gordon lightfoot

Playlist #255

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Happy Monday, folks! We’ve got a three-hour early release due to a Death Storm headed our way this afternoon. How about some tunes to get us through the tornados?

  1. Bedouine, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and Waxahatchee, “Thirteen”: I swear, I think I have more covers of this song than just about any other. There’s something about it that just attracts musicians to it like honey. It is a fabulous song, mind, and every version I’ve ever heard of it is just different enough from each other and the original to be worth listening to. I guess Big Star is the Velvet Underground of power pop.
  2. Bruce Springsteen, “A Rainy Night In Soho”: A Pogues cover that makes Bruce Springsteen sound like Tom Waits. I can dig that.
  3. The Gray Charlies, “Nothing Matters”: Alright, lemme brag on my brother for a minute: Clyde has put together an EP of songs that are phenomenally crafted and expertly recorded. They sound remarkable. I wrote the lyrics for all of them, but don’t hold that against the band. This is the first single, available now, and I recommend you go give it a listen. It’s gorgeous!
  4. Gordon Lightfoot, “Sundown”: Canadian crooner compels compatriots to cease convening conveniently close to his casa.
  5. Lord Huron, “The Night We Met”: Apparently the song the band is most famous for, thanks to its inclusion in some teen drama on CW or something. I dunno, it’s a great song off a great album.
  6. Neko Case, “This Tornado Loves You”: Someone was asking me about the difference between a Tornado Watch and a Tornado Warning this morning, as we’ll be under at least one of those this afternoon. A Watch is when conditions are suited to the formation of a tornado, and a Warning is when tornados are imminent or possibly already making touchdown nearby. In either case, listen for the sirens and get someplace safe if you hear ’em.
  7. Jimi Hendrix, “The Wind Cries Mary”: There’s a chance of high winds even without tornados this afternoon, though I hear they’ve been downgraded from “hurricane-strength” to merely “Oklahoma breeze.”
  8. Tom Waits, “A Little Rain”: This was the sort of Tom Waits song I was talking about above when I was talking about that Bruce Springsteen song. It’s great.
  9. Calexico, “Not Even Stevie Nicks”: Man, not even Stevie Nicks? Not even her? Not even with all the scarves and diaphanous pieces of fabric draped across everything? Fuck.
  10. Stabbing Westward, “Violent Mood Swings”: If this doesn’t get your blood pumping, please check that you still have a pulse.

Playlist #237: Wrecks

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

Happy Monday, folks. We’ve got a short week this week, what with Veterans Day happening tomorrow, but we’ve also got a historically-based playlist for you today. Starting with:

  1. Gordon Lightfoot, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: Fifty years ago today, the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, taking twenty-nine men with it. Lightfoot apparently wrote and recorded the song just a month later, and it was released in August of 1976, giving him the biggest hit of his career.
  2. Tom Petty, “You Wreck Me”: Is there a better Tom Petty album than Wildflowers? If so, I haven’t heard it (and neither, I’d assume, has anyone else, ’cause this is clearly his best album). That chorus is so good to sing along to.
  3. Pearl Jam, “Wreckage”: Pearl Jam’s latest studio album included this gem, an acoustic-based song that stands as one of the best they’ve written in the past fifteen, twenty years.
  4. Bruce Springsteen, “Wrecking Ball”: It’s a song about Giants Stadium in New Jersey. They were about to tear it down, and the Boss had to write a song in ode to it. It’s one of his better latter-day songs.
  5. George Harrison, “Wreck of the Hesperus”: Based on a Wordsworth poem about a shipwreck? Or a Procol Harum song of the same name? I dunno. It’s mostly George Harrison lamenting getting older, but still being able to rock out. It’s chock-full o’ puns, which is one of my favorite forms of song lyrics.
  6. Loose Fur, “Wreckroom”: Look, Loose Fur is weird. Just…really weird. But also nifty. Mostly weird.
  7. They Might Be Giants, “Wreck My Car”: Please do not wreck someone else’s car, even if they ask you to. That’s probably insurance fraud, and you don’t wanna be involved in that.
  8. Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs, “Wreckless Abandon”: Mike Campbell’s solo work is more workmanlike than anything he did with the Heartbreakers, but c’mon, not everyone is a songwriting dynamo like Tom Petty was.
  9. Emmylou Harris, “Wrecking Ball”: A different “Wrecking Ball” than the Bruce Springsteen one. It’s a beautiful song, though.
  10. Wreckless Eric, “Whole Wide World”: Featured to great effect in the movie Stranger than Fiction, it’s one of those three-chord garage rock songs that you can learn in two minutes and play all by yourself forever. We recommend turning the amplifier way up for this one.