Category: Uncategorized

We said goodbye to the mighty Marianne Faithfull last month, as well as to the quiet genius Garth Hudson, wizard organist of The Band, who skillfully handled any number of other instruments as well. I need to remain mindful about working musical elders into these mixes while they’re still alive, as I am not trying to get all “In Memoriam” here. But these two deserve an appreciative word, a respectful moment of silence if you’re so inclined, and a place in the playlist, so you’ll find them here in 12.02.

Beyond that, so many things to tear one’s hair out about. Still hard to believe that we have turned the reins over to a convicted criminal, whose track record as a human being falls so short of humane all the possible ways. With this track record you wouldn’t hire him to babysit your child and yet here we are. The situation has inadvertently uncovered democracy’s foundational fatal flaw: in designing positions of power that people can attain via, essentially, a popularity contest, in the long run the evil people are going to win, for the simple reason that they are always going to want it more. And, because evil is as evil does, they will be willing to do what it takes, which will always eventually include subverting the very institutions and systems through which they attained the power. Me, I retreat into music, finding solace there, and community. I offer a heartfelt thank you to those of you who have written in with encouraging words. As I have said in the past, knowing that I’m making a genuine connection with a small number of people feels, these days, much more rewarding than seeing soulless statistics about clicks and visits. Ideally this might also reflect back onto you, knowing that you aren’t just a faceless one among millions. You matter here, as an actual person.

And with that, the songs:

1. “Até Ao Verão” – Ana Moura (Desfado, 2012)
2. “Ticket to Ride” – The Beatles Help!, 1965)
3. “Get It While You’re Young” – The Act (Too Late at 20, 1981)
4. “That’s What You Say (Every Time You’re Near Me)” – Gloria Scott (What Am I Gonna Do, 1974)
5. “Beaches” – Beabadoobee (This is How Tomorrow Moves, 2024)
6. “Army Of Me” – Björk (Post, 1995)
7. “Blue Skies” – Art Tatum (Art Tatum, 1950)
8. “Woman King” – Iron & Wine (Woman King EP, 2005)
9. “Nathan Jones” – The Supremes (Touch, 1971)
10. “Sunday Best” – Lauren Mayberry (Vicious Creature, 2024)
11. “You Keep On Lyin'” – The Hoods (Gangsters & Morticians, 1991)
12. “Look Out Cleveland” – The Band (The Band, 1969)
13. “Vendala Vida” – Dinosaur Feathers (Fantasy Memorial, 2010)
14. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” – Marianne Faithfull (Strange Weather, 1987)
15. “The Narcissist” – Blur (The Ballad of Darren, 2023)
16. “He Can Only Hold Her” – Amy Winehouse (Back to Black, 2007)
17. “Better Must Come” – Delroy Wilson (Better Must Come, 1971)
18. “Change” – Tears For Fears (The Hurting, 1983)
19. “Walking Aimlessly” – Anna Ternheim (The Night Visitor, 2011)
20. “Life Is” – Jessica Pratt (Here in the Pitch, 2024)

Random notes:

* We’ll start with something a bit off the beaten path: Ana Moura’s splendid “Até Ao Verão.” Delicious, melodramatic chords anchor the heart of this deceptively brisk composition while lovely, front-of-mix guitar work dominates the accompaniment. Ana Moura is a Portuguese fado singer, but her 2012 album Desfado was somewhat controversial among sticklers, not being a pure fado LP. She actually recorded the album in the United States, employing the American producer Larry Klein. Fado or no, the Portuguese public didn’t mind at all; it now stands as the country’s biggest-selling album of all time. For the first time, Moura sings in English on a few songs on this album. But you don’t have to understand the lyrics to be moved by “Até Ao Verão” (which translates to “Until Summer,” according to Mr. Google); the song is gorgeous, with all the melancholy ache of traditional fado but with a modern spark igniting the performance.

* Okay so “Ticket to Ride” may be so familiar that your ear doesn’t really pay attention to what it’s hearing. But to me, this has always been one of the more magical Lennon-McCartney numbers. To begin with, it comes from a marvelous pivot point in their output, possessing at once the simple-seeming charm of their early hits while also displaying a depth of craft that will start to characterize their music moving forward. Listen to how the recurring guitar pattern and the drumming together conspire to defeat a strict sense of time. Note too the simple yet beguiling chord changes that link the verse to the chorus, and the striking intervals in the vocal harmonies at that same point. Things of course would grow ever more complex as the Beatles soon begin to use the recording studio itself as a kind of instrument. As a side note, some three years into their recording careers (Help! was already their fifth album), this was the first Beatles song to clock in at over three minutes.

* The trio Dinosaur Feathers had a minor moment in the online sun back when the music blogosphere was a dynamic thing. But their internet trail is pretty thin at this point–no Wikipedia page, a handful of likes on a Facebook page last updated in 2015, a Bandcamp page you have to dig through to find their full discography. “Vendela Vida” dates back to the days of good promise, in 2010, from the band’s debut album Fantasy Memorial; it was featured here that same year. The song’s connection to the writer Vendela Vida was and is unclear. Maybe it was just a fun name to sing. In any case this is still a fun song to listen to.

* “Nathan Jones” was, in 1971, one of the last top-20 hits for the Supremes after the departure of Diana Ross, who left the group the previous year. The three remaining Supremes certainly stayed busy in the immediate aftermath: the album Touch, where you’ll find “Nathan Jones,” was already the Supremes’ fifth Ross-free release. While Jean Terrell had taken over lead vocals, for “Nathan Jones” all three women sang lead together, an unusual and rather fetching maneuver.

* The Act was a British band plying their trade at the height of new wave’s power pop takeover; their one album, Too Late At 20, came out on Hannibal Records in 1981. The Act’s only minor claim to fame is being the band that Nick Laird-Clowes was in before going on to front The Dream Academy (best known for “Life in a Northern Town,” which Laird-Clowes co-wrote). That said, “Get It While You’re Young” is a pretty solid piece of vintage early-’80s British rock, an era and sound for which I will always have a soft spot.

* Lauren Mayberry is the lead singer of the Scottish band Chvrches. Vicious Creature is her first solo album, but she has made it clear that the band, while currently on hiatus, will be back together in the future. And if all else fails down the road, maybe she can fall back on her undergraduate law degree and master’s degree in journalism. But I’d say she’s not nearly through as a singer and songwriter. Her bright, pop-leaning sound is tempered, to my ears, by deft melodic acumen as well as activist-informed lyrics that range well beyond the purview of the typical Spotify hit.

* The Jessica Pratt song “Life Is” was selected as the best song of 2024 by the venerable Said the Gramophone blog, maintained all these years by the novelist Sean Michaels. Michaels can write circles around pretty much anyone who tries to write about music. His wide-ranging taste is not always mine; he finds treasure in the extremities of both pop and lo-fi that eludes my ears. But this one stuck with me. I like its strong yet leisurely beat and its sneaky melodicism. That post-chorus shift at 1:19 is inspiring, and leads into a second verse with a different melody than the first. The song is a glowing mystery, and a nice place to land.

“Evening Dream” – Mo Kenney

Everything about “Evening Dream,” in all its toe-tapping melancholy, speaks to attentive craft and artful detail; this is one structurally sound, melodically incisive, smartly produced song. Look how easily the listener is swept in, first with the crisp acoustic strums and then a quickly introduced verse that barely allows the singer a breath, employing an unbroken stream of trochaic rhythm to accentuate a sense of movement. (A trochee is the opposite of an iamb: ONE-two, ONE-two versus one-TWO one-TWO.) Note if you will how the single place at which the opening verse allows for a breath follows the phrase “evening dreams”–and that this, in turn, is the only time the title presents itself in the song. Most pop songs, conversely, pretty much pound their titles into your head–or, in any case, utilize as a title the most often repeated phrase in the song. While doing it as Kenney does here may not guarantee the quality of a song, I’ll suggest that songwriters who know and care enough to use this device are a self-selected group of thoughtful artists, likely to be creating thoughtful, worthwhile art.

So the chorus doesn’t give birth to the title. What it does do, smartly, is offer up a metrical contrast to the verse: as opposed to the run-on vibe created by the relentless trochees, the chorus consists of two lines of clipped, two-syllable chunks (these appear to be called spondees, but I definitely had to look that up). The chorus ends with one more metrical shift as Kenney sings “I can take/I can take care of myself.” That this ultimately becomes the most repeated phrase in the song but is not the title suggests, however subtly, that the song’s narrator is actually not quite so sure about taking care of themself. Later, the second time through, the chorus leads us into some elegant bass lines and a wistful bridge–because of course this well-constructed song has a bridge. Don’t get me started on the vanishing art of the bridge.

Kenney is a singer/songwriter based in Nova Scotia. “Evening Dream” is the first track made available from their fifth album, From Nowhere, which is slated for a September release. You can check out the Kenney discography on Bandcamp.

photo credit: Matt Horseman

“Wishful Thinking” – Julia-Sophie

I’m fascinated by an offbeat bit of synthesized percussion that you can hear in “Wishful Thinking” if you stop to listen for it. The song itself starts with a smooth, propulsive beat, possessing the vibe of a calming burble. Then, at 0:31, a sound, somewhere (sort of) between a scratch and a cymbal choke, starts up and goes on to hit at a regular interval that does not–interestingly; weirdly–align with the song’s beat. (When I called it “offbeat” I meant that literally.) It’s a background sound, easy not to notice consciously. But its gentle if determined persistence to mark out an unrelated beat adds texture and mystery to a song that initially presents as a smooth ride. It also sets up later sections of the song when most of the instrumentation is stripped away; the first time we hear this, at 1:07, that offbeat percussion sound comes to the forefront, and here it subtly regularizes, somehow, momentarily, into the beat of the song. This is the kind of thing that I can end up delighted by. You?

Meanwhile, floating above everything is Julia-Sophie’s breath-filled voice, which entices not merely in its variegated lead role, which includes some spoken interludes, but in the differing ways she accompanies herself. I especially like how some of her vocals, both in lead and backing iterations, appear to meld into synthesizer washes, which happens throughout the song–yet another subtle touch that requires active listening to notice. But–this is an ongoing point I’ve been making here for 20-plus years–even if not registering consciously, subtle production and/or compositional features contribute to a song’s disposition and, ultimately, its allure (or lack thereof). When all is said and done, it’s what I’ve been here all these years trying to discern–not just to say “I like this” but “Let’s figure out why I like this.”

The half-British, half-French singer/songwriter Julia-Sophie Walker has a recording history dating back to the mid-2000s, when she fronted the Oxford, UK-based band Little Fish. She was known as Juju Heslop at the time. She eventually married bandmate Ben Walker, and they went on to form the electro-pop band Candy Says, at which point she was using the name Julia Walker. After 2019, Julia-Sophie adopted her full birth name as her stage name and began a solo career, with a more experimental brand of electronic pop. “Wishful Thinking” is a track from her latest release, the full-length album Forgive Too Slow, which comes out tomorrow. Check out all her solo work on Bandcamp.

“Collies” – Tennessee Kamanski

If Fingertips is in many ways an ongoing salute to quality over virality, and if I could be somehow more effective at informing the wide world of my mission, an artist like Tennessee Kamanski would be on my promotional poster. What carefully written and beautifully performed music she produces! Agile guitar work; an unconventional sense of melody and hook; sweet vocal presence: she’s got the goods. Me, I don’t care if someone has millions of YouTube streams; I don’t care about TikTok sensations. I care if someone writes terrific songs; I care if they perform with heart and soul. I’m on board with Tennessee Kamanski, who does both of these things.

Based in Southern California, Kamanski first came to my attention as part of the wonderful if short-lived duo Allen LeRoy Hug, whom I featured first in a review and next in a playlist, both times in 2021. With the duo disbanded, Kamanski has released two new songs since: last year’s lovely “Red Sun” and now the inscrutable and fetching “Collies.”

Launching off a graceful, cascading guitar lick, “Collies” also sports a firm backbeat, subtle melodic flair, no apparent chorus, and tantalizing lyrics that seem obviously to make sense to the songwriter while eluding explication from the casual listener’s point of view. I enjoy this type of specific-but-enigmatic lyric; it tells me I’m in good artistic hands, and encourages and rewards repeat listening. Yes there’s a passing reference in the lyrics to a border collie, but why is the song called “Collies”? What’s with the blood loss? The bag of apples? The nimble guitar lick–heard only three succinct times in the song–provides the ear with a sturdy if quirky hook, a musical anchor that gives the lyrics permission to mystify. And even as the acoustic guitar is front and center those three times, the song doesn’t present otherwise as acoustic, featuring that strong beat and a variety of instruments and production touches. I like the offhand electric guitar gurgle at 1:25, and the space-age synth flares at 1:03 and 2:07, to point to a few notable flourishes.

You can as always download “Collies” via the above link (thanks to the artist for that), but allow me to encourage you to visit Bandcamp and download the song there and support her directly; you can pay anything you’d like. While there you can also read and ponder the lyrics yourself and see what unfolds in the song for you as you follow along.

The two Grateful Dead-adjacent songs that have rather randomly wandered into this month’s mix happen, both, to be songs that are not available on Spotify. Let this serve as a gentle but important reminder of the value of owning your own music, the value of having songs and albums that are yours (even if “just” digitally). These, then, become songs that are yours regardless of how good a Wifi connection you have, yours regardless of the vagaries of licensing arrangements and other capitalism-generated obstructions that keep songs off of streaming services (any one of which may go out of business someday). I have a rather extensive digital music library and while it’s a (much) more unwieldy beast than my CD and LP collection were, and are, it’s still a roped-off, self-selected aggregation of music that is easily and directly accessible, without the pesky barriers of menus and suggestions that streaming services build, purposefully, into their interfaces. I can organize my library according to my own sense of order, and find things instantly. And, as a bonus, I’m not feeding the Big Tech data machine every time I click on something; within the bounds of my own library, I escape the implacable eyes of the algorithm, the relentless fog of the feed.

To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of abandoning Spotify or Apple Music. While I have (very) mixed feelings about the company, I still do lean on Spotify to check out music I’m curious about, either old or new. But then I buy the albums that move me. (I just this month picked up the Katie Von Schleicher album–see below–as an example.) And believe me, I know that one uninfluential person’s quirky behavior vis-à-vis the 21st-century music scene is not going to make a whit of difference to the way music is “consumed” (ugh, I hate that word) here in 2024. But so-called “influencing” in our world is a performative sham, a virtual maelstrom of thankless activity. I’ll settle for the idea that two or three of you out there are paying actual attention, and perhaps I’ve given one or two of you some food for thought, as opposed to facile images to “like” and immediately forget.

End of soapbox; meanwhile, the playlist!:

1. “For Emma” – Bon Iver (For Emma, Forever Ago, 2007)
2. “Overjoyed” – Katie Von Schleicher (A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night, 2023)
3. “Living on Borrowed Time” – Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (Express Yourself, 1970)
4. “Cemetery Gates” – The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead, 1986)
5. “Floating On A Moment” – Beth Gibbons (Lives Outgrown, 2024)
6. “Hold (Alternate Take)” – Nubya Garcia (Nubya’s 5ive, 2017)
7. “Martha My Dear” – The Beatles (The Beatles, 1968)
8. “Friend of the Devil” – Lyle Lovett (Deadicated, 1991)
9. “Undone” – Amy Cooper (Water/Fire, 2005)
10. “Since You’ve Been Gone” – Cherie and Marie Currie (Messin’ With the Boys, 1979)
11. “Barbara H.” – Fountains of Wayne (Fountains of Wayne, 1996)
12. “Balboa” – Eileen Allway (Love Water, 2024)
13. “Irrésistiblement” – Sylvie Vartan (La Maritza, 1968)
14. “Too Many Losers” – Bobby and the Midnites (Bobby and the Midnites, 1981)
15. “This Time” – Land of Talk (Life After Youth, 2017)
16. “Who Is It” – Björk (Medúlla, 2004)
17. “Something About You” – The Four Tops (Four Tops Second Album, 1965)
18. “4316” – Isobel Campbell (Bow To Love, 2024)
19. “Aimless Love” – John Prine (Aimless Love, 1984)
20. “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” – Warren Zevon (Warren Zevon, 1976)

Addenda:

* Pretty much everything Beth Gibbons sings sounds iconic. She just hasn’t been very widely heard in a long time: believe it or not it’s been 16 years since the last Portishead album, with the band performing only sporadically since then, and releasing only two stand-alone singles during that time. Although Gibbons did give us a non-Portishead album, in 2002, it was a collaboration with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, who performs as Rustin Man. And so the forthcoming album, Lives Outgrown, will be the 59-year-old Gibbons’ very first solo offering. The album’s 10 songs were recorded over the course of 10 years; it comes out May 17.

* Lyle Lovett’s plaintive take on the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” is impeccable, an all-time great cover. While there’s nothing wrong with the original, it sounds over-caffeinated and tossed-off by comparison. Lovett keeps the heartbeat moving but gives the song space to breathe; the spotless arrangement enhances the poignancy. This version can be found on the 1991 Grateful Dead tribute CD Deadicated, which was one of the earlier and more commercially successful tribute albums, of which since then there have been countless. And yet Deadicated is out of print and is not available on the standard streaming services, although of course is floating around on YouTube. The Los Lobos cover of “Bertha” is another highlight from that album.

* Amy Cooper was featured on Fingertips so far back in the day (circa 2005) that I can’t find the post: over the course of various site updates and platform changes, some items from the first few years here have vanished. No great loss, perhaps, but there are some excellent songs involved, including this, the lead track from Cooper’s debut album, 2005’s Water/Fire. Turns out Cooper is in general a bit hard to track down. She released the follow-up EP Mirrors in 2006 (or 2007, depending on your source), and that’s where the trail goes cold. (It doesn’t help that she shares a name with the internet-famous “Central Park Karen,” of bird-watching-related notoriety.) Some extra poking around led to the discovery that our musical Amy Cooper has more recently been part of a duo called Naked Hearts, a band that began in the early ’10s but with songs online as recently as 2020 (including the appealing “Only For You”; it’s nice to hear her again–check it out!). She should ideally link her disparate Bandcamp identities together, but I am in any case happy to see that she isn’t one of those talented singer/songwriters who simply faded without a trace.

* Sylvie Vartan is a veteran French superstar, associated most closely with the yé-yé movement of the 1960s. Born in Bulgaria, she’s had a long-lasting and wide-ranging career as both a singer and an actress. Her most recent album is 2021’s Merci pour le regard.

* Eileen Allway is an L.A.-based singer/songwriter that I featured here with an MP3/review this past November. While I have a long-standing policy of not featuring an artist more than once within a 12-month period when it comes to the review section, that doesn’t prevent me from following a review with a song on a playlist, especially when the artist in question has released an album as packed with excellent songs as is Allway’s 2024 album Love Water. “Balboa” calls to mind the incandescent Canadian singer/songwriter Jane Siberry, which is a high compliment in my book. I encourage you to check the whole album out on Bandcamp, and buy it too (it’s reasonable!).

* The other Grateful Dead-adjacent track in the mix this month is as noted another one that you won’t find on Spotify. This is the unusually riffy (for him) “Too Many Losers” from Bob Weir, fronting the ’80s band Bobby and the Midnites. They put out two albums, in 1981 and 1984, and went their separate ways. Interestingly, the band’s drummer was Billy Cobham, a renowned jazz/fusion musician who played with Miles Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and many other notables.

* Careful readers might remember a Katie Von Schleicher reference earlier this month (she produced the Max Blansjaar song featured in the last batch of downloads). I mentioned at the time that I had featured Katie as a singer/songwriter back in 2013. What I did not mention is that she continues to record wonderful music herself; a particularly fetching album is the one she released in October of last year, the archly titled A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night (look up the reference if you don’t recognize it). I had a hard time deciding which song to feature, so I encourage you to check out the whole thing over there on Bandcamp.

“Something Wrong” – Hand Habits

Thumpy, minimal, and deliberate at the outset, “Something Wrong” turns melodic and bittersweet in the chorus. The song’s instrumental and structural diversity is a subtle super power here; we get gently strummed acoustic guitars and crunchy electric guitars mingling agreeably, with austere synthesizer lines waiting in the wings, while the time signature bump in the verse, with its 6/4 insertions, keeps the ear off-balance (in a good way). The brief a capella break at 1:01 resets the vibe and leads into some subtle but terrific vocal harmonies. That insistent instrumental lead at 1:26, running through the verse without the vocals, is either a synth or a processed guitar of some kind; at 2:14, it’s definitely the synthesizer, offering a new melodic line and–listen for it–a plucky banjo in the background mix. The song’s hypnotic veneer masks over its variegated elements, coalescing in the plaintive beauty of the simple chorus.

Hand Habits is the name guitarist Meg Duffy uses for their solo work. Highly credentialed as a session guitarist for the likes of the War on Drugs, Weyes Blood, and Perfume Genius, they were also lead guitarist in Kevin Morby’s live band from 2015 to 2018. “Something Wrong” is a track from the six-song EP Sugar the Bruise, which was released in June. MP3 via KEXP.

“If You Care” – Post Modern Connection

There’s a refreshing Haircut 100 vibe to this sprightly romper with a melancholy undercurrent. Two guitars in interplay anachronistically drive us forward–crisp skittery guitar for the rhythm, a bright finger-picked guitar on top for the lead. I’m really connecting to the maturity of the sound here, and while I’m not even exactly sure what I mean by that, I’m guessing it’s to do with a few different details: the dusky tone of front man Tega Ovie’s wistful voice, delivered without electronic gimmickry; the aforementioned guitar work, which you’re not hearing much if any of in the music aimed at and consumed em masse by the TikTok generation; and also something in the lyrics, which seem at once simple and elusive and conjure a scenario that feels miles removed from the uncurbed rhyming and pouty relationship micro-management stories that infect pop music produced by and/or aimed at the aforementioned generation. On the one hand this is old guy talk; on the other hand, if musical standards have any long-term meaning, there is good reason to be dispirited by a lot of what’s out there getting millions of streams here in 2023. In this context, “mature” is a major compliment and breath of fresh air from a new-ish band.

Post Modern Connection is a duo from British Columbia, with Georges Nasrallah alongside Ovie. Theirs is a multicultural partnership–Ovie is from Nigeria, Nasrallah from Lebanon. PMC used to be a larger band but they seem to have reduced post-COVID. “If You Care” is a single released in September. Post Modern Connection has one EP under their belts, 2021’s Clustered Umbrella, and a second one coming out in November, entitled A Welcome Change, which is where you’ll find “If You Care.”

“Creampuff” – Soltero

“Creampuff” lopes along with an attractive offhandedness; the 18 or so seconds the song takes to settle into its spangly, lo-fi groove is a good indication of how simultaneously casual and purposeful things are going to be here. Tim Howard, Soltero’s front man and general mastermind, sings with a waver that is not to be corrected or denied; I think he skates pretty close to losing pitch here and there as well, although my ear isn’t perfect on the one hand so I can’t be sure, and on the other hand I enjoy loose, human voices like this, so the wavery voice and pitch are fine by me. Vocal perfectionists be warned.

In any case, “Creampuff” is homey and unhurried, positioning sneaky-strong melodies on top of a twangy, off-kilter accompaniment–all instruments, it should be noted, played by Howard. Structurally, the song is an amiable parade of interrelated sections; how much are repeats and how much are different iterations–never mind what’s a verse and what’s a chorus and hey is that a bridge in there too?–is difficult to work out without a lot of careful listening, but that itself is part of the charm. The overall effect is a friendly musical saunter–until, that is, the song crosses paths with an unexpected gong and muted alarms around 3:49. A tremulous, winding-down coda ensues, by the end rendering the bulk of “Creampuff” something of a dimly remembered dream. My immediate inclination is to hit the play button again.

Tim Howard is an American who has been living in Germany since 2018. “Creampuff” is the first English-language song he’s recorded since 2017. Soltero through its extended lifetime has been both a band and a solo project for Howard. This is now the fifth time Soltero has been featured here, dating all the way back to 2004; see the Artist Index for details.