Funeral to Finish

  There's a fascinating thing with older albums that you don't see that much anymore, and that's the Instant Cover.  By that I mean artists covering really popular songs that were only, like, a year old.  This record contains, of course, three lock-solid All Time Greatest songs that are all Four Tops originals, "Reach Out I'll Be There," "Standing in the Shadows of Love," and "Bernadette" (all three written and produced by H-D-H, the absolutely DEADLY songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland, more on which below).  These songs are all canonical and cannot be questioned. But then there are a slew of covers, including not one but TWO Monkees covers, "Last Train to Clarksville" and "I'm a Believer."  Crazy, right?  It's like if Kendrick said "OK, I've got another stone classic album, lemme just throw on two Bieber covers to round it out."  I mean, the Tops are of course amazing singers and do great rend...

  I would wager a fair amount that almost every person reading this blog has, at some time or another, drunk-wailed "ALLLLLLLISON, I KNOW this world is KILLING YOU" in a bar or at a party or just at home, looking forlornly out a window.  That song, "Alison," was wired into my brain by the time I was 17 and will never leave.  And it's just one of the songs on this incredible collection. The songwriting is, of course, nearly flawless; the melodies juke around, always taking a slightly unexpected but then almost inevitable turn.  There's the straight punkabilly of "Mystery Dance" and the pure pop of "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes."  Of course it was produced by Nick Lowe; his sensibility is obvious, but Elvis takes it and runs with it.   Then, of course, there are the lyrics.  Elvis is probably one of the top 5 or 10 greatest lyricists in rock history, and it's obvious on this, his first album, that he's interested in wordplay...

  I think I owned this album on vinyl at one point?  I was at least vaguely familiar with most of the songs and the cover looks familiar so I think I might have.  Right now I'm imagining the trail of vinyl albums stretched out behind me from town to town.  I guess they're all in a landfill somewhere now. Cool album!  There is some straight-ahead rockabilly kind of stuff ("Don't Worry Baby") and some songs obviously strongly influenced by Latin music ("Corrido #1," which is sung in English, interestingly).  "Our Last Night" has a melody that could have been sung by Hank Williams.  It's that kind of blend. "How Will the Wolf Survive," the closer on the album, is the song you probably will have heard.  I clearly remember hearing it on the radio in the mid-80's.  Maybe you did too. As far as I can tell, Los Lobos is still around.  In 2009, they released an album of Disney covers called "Los Lobos Goes Disney," which kind...

  Never listened to this album, so I put it on yesterday and there's this spoken word kind of intro and then I realize I know the first song, because it's so ubiquitous in popular culture that I knew the opening notes by heart, without ever knowing who it was or where it was from. I know, right?  The even trippier thing is I can't place where I've heard it but it's so immediately familiar that I must have heard it hundreds of times!  Wild.  A little digging around shows that it's been in movies like "The Hangover" but I probably know it from some of the commercial it's been in, like this . Anyway, R&B is not really my thing but I enjoyed this album enough.  I mean, it sold 10 million copies in the US, so it certainly spoke to a lot of people.  I did enjoy the vocals in "Caught Up" quite a bit, and there is no doubt that Usher is a gifted singer.  But maybe just not for me, and that's ok!  Not everyone loves everything. One incredi...

  Wow!  First "Crooked Rain," now this!  It's a 1-2 punch of Dad Rock for the ages. Can't say they don't have a sense of humor about themselves, though, huh?  Above photo taken by the author at the Bill Graham Civic, November 2017.  Now that was a fun show - except for the Millennials who insisted on yelling at each other through literally every song - but nothing really compares to their set at the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago in 2010, a show I was lucky enough to be at, where my eyes were first opened to this truly great band.  Here's a video of "All My Friends," a song from the album we're discussing today, and yet another Gen X anthem.   Remember when we were talking about "Gold Soundz" in the last installment and how it's maybe about growing up?  Same thing here, except it's about being on the wrong side of 40 instead of 30.  It's the sequel to GS, I guess.  And, apparently, the second best song of the 2000s !  (Outka...

  So far in this project I've encountered the first album I personally owned , but here we have the first album that is one of My Favorite Albums of All Time (so much so that, when I did the incredibly predictable music nerd exercise of compiling a list of my Top 20 Albums ever in 2009, this was #11), so I may not be completely objective about it.  I know this album so well that I really didn't have to listen to it again for this project but it's always a pleasure to return to so I did anyway. Big picture, this, to me, is an album about growing up, becoming an adult.  Not that growing up between 18 and 25, but the slacker Gen X version of growing up between 25 and 29, when you're realizing you can't just hang out and drink beer every day any more, that you have to move on and actually become an adult. "Gold Soundz," the centerpiece and best song on the album, is a paean to lost love and a lost life: So drunk in the August sun And you're the kind of gir...

  Imagine my surprise when I got about halfway through this album, looked at the tracklist, and realized this ISN'T the album with "West End Girls" on it.  Straight honesty here, I did not know the Pet Shop Boys had another album, or really, another song.   So this is a pleasant enough EXTREMELY '80s synthpop record.  There are some nice melodies and the whole thing sounds somewhere between Wham! and Depeche Mode, maybe more towards the Depeche Mode side but lighter.   Do you want to know how '80s this is?  Listen to the first 30 seconds of "What Have I Done to Deserve This?"  It is the perfect distillation of what you think of when you think "'80s music."  Actually, the whole song is. Featuring Dusty Springfield!  Yes, that Dusty Springfield.  This song might be the keystone that holds the entire '80s together.  From Wiki : "It was kept from the top of the Billboard charts by "Seasons Change" by Exposé and "Father F...

  I started this project during a tumultuous time in American history.  The first post was about a week and a half before what might have been the Most Consequential Election of Our Lives, and I've dutifully more or less ignored politics, sticking to sports, as it were, as a madman threatened the foundations of our democracy and a mob stormed our capitol building.  (That day, the record was Alice Coltrane's "Journey in Satchidanada," which I will now never be able to listen to without remembering rioters bashing the windows of the capitol in with flagpoles holding American flags.)  But today was the inauguration of Joe Biden, a pleasant and thoughtful man, as anti-Trump as it gets, and so it seems fitting that today's album is the work of a singular African-American poet while another one took the stage. Just beautiful.  Now, Tupac Shakur's language was certainly, um, more earthy than Ms. Gorman's, and his concerns were more quotidian than her lofty poetr...

  This album will always be indelibly connected to the UK rave-and-ecstasy scene of the early '90s, but let me blow your mind with a theory I just came up with whilst listening to this album yesterday for the first time in since the early '90s: not only is this a document of that scene, it also mimics an ecstasy trip itself . Bear with me.  So it starts with the sunny and blithely optimistic "Movin' On Up," the come-up, as it were, before moving into the real meat of the album, the hardcore part of the trip.  The next two songs, "Slip Inside This House" and "Don't Fight It, Feel It," are both trippy dance tracks of exactly the type you'd associate with a severe MDMA dance event.  Then after that you'll need some water and a rest so "Higher Than the Sun" (wink wink) and "Inner Flight" playing in the chill room.  You get back to dancing with the gently vibey but still danceable "Come Together" and "L...

  I never really took a side in the Britpop Wars of the mid-90's, mostly because I had no idea they were going on.  My wife grew up in Ireland and there it wasn't just a background thing, it was a Hot War, and you were either with Oasis or Blur.  My wife, and her crowd, were Blur People.  That's what one of her friends literally said, out loud, to her.  "We're Blur people."  I like a lot of Oasis songs and a lot of Blur songs so I guess I'm neutral.  I'm the Switzerland of Britpop Wars. This album was one of the most important shots of the Britpop Wars.  I guess it was like the Battle of Hastings, with Blur barging in and announcing their presence right off the bat with "Girls and Boys" a song about everyone having sex with everyone else that I distinctly remember hearing at a Britpop-themed New Years Eve party in maybe 2003 or 2004.  Can you imagine, a Britpop-themed New Years Eve party at a club in San Francisco?  What a world. There a...

  Good God, this is a jam.  You can literally feel the heat and the sweat from the crowd on every song.  It all purports to be a live album, but it turns out the first two sides, including the incredible, 10-minute "Get Up" and the second side's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose," were recorded in studio and then crowd sounds were added.  No matter, because James Brown and his band in studio rock harder than 95% of bands live. The second disc was recorded in Brown's hometown, Augusta, Georgia, at the Bell Auditorium.  Feast your eyes on this beauty.  This is what venues used to look like. I urge you to listen to this album, not only because the band (including Bootsy Collins on bass and, on the live tracks, Maceo Parker on sax, and other legends) is incredibly tight and punchy, but also because you really have to appreciate the artistry of James Brown using his voice not only as a vehicle to deliver a song but also as an instrument of the band as well, just as ...

  Oh my god what a relief.  After two straight bleepy bloopy overcompressed Autotuned vocals albums, this arrives like a pure and clean breath of fresh air.  It's just Loretta and an incredible studio band and the Jordanaires singing backup.  11 fantastic songs in a tight 29:43.  What a gorgeous album. Of course, you all know "Coal Miner's Daughter," written by Lynn, about her upbringing in rural Kentucky.  I bet if you asked 100 people at random to name a country music song, maybe 50% would name this song.  (The fact that it was the title of Lynn's autobiography and a movie of the same name probably doesn't hurt.)  That's followed by a fantastic cover of Conway Twitty's "Hello Darlin'," which has been covered tons of times, of course, including by George Jones.  Lynn brings her own reading of the song, and to my mind does it just as much justice as Twitty's. There are some SONGWRITERS represented here.  The third song, "Less of ...

  What were you doing in 2007?  I moved in with my girlfriend, soon to be wife, and got a dog.  All that domestic stuff!  It was a very nice year for me.  Britney Spears was not having that great a year.  Remember that scene of her shaving her head in front of thousands of popping flashbulbs?  2007.  Filed for divorce?  Temporarily lost custody of her kids?  All in 2007. Somehow, during all this, she managed to put out what until yesterday I did not know was " the best and most influential album of her career ," and even " one of the most influential albums of the last decade for the way it suffused hip hop, pop, R&B and EDM ."  What I did find out, as soon as I put it on, is that this album is the Good Horny rejoinder to yesterday's Dark Horny .  Britney is out here and she wants to get it! Ooh, ooh baby Touch me and I come alive I can feel you on my lips I can feel you deep inside Ooh, ooh baby In your arms, I finally bre...

  Who knew that a whole album about doing blow and having sex could be so fucking DARK? Those are both typical rock star activities, and by the time this came out Abel Tesfaye was already a star, but unlike his predecessors like Jerry Lee Lewis or David Lee Roth or anyone else with three names, the rewards of stardom aren't making him happy, they're making him very sad. So there's songs like "In the Night" which is an unquestionable electro-pop jam and you're bopping your head up and down until you start listening to the lyrics and then you're like "wait....what?" because it's becoming clear this is a song about a sexual abuse survivor who becomes a stripper. In the night she hears him calling In the night she's dancin' to relieve the pain She'll never walk away I don't think you understand In the night when she comes crawlin' Dollar bills and tears keep fallin' down her face She'll never walk away I don't thin...

  When I was a kid, MTV was just starting out and one of the videos I distinctly remember seeing in those early days was "Ashes to Ashes," from this album.  It looks extremely dated and janky now, but at the time I guess it was super avant garde and artsy. (Two side notes here - MTV went on the air on August 1, 1981, which means they were playing videos from albums that were already a year or more old, which seems bizarre now but I guess makes sense when no one really knew they were supposed to be making videos for songs yet; and David Bowie was 33 years old when he made this, which is much, much younger than I am right now.  Why does he seem so old?  Lana del Rey is older right now than David Bowie was in this video.  Wild.) I think "Ashes to Ashes" is the centerpiece of the album, not only because it's literally in the middle of the album, but because it's between the weirder stuff at the beginning, like "It's No Game (Pt. 1)" and the title t...

  There are so few artists with a truly unique voice.  The kind of artist where, when you hear them, you know it can only be one person.  And I don't necessarily mean "singing voice," although that's sometimes the case (see Cocker, Joe, or Waits, Tom).  I mean an entire style of music, a sound, the whole thing.  Fiona Apple is one of those artists and God bless her for it.  I'll give you an example.  A while back, my wife and I started watching "The Affair" on Showtime (not a terrible show in the first couple of seasons, before it devolved into crazier and crazier shit as finally went madly off the rails) and the show has an arresting and immediately memorable theme song .  I knew the instant I heard it that it was Fiona Apple but had to check anyway because I always doubt myself and of course it was. I really liked this album, from which I had never heard a single track, quite a bit.  It starts off with the title song, which is like the open...

  A little prog for your post-attempted-coup listening, perhaps?  Well here you go.  Wanna know how prog this is?  There are only 3 songs on this album, and one of them is a whole side (albeit in 4 different movements, I guess).   I liked the first 42 seconds a lot, which consists mostly of absolute silence and nature sounds.  The remaining 37 minutes I did not love, but I'm not a huge prog guy.  There's a lot of noodling.  We should also discuss Jon Anderson's voice, which is truly otherworldly in its extremely high pitch and elfin quality.  And the lyrics are very "meditating while focused on a crystal:" The time between the notes relates the color to the scenes A constant vogue of triumphs dislocate man, so it seems And space between the focus shape ascend knowledge of love As song and chance develop time, lost social temperance rules above Ah, ah Then according to the man who showed his outstretched arm to space He turned around and ...

  This seems like a really good album for Will American Democracy Survive Or Not Day because, although I know more about the structure of the atom than I do about jazz, I listened to this twice through in a row yesterday and found it deeply soothing (if a little boring, go ahead and kill me.)  To a total jazz ignorant like myself, it sounds very nice!  Vaguely sitar-y and Beatles-go-to-India-like, which makes sense. But among people who know what they're talking about, this album is not just highly regarded, it is a fucking 10!  Like literally a Pitchfork 10 , which is exquistely rare.  I think the Pitchfork writer had a religious experience: When I finally opened my eyes, a beam of sunshine flooded through my apartment. Like the cascading harp at the center of the album, the sunbeam seemed to say to me that art is the only thing that exists beyond death. Shadows don’t exist without light. Each defines the other. Alice Coltrane made Journey in Satchidananda fro...

  There's something I have alluded to before as we get this project well underway, and that's acknowledging my unfamiliarity, as a middle-aged white guy, with large swaths of current popular music, although I will say that I am way better off than most guys my age.  I regularly score in the 80% range in the Coachella lineup test, which simply asks how many Coachella bands you've heard of.  Now, a lot of guys my age have no idea who many or most of the Coachella artists are, save for the Legacy Act that typically closes the last night, but I actually like listening to new music.  Some of it, anyway.   This is all a roundabout way of saying that until mid-2020 I had never even HEARD of Bad Bunny, which is unusual for me because I know who Lil Pump and Juice WRLD and 100 gecs are.  So some how Bad Bunny fit into that slice of music that was big enough to make an impact on the cultural zeitgeist but somehow totally evaded me.   This did not stop ...

  Otis Redding's last studio album before he died in a plane crash in 1967.  He was 26 years old when he died!  This record has some incredible stuff - like his "Try a Little Tenderness," which I was yesterday years old when I learned is a cover of a Bing Crosby song, of all things - and some far-out-man stuff, like his cover of "Day Tripper" by Lennon & McCartney.  But really, I don't care if it's soul classics or Tin Pan Alley songs or "Happy Birthday," I would listen to Otis Redding sing anything.  That voice is insane. Like all great records, the backing band on this is Booker T. & the MG's.  The talent on this album is so deep that Isaac Hayes is playing piano.  Piano!  That's like having Greg Maddux pitching batting practice. So this is a perfectly good way to ease into what God help us should be a better year.  It's rainy and shitty in San Francisco today and it's a good day to just let this wash over you.  Otis i...