Happy Monday, folks! Summer proceeds apace, and we have air conditioning again, thank God. I was not doing well in those higher temperatures we were experiencing last week, let me tell you. Anyway, here’s some songs.

1. Bruce Springsteen, “Shut Out the Light”: Been slowly working my way through Tracks II the past few days, and I know it’s cliche at this point but holy crap, Bruce throws out entire albums he’s not completely satisfied with? Which makes me wonder what possessed him to release High Hopes (zing!).
2. Wilco, “Hell is Chrome (Live)”: A new live Wilco set just dropped, but most of what it did was remind me that I really do not remember many Wilco songs after about Sky Blue Sky. These are good songs, expertly performed, but they all feel pretty damn ephemeral to me, just background noise as I go about my day. This song, from A Ghost is Born, still slaps, though.
3. James McMurtry, “South Texas Lawman”: A new James McMurtry album is a cause for celebration. He does one about 9/11 and W on here, and even though that’s only about a quarter century late it still feels entirely too relevant given the current tensions in the Middle East with another country whose name starts with an “I.” But that’s not this song. This is a country rocker about a lawman who wants to retire to the beach.
4. Murder by Death, “Believe”: These guys just hit that dopamine button in my brain and make me wanna pick up my guitar and just strum the hell out of a couple of songs.
5. Better Than Ezra, “Desperately Wanting”: There’s more to this song than the chorus, but all you really want to sing is the chorus part. The band gets that. They keep the verses short.
6. Adeem the Artist, “Cowards Together”: I wish more country artists had the guts to be as open about who they are as Adeem the Artist, the cast-iron pansexual who pens such beautiful songs about not wanting to fight.
7. The Wallflowers, “It’s A Dream”: My brother dismisses Glad All Over as “the Wallflowers just trying to sound like the Clash, but we’ve already got the Clash at home,” but I think it plays enough with the usual Wallflowers formula to keep them fresh and interesting and it’s still one of my go-to driving albums.
8. Jack Johnson, “Taylor”: I remember, back in college, hearing a solo acoustic demo of this song around the time his debut, Brushfire Fairytales, came out, and I loved it. The version included on On and On is still plenty good, mind you, but I’ve been sorely tempted to go digging and see if I can find that original version again.
9. Counting Crows, “Untitled (Love Song)”: “Throw your arms around my neck” is actually a pretty good chorus, actually.
10. Aimee Mann, “Columbus Avenue”: Aimee Mann makes me nostalgic for college. Not because I listened to her stuff in college – I was stick pretty deep in the Bob Dylan thing back then – but just the tone of it seems to evoke a nostalgia in me, and when I feel nostalgic, that’s the time I think of. I feel like I could walk the streets of Clarksville at midnight with this song on repeat on the discman and all would be, if not quite right with the world, at least bearable and acceptable.