Shadow Show, "On a Cloud" (Track of the Week)

One thing that both thrills and depresses me is that there is an unending stream of amazing new music coming out every day. The embarrassment of riches is thrilling, but the fracturing of the listening audience is depressing. It's often hard to find this new music, and when I do, it's hard to find other people digging the same thing. When the encounters do happen it's amazing. A few weeks ago I was at a record store in Hoboken and the clerk was playing an album by the Sundays, a band I've recently returned to. I enthusiastically let her know this, and later when I bought a Ween live album she returned the favor by gushing about it. 

I thought I would share some new music today so the world has a slightly better chance of hearing it. I get a lot of my new music from New Jersey's freeform station WFMU. The other day as I drove to the train station I heard a song come out of my speakers that blew me away. When I stopped at a light I immediately turned on Shazam so that this nugget would not escape me. 

The guitars shimmered and jangled with pristine, pure beauty. The tight harmonies lifted me up further, ready to face my day ahead. The song in question is "On a Cloud" by Shadow Show, which I listen to multiple times a day. I know almost nothing about this band, other than I want a way to hear this sublime sound forever. 

Falling in love with a song and a band isn't that different from falling in love with a person. The desire can be persistent, insatiable, and even maddening. I remember when I became a Bowie-head in the late 90s. I bought practically his entire back catalog on CD in less than two years (and I was broke.) It is amazing to me that I can still get that crazy feeling of connection with a band that I used to have as a teenager. It's less fun, however, if you can't share it. I recommend that you go and tell people about your favorite new song the way you did in high school. I think it will make the world a better place. 

Ween, "Transdermal Celebration" (Track of the Week)

Life has been busy recently and I have been neglecting this blog and not cross-posting my Substack stuff. I wrote a primer on what I call "baby politics" about simple narratives low information voters have and how to address them. I also wrote about Inside Llewyn Davis and the dismal nature of February. Little did I know that things would get even worse!

Death took a relative and a colleague this week, and I took my own advice to wallow in my negative feelings a bit. After a few days I've come out on the other side and am ready to talk about the things that have been pulling me through.

One of them has been the music of Ween. They were a band I did not rate much in the 90s and early 2000s when their profile was highest. They seemed like a joke band and purveyors of the kind of deep hipster irony that I just didn't get as perhaps an overly earnest young person. My biggest encounter with them was hearing that "push the little daisies" song on Beavis and Butthead and the college radio station in grad school spinning "Bananas and Blow." 

It's fitting then that I would finally "get" Ween by hearing them on the radio. One of my favorite DJs on WFMU likes to spin them, and after loving every song he played I realized that I actually really enjoy Ween. It might be that I have started listening to lots of Zappa and Beefheart and so crave the weirdness. It might also be that I am not so earnest anymore and need to mock the world around me instead of trying so hard to fix it. Ween's irreverence has been a welcome addition to my life in a trying time. 

Hearing more of their music I also realized they have some truly heartfelt songs, and that the ironic front gets dropped in surprising and effective ways. I have been digging the Quebec album the most for that reason. I am not sure what "Transdermal Celebration" is even about, but it has a kind of joy of living beating inside it. That's a feeling that I think we could all use. Put it on and turn it up. 

Low, "Just Make It Stop" (Track of the Week)

Over on my Substack page I wrote about how January 6th is a test that we are currently failing. That reality is hard to hold in my head sometimes, as is a lot of news these days. The daily reports of carnage in Gaza and Ukraine fill me with such sadness, and America's political scene does not fill me with hope. It is hard not to get stuck in a doom loop.

Beyond distancing myself from social media, I have managed to cope by paradoxically embracing my negative emotions. Our broken world is a cruel, capricious place where virtue goes unrewarded and the worst people never face justice. If you try to deny that basic, unalterable fact you will make yourself insane with anger and grief. The best artists and philosophers instead teach us how to endure this existence and even flourish in it despite its inherent absurdity. 

To that end I have been reading Kierkegaard again, but also listening to the right kind of music. Last week while listening to WFMU I happened to hear the song "Just Make It Stop" by Low and it stopped me in my tracks. 

I'd listened to some of Low' music before, but not this song. For a band considered "slow core" it's pretty fast-paced. The lyrics, however, are harrowing. The singer's heart is broken by this world and she begs and pleads for all of it to just stop. She's not suicidal or anything, just tired and worn out and needing a break from the never-ending pain and horror that she knows actually will not ever stop. 

This is an emotion I have felt at many times in my life, a desperate need to escape the inescapable, cruel reality that none of us can break from as long as we are living. Kierkegaard calls despair "the sickness unto death," and "Just Make It Stop" articulates that feeling better than any other song that I've heard. In an especially cruel irony Mimi Parker, the singer of this song, was cut down by cancer in 2022.

Lest you think I am horribly depressed or something, I am not. Making peace with the wretchedness of this world is necessary to overcoming it. In a year that I am sure will prove to be an awful one, the soul needs preparation. Once we dispose ourselves of childish optimism, we can actually get down to the real work of fighting the good fight against the worst of this world, victory or no victory.

Tom Waits, "Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis" (Track of the Week)

This last week has been a real roller coaster. My winter break began, and on Wednesday I got to see a bunch of my former students at an event at my school. On Thursday, I got to bum around New York City for the day. When I got home, I went into the basement and saw that our boiler was leaking and our heat was off. Turns out we need a new one! Merry fucking Christmas.

In a strange twist of events, this whole fiasco has me feeling more optimistic than I have in awhile. Yeah we are confronted with an annoying and expensive problem, but we are going to fix it. I was also able to find a way to travel with my family instead of being stuck here waiting to get the boiler fixed, so Christmas has been saved, too. In a fit of good feeling I wrote a Substack piece on establishing some good habits for engaging in politics in 2024. The fascists want us confused and hopeless, we need to put our shoulders to the wheel and ignore the bullshit. 

I have to get up at 3AM tomorrow for my flight so I am trying to relax myself by drinking a Manhattan and listening to Tom Waits music from the 70s. I don't think he really showed his true genius until the 80s, but in the polyester decade he cut one of the great sad Christmas songs, "Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis." It's resonating with me because it's about persevering through some shit times. After every crappy day comes sleep and then a new morning. Maybe that new day will be shit too, but perhaps it won't. 

The whole premise of the song is a dark joke. Christmas cards that come with a yearly round-up of life events usually come from middle-class families wanting to brag on Susie's grades and Bobby's position on the varsity squad. They don't come from sex workers living a hand to mouth existence on the margins of society. The narrator's life is hard. She talks about a record from the person she's writing to, but also that her record player had been stolen. She tried going back to live with her parents in Omaha but "everyone I used to know is either dead or in prison." Now's she's back in Minneapolis "and I think I'm going to stay." By the end she admits she's in jail and needs help. In the worst and most desperate straits, she's still thinking that things can turn around. After all, "I'll be eligible for parole come Valentine's Day." 

The holidays are a time of reflection, which can often make us rue the ways our lives didn't turn out the way we thought they would. But even in the worst circumstances, people still find ways to keep on living. My busted boiler is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Tomorrow is another day. 

John Lennon, "Working Class Hero" (Track of the Week)

I've written less for this blog in the past month than I have since I first started writing it. The truth is, I am just too tired most evenings to sit and write, or I have other work to do. The start of the school year this year has been especially rough. 

Music is seasonal for me, and every autumn I keep coming back to a playlist I made of songs from the Beatles' first solo records. The shift from summer into fall is mirrored in these songs by the kings of the pop music scene descending out of Beatlemania. In the words of one of Lennon's songs from the era, "I was the walrus, now I'm just John." Fall is a time of reflection for me, and these albums are full of reflective feelings about spending a decade in the eye of the pop cultural storm. Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is the most famously reflective of these albums, with literal primal screams. While most of the songs are painfully personal, he gets political on "Working Class Hero." 

Like the rest of his generation, Lennon was the product of the long post-war economic boom in the West, one still not over when he wrote this song. In Britain, it was the era where PM Harold Macmillan could taunt a heckler by saying "you've never had it so good!" The class struggles of the preceding decades seemed to have been drowned in a tidal wave of cheap consumer goods. This song questions what workers actually got in the bargain. Instead of the sunny vistas of postwar consumerism, Lennon sees children cowed by punitive schools, locked early into unfulfilling careers, and working unsatisfying jobs leavened only by the opiate of television at the end of an awful day. 

Lennon uses an old folk riff on acoustic guitar, sounding like the finger-pointing Dylan of "Masters of War." The first lines still hit me in the face, "As soon as you're born they make you feel small/ By giving you no time instead of it all." This month, when I just don't seem to have the time or energy to write, I am feeling it really hard. 

This song does not lay out any specific political plan, but encourages the listener to dump the ideology that keeps them from questioning and changing the system. That's the first, crucial step. In the past decade, I have noticed more and more people refusing to reduce themselves to their job, a process that accelerated during the pandemic. Whereas striking workers were once treated almost as outlaws by normie types, there has been an outpouring of support for the picket lines in recent strikes. Many people are realizing the raw deal that neoliberalism gave them once the "boom years" ended. Over fifty years after writing this song, Lennon smirks from the grave. 

Wall of Voodoo, "Mexican Radio" (Track of the Week)

Every now and then I have to hand it to TikTok and YouTube because it will promote old songs I like in ways that my kids can appreciate. Just the other day, one of my daughters was singing the chorus to "Mexican Radio" and I was both delighted and puzzled. My daughters usually turn their noses up at my music, but if they encounter it on their own, they dig it. 

"Mexican Radio" was a rarity, a weird underground song that somehow managed to hit the mainstream in the benighted 80s, an era of conformity without an internet safety valve. When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke, with the keyboards reminiscent of a ranchera accordion sound and the spliced in dialogue from a Spanish-language broadcast. Since then, I have found the song's deeper meaning.

At base, it's a song about the unknowability of other cultures. Mexico is not far from LA, and you can pick up its radio stations, but they sound like broadcasts from another planet if you don't know Spanish. You are confronted with the uncanny feeling that the world is a big place and that what you know of it is actually pretty small. Anyone who has traveled abroad by themselves knows this sensation. You find yourself in a whole other world where people literally do not speak your language. It's disorienting in the extreme, a "riddle" as the song goes. 

There are a lot of headlines about social studies education being under attack, but I have witnessed a more silent strike in education against learning foreign languages. Schools and universities across the country are closing their language programs, and students seem less interested in learning about them. That's a shame for so many reasons, not least because if language shapes our reality, learning new a language allows you to live in a different reality. The alternative is to be like the song's narrator, intrigued, but unable to comprehend the world next door. 

The Grateful Dead, "He's Gone" (Track of the Week)

Longtime friends know that I am a longtime Grateful Dead hater. I first encountered them in the late 80s, when they were selling out stadiums and had a big hit with "Touch of Grey." Their name made them sound like a metal band, but this song sounded like some far too mellow 80s pop music. The way Jerry Garcia sang "I will survive" like he was falling asleep seemed to drain the song of any urgency. I just didn't get it. 

Soon after that I started listening to classic rock radio, and so I heard songs like "Casey Jones" and "Trucking" with some regularity. I bought a cassette of the Skeletons from the Closet comp (admittedly not a good place to start) and was singularly unimpressed. I just could not get over how all this music steeped in the soulful roots of blues and country could be sung so feebly. At that point in the early 90s I was confirmed in my opinion that the Dead sucked.

Over the years I met people whose taste in music I respected who liked them. My dislike was so intense that I just refused to listen and assumed that my friends had been hypnotized by hippies at some point in their lives, or that they had enjoyed the Deadhead culture without paying much attention to the product at the center of it. (As a Mets fan I can certainly understand this dynamic.)

As I have aged I have learned not to trust the prejudices and attitudes formed in my youth. After all, I once told people in my mid-20s that I would never get married or be a father, and now I enjoy both so much I can't imagine a different life. I once poo-pooed musical theater and graphic novels, and now I enjoy both. In that spirit, earlier this year I reached out to some Dead fans in my life for recommendations to attempt to change my ways. 

Not surprisingly, they all gave me live songs to listen to. My big mistake in my youth was getting my impression of the Dead from their studio recordings, which I have certainly not changed my mind about whatsoever. Live, however, they could weave quite a sonic tapestry, including taking old songs and adding something new to them. It's obvious that Garcia was a true student of American roots music, which I also love, and that he had a great ear for musical nuance. 

This all came to me yesterday when I was listening to the Europe 72 album in my car while waiting to pick my kids up from camp. "He's Gone" was not one of the songs recommended to me, but it just hit me the right way. The rhythm and feel grabbed me from the start and I found myself grooving along, not concerned about waiting for my kids in the hot July sun. 

I still think that the Dead could've been a truly great band had they brought in a lead singer with the soul power that the music requires. Nevertheless, I can enjoy the interplay of their live music, and the reminder that you can always change your mind about things, even in middle age. 

Steely Dan, "Bad Sneakers" (Track of the Week)

There's been a resurgence of interest in Steely Dan, a band I've long loved that inspires wildly disparate opinions. Even in my case, it was an acquired taste. I had liked a couple of their songs off of classic rock radio, but in the 90s I had been captured by the orthodoxy of punk, meaning I automatically discounted smooth music and anything that smacked of virtuosity. In the summer of 2000 (one of the most fun I ever had) a coworker made me a Steely Dan mix tape and demanded that I give them a chance. I did, and something finally clicked. It might have helped that I was just getting into jazz at the time. 

While I have been digging the Dan for over twenty years now, their songs can still surprise me. I was listening to Katy Lied the other week, and for the first time "Bad Sneakers" spoke to me on a new level. I had always enjoyed the song, and assumed that the lyrics were just another example of the group's playful "dark sarcasm." For whatever reason, I listened harder and found profound sadness. Every now and then Becker and Fagan let the hipster mask drop and got real about the human condition. 

I realized the song was written from the point of view of someone either in a mental institution or rehab facility. The first part of the chorus is pretty harrowing: "I'm going insane/ Laughing at the frozen rain/ I'm so alone/ When they gonna bring me home?" Perhaps I was distracted by Michael McDonald's distinctive voice backing Fagan and wasn't paying attention to what they were saying. I'd always thought of the song being more wistful, rather than a cry for help.

I listened to it pretty much every day during my commute home at the end of the school year. Like the song itself, it's a time that brings complicated emotions. I am proud of the seniors who are graduating, but sad to lose them. I am looking forward to finally having a summer but stuck in some of the most intense and stressful work of the year in terms of grading and report writing. I'm usually doing this while exhausted, and this year, despite being easier than any school year since 2019, was still harder than any school year I had before the pandemic. Maybe I was internally mourning that fact and the knowledge that they're never "gonna bring me home" to a time when my job was hard but not overwhelming. 

If you go online to sites where people parse song meanings you will find little consensus about "Bad Sneakers." That's usually the sign of a good song. 

ZZ Top, "Jesus Just Left Chicago" (Track of the Week)

I was weirdly missing Texas this week. I lived there for three years in a kind of love-hate relationship. I came to adore Houston and Austin, the amazing food, the great musical tradition, and a certain kind of zest for life that was refreshing after spending the rest of my life in the staid Midwest. At the same time, I despised its fascistic politics, open bigotry, and suffocating provincialism. I went back to visit last summer and enjoyed myself, but also knew it was definitely not a place I wanted to live.

Despite my resolution on this count, there are days when I need a taste of Texas. So this weekend I thew on ZZ Top's Tres Hombres record. It includes maybe the greatest gatefold of all time (pictured above), a gorgeous still-life tableau of Tex-Mex food. Eat your heart out, Rembrandt. 

Beyond the imagery, the music is pure Texas. It's a perfectly executed blues shuffle shot through with the spirit of Lightnin' Hopkins. When I listen to "Jesus Just Left Chicago" I can imagine myself sitting at the bar in the Flashback Cafe in Nacogdoches, sucking down a dollar twenty five Lone Star on a sticky Friday night. My time in Texas wasn't all that fun, but it sure was memorable. Despite its faults, it's a place with a real unique culture and spirit that you just can't elsewhere. While ZZ Top is best known for their sleek 80s hits, their bluesy 70s stuff will give you some of that Texas spirit without having to go there.

Track of the Week: Fountains of Wayne, "Sick Day"

Last night we watched That Thing You Do! for family movie night, which reminded me how much I love Fountains of Wayne. (They did the title song that makes the "Wonders" a hit band in the film.) Going back to them can be a bit emotional for me, partly because I was listening to their first album a lot during one of the lowest depressions of my life, and also because Adam Schlesinger's death made the awfulness of COVID real for me in the early days of the pandemic. 

I was struck by how much everyday melancholy permeates their songs. It isn't just the usual pop song laments about lost love, but also how much daily life grinds us down. "Sick Day" takes the point of view of a burned out office worker who decides she needs a break from the brutal commute from Jersey (something I know well) and the disheartening routines of being a low-level worker. 

Songs about worker alienation tend to be more openly rebellious, like Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It." Rarely are they more real, like "Sick Day." Very few of us ever tell our employers to go to hell, even if we all may have been in a job that made us wish we could do this. Instead, we soldier on, cry in the bathroom, or take a sick day just to get a break from the crushing ennui. 

"Sick Day" has all the hallmarks of what I love about Fountains of Wayne beyond the aching yearning tone. The guitars are sublimely jangly, and the lyrics clever. "Lead us not into Penn Station" to the cadence of "Lead us not into temptation" is just *chef's kiss* as far as I am concerned. Now that I live in Jersey I can't get over the very specific references to the PATH train and Holland Tunnel. I've been commuting from Jersey to NYC for twelve years now and this song speaks to me in ways that few others do. 

I am on spring break right now, and this song is helpful reminder for me to make the most of these days I am getting. If you're on spring break I recommend giving it a listen. 

Mattiel, "Those Words" (Track of the Week)

This week brought 2022's Spotify Wrapped, the moment of truth for music hipsters. We can tell people what we listen to, but the app gives us the numbers and it doesn't lie. I've found that my Wrapped can sometimes be a good indicator of my mental health in any given year. The year when "Weighless Again" by The Handsome Family was my number one was....not a good one. 

I was elated to see that most of my top ten, including my top two songs, were new ones rather than old favorites. In recent years I have been making an effort to listen to new music whenever possible. I wrote about my number one, Cate Le Bon's exquisite "Moderation," earlier this year. My number two comes from Mattiel, a band I liked so much that I bought their most recent album on CD and have been playing it constantly in my car. 

They get their name from lead singer Mattiel Brown, who grew up on a Georgia farm but makes post-punky music rather than country twang. Their aforementioned Georgia Gothic album was my favorite this year, but my favorite song wasn't on it. "Those Words" came out as a non-album single, a tradition in great need of being returned. 

The song is wonderfully bouncy with a pleasing jingle-jangle reminiscent of fellow Georgians REM. Brown's deep alto voice, as with most Mattiel songs, is the thing that elevates it beyond the usual indie rock. Its rich dark sound just holds together while giving extra zest, like putting brown sauce on an English breakfast. It's a song I put on many mornings as I boarded the commuter train, mixing my need to get pumped for the day with all the nagging doubts still there in my mind. 

A lot of stupid shit people say gets me mad, but little more than other dudes my age who like music saying they don't listen to anything new. As we age it's crucial to keep living in the now, and not in the past. I may not be the largest audience, but I am glad groups like Mattiel are out there for me to listen to. 

Tangerine Dream, "Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares" (Track of the Week)

Middle-aged music fans like myself have a tendency to get weird with it at this stage in our lives. I have listened to the usual verse-chorus-verse songs for years, which don't excite me enough anymore. This has led down the road to jazz and (gulp) Frank Zappa, but also Tangerine Dream. Just yesterday I fanboyed out at Record Store Day Black Friday because they had an Edgar Froese solo album. 

Their music, in case you don't know it, is sort of Brian Eno on mushrooms with even less song structure. Tangerine Dream created soundscapes, ones they converted into some truly great film scores in the 70s and 80s. I also like how their music, played with old Moog synthesizers, sounds both like the past and the future at the same time. Like their countrymen Kraftwerk, they made groundbreaking electronic music best heard by playing it on an old-fashioned, analog record. I love early electronic music because the rules have not been written yet, and the experimenting required literally dial and knob twisting to get it to work. 

I love so much of Tangerine Dream's work, but my fave deep cut is "Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares." Despite its title, I listen to it often at bedtime to soothe myself. In those eerie moments before sleep, when I can feel consciousness slipping away, the effect is sublime, like floating in space. It's music I embraced in the depths of the pandemic, giving me the inner calm I so urgently needed. Hopefully it can serve you, too. 

Public Image Ltd, "Swan Lake" (Track of the Week)

Guitarist Keith Levene died this week. He's one of those musicians unknown by most but legendary among true heads. I did not get initiated until I was in grad school and picked up Simon Reynolds' incomparable post-punk tome, Rip It Up And Start Again. British punk's creation myth starts with the Sex Pistols, and Reynolds appropriately located post-punk's origins in Public Image Ltd, the band formed when Johnny Rotten became plain old John Lydon again. I had thought of PiL in terms of their pretty tepid 90s output, not knowing how amazing their early stuff could be. Levene's arty, fractured guitar playing was key to the band's sound, and made the three chords and a cloud of dust riffing on punk seem pretty lame and pedestrian by comparison. 

Their self-titled first album still had some fierce riffing, but their next, Second Edition/Metal Box (US and UK versions, respectively) sounded like nothing else that came before. Lydon's voice sounds forcibly restrained, no longer sneering and spitting but a half-scream caught in his throat. Jah Wobble's bass is a kind of wall of dread, dub as played by the devil if he'd never picked up an instrument before. Levene's guitar, angular, caustic, meandering, was like a punk rocker had been locked in a room for a year with only free jazz and prog records to listen to. 

It sounds best to me on "Swan Lake" off of Second Edition, originally given the evocative title "Death Disco." It's about the death of Lydon's beloved mother, an anguished cry of despair about the finality dying. The line "the silence in your eyes" so aptly describes the feeling of looking at someone you've always known but suddenly they are not there anymore, just their body. The song perversely incorporates a disco beat and the melody from Tschaikovsky's "Swan Lake," but it's Levene's curtains of jangly feedback that make it all work. I guess it's appropriate to remember him with a song about death. 

Pale Blue Eyes, "Globe" (Track of the Week)

I have made some good and bad choices in the past few years, but the best was making sure that I mostly listen to new music. It is truly mindblowing how much good music is out there, and how much work it can be to access it sometimes. Despite those difficulties, listening to new music helps keep me fresh in middle age and from becoming yet another Gen X bore getting high on nostalgia.

Sometimes, however, I cheat a little. A lot of my favorite new music strongly recalls the sound of new wave and post-punk. It's kind of great to hear so much music that strips out the best aspects of 80s music and leaves its excesses of overproduction out. 

Pale Blue Eyes is a band in this vein I just discovered via the Sound Opinions podcast. The name is such an obvious Velvet Underground reference that it's almost cringy, but the band still delivers. You'd have to in order to get away with such a bold move. Despite the Velvets' name, the sound recalls other sources. The insistent, pulsing bass owes much to Peter Hook of Joy Division and New Order, the nervy rhythms are pure new wave. The airy synths recall the textures used by The Cure. Somehow it's not in any way derivative. I like a lot of their songs, but "Globe" brings the elements together most beautifully. 

This is a style of music I always come back to in October, as the leaves die and fall and the nights get darker and longer. In years past I might have been content to spin Echo and the Bunnymen's Crocodiles yet again. I am glad in my middle age to find someone current to give me the same spooky vibe.

Uncle Tupelo, "Graveyard Shift" (Track of the Week)

Due to a new writing project I have been taking a deep dive back into Uncle Tupelo. There is no other band that encapsulates the experience of being a misfit with lefty politics living in a small Midwestern town in the early 90s. I didn't discover them until their last album Anodyne, right as I was about to graduate from high school in the year of '94. That album filled me with the joy of recognition; I hadn't heard any music before that spoke so directly to my specific circumstances. 

Later on, I dug deeper into their catalog, and it still amazes me how hard they went right out of the gate. No Depression, their first album, became the name of a whole new music scene and a magazine devoted to it. "Graveyard Shift" is the first track off of that album. It sounds like The Clash if they were from Iowa. 

The first lines, "Home town same town blues/ Same walls closing in" just sums it all up. It's about the experience of working a factory job in a small Midwestern town where you grew up and feeling completely trapped by it. I spent my college summers working in local factories, including one summer on the graveyard shift. Granted, I was a college boy, so I could the light at the end of the tunnel. It also became clear to me that a lot of people work really hard for too little money. And yet, "The powers that be/ might take it all away."

The guitars and drums crunch and crash with wild abandon. It's the sound of wanting to jump out of your body trying not to look at the clock while being chained to a machine for eight hours. "There's much you've missed working on that graveyard shift." Yeah, no kidding. On the graveyard shift you literally lose the sunlight because you've got to go to bed in a morning light harsh in ways you never though possible. 

Being a lefty in the early 90s included a deep feeling of futility. You raged against the obvious shittiness of the system but did so with no expectation that anything could change. After a decade of Reagan, there was No Alternative. So you found rebellion where you could, including blasting the music of some fellow small-town Midwestern misfits. Thirty years later it still feels liberating. 

Cate Le Bon, "Moderation" (Track of the Week)

As age fifty approaches and I see people my age becoming increasingly narrow-minded and reactionary, I try my best to stay open to new things. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I fail, but I've mostly been able to keep listening to new music. I'd say it makes up the vast majority of my listening, helped along by having two daughters who prefer the current pop sound. 

One of the biggest surprises I've had this summer is turning on the Top 40 station in the car with my kids and hearing Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill." It was a song I enjoyed in the 80s, but it was never this popular. Beyond it being a great song featured on a hit show, I think its popularity has to do with the fact that the mid-80s sound meshes well with the current pop landscape. "Running Up That Hill" really does not sound jarring when heard between Harry Styles and Doja Cat. (The same could not be said for a similar 90s song like "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone.") That also might be why my kids demanding to hear Top 40 in the car isn't bugging me that much. The sound reminds me of my own childhood.

It's not just pop music with 80s vibes, my favorite independent music in recent years has also tended in that direction. Lots of atmospheric synths, reverby guitar for texture rather than melody, nervy rhythms, and if not drum machines, drums that sound like drum machines. I actually wondered if well-known alt acts like Angel Olsen and Big Thief going in a folk/country direction was a kind of reaction against the electronic sound I've been hearing. 

When Spotify gives me its Wrapped at the end of the year, I am sure Cate Le Bon's "Moderation" will be at the top. I just can't stop listening to it and often start my listening sessions with it first. It definitely sounds like it could have been sung by Kate Bush in 1985, but without sounding derivative in any kind of way. I couldn't tell you exactly what the song is even about, it just gives me that aching feeling of longing that only music can dig out of my soul. Her melodic bass playing and the spooky saxophones reminiscent of Berlin-era Bowie are like catnip for me, and that's even before the gorgeously reverby guitar kicks in. 

I've been listening to this song on repeat all year, but with summer ending and the school year approaching the twinge of longing it evokes is especially strong. It's a vibe my favorite 80s music from REM to New Order evokes so well. As awful as things are right now, it pleases me greatly that modern artists have been able to mine what was good about the 80s sound while ditching its awful excesses. 

Angel Olsen, "Go Home" (Track of the Week)

I'm a huge Angel Olsen fan, and so was super-excited to listen to her new album this week. I'd been humming the single "Big Time" for weeks already, its infectious country soul is irresistible to me. That song, the album's title track, is all about good feeling and the joy of falling in love. 

Other songs, however, go in far darker directions. On my first listen the song "Go Home" stopped me in my tracks. It might be about a relationship ending, but I hear it as an elegy for the country. It slowly builds in a way that sends a knife into my soul, like "Bridge Over Troubled Water." The crucial line is "We watched it all burn down and did nothing."

Looking at the wreckage around me I get the feeling that the point of no return has long passed us by. The courts are poised to revoke rights, the fascists who tried to overthrow the government on 1/6 are about to sweep the election, mass shooters murder and nothing happens. 

In times of extreme futility like this it's natural to want to "go home" and "go back to small things." In the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting I suddenly understood quietism. If this world is irreparably broken and resists all attempts at being fixed, might as well retreat into the monastery of my mind. This might not be the intended message of the song, but it's the one that speaks loudest to me right now.

Julian Cope "Sunspots" (Track of the Week)

Streaming music is a luxury I take for granted all of the time. It's really amazing just to be able to call up whatever I want to hear at a particular moment. At the same time, it can't do what radio does. A really good radio station will introduce you to something you never knew existed, and it will become your new favorite.

Every morning I listen to WFMU in the car on my drive to the train station. It's only about a six minute trip, but in a given week I will hear at least one song that gets added to one of my playlists. Last week that song was "Sunspots" by Julian Cope.

I always associated him with what I thought of as "alternative" music in that very specific period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." I would stay up late on Sunday night and watch 120 minutes, and instead of loud guitars I mostly heard Madchester beats and catchy melodies from the likes of the Sugarcubes and The Sundays. (At that time it seemed like all the alternative music came from the British Isles.) That's when I first heard Julian Cope, who I didn't dislike, but also didn't rate that much.

However, hearing "Sunspots" on my car radio on a gorgeous spring morning electrified me. I've been singing it to myself since. I also can't get over how its guitar sound seems to be lifted from one of my favorite Stones psychedelic songs ("Citadel") while the two note synth riff seems to come from one of my all time favorite songs (Gary Numan's "Are Friends Electric.") Evidently mister Cope and I share the same tastes.

As I mentioned last week, the month of May is made for psychedelia. Life comes bursting out of the ground and walking around will get you high on flowers, pollen, and sunshine. The beat of this song is perfect for a spring walk, which I have taken many of these past two weeks. If you're taking your own spring walk, give this song a spin. 

Beatles, "Paperback Writer" (Track of the Week)

Can't I just be obvious for once?

Yes just about everyone loves the Beatles, but it's easy to take them for granted. The brilliant Get Back documentary was a necessary reminder of their greatness and how their songs should not be reduced to mere musical wallpaper.

In that vein, I was talking with a friend about the Beatles recently, and we both started gushing about "Paperback Writer." I had first heard the song as an eleven-year old when I got my first Beatles album, The Beatles 20 Greatest Hits, on cassette for Christmas. It's not the best compilation even by the standards of 80s Beatles comps, mostly because by hitting the biggest hits it omits a lot of psychedelic stuff. I didn't hear that stuff until much later.

However, "Paperback Writer" gave me a taste with its phased background vocals. Back in '66 the Beatles laid down several gauntlets on Revolver, but before they dropped that bomb in August, "Paperback Writer" backed with "Rain" (their best non-album B-side by a country mile) made a bold declaration. "Rain" gets really strange with some parts played backwards while "Paperback Writer" serves up the hooks. 

Those hooks allowed the Beatles to sneak something much more interesting than "I want to hold your hand" love sentiments into the Top 40. Hearing it on that Beatles comp I was fascinated by the song's narrative. It's just a guy begging a publisher to take on his book. He seems kind of desperate to escape the obvious drudgery of his daily life. It's a strange slice of life image that bands not as big as the Beatles would have been allowed to get on the radio. 

Beyond the lyrics, the song rocks harder than anything the Beatles had recorded up to that point. It's almost as if they heard all the great garage punk bands in America playing a harder version of the British Beat originated by the Fab Four and decided to show them how it REALLY ought to be done. The guitar riff just cuts like a buzzsaw. The song moves fast, clocking in at only two minutes and 18 seconds but it's so intense you don't even notice it. On top of all that, McCartney's bass is placed up front. He plays complex lines untethered from the main riff, freeing his instrument from its usual background role. It's a revolution in the use of bass in rock and roll years ahead of its time yet easy to miss because he never overwhelms the song. 

It's a song I've heard performed on their last tour, and those performances made their need to retreat to the studio pretty clear. The music was getting too complex to be played on a stage where they couldn't really hear each other. People like to mark that transition with "Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane' but I do it with "Paperback Writer/Rain."

Nirvana, "Aneurysm" (Track of the Week)

Even though I grew up in the 90s if I decide to listen to old music I will dig up stuff from the 60s and 70s as opposed to the decade of my youth. It's not because I don't like the music, it's because it has such intense emotional connections for me. The memories can get a bit overwhelming. 

For some reason, I have been able to overcome that recently, and have been incessantly listening to the OG grunge that came out of Seattle in the early 90s, before the Silverchairs and Bush-es of the world turned the genre into lamesville. 

Back in 1991 I was trying to explore more challenging, less mainstream music with the resources available to me in a small town in the middle of Nebraska before the internet. In the fall of 1991 this meant a lot of REM, The Clash, Depeche Mode and *gulp* The Doors. That was my main listening diet when I got hit upside the head by "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It was love at first feedback. 

After a year of listening to Nevermind on repeat and going back to pick up Bleach I was desperate for more of my favorite band, and so I bought the B-sides and rarities comp Incesticide the day it came out. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but some of the songs put their hooks in me, including "Aneurysm." (I find it best heard in the live version at Reading.) At their best Nirvana sounded like an explosion, but here their fireworks do the loud-quiet-loud thing they lifted from The Pixies for their biggest hit. (It's fitting that this was the B-side to "Smells Like Teen Spirit.") The loud parts are truly fearsome, the most savage attack they mounted in any of their songs. For me it's a song that belongs in the B-side hall of fame.

Nirvana reminds me of my angsty teen years like nothing else, when I would blast this music in my car and blow away all of anxiety and feelings of inadequacy in a hurricane of feedback and drums. It can feel weird and a bit embarrassing to go back to that state of mind as an adult, but the music is a reminder that I've come a long way. I only wish Kurt had been able to make his own journey.