sturgill simpson

Playlist #133

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

Happy Monday, folks! We’re closing in on Thanksgiving Break, a time when I won’t have to go to school for several days straight and will most likely wreck my sleep schedule. But so it goes! Here’s this week’s playlist for your listening pleasure.

  1. Noah Kahan and Hozier, “Northern Attitude”: So I was reading a thing that talked about Noah Kahan and referred to him as “Vermont Hozier,” and that piqued by interest. His style is different than Hozier’s, more earthy and folky. But I’m down with that. This is a duet he did with Hozier.
  2. Brian Fallon, “Forget Me Not”: I just love the way he shouts “Stacy!” at the beginning of each verse. Cracks me up every time.
  3. The Smashing Pumpkins, “Today”: I can only handle Billy Corrigan’s singing voice in small doses, but this song ain’t so bad.
  4. Iron & Wine, “Call It Dreaming”: The outro to this song reminds me very much of the Elton John song “Levon” for reasons I cannot really explain.
  5. Jackson Browne, “Downhill From Everywhere”: It’s a song about saving the oceans.
  6. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “A Thing About You”: I just love the energy of this song, and the guitar solo is one of the more raucous ones ever committed to Heartbreakers tape.
  7. Waxahatchee, “Sparks Fly”: I like how deceptively simple their songs are. There’s more detail and intricacy to them than it appears at first listen.
  8. Wilco, “I Might”: I feel like The Whole Love is an underrated Wilco album, if such things even exist. It’s not the first one I’ll reach for when I’m in a Wilco mood, but it’s definitely in the top five or six.
  9. Tom Waits, “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought Six”: “Gonna whittle you into kindlin'” is just such a baller line.
  10. Sturgill Simpson, “Keep It Between The Lines”: I’ve liked everything I’ve ever heard by this guy, but A Sailor’s Guide to Earth is still his best, I think.

Playlist #2

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

Here’s this week’s playlist. I was feeling a little more melancholy this week than last, which I feel is reflected in the selections.

  1. Josh Ritter, “Come and Find Me”: Pretty sure most of this song is just a G chord with little variations to keep it interesting.
  2. The Lemonheads, “Into Your Arms”: One of my team teachers loves the Lemonheads (she’s seen them in concert dozens if not hundreds of times) and I learned how to play this song on the guitar for her. It’s a good and simple song.
  3. The Low Millions, “Eleanor”: Did you know Leonard Cohen’s son had a band? And it was this band? And they never put out another album other than the one this song is on? It’s all true.
  4. The Marshall Tucker Band, “Can’t You See”: I’m a sucker for songs with a real simple chord progression, and this one is just D, C, G, D the entire way through. That’s it. No variation, no chorus, nothing but those three chords.
  5. The National, “90-Mile Water Wall”: My favorite part of this early song from the National is that you can hear the lead singer breathing into the microphone if you listen for it.
  6. Neko Case, “Margaret and Pauline”: Such a beautiful song and character sketch. The juxtaposition of the two characters is sad and gorgeous.
  7. Sturgill Simpson, “Keep It Between the Lines”: Part of the album Simpson wrote ostensibly as advice to his newly-born child, this one advises the listener to, “Stay in school/stay off the hard stuff and/keep it’ tween the lines.” Good advice for anyone, really.
  8. Uncle Tupelo, “High Water”: There was a time in graduate school where I became more than a little obsessed with everything even tangentially related to the band Wilco, which included Jeff Tweedy’s original band Uncle Tupelo. This song, from their fourth and final album, is a good indicator of why I liked them so much if not really representative of what they did as a band (think “punk country” or “alt-country,” if you will).
  9. Van Morrison, “Wonderful Remark”: Specifically, the version from the Philosopher’s Stone collection of outtakes and rarities. The original version is awesome, too, though this one somehow feels more striped down without the overwhelming piano of the original (and this one has flute).
  10. Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, “Friends”: Ryan Adams, I think we can all agree, has some problems. Dude is terrible to women and suffers from diarrhea of the recording studio (remember those times he put out three albums in a single calendar year? Yeah, I said times, plural, ’cause he’s done it more than once). But this song, from the double-album Cold Roses (which I still insist would have made one of the finest single albums of his career if he’d just cut some of the fat from the two-disc set), is still one of the best he’s ever written or committed to tape.