Category: playlist

Okay so I really don’t think the jaw-dropping Paul Simon song “Adios Hermanos” is made for playlists, as it operates doubly out of context in this setting—it comes from an album in which he sang a selection of songs he wrote for his ill-fated Broadway show, The Capeman; in this song he sings, first-person, in the voice of the lead character, a Puerto Rican gang member in NYC, convicted of murder. Not made for playlists and yet here it is, because wow it’s just too stunning to leave it there on a semi-forgotten album from a troubled show. The presentation slays me, having a lot to do with the radical way he turns doo-wop music into something theatrical and timeless, with an air of unimpeachable solemnity and sorrow. And that part where the song shifts and heads into its extended coda at 3:23 (beginning with “I don’t lie when I speak”)? Gives me goose bumps every time. Simon got rather beat up for The Capeman, but if it only existed to bring this song to light I am thankful for it. You can tell me if I succeeded in shoehorning it into a playlist that, I understand, ends up going in a variety of odd directions. (Oh and note the language in the Simon song is NSFW; don’t be fooled by the old-fashioned musical setting.)

The obscurity of the month is surely “Too Soon You’re Old” (ain’t that the truth), from the Milwaukee-based singer Penny Goodwin, who recorded one album in 1974 and was not apparently heard from again. Years later, the album gained a second life as a sought-after rarity for vinyl collectors, with original copies going for upwards of $150. But it was reissued in 2010, so is now available for the rest of us. I heard this first through the upstanding British blog Crying All the Way to the Chip Shop just a couple of weeks ago.

I am happy as well to present two relatively brand-new songs in this month’s mix: Jessie Baylin’s gratifying, earwormy “Black Blood,” which manages to be upbeat and brooding at the same time; and Laura Marling’s “I Feel Your Love,” which all but leaped out of the speakers when I was recently listening to her latest album, Short Movie. I have featured both of these artists previously on Fingertips. Baylin I believe to be seriously under-appreciated as both singer and songwriter, and I am delighted with her new album, Dark Place. Marling, on the other hand, has received gushing press since her 2008 debut, Alas, I Cannot Swim. I have been keeping her at arm’s length, convinced of her talent but not, necessarily, of her capacity to reach me personally. This album may change that. I am definitely going to keep listening.

Just two returnees this month from the 2014 volume of the Eclectic Playlist Series, and they are two of my all-time favorite artists, by a wide margin: The Kinks, with one of the greatest overlooked songs of the classic rock era, and the previously discussed Mr. Simon. Enjoy the mix, via the Mixcloud widget, and tell your friends, because there’s no point in keeping all this to ourselves.

“Lined Up” – Shriekback (Care, 1983)
“Come On Let’s Go” – Broadcast (The Noises Made By People, 2000)
“No More Looking Back”- The Kinks (Schoolboys in Disgrace, 1975)
“Pullin’ Back the Reins” – k.d. lang (Absolute Torch and Twang, 1989)
“My Place” – The Adverts (Cast of Thousands, 1980)
“Black Blood” – Jessie Baylin (Dark Place, 2015)
“The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” – The Walker Brothers (The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, 1966)
“Some Days Are Better Than Others” – U2 (Zooropa, 1993)
“Thursday” – Asobi Seksu (Citrus, 2006)
“Too Soon You’re Old” – Penny Goodwin (Portrait of a Gemini, 1974)
“Adios Hermanos” – Paul Simon (Songs From The Capeman, 1997)
“Sore” – Annuals (Wet Zoo, 2008)
“Changes” – Yes (90125, 1983)
“I Feel Your Love” – Laura Marling (Short Movie, 2015)
“Bohemia” – Mae Moore (Bohemia, 1992)
“12:51” – The Strokes (Room on Fire, 2003)
“Don’t Give Up” – Petula Clark (Petula, 1968)
“Out of My Hand” – Michael Penn (Resigned, 1996)
“Good Girls” – Merry Clayton (Gimme Shelter, 1971)
“Leave Your Body Behind You” – Richard Hawley (Standing at the Sky’s Edge, 2012)

How terrific is the song “She’s So Tough,” by the late, great Willy DeVille, who initially did musical business as Mink DeVille? He never really fit in anywhere, Willy DeVille, coming on the scene in the middle of punk’s transition to new wave while being neither punk nor new waver himself. Air-tight and hook-laced, “She’s So Tough” is an uncontaminated bullet of tender toughness, a Van-meets-Velvets amalgam topped by one of the three or four greatest guitar riffs of all time. I do not joke.

The Eclectic Playlist Series exists to bring a song like “She’s So Tough” back to the world, and place it in idiosyncratic context with artists known and less-known, from nearby years and from decades gone by. An underrated Tom Petty nugget (I like to think he’s pulling a Randy Newman on us here, narrator-wise) segues smartly into an outtake from Liz Phair that woulda coulda shoulda shut down the haters in 2003. The hard-to-find (i.e., not digitally distributed) title track from Heroes Are Hard to Find turns up just like that. An unexpected burst of spiritual wisdom from Syd Straw may just blow your mind and melt your heart if you listen carefully enough. And can Grant Lee Phillips write a melody or what?

Above and beyond all this, I have a couple of specific webpeople to tip my hat to for two of this mix’s more obscure songs. First shout-out goes to Sheila B, from the irresistible Cha Cha Charming web site, who (unbeknownst to her) introduced me to the glory of The Glories, via her Northern Soul-filled “She Sold Me Magic” mix from last February, which I only recently stumbled upon. Big thanks too to George from Between Two Islands, who more directly dug a song out of the dark caverns of my memory in the form of “Will You Stay Tonight?” from the impressive but lost British band Comsat Angels.

Oh, and the returnees to the 2015 Eclectic Playlist Series from the 2014 Series this month are three solid favorites: the aforementioned Ms. Phair, Stevie Wonder, and Talking Heads. Everyone else here is mixed in for the first time. Happy listening, via the Mixcloud widget (note entire playlist directly below), and we’ll do this all over next month.

“Spinster’s Waltz” – Evan Lurie (Selling Water by the Side of the River, 1990)
“California” – Low (The Great Destroyer, 2005)
“She’s So Tough” – Mink DeVille (Cabretta, 1977)
“No News” – The Glories (single, 1968)
“You Got Lucky” – Tom Petty & the Hearbreakers (Long After Dark, 1982)
“Don’t Apologize” – Liz Phair (outtake from Liz Phair, 2003)
“Heroes Are Hard to Find” – Fleetwood Mac (Heroes Are Hard to Find, 1974)
“Little Broken Hearts” – Norah Jones (Little Broken Hearts, 2012)
“Rocket Love” – Stevie Wonder (Hotter Than July, 1980)
“Temptation Eyes” – Blake Babies (Rosy Jack World, 1991)
“Will You Stay Tonight?” – Comsat Angels (Land, 1983)
“Hard Times” – John Legend & The Roots (Wake Up!, 2010)
“All Things Change” – Syd Straw (War and Peace, 1996)
“Presence of the Lord” – Blind Faith (Blind Faith, 1969)
“Far End of the Night” – Grant Lee Phillips (Virginia Creeper, 2004)
“Our Hearts Are Wrong” – Jessica Lea Mayfield (Tell Me, 2011)
“Cannonball” – The Breeders (Last Splash, 1993)
“Mind” – Talking Heads (Fear of Music, 1979)
“To Love Somebody” – Nina Simone (To Love Somebody, 1969)
“Nobody Dies” – Daisy Victoria (Nobody Dies EP, 2014)

For a band or an artist to re-record in its entirety another band or artist’s album is a relatively unusual occurrence, and for the re-recording to emerge as its own work of art is even rarer. One of the best I’ve heard to date is the edgy, guitar-centric reinterpretation of the Steely Dan classic Aja done by the Canadian band The Darcys back in 2012. At the time, I featured the song “Josie” here on Fingertips, as it was the free and legal MP3. But “Home at Last” was always my favorite song on the album and the 21st-century redo is pretty brilliant. It’s actually one of three covers on this month’s playlist, the other two being Diana Krall’s simmering take on the Tom Waits song “Temptation,” and then (kind of a trick answer) Al Wilson’s “Show and Tell,” which itself was a huge hit at the time, far overshadowing the original recording, done only the previous year by Johnny Mathis, of all people. Favorite segue this time around pretty much has to be Alina Simone’s “Beautiful Machine” into that awesome Matthew Sweet song. Two songs in the same key can make for segue heaven under the right circumstances. Oh and I would be remiss this time if I didn’t give a hat tip to the retro awesomeness of the dustystevens music blog, which recently re-fired some dormant brain cells by re-introducing me to “The Sun Doesn’t Shine.” I love when that happens.

“Beyond Belief” – Elvis Costello & the Attractions (Imperial Bedroom, 1982)
“Words That I Employ” – Coach Said Not To (Coach Said Not To EP, 2005)
“Love In Action” – Utopia (Oops! Wrong Planet, 1977)
“The Sun Doesn’t Shine” – Beats International (Excursion on the Version, 1991)
“Holy City” – Joan As Police Woman (The Classic, 2014)
“Man Overboard” – Blondie (Blondie, 1976)
“Home At Last” – The Darcys (Aja, 2012)
“I’m Alright Now” – Soul X 2 (single, 1968)
“Man From China” – Vivabeat (single, 1979)
“Closer to Fine” – Indigo Girls (Indigo Girls, 1989)
“Beautiful Machine” – Alina Simone (Make Your Own Danger, 2011)
“Devil With the Green Eyes” – Matthew Sweet (Altered Beast, 1993)
“Temptation” – Diana Krall (The Girl in the Other Room, 2007)
“Somewhere They Can’t Find Me” – Simon & Garfunkel (Sounds of Silence, 1966)
“Read About It” – Midnight Oil (10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, 1982)
“Lionsong” – Björk (Vulnicura, 2015)
“Juanita” – Rachel Smith (The Clearing, 2001)
“Wonderland” – Nils Lofgren (Wonderland, 1983)
“Show and Tell” – Al Wilson (single, 1973)
“Why” – Annie Lennox (Diva, 1992)

Speaking of quality, welcome to another edition of the Eclectic Playlist Series, which aims entirely at a quality listening experience, regardless of either how many decades or how many sub-genres of music we have to explore to get there. I mean, seriously: do you really only like one kind of music?

Note that there have been 11 playlists in the Eclectic Playlist Series to date before this new one, running from December 2013 to December 2014, and up to this point, no artist has appeared twice. With the new year, the EPS officially resets: we are in series 2, and you will now begin to see (i.e., hear) some of the folks who have already made appearances. Specifically, here on EPS 2.01, we say hello again to one of my long-time and all-time favorites, Sam Phillips, who previously landed a song on playlist 1.07 (“This Is Not What I Thought”).

Note too that this may be the least “classic-rock-y” playlist in the history of the internet that still manages to feature Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, and the Moody Blues. The presence of Allen Tousaint, the Nerves, and Jessy Bell Smith, among others, helps. Plus Mick Jagger’s falsetto (and fine Arab charger). Did I help him carry his cross through town? Did I keep my ammunition under cover? Even so, they left me at the station, and down down down I went. But in the end, pressure makes diamonds, quality trumps quantity, and there is always more music to accompany us on this journey. See you next month.

“I Was in the House When the House Burned Down” – Warren Zevon (Life’ll Kill Ya, 2000)
“I’m Gonna Destroy That Boy” – The What Four (single, 1966)
“Escalator of Life” – Robert Hazard (Robert Hazard EP, 1982)
“Cruel Inventions” – Sam Phillips (Cruel Inventions, 1991)
“Cherry Tulips” – Headlights (Some Racing, Some Stopping, 2008)
“You and Me” – The Moody Blues (Seventh Sojourn, 1972)
“Tractor Rape Chain” – Guided By Voices (Bee Thousand, 1994)
“Go Back Home” – Allen Toussaint (single, 1965)
“Ways of Looking” – The Mynabirds (What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood, 2010)
“Open Your Heart” – The Human League (Dare, 1981)
“Delia” – Bob Dylan (World Gone Wrong, 1993)
“John Mouse” – Jesse Bell Smith (The Town, 2014)
“When You Find Out” – The Nerves (The Nerves EP, 1976)
“Off and Running” – Lesley Gore (My Town, My Guy & Me, 1966)
“Shiver” – Coldplay (Parachutes, 2000)
“Icarus” – White Hinterland (Kairos, 2010)
“Nothing But a Heartache” – The Flirtations (single, 1968)
“Nearly Lost You” – Screaming Trees (Sweet Oblivion, 1992)
“Emotional Rescue” – The Rolling Stones (Emotional Rescue, 1980)
“Pressure” – My Brightest Diamond (This Is My Hand, 2014)

While taking its usual romp through the decades, this latest iteration of the Eclectic Playlist Series focuses its 2010s attention largely on the current year, as a way of highlighting songs from three of my favorite albums of 2014. Other than that, we get the usual strange brew of things that somehow go together for largely unknowable reasons. Along the way we find a Radiohead B-side far stronger than most bands’ A-sides, a lost new wave ballad from the downtown NYC scene (from an album, The Shirts’ debut, never put on CD as far as I can see), and a song that, internet at my disposal or not, I could discover no confirmation of year of release—this the completely obscure but oddly satisfying “So Long Sam,” from Barbara Ruskin, a British singer/songwriter of the “swinging London” era. Because she is still alive and potentially reachable online, once I have this playlist posted, I’ll see if I can ask her directly about this song, and maybe I can nail down the year that way. Which would actually be kind of fun. But, thanks to good old-fashioned email, I was able to get the information directly from Ruskin herself, who informs us that “So Long Sam” was written and recorded as a demo in 1967. It never ended up being released until President Records put out a Barbara Ruskin retrospective album in 2004 entitled A Little of This, which is quite a bit of fun.

As for why 1997 alone represents the 1990s this time, I have no explanation. Oh, and the Robert Plant song? Unexpectedly awesome.

“Surrender” – J. Geils Band (Monkey Island, 1977)
“Pearly” – Radiohead (Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP 1997)
“Kristine” – Sky Ferreira (Night Time, My Time, 2013)
“Heart of Stone” – SVT (No Regrets, 1981)
“Sonic Parts” – Khoiba (Nice Traps, 2005)
“Running Through the Night” – The Shirts (The Shirts, 1978)
“No One’s Gonna Love You” – Cee-Lo Green (The Lady Killer, 2010)
“So Long Sam” – Barbara Ruskin (demo, 1967; A Little of This, 2004)
“Long Gone (Buddy)” – ‘Til Tuesday (Everything’s Different Now, 1988)
“Loop De Li” – Brian Ferry (Avonmore, 2014)
“Les Petits Ballons” – France Gall (single, 1972)
“Why Can’t You Fix My Car” – Leo Kottke (My Father’s Face, 1988)
“The Agency Group” – Alvvays (Alvvays, 2014)
“Hide in Your Shell” – Supertramp (Crime of the Century, 1974)
“Everybody Knows (except you)” – The Divine Comedy (A Short Album About Love, 1997)
“House of Love” – Robert Plant (lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar, 2014)
“Louis Quatorze” – Bow Wow Wow (single, 1982)
“Just One Last Look” – The Temptations (With a Lot O’ Soul, 1967)
“Annan Waters” – Kate Rusby (Hourglass, 1997)
“Parables” – Rebekah Higgs (Rebekah Higgs, 2006)

As regular visitors realize by now, the Eclectic Playlist Series exists to counter the internet’s discouraging tendency to group music strictly together by genre and/or decade. I’ve been hoping that there are at least a handful of recalcitrant 21st-century listeners who might find some delight in this kind of eclecticism.

Recently what has been further occurring to me is the cultural price we pay for the internet’s reductive organizational habits. Not only are we as listeners short-changed by being denied a larger context for our listening, but the musicians are as well, which may in turn have a subtly adverse effect on the music they will go on to create. Think of all the artists who have come of age here in the 21st century who never find their music presented in any kind of broader historical context. The whole system is becoming a kind of closed feedback loop, to the detriment of musicians and listeners alike.

But: here I am again, with 20 songs, representing six decades and a variety of rock’n’roll-related genres, melded into one 80-minute-or-so listening experience. Radioing heaven, getting mixed signals, ending up in some kind of weird but inspirational church, with idiosyncratic stops along the way to ponder the state of human relationships. It’s all right to feel a little fear, to be sexy with a belly like Jack Nicholson, running around in circles all day long. With a hell of a guitar solo. Many problems are solved by a hell of a guitar solo, or maybe just a tube of cherry chapstick.

Oh, and this: as the first year of the Eclectic Playlist Series draws nearer to a close, I figured it was time to alert you guys to a larger-scale intention of this wide-ranging enterprise. As a way of enforcing variety and surprise, I decided from the start (but forgot to tell you; oops) that no one artist would be featured here more than once in a calendar year. So far so good (although I did feature Rilo Kiley in one playlist and Jenny Lewis in another), and I will happily finish the playlist year next month with that intention intact. But with this overall structure in mind, I realized kind of after the fact that rather than simply identifying each month’s list as “Volume 1,” “Volume 2,” and so forth, it might be better to label them in such a way as to make entire years more readily identifiable. And so with this month’s playlist, I’m introducing a slightly new ID system: rather than calling this one “Volume 10,” I am labeling it “1.10.” When the new year of playlists starts in January, it will be “2.01.” Etc. Once we get to the playlists beginning with “2,” you may begin to see certain artists from the first year’s playlists slide back in, even as new artists continue to arrive.

“Remember” – Greg Kihn Band (Next of Kihn, 1978)
“Everything Passed Me By” – James Irwin (single, 2014)
“I Radio Heaven” – Over the Rhine (Films for Radio, 2001)
“Can’t Be Sure” – The Sundays (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, 1990)
“Too Late to Turn Back Now” – Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose (single, 1972)
“Damn, Wish I Was a Man” – Cindy Lee Berryhill (Who’s Gonna Save The World?, 1987)
“Raphaël” – Carla Bruni (Quelqu’un m’a dit, 2003)
“Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” – Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel (The Best Years of Our Lives, 1975)
“Cherry Chapstick” – Yo La Tengo (And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, 2000)
“The Touch of Venus” – Sandy Wynns (single, 1965)
“White Mice” – The Mo-Dettes (single, 1979)
“Sleepless” – King Crimson (Three of a Perfect Pair, 1984)
“Axes” – Low Frequency in Stereo (The Last Temptation Of…, 2006)
“Bitter” – Jill Sobule (Happy Town, 1997)
“These Eyes” – The Guess Who (Wheatfield Soul, 1969)
“{Explain}” – Sarah Blasko (What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have, 2006)
“Charm” – The Wild Colonials (This Can’t Be Life, 1996)
“Maid in Heaven” – Be Bop Deluxe (Futurama, 1975)
“Take Me to Church” – Sinéad O’Connor (I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, 2014)
“Mercy Street” – Peter Gabiel (So, 1986)

We begin with an idiosyncratic ode to meditation from the outset of the so-called “Me Decade” and we finish with a beautifully bombastic, regret-saturated song that inadvertently celebrates the over-the-top violence that laces 21st-century entertainment without much second thought. Are we civilized or are we falling down or are we just plain crazy? And why does love got to be so sad? Full of hope and wretchedness we are, we humans, with our electric friends and persistent enemies, with pistols in our suitcases and our eyes forever on the TV. And yet as long as some of us can write these achingly gorgeous melodies—Jenny Lewis can sing “Late Bloomer” to me all day long and I will just about burst with pleasure—we are somehow okay. We sit. The sky falls. Life goes on.

“Sitting” – Cat Stevens (Catch Bull at Four, 1972)
“Come Monday Night” – God Help the Girl (God Help the Girl, 2009)
“Thieves in the Temple” – Prince (Graffiti Bridge, 1990)
“Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad?” – Derek and the Dominos (Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, 1970)
“Late Bloomer” – Jenny Lewis (The Voyager, 2014)
“Times Square” – Marianne Faithfull (A Child’s Adventure, 1983)
“Elouise” – Maps (We Can Create, 2007)
“You Showed Me” – The Turtles (The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, 1968)
“Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” – Gary Numan and Tubeway Army (Replicas, 1979)
“Enemy” – Kacey Johnansing (Grand Ghosts, 2013)
“Falling Down” – Tears for Fears (Raoul and the Kings of Spain, 1995)
“You Didn’t Say a Word” – Yvonne Baker (single, 1966)
“Crazy” – Pylon (single, 1981; Chomp, 1983)
“Spin-O-Rama” – The Primitives (Spin-O-Rama, 2014)
“Cold Cold Ground” – Tom Waits (Frank’s Wild Years, 1987)
“By Your Side” – Sade (Lovers Rock, 2000)
“Living in the Past” – Jethro Tull (single, 1969; Living in the Past, 1972)
“Get Civilised” – Fingerprintz (Beat Noir, 1981)
“Freereggaehibop” – James Carter (Conversin’ With the Elders, 1996)
“Skyfall” – Adele (single, 2012)

So I have managed to visit all seven decades this time, if the sketchy information available about the LaVern Baker track is to be believed. From what I was able to discern, the song was likely recorded in 1958, although may not have been released until 1960 or 1961. Honestly, when digging down deep for something obscure, sometimes it’s like the internet doesn’t even exist.

Candidate for the Jarring Segue Award this time around is probably Style Council into the Beatles but only because the Style Council song is directly connected to the song that follows it on the original record, burdening the MP3 with a truncated-sounding finish. As for the better end of that spectrum, I especially like the segue between the great, neglected In Tua Nua track “All I Wanted,” dating back to 1988, and the title track from the relatively new Wye Oak album. And how’s “Sylvia Said” for another great lost song? This one was quite lost indeed for a while, an outtake from the sessions that produced Cale’s Fear album in 1974. It surfaced officially in 1996 on a compilation album called The Island Years, featuring the three records he recorded for Island Records in the mid-’70s. It always amazes and delights to find a cast-off song that ends up worthy of classic status.

“Voodoo Voodoo” – LaVern Baker (single, 1958)
“Give Me Back My Man” – The B-52s (Wild Planet, 1980)
“Imitosis” – Andrew Bird (Armchair Apocrypha, 2006)
“Peace Like a River” – Paul Simon (Paul Simon, 1972)
“All I Wanted” – In Tua Nua (The Long Acre, 1988)
“Shriek” – Wye Oak (Shriek, 2014)
“Fat Man and Dancing Girl” – Suzanne Vega (99.9F°, 1992)
“Taking Some Time On” – Barclay James Harvest (Barclay James Harvest, 1970)
“Ageless Beauty” – Stars (Set Yourself On Fire, 2005)
“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” – Neutral Milk Hotel (In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, 1998)
“Don’t Leave Me Starvin’ For Your Love” – Holland-Dozier (single, 1972)
“How She Threw It All Away” – The Style Council (Confessions of a Pop Group, 1988)
“It’s All Too Much” – The Beatles (Yellow Submarine, 1969)
“Plath Heart” – The Braids (Native Speaker, 2011)
“T-Birds” – Blondie (Autoamerican, 1980)
“Sylia Said” – John Cale (outtake, 1974)
“The Adjustor” – Octopus Project (One Ten Hundred Thousand Million, 2004)
“Car Song” – Elastica (Elastica, 1995)
“You Told Me” – The Monkees (Headquarters, 1967)
“Youth” – The Lawlands (single, 2013)

Ready or not here comes another hop, skip, and jump through six decades of something resembling rock’n’roll music: the Fingertips Eclectic Playlist Series, Vol. 7. Mixcloud followers may see that I went back and named each playlist in the series after Volume 1, because I have been feeling that titles would be a nice handhold into the music. But everything is operating on intuition here, so those in need of concrete messages or Beats-music-like “I need a playlist for this precise activity at this specific moment in my day” may simply be confused. So it goes.

I would rank “MacDougal Blues” and “Mama Used to Say” among the more highly-regarded “lost gems” in my digital music library, and I kind of like how completely different they are and that both ended up here. Note that the British R&B singer Junior went on to re-record the song much more recently, but accept no substitutes: the original 1982 version is definitive. And talk about lost, whatever on earth became of Sinéad Lohan? What a fine late ’90s effort No Mermaid was, and it was even all over the radio back before an autocratic pop sheen was required for airplay. After just the one album, Lohan withdrew from the music scene without a peep, and while I completely respect the idea that someone would in fact want to withdraw from the music scene without a peep, she seemed a great talent, and I am sorry for the loss of whatever music she might have gone on to make. And yes, “I Do the Rock” walks a fine fine line between novelty song and legitimate musical contribution, but it put a smile on my face back in the day and is kind of fun to hear again in a day and age that can use some extra smiles.

Note that Mixcloud has now eliminated the capacity to see a song list on its site, no doubt due to licensing complications. In the notes over there I have linked back to this blog post, so that the song list (see below) is relatively handy for those who would like it.

“Fantastic Voyage” – David Bowie (Lodger, 1979)
“The Wind Blew All Around Me” – Mary Lou Lord (Baby Blue, 2004)
“One Chain Don’t Make No Prison” – The Four Tops (Meeting of the Minds, 1974)
“Solid Love” – Joni Mitchell (Wild Things Run Fast, 1982)
“MacDougal Blues” – Kevn Kinney (MacDougal Blues, 1990)
“Mindless Child of Motherhood” – The Kinks (Arthur, 1969)
“Hardships (Gospel Version)” – Jenny Wilson (b-side, 2010)
“Mama Used to Say” – Junior (Ji, 1982)
“Whatever It Takes” – Sinéad Lohan (No Mermaid, 1998)
“I Always Knew” – The Vaccines (Come of Age, 2012)
“Shake the Disease” – Depeche Mode (single, 1985)
“Full Speed” – Claude Bolling (Qui?, 1969)
“This Is Love” – PJ Harvey (Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, 2000)
“I Do the Rock” – Tim Curry (Fearless, 1979)
“Baby It’s You” – Smith (A Group Called Smith, 1969)
“Pretty Deep” – Tanya Donelly (Lovesongs for Underdogs, 1997)
“100 Yard Dash” – Raphael Saadiq (The Way I See It, 2008)
“So Long” – Fischer-Z (Going Deaf for a Living, 1980)
“Heart is Strange” – School of Seven Bells (Disconnect from Desire, 2010)
“Slapstick Heart” – Sam Phillips (Omnipop, 1996)

As for Spotify, we get a poor version of the playlist there this time around, as the widely-used streaming service is missing four of the songs I have included on this list—five, really, since the only version they have of “Mama Used to Say” is the inferior newer version. I didn’t expect the obscure Claude Bolling instrumental to be available, and am not surprised “I Do the Rock” is missing also. But Sinéad Lohan? Sam Phillips? Both released on major labels?

But, for those who find Spotify more convenient, here is the link, which yields the 16-song version, with all sorts of spoiled segues:

Welcome back to the Fingertips Eclectic Playlist Series, my ongoing attempt to make sense of 50-plus years of rock’n’roll music. It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it. Or not, perhaps—look, after all, at the strictly segregated way music tends to be presented online, broken almost always into playlists devoted to specific genres and/or specific decades. Isn’t it just a tiny bit more interesting, not to mention aurally enlightening, to hear late-’80s Paul Kelly segueing into current Arctic Monkeys banging loudly into a fierce piece of early ’90s singer/songwriter goodness from Brenda Kahn? Isn’t it more interesting to hear a track you might have forgotten (“Jeannette”) from a band you might not have forgotten? Not to mention a cool-sounding song you might never have heard in the first place? (I’m thinking “Iron for the Iron” is this time the most obscure number, especially as it remains unavailable on Spotify; see further discussion below.) I know such eclecticism is not for everyone but I also know that “the public wants what the public gets,” so some of this is just a matter of going against the grain and figuring that increasing numbers of people will catch on over time. Or not, and I’ll still have fun.

Note that as of this month, I will be anchoring the playlists on Mixcloud rather than Spotify. Spotify users will still find the lists available there, but, to be blunt, the Spotify lists are just not as good as the Mixcloud ones, and haven’t been from the start. The main reason Mixcloud is better is that each time I make one of these lists, I end up selecting one or two songs that are not available on Spotify. I try to make substitutions in these cases, but I’m not happy about it. On Mixcloud, I am physically uploading the playlist so all songs remain the same.

As a bonus, the playlists on Mixcloud have genuine, radio-like segues rather than randomly different amounts of dead air.

I encourage you to listen via Mixcloud, which is as easy to do as clicking the button below. You don’t have to visit the site, you don’t have to sign up for anything, and proper licensing fees are being paid. The track listing is available simply by scrolling within the Mixcloud widget, here:

This playlist also exists on Spotify, but in a bastardized version. Two songs come up missing on Spotify: the awesome cover of “You Can Call Me Al” by the band Chamberlin, from 2012, and the largely forgotten new-wave-era single “Iron for the Iron,” from the British band the Planets, which was released in 1980. I replaced the Chamberlin track with a song from the band Zeus but the Planets song I just left out. The Spotify playlist has 19 songs instead of the usual 20.

But if Spotify is your thing, here you are: