrics, the marvelous acoustic groove, the incisive flute accents, the bass line hook, the wild string arrangements, all conspiring to take listeners, nearly against their will, on a seven-minute ride to some other world than our own. It goes on and on and I guess I enter the slipstream, or some such thing, because it feels over in a flash. For those who may be interested in more background about this song than you thought might be possible to report on, check out the most recent episode of Andrew Hickey’s monumental podcast series A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which is partially what brought the song back to the front burner here (although I’ll note I had nearly included it in EPS 10.10, before the Hickey episode; it’s been in my “to be featured at some point” folder for a long time).

As the American baseball season has drawn (at last!) to a close, I’m pulling from the immense scrap heap of musical history a semi-obscure piece of jazzy pop named after a baseball player with the unusual name of Van Lingle Mungo. Mungo was a talented pitcher–a five-time All-Star, playing 11 seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers and three for the New York Giants in the 1930s and 1940s–but we’d have zero reason to recall him at this point were it not for Dave Frishberg’s weirdly compelling song. With lyrics that are nothing more than names of baseball players from the 1940s strung artfully together, the song “Van Lingle Mungo” was a favorite of the legendary NYC radio DJ Vin Scelsa back in the day, which is how I came to know of it as a relative youngster. Something somewhere reminded me of it this fall, leading to its inclusion at the bottom of this month’s mix. Enjoy the autumnal mood and marvel in particular at the way the players’ names scan perfectly as lyrics.

“Van Lingle Mungo” also acts as an idiosyncratic, unintended bookend to the playlist’s opener, which is another song, now that I think about it, that features lyrics that are merely a list of items: King Crimson’s “Elephant Talk,” in which each verse is comprised of words related to talking, the verses going in alphabetical order from A to E. My favorite moment is in the fourth verse, when vocalist Adrian Belew breaks the format to sing “These are words with a D this time.”

In between these two odd but potent songs you’ll find the usual brew of different sounds and decades intermingling as one extended listening experience. Here, specifically, is what you are in for; extra notes below the widget:

1. “Elephant Talk” – King Crimson (Discipline, 1981)
2. “Bootleg Firecracker” – Middle Kids (single, 2023)
3. “Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles” – Captain Beefheart (Clear Spot, 1972)
4. “Driven Away” – Mary Lou Lord (Speeding Motorcycle EP, 2001)
5. “I Can’t Believe You Love Me” – Tammi Terrell (Irresistible, 1965)
6. “That Tone of Voice” – Amy Rigby (Diary of a Mod Housewife, 1996)
7. “Australia” – The Shins (Wincing the Night Away, 2007)
8. “Dreaming” – Blondie (Eat to the Beat, 1979)
9. “Eucalyptus” – The National (First Two Pages of Frankenstein, 2023)
10. “Haunt Me” – Sade (Stronger Than Pride, 1988)
11. “Ugly Beauty” – Thelonius Monk (Underground, 1968)
12. “The Big Show” – The Extraordinaires (The Postcard EP, 2011)
13. “Inbetweener” – Sleeper (Smart, 1995)
14. “I’ve Got a Need For You” – David Ruffin (David, recorded 1970-71; released 2004)
15. “Down in the Valley” – The Broken West (I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 2006)
16. “The Voice” – The Moody Blues (Long Distance Voyager, 1981)
17. “Red Horse” – Corinne Bailey Rae (Black Rainbows, 2023)
18. “Wanderlust” – Polly Scattergood (Arrows, 2013)
19. “Talisman” – Air (Moon Safari, 1998)
20. “Van Lingle Mungo” – Dave Frishberg (single, 1969)

Random notes:

* “I Can’t Believe You Love Me” was Tammi Terrell’s debut single for Motown, recorded when she was only 20. When her first few records didn’t gain much commercial traction, Berry Gordy partnered her with Marvin Gaye for a series of singles that became major hits, starting with the indelible “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1967. But health problems, which dated back to severe headaches suffered as a child, soon began to interfere with Terrell’s ability to perform. Later that same year she collapsed on stage while singing with Gaye. She was subsequently diagnosed with a brain tumor. After an initial operation she continued to record and perform but her condition would steadily decline. When she died in 1970 she was only 24.

* The National’s cryptically-named album First Two Pages of Frankenstein may be the first release of theirs that captured my ears without hesitation. “Eucalyptus” is one of a number of excellent tracks. That said, I have yet to find time to investigate their surprise follow-up recording, Laugh Track, which shares cover art but offers up 12 new songs just five months after Frankenstein‘s release. It’s almost as if my mind and/or heart can only absorb a certain amount of input from any given artist in the course of a year or so. I’ll get to Laugh Track, which is probably quite good too, but it may yet take a while.

* I missed the memo on this but I am now belatedly glad to know that Mary Lou Lord started singing again in the mid-’10s. I had heard about the serious problem she had with her vocal cords some ten years earlier; it didn’t sound good at the time. And then I lost track of her. (There’s so much to keep track of!) So I’m just now realizing that she returned in 2015 with her first album since 2004, the self-released Backstreet Angels. More recently, the British label Fire Records released a career retrospective double-album last year called She’d Be a Diamond, with all the good stuff–a great introduction to a special artist if you’re not familiar with her. “Driven Away” is a song from the 2001 mini-EP Speeding Motorcycle, and can also be found on the 2022 Fire Records release.

* It’s a bit startling to listen to “The Big Show” and realize that the Extraordinaires, from Philadelphia, released the song in 2011. Were things already that bad back then? They wrote this when Twitter was still on the upswing, and the idea of President Donald Trump would have seemed a bad joke. Here’s how it starts:

We say it like it’s true then watch it put down its roots
And blossom from the gossip into truth
We’re in the weeds up to our knees
It’s hard to tell the poison from the fruit

Little did they know! The Extraordinaires have been a duo, a four-piece, and a five-piece band, while in recent years settling into a trio. Of their dozen or so releases of various lengths, the single “Monika,” from 2020, is their most recent. “The Big Show” appeared on their 2011 EP Postcard. You can explore the whole catalog over on Bandcamp.

* David Ruffin was one of the lead singers for the Temptations during their classic run from 1964 to 1968. “I’ve Got a Need For You” is from a solo album that he recorded in 1970 and 1971 but which, somehow, wasn’t released until 2004. And while I didn’t do this at all on purpose, in doing a bit of research I came upon the slightly uncomfortable fact of Ruffin’s abusive relationship with the aforementioned Tammi Terrell, which included the fact that he proposed marriage to her while (surprise!) it turned out he was already married. Life, in case you aren’t yet aware, is pretty messy.

* The Australian trio Middle Kids remain one of my favorite bands to come on the scene in recent years. Attentive readers here may remember seeing “Bootleg Firecracker” briefly featured here earlier in 2023; I had to take the review down when it came to my attention that the download had been removed from the site that initially hosted it. So here it is more permanently. The other new single the band released this year, “Highlands,” is also excellent. A new album is expected early next year.

* Standard-issue rock music history has it that the mighty prog-rock dinosaurs who ruled the scene beginning in the late ’60s were killed off, asteroid style, by the punk rock assault of the late ’70s. The truth is more nuanced than that, as seen in two divergent entries in this month’s mix. We have the aforementioned “Elephant Talk,” which saw a prog-rock band shift nimbly into new wave territory, managing to create an up-to-date identity while maintaining the King Crimson name. And we also have the Moody Blues, who let the new wave crash all around them, informing some new sounds while they remained true to their musical core; the in-the-moment effort, 1981’s Long Distance Voyager, stands as one of their best, with the lead single “The Voice” sounding at once familiar and fresh. The band’s long and complicated history is too much to get into here; note simply that they persisted, with some commercial success, well past the punk rock interruption, before devolving in the 2000s into a live nostalgia act.

* For those who enjoy these extra notes each month, you should know that visitors who receive the Fingertips newsletter get a few additional blurbs in the email accompanying each playlist. Sign up details are in the sidebar to the right.

Hop-skipping as usual through the decades and musical styles, I seem to have unconsciously leaned in the direction of “interesting juxtapositions” this time around. There’s Lana Del Rey into “Telstar,” for one, and “Telstar” into Depeche Mode, for another. The opening duo is another sort of juxtaposition, offering power pop from 30 years apart, back to back. Then there’s the offbeat sense made from Carole King leading into Jill Scott, or Veruca Salt into that luscious Lydia Luce song. And what to make of Elvis Costello into Buddy Holly? I didn’t adjoin them on purpose but realized afterwards how much Elvis in his early incarnation was identified with his Buddy Holly glasses and wardrobe. I was instead going here for comparing and contrasting the pre-rock’n’roll vibe of the Elvis song with the early rock’n’roll potency of Buddy Holly’s (posthumous) release.

And there’s more, as you’ll see. As always I encourage listening all the way to the end, even if it takes a few sessions: unlike old vinyl albums, the songs don’t get any worse towards the end of side two. The Roches song that concludes (and lends a title to) the mix is in particular a distinctive, overlooked treasure:

1. “Girl of My Dreams” – Bram Tchaikovsky (Strange Man, Changed Man, 1979)
2. “Carly (Goddess of Death)” – The Capes (Hello, 2006)
3. “Twilight” – Shawn Colvin (Cover Girl, 1994)
4. “Mariners Apartment Complex” – Lana Del Rey (Norman Fucking Rockwell, 2019)
5. “Telstar” – The Tornados (single, 1962)
6. “Everything Counts” – Depeche Mode (Construction Time Again, 1983)
7. “Quiet” – Lucy Bell (Emotion Pending EP, 2023)
8. “Pleasant Valley Sunday” – Carole King (demo, 1966; The Legendary Demos, 2012)
9. “Hate on Me” – Jill Scott (The Real Thing – Words & Music, Vol. 3, 2007)
10. “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” – Elvis Costello (National Ransom, 2010)
11. “Love’s Made a Fool of You” – Buddy Holly (demo, 1958; released 1964)
12. “Got to Get You Back” – Sons of Robin Stone (single, 1974)
13. “No Substitute” – The Shivvers (unreleased single, 1980)
14. “Seether” – Veruca Salt (American Thighs, 1994)
15. “Occasionally” – Lydia Luce (Dark River, 2021)
16. “Sorrow” – The Merseys (single, 1966)
17. “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” – The Clash (single, 1978)
18. “Capacity” – Charly Bliss (Young Enough, 2019)
19. “Hang Down Your Head” – Tom Waits (Rain Dogs, 1985)
20. “So” – The Roches (Can We Go Home Now, 1995)

Random notes:

* “Girl of My Dreams” was one of a handful of late-’70s new wave nuggets to hit the US top 40 (just barely: it peaked at #37), and one of the best of the bunch. Bram Tchaikovsky was the stage name adopted by British guitarist Peter Bramall, first as a member of the great pub rock band The Motors and then as leader of his own band, to which he also lent the name Bram Tchaikovsky. The rest of the band’s debut album, Strange Man, Changed Man, thanks in part to the leader’s appealingly resonant voice, was above average guitar rock, but has long since fallen into obscurity. Even the indelible power pop gem “Girl of My Dreams” has but 75,000 streams on Spotify; I guess it has yet to find its way onto a streaming TV series. By comparison, its 1979 new wave top-40 compatriot, Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to be Kind,” has some 27 million streams. Numbers never tell the whole story.

* Along with her masterly strengths as a singer and acoustic guitar player, Shawn Colvin has long displayed a preternatural gift as a covers artist–perhaps, I’m guessing, because of those previously mentioned strengths. In her early years as a performer, many a concert highlight moment came from how she interpreted songs–songs that often arrived from much more of a rock setting than her “girl with a guitar” milieu. And while her cleverly named 1994 album Cover Girl may be a bit too much of a good thing–one or two well-placed cover songs in a concert may have a bigger impact than 13 in a row–there’s no question that the good stuff is top-notch. I’ve always been partial in particular to her transformative cover of the Robbie Robertson song “Twilight.” How she even heard what she does with it in the Band’s slightly (and oddly) perky, organ-frilled arrangement is something of a miracle. But boy does she nail this one–an all-time great cover.

* Veruca Salt has a long, involved history, with a little bit of everything: buzz band status, critical and popular backlash, intra-band feuding, a long hiatus, and, more recently, the unexpected rapprochement and return to form. “Seether” is the song that introduced the Chicago quartet to the world, but American Thighs, the grunge-influenced debut, is possibly not quite as good as the band’s surprise reunion album, 2015’s Ghost Notes. In any case, check that one out if you enjoy their sound and missed the memo. And now the latest news from Verucaland: in June, front woman Louise Post, after all these years, released her first solo album, Sleepwalker. Sounds intriguing after a quick, abbreviated listen–definitely a broadening and/or mellowing and/or 2020-ing of the Veruca Salt palette, with a couple of characteristically crunchy numbers in the mix. I hope to go back and listen more closely.

* While the Monkees made some noticeable tweaks to “Pleasant Valley Sunday” when they did their big hit version, there’s something in Carole King’s delivery of the song she co-wrote with Gerry Goffin that really hits home. She and Goffin were writing from their own experience of having moved out of New York City to the suburbs and their distaste for the lifestyle encountered there. (There was in fact a Pleasant Valley Way in their New Jersey neighborhood.) As for the Monkees’ version, King was reportedly unhappy with the changes that were made, which included a faster pace and some new and shifted words in the bridge. Admittedly the lyric changes robbed them of a bit of sense but this wasn’t Pulitzer Prize winning poetry in the first place. And the musical changes, which included the electric guitar line that opens the song and later recurs, helped flesh out and solidify a song that was a bit on the short side. King apparently made peace with the alterations over time; on her 2005 live album, she sings the song the Monkees’ way, complete with the introductory guitar lick (done here on an acoustic guitar).

* The Lydia Luce song, featured here in 2020, is just gorgeous. The laid-back verse eases you in but that chorus is thrilling, with its melancholy chord changes, dramatic build, and perfect resolution. If you didn’t hear it the first time here’s another invitation.

* Power-pop-oriented Milwaukee band the Shivvers had a brief, shining moment of regional fame in the early ’80s, which included being named best local band by readers of the Milwaukee Journal in 1982. But they never managed to get a record deal during their lifespan, which involved but one officially (self-) released single and a batch of other songs recorded but tucked away for years on (so I imagine) dusty boxes of tape reels. In 2006, a record label specializing in–hang on, this is a mouthful–“rare, obscure, independent and undiscovered punk, post-punk, D.I.Y., and power-pop groups from the U.S. and the U.K. 1977-1984” released an album called–hang on, another mouthful–Lost Hits from Milwaukee’s First Family of Power Pop: 1979-82, featuring every bit of recorded Shivvers material in existence. “No Substitute,” written by front woman Jill Kossoris, is one of 21 tracks. A song very much rooted in its jangly, new-wave-y time, it also has that timeless quality built into power pop, if only because the genre persists against all odds into the current day. You won’t find any on the charts, you’ll see classics generally ignored (see “Girl of My Dreams,” above), but the genre does not die, perhaps because the human yearning for melody, also against all odds, survives even the harshest, unmelodic pop cultural moments, however long-lasting. I’m waiting for the current one to end but am not holding my breath.

* The Philly-based Sons of Robin Stone were also mostly a local, unrecorded phenomenon, but they did at least briefly have a record deal: “Got to Get You Back” was the B-side of their one single for ATCO Records. The song eventually found its way to Northern Soul aficionados, as many great B-sides eventually did and still do. Note that on Discogs it’s listed as an A-side but according to a relative of one of the original band members, in a note on an internet forum from 2002, this was actually the B-side. (I do my homework here.) Note too that the original label does not have an A or a B on either side, but the item number on the label for this song ends in “1” while the number on the flip side ends in “0,” which suggest this is in fact the B-side. (More homework.) These guys were typically classified as “blue-eyed soul,” which was the emergent euphemism in the ’70s for white groups aligning sonically with music Black artists were making at the time. Whatever: it’s a pretty cool early disco song, complete with a time-signature oddity in the chorus that adds a gratifying twist and yet somehow doesn’t interrupt the groove.

* If the opening lines of “Sorrow” ring some sort of distant bell in your mind, it’s probably because George Harrison launches into them, non-sequiturishly, in the extended coda to the great Beatles song “It’s All Too Much”–check it out at 4:17. Like many hits from the past, “Sorrow” has a backstory. Its recording life began, unassumingly, as a B-side of a single by the American band The McCoys, released in 1965. The Liverpool-based band The Merseys (formerly The Merseybeats) recorded their own version in 1966, and this one became the big hit in the UK that Harrison quoted. Digging deeper: the song was co-written by Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, and Richard Gottehrer, the team that had written “My Boyfriend’s Back” and the McCoys’ big hit “Hang On Sloopy,” among other songs. They also briefly recorded as a group called the Strangeloves, where they had a hit with the song “I Want Candy” (later revived indelibly by the band Bow Wow Wow). Gottehrer was arguably the most consequential of the three, going on to found Sire Records in New York with the late Seymour Stein, a formative moment in the American new wave scene. He would go on to produce albums for Blondie, the Go-Go’s, Marshall Crenshaw, and, more recently, two 2010s albums by the Dum Dum Girls.

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.

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.

We’ll launch this month’s mix with one of rock’n’roll’s all-time great singles and then take the usual trip through decades and genres to land, ultimately, in a pretty-much genre-less 21st-century instrumental inspired by the poetry of e.e. cummings. You know, just another run-of-the-mill internet playlist. Stick around for the whole ride and you’ll hear power pop, classic R&B, Americana, some pre-Beatles rock’n’roll from an unexpected source, a couple of generations of indie rock, and maybe something in there qualifying around the edges as classic rock too. There are even a couple of bonafide hit singles in here this time. Note that I have nothing against hits, they just have to be good, not merely popular, and there is no arguing the all-time quality of “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” however familiar (to some) it might be. Head to the widget below the playlist to listen, and head down below the widget if you’re interested in a smattering of background notes about what you’re listening to.

Here’s what you’ll hear:

1. “Going Underground” – The Jam (single, 1980)
2. “Hunter” – Jess Williamson (Time Ain’t Accidental, 2023)
3. “Daphne” – Squeeze (Ridiculous, 1995)
4. “I Just Don’t Understand” – Ann-Margret (On The Way Up, 1962)
5. “I Can’t Stay Long” – Ultravox (Systems of Romance, 1978)
6. “Learn to Say No” – Lydia Loveless (Indestructible Machine, 2011)
7. “Captain” – Shapes of Race Cars (Apocalypse Hurts EP, 2004)
8. “Sing Me a Love Song” – The Glories (single, 1967)
9. “Dorina” – Dada (Puzzle, 1992)
10. “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” – Linda Ronstadt (Heart Like a Wheel, 1974)
11. “Holding On” – Body Type (single, 2023)
12. “Heaven” – The Walkmen (Heaven, 2012)
13. “Reach Out I’ll Be There” – The Four Tops (single, 1966; Reach Out, 1967)
14. “In a Manner of Speaking” – Martin Gore (Counterfeit EP, 1989)
15. “Come and Hold Me” – Fanny (Fanny, 1970)
16. “Ghost of York” – As Tall As Lions (As Tall As Lions, 2006)
17. “John I Love You” – Sinéad O’Connor (Universal Mother, 1994)
18. “Magnolia Blues” – Adia Victoria (A Southern Gothic, 2021)
19. “You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance” – Bruce Cockburn (Inner City Front, 1981)
20. “the rain is a handsome animal” – Tin Hat (the rain is a handsome animal, 2012)

Smattering of background information:

* Yes I do consider “Going Underground” to be one of rock’s all-time best singles; in my own peculiar world I’d rank it in the top 10 if not top 5. Adding to its powerful charm is the fact that it was a single through and through, never placed on an album (except of course on after-the-fact compilations). The Jam, like the Beatles before them, were inclined to release songs as stand-alone singles, which in retrospect seems at once urgent and romantic. “Going Underground,” released in March 1980, appeared while the trio were at the height of their powers, in the middle of a three-album run of exceptional quality; it went to #1 in the UK and solidified their huge rock-star status there–a condition never close to being realized here in the US. Engaging from the offbeat, staccato intro through to its fading bass note, the song is solidly built musically and confident lyrically, with its signature flip-flop: a pre-chorus that asserts, first, that “the public gets what the public wants” but, the second time, that “the public wants what the public gets.” That’s about as subtle and incisive an indictment of capitalism as you’re going to get in a pop song. Curiously, “Going Underground” was originally intended as the B-side to a song called “Dreams of Children,” but the single apparently got misprinted as a double A side. Radio programmers gravitated to the catchier and more forceful “Going Underground,” as did the UK public.

* No you’re not missing anything: “Heaven” by the Walkmen does not have the word “heaven” in the lyrics. And it’s even the title track to their 2012 album, which turned out to be the band’s last–so far. After a long hiatus the group has reunited for some live performances in New York City. Stay tuned.

* Ridiculous, from 1995, was once upon a time considered a late-career release for the intermittently brilliant British band Squeeze; whoever anticipated that they’d be releasing albums 20-plus years later? (They had three in the 2010s, most recently 2017’s The Knowledge; and in 2022 came an EP with one new song, two re-recorded older songs, and three live recordings.) While not as widely heard as their late-’70s/early-’80s LPs, Ridiculous was a strong effort, with a handful of memorable songs, including this quirky bit of relationship observation. Don’t miss the signature Tilbrook/Difford octave harmonies in the chorus. And while few here in the US, these days, are likely to have any idea who Nana Mouskouri is, the Greek singer (and, at one point, politician) had a hugely successful international career for decades. And for a long stretch there, even people who probably never heard her sing knew her name and her enduring look: the severe, middle-parted dark hair and those large, dark-framed, rectangular eyeglasses. You basically never saw popular singers with glasses back in the day, and mostly still don’t. Leave it to Glenn and Chris to work her so vividly into a song lyric.

* The Glories remain a soul group from the ’60s with an uncommonly small internet footprint. It doesn’t help that their name is rather too generic for search engines; you’re as likely to come up with references to the movie The Glorias and/or a batch of religious literature as anything about this elusive but terrific trio. They can be found neither on Wikipedia nor, for all intents and purposes, on Allmusic. But the compilation Soul Legend that someone or another released in 2011, apparently only digitally, is the place to go to hear pretty much everything the group recorded during their short, commercially negligible, but aesthetically powerful run.

* Dave Gahan gets all sorts of well-deserved credit for the deep distinctive voice with which he has fronted Depeche Mode for decades on end. But bandmate and principal songwriter Martin Gore brings some decent pipes to the table as well when he occasionally steps up to lead vocals for the band. He has released a handful of solo recordings over the years, opting either for covering other people’s songs or penning atmospheric electronic music without vocals. Here he finds the spacious dark ballad hiding within Tuxedomoon’s prickly composition from earlier that decade. Fifteen years later, Nouvelle Vague gave it a bittersweet bossa nova twist and that’s the one that really hit (60 million Spotify streams and counting).

* 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.

* Fanny was the first all-female band to release a major-label album, and while they experienced a certain amount of commercial and critical success in the early to middle ’70s, they somehow never really stuck in terms of widespread legacy or long-term industry recognition. I say “somehow”; I mean flagrant sexism. They were serious and talented musicians, and yet of course had to keep resisting record-company executives who wanted them to play up their sex appeal. They worked with producers Richard Perry and Todd Rundgren; they toured around the world, opening for big-name bands like Jethro Tull and Humble Pie. Even as they faded quickly from our mainstream cultural memory, they did inspire later generations of female rock’n’rollers, including the Runaways, the Go-Go’s, and the Bangles. The band has received a new round of overdue attention here in the 21st century. A long-awaited reunion is in the works, which will include at least one live performance and a new major-label album.

* The song “Captain” by the LA-based band Shapes of Race Cars was one of Fingertips’ early precious finds, a song that convinced me there were unrecognized treasures floating out there on the internet if only one had the patience and wherewithal to track them down. The song, a first-rate power pop gem, appeared originally on their debut EP in 2004, and re-appeared in a revamped and shortened version on their first full-length release, 2006’s Power. The band released one more album in 2010 and seemed to fade away–until resurfacing during the pandemic with their 2020 single “Say Yeah.” Oh and perhaps there are one or two longstanding Fingertips visitors among you who remember that “Captain” was one of 13 songs featured on the one and only CD project produced here, the elusive Fingertips: Unwebbed disc, released late in 2006. I may still have a few copies if anyone is curious these many years later!

* While Midge-Ure-era Ultravox and John-Foxx-era Ultravox both have their charms, I think that Systems of Romance functions as a really satisfying transitional work. (Note that both Systems, from 1978, Foxx’s last with the band, and the first Ure-fronted album, 1980’s Vienna, were produced by Conny Plank, most well-known for his work with Kraftwerk.) In Systems you can pretty much hear where things are heading, even as the band was as yet trafficking in spiky electronics more than achy, synth-driven melodrama. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In any case, check out “I Can’t Stay Long,” which is the exact kind of lost classic these playlists exist to uncover and highlight.