It’s Monday again, somehow. Time continues forward. SOL testing starts this week at my school, so we’re stuck in one class each day for two periods instead of one. I’m thinking the kids are gonna get real sick of my dad jokes before that time ends.

1. Dire Straits, “Your Latest Trick”: It’s one of those classic ’80s songs with saxophone solos in it.
2. Elvis Presley, “Run On”: I’d only ever heard the Johnny Cash (and, by extension, the Gaslight Anthem) version of this song, which is slower and more menacing. Elvis’s version sounds like a tent revival on speed.
3. Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, “Just Dropping In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”: Kentucky-Fried Kenny was apparently a bit…psychedelic back in the day? I somehow never realized he’d done this song, but it’s groovy.
4. Drive-By Truckers, “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”: I love story songs, and ones based on reality (Carl Perkins really did win a Cadillac from Sam Phillips) are just always pretty great. And no one really does them better these days than the Drive-By Truckers, who have such an eye (and ear) for detail.
5. Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins, “Born Secular”: Such a sad, deep song, driven by that drum machine loop and the big chords on the piano. There really isn’t a bad song on that album.
6. Nanci Griffith, “This Old Town”: Oklahoma is littered with towns like the ones this song is about: small, isolated communities that should have shut down years ago, shoud’ve become ghost towns a dozen times over, but still somehow cling to life and continued existence. Most of them are built around the local public school, actually.
7. Tom Petty, “Crawling Back to You (Alternate Version)”: The original version of this song remains one of the absolute best on his best album, Wildflowers. This alternate take feels looser and somehow sadder.
8. Bruce Springsteen, “O Mary Don’t You Weep”: The Seeger Sessions collection is such a strange aberration in Springsteen’s catalog. It’s loose and celebratory and fun, without the dozens of layers of post-production and overdubs and the agonizing over mixing and mastering that usually accompanies a Bruce production.
9. Van Morrison, “Almost Independence Day”: While the guitar riff sounds almost like “Wish You Were Here,” the song’s other Pink Floyd connection is the length – it’s over ten minutes – if not the thematic content. Van sorta goes on a rambling, stream-of-consciousness sort of thing over the course of the song, but it sounds amazing. The low buzzsaw of that keyboard (or is it a cello or a double bass? I honestly don’t know) that cuts through occasionally gets me every time, and I wish I could figure out how he got that tone out of it and how I could duplicate it.
10. Collective Soul, “Shine”: So apparently the entire album this song is off of was just the demos the lead singer did on his own, playing all the instruments himself. The little “yeah” before the chorus was sung through a toilet paper roll, which is a hilarious bit of trivia with which to impress your friends.