Fingertips

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.