Author: xeyeti

Playlist #226

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Happy Monday, folks! I spent the weekend bouncing between anxiety, a deep well of sadness, and blinding, incandescent rage. Why? No idea. But let’s listen to some music to soothe the soul.

  1. The Mountain Goats, “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”: Early Mountain Goats, while lacking the polish and full band of later releases, is the best Mountain Goats. And this is the best of early Mountain Goats, for the inclusion of the “Hail Satan” near the end if nothing else.
  2. Gov’t Mule, “John the Revelator”: Who knew I’d like Gov’t Mule? Probably a number of people knew this, and they just refused to tell me. I’m disappointed in all of you.
  3. Cassandra Jenkins, “Only Relaxation”: Relaxing, piano-based Americana to soothe the weary soul.
  4. Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control”: And then some new wave, because I like to create those whiplash effects.
  5. Woody Guthrie, “Deportee (Woody’s Home Tape)”: Not for nothin’, but Abrego Kilmar Garcia was immediately detained by ICE again just this morning in Baltimore. They couldn’t even let this dude spend a whole 48 hours out of custody before they just had to grab him again.
  6. Margaret Glaspy, “Jesus, Etc. (Feat. Norah Jones)”: I do love me a Wilco cover.
  7. Josh Ritter, “The Curse”: The saddest song about a mummy coming back to life and then sapping the life energy out of the Egyptologist who found his tomb.
  8. William Elliott Whitmore, “Diggin’ My Grave”: You’ll hear the banjo differently after this song, and that ain’t a bad thing.
  9. The Strumbrellas, “Spirits”: Strummy guitars, shout-along chorus, nifty little piano interlude? Yeah, it’s got all those. Good stuff.
  10. Fleetwood Mac, “Rhiannon”: Do I really need to talk about this song? I can’t imagine that none of you out there in the world haven’t heard this song already.

Playlist #225: Back to School Edition

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Happy Monday, folks! And welcome back to school, students. That’s right, the school year has officially begun in Northern Virginia, marking my 21st year as a teacher. Yup, my career will be old enough to drink this year. That’s terrifying. Let’s get to the playlist.

  1. The Calling, “Let The Day Begin”: As I’ve said in the past, this song is intimately linked in my mind with the start of the school day. It played on the classic rock station every morning right around the time I was headed to school, so it’s kinda irrevocably linked forever to me.
  2. Langhorne Slim, “The House of My Soul (You Light the Room)”: Love playing this song. It’s such a simple chord progression that he manages to squeeze a lot of energy and emotion out of.
  3. Radiohead, “Go To Sleep (Live)”: Live Radiohead is always a fun time, because I’m left wondering how they managed to get the song that appeared on the album (with all its blips and squiggles and beeps) to sound so good live.
  4. Golden Earring, “Twilight Zone”: Man, after spending several weeks not working, being back in the classroom feels more than a little like the Twilight Zone.
  5. The Beatles, “Yer Blues”: So John says, “If I ain’t dead already/Well, you know the reason why,” but do we? Do we really know the reason why, John? Because I don’t think we do.
  6. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, “Casa Dega”: Hearsay and secondhand information lead to heartbreak. Or Heartbreakers.
  7. Pink Floyd, “Pigs (Three Different Ones)”: The repeated “ha-ha, charade you are” line kills me every time. The very British pronunciation of charade (“sha-raad”) makes me giggle.
  8. Elliott Smith, “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands”: Man, I haven’t listened to Elliott Smith in a while. I think fall is the best time to listen to him, and a revisiting of his discography is imminent.
  9. The Lemonheads, “Into Your Arms”: There are a few ’90s songs that are just there for that killer chorus (this one, the La’s “There She Goes,” REM’s “The One I Love,” Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”). Someday I’mma put together that playlist.
  10. Gin Blossoms, “Hey Jealousy”: Speaking of great ’90s songs…

Playlist #224

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Happy Monday, folks. We’re up bright and early today because it’s the first day of teacher in-service week, when they see if they can crush the desire to teach out of us via the medium of meetings. We’ll see if they succeed this year or not.

  1. The Wallflowers, “Some Flowers Bloom Dead”: One of the first Wallflowers songs I tried to learn (after “One Headlight,” of course). The chords are easy enough, as I recall, though I don’t think I ever sang it very well. That has never stopped me from singing a song, though.
  2. Neil Young, “Harvest Moon”: Speaking of songs I don’t sing well, I kinda love this one. It’s a simple love song, but it just sounds so beautiful.
  3. Fleetwood Mac, “Seven Wonders”: ’80s Mac just hits different.
  4. Glen Phillips, “Men Just Leave”: I still love how stripped down and countryish that first Glen Phillips solo album is. Even almost 25 years later, it’s still very immediate and evocative.
  5. Van Morrison, “Once In A Blue Moon”: Mid-2000s Van is a strange beast, taking elements from all the other versions of him that are out there and amalgamating them into something that still feels relevant, joyful, and vital.
  6. The Raconteurs, “Carolina Drama”: Sometimes you’re the preacher man, and sometimes you’re the milkman.
  7. The Band, “Acadian Driftwood”: It’s always interesting hearing about the treatment of Native Americans/Indigenous Americans/First People (depending on where and who you are) in places like Canada, though a lot of it still boils down to, “Same shit, different government.”
  8. Wilco, “Summer Teeth”: A perfect encapsulation of the wanning days of summer.
  9. Old 97s, “Every Night Is Friday Night (Without You)”: Gotta love a shout-along song from these guys. It’s always fun.
  10. The Decemberists, “Sons & Daughters”: It’s so rare that you hear a song sung in the round in this day and age, but they manage to pull it off.

Playlist #223: Tom Waits

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Happy Tuesday, folks! It’s August now, and I have to go back to work next week. Boo. In the meantime, I’ve been listening to a lot of Tom Waits the past couple of days. I figure he’s got several modes, or characters, that he plays in his songs: there’s the junkyard carnival barker, full of weird friends and weirder situations; there’s the jazzy hipster who read Kerouac a few too many times and always wears a damn trilby, regardless of whether it goes with his outfit or not; and there’s the hopeless romantic crooner, sitting at his piano and crying softly into his beer. That last one is the one I’ve been focusing on, and here’s ten of his best.

  1. “(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night”: As good an ode to driving the main drag with your best girl in the seat by your side as any Bruce Springsteen ever wrote. But, whereas the Boss’s odes to the road are always desperate, hopeful paeans to escape and freedom, Tom Waits’ version seems more subdued, more realistic. Monday’s gonna come back around all too soon, so you might as well enjoy the drive and the pool hall while you can.
  2. “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You”: Early tune (from his debut, Closing Time) lamenting how easy it is to fall in infatuation with someone at first sight, and how often such things go disastrously wrong (at least for Tom).
  3. “Tom Traubert’s Blues”: It feels like the cinematic opener for some stage musical. Ane the chorus lifts directly from the old song “Waltzing Matilda” to gorgeous effect.
  4. Shiver Me Timbers”: Who knew a song about being a pirate could be so affecting?
  5. “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”: The best fake-out in musical history: she’s not married, there is no baby, she’s actually in jail and needs to borrow money. Brutal and heartbreaking.
  6. “Hold On”: Probably one of the more optimistic songs in Tom Waits’s catalog.
  7. “Ol’ 55”: Let’s just forget the Eagles’ cover of this one. It doesn’t have a patch on the original ode to a car.
  8. “Jersey Girl”: The best Bruce Springsteen song he never wrote, to the point that folks often think it is a Bruce song and he’s even covered it live on several occasions.
  9. “No One Knows I’m Gone”: A dark meditation on being alone and unnoticed.
  10. “Please Call Me, Baby”: A simple love song, which Waits can drop in the middle of all the carnival japery and found-instrument weirdness like it’s no big deal. Y’know, just a perfect encapsulation of a relationship from out of nowhere, like you do.

Playlist #222

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Happy last Monday in July, folks! August will be here at the end of the week, which means we’ve reached the time of year when I don’t have a paycheck coming in (why the school system still only does teacher paychecks over 11 months instead of 12 is beyond me). So, if anyone wanted to buy a book or a CD to help a guy out, now would definitely be the time!

  1. Tom Lehrer, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”: Man, Tom Lehrer died over the weekend. In other news, holy crap, Tom Lehrer was still alive. Go poison a pigeon in his honor.
  2. The Move, “I Can Hear the Grass Grow”: It’s not hippy-drippy hearing the grass grow, it’s muscular, bottom-heavy rock hearing the grass grow. There is a difference.
  3. Mission of Burma, “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver”: I came to this song through Moby, of all people. The album is from 1981, and sounds like it could’ve come out in 2005 or anytime in between.
  4. Black Sabbath, “War Pigs”: I will forgive this song for rhyming “masses” with “masses,” because even though they are the same exact word, it’s a different meaning in each instance, and it doesn’t feel like Ozzy is rhyming a word with itself.
  5. Big Country, “In A Big Country”: It’s pretty ballsy, naming your biggest hit after your band name, but Big Country manages to pull it off.
  6. The Rolling Stones, “Let It Bleed”: There are just some things we can all agree that we need, including someone we can lean/bleed on. Mick Jagger knew it, and you know it.
  7. Them, “Here Comes the Night”: It’s too loud and nervy to be wistful, too wistful to be punky, and too Van Morrison to ignore.
  8. The Kinks, “Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy”: Everybody clap as fast as you can! No, faster!
  9. Yael Naim, “New Soul”: Remember when this song was used in an ad for the iPod? Remember when there were dedicated music players, separate from our phones? Good times.
  10. The Both, “No Sir”: I’m just a sucker for anything involving Aimee Mann. I’ve come to terms with it, as should you.

Playlist #221

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Happy Monday, folks! After several days of our upstairs neighbors sounding like they were trying to slam their way through the floor into our bedroom (but probably just redoing their flooring, I think), things have quietened down around here, just in time for the wee lad Donovan to come visit. Here’s a playlist.

  1. Queens of the Stone Age, “No One Knows”: Is this the heavy week of songs? ‘Cause this is a pretty heavy song. Kicks some ass. Makes me wish I owned a motorcycle and I could drive it 100 mph down the highway without a helmet on.
  2. Godsmack, “Voodoo”: Yeah, it’s the heavy week! They don’t even say the title of the song until near the very end, but that chorus just rocks.
  3. Lord Huron, “Bag of Bones”: Okay, so maybe calling this “the heavy week” is a bit of a stretch, since this song is pretty hazy and Americana-y. I do like it a lot, though.
  4. Southern Culture on the Skids, “Voodoo Cadillac”: The Regular Joes (Uncle Randy’s old band) used to play this one at their shows, and I’ve always dug it.
  5. The Wallflowers, “Move The River”: I know my brother doesn’t really consider the album this is from to really be a real Wallflowers album, what with it really only featuring Jakob Dylan from among all the folks who’ve ever been in the band, but I still like it.
  6. Matthew Sweet, “Girlfriend”: I always expect the drums to be a fuller, heavier presence in this song than they are, but it’s still a damn good song.
  7. Mike Doughty, “Fort Hood”: Best use of the “Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” chorus that I’ve ever heard.
  8. Jimmy Eat World, “The Middle”: Such a hopeful, upbeat song.
  9. Jason Isbell, “24 Frames”: Such a fuckin’ downer. Also, this album came out ten years ago? It feels like it’s always existed, and Isbell just conjured it into the physical realm.
  10. They Might Be Giants, “Kiss Me, Son of God”: Hey, I can’t help it if everyone thinks I look like Jesus and mistakes me for His second coming. That’s just a side effect of this beard, man.

Playlist #220

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Happy Monday, folks. It’s a stormy one here in Northern Virginia, where we’ve reached the part of the summer when it rains most every afternoon for an hour or so. In unrelated news, I’ve received the edits for Book 8 back from my editor, so I’ll probably sit down sometime in the next couple of weeks and go through those and make the changes so it reads like something that wasn’t written by an unhinged lunatic with a comma addiction. Until then, here’s a playlist.

  1. Andrew Bird, “Frogs Singing”: A quintessential summer song. It always makes me think of a time I was visiting with my great-grandparents and they took me to a church revival at a little country church out in the middle of nowhere, eastern Oklahoma. The place was in a swamp, essentially, and all you could hear were the frogs singing and the cicadas buzzing. That sound was and remains summer to me.
  2. Case/Lang/Veirs, “Atomic Number”: Why does this song always make me feel so sad? Am I just trained to hear Neko Case’s voice and immediately feel like all the good has been sucked out of the universe and right into her vocal chords?
  3. Frank Turner, “Get Better”: A great shout-along song for when the world’s got you down and you feel like, fuck it, I can actually handle everything you’re gonna throw at me.
  4. Josh Ritter, “Getting Ready to Get Down”: If you see me dancing to this song in the car, feel free to dance along. It’s very danceable.
  5. Greg Feldon, “Incoming”: There’s no reason to give up. There’s no reason to give in. Keep your head up and keep fighting. The world will improve.
  6. Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”: The through line from this song to the work of Bruce Springsteen around Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River is just a straight line. I’m not saying Tracy Chapman is the lesbian Bruce Springsteen, but I’m not not saying that, either.
  7. Kris Orlowski, “Go”: There are only a couple of great songs about lighthouses out there in the world. This is one of them, especially the version sung by Glen Phillips.
  8. Van Morrison, “Wild Night”: A song about getting kitted out and going out on the town, as only a young person in their early to mid-twenties could do. I’m too old for that now, I think, but damn if this song doesn’t make me want to give it a try.
  9. James McMurtry, “Just Us Kids”: And then there’s this song to bring me back down to reality and remind me that, no, I’m in my 40s and I have responsibilities, but hey, maybe I can still have some fun if I really put myself out there.
  10. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, “Spike (Live)”: And then there’s this reminder that sometimes when you put yourself out there, you go into a bar and get made fun of so bad by a bunch of old curmudgeons that you just walk out, hitch a ride on the nearest interstate, and never come back ever again. Life’s funny that way.

Playlist #219

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Happy Monday, folks! The ridiculously high temperatures outside persist, but so do I! I kinda have to, since I don’t think I’m allowed to die anytime in the next thirty or so years. Anyway, here’s a playlist.

  1. Rise Against, “Give It All”: How would I describe this one? Emo? Pop-punk? Alternative? I dunno. It’s just a good song, man. We don’t always have to fit everything into these tiny prescriptive boxes.
  2. 10,000 Maniacs, “Trouble Me”: I go through phases where I want my music to sound like someone else’s. Right now, I want my music to sound like 10,000 Maniacs. There are definitely worse sounds.
  3. Noah Kahan & Hozier, “Northern Attitude”: We get it, things in the northern part of the US are darker and colder and sadder and all that. Just move to Phoenix and get on with things, guys.
  4. Mark Knopfler, “Prairie Wedding”: I love the guitar line in this song, and it’s just such a simple, beautiful song about the power of Mark Knopfler’s letter-writing skills. How else did he convince a woman to move to the barren west and marry him?
  5. Gorillaz, “Some Kind of Nature (Featuring Lou Reed)”: Gotta love a song that uses Lou Reed’s raspy talking as a selling point.
  6. The Gaslight Anthem, “Biloxi Parish”: There’s something nostalgic and sad underlying this song, which is something you could say about a great number of the Gaslight Anthem’s songs.
  7. HAIM, “Now It’s Time”: It uses U2’s “Numb” as a basis, but goes in a totally different direction. Pretty neat.
  8. Murder By Death, “Believe”: Great band, weird name. Not a death metal band, as you may be thinking. Folky alternative.
  9. The Offspring, “Self Esteem”: The sneering “na-na”s in this song are just great.
  10. Enya, “Orinoco Flow”: Apparently she came up with this song after her A&R guy said, “I don’t hear a single.” Enya said, “Oh yeah? Bet,” and came back a couple weeks later with this song. She is now living the dream, only recording when she feels like it, rarely touring, and just hanging out in her freakin’ castle with her cats. We should all be so lucky.

Playlist #218

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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.

Playlist #217: Summertime

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Happy Monday! It’s all officially summer now, what with the summer solstice occurring late last week, so let’s look at some of my favorite songs about summer and summer-related stuff.

  1. Don Henley, “Boys of Summer”: Did you know the Ataris did a cover of this song, only instead of a “Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac” it’s a “Black Flag sticker” on the Caddy? I’m pretty sure the Venn Diagram of people who drive Cadillacs and people who would put a Black Flag sticker on their car has zero overlap.
  2. Mungo Jerry, “In the Summertime”: It’s all loosey-goosey and jugbandy. Feels like the most casual, tossed-off thing in the world, which is perfect for summer. We’ll just ignore the bit about, “If her daddy’s rich, taker her out for a meal/If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel,” which feels a little like Mungo Jerry and his ridiculous hair ought to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
  3. Sublime, “Doin’ Time”: Ever heard a ’90s alt-punk band borrow liberally from Gershwin? Well, you have now! And it actually works surprisingly well.
  4. Glen Phillips, “Winter Pays For Summer”: I rather like the idea that the reward for dealing with the season you don’t like is the season you do like. The winter, that is, pays for the summer, though in my case I think it works the opposite (I hate summer heat. I should escape to cooler climes, but I’m pretty locked-in here in Fairfax County).
  5. Wilco, “Summer Teeth”: Does the title make any sense? Does it matter if it does? Not even a little. This bright bite of poppy bubblegum is from the similarly-named album Summerteeth, which is likewise full of Brian Wilson-esque tunes to bop along to as a summer night stretches out before you.
  6. Better Than Ezra, “Summerhouse”: It’s about a summer house, but more accurately it’s about a murder that no one really seems to care about. So it goes.
  7. Iron & Wine, “Summer in Savannah”: From that weird, experimental period where Iron & Wine tried to pretend they weren’t an old-timey string band sort of thing and were just a bunch of synth nerds. You can be both, Sam Beam. You can be both.
  8. The Head and the Heart, “Summertime”: With enough reverb on the guitar for a Ventures solo and enough yearning to make Brian Wilson blush.
  9. The Beach Boys, “Fun, Fun, Fun”: We’ve already established that the Beach Boys were the quintessential band of summer, and “Fun, Fun, Fun” is one of their absolute best summertime tunes. Joyriding in a T-Bird? Saying you’re going to the library when you’re going out cruising? It’s such a time capsule of the early 1960s. I can just see Harrison Ford and Opie searching for the Wolfman while this song plays.
  10. Ray LaMontagne, “Summer Clouds”: A wistful, finger-picked ballad that feels like a Sunday morning in October kind of song, a longing remembrance of the past.