Friday Playlist
Last week I was struggling to find music. This week I have too much. Time for me to put on my editing hat as I put this playlist together.
“9 to 5” - Dolly Parton I laughed when S came home earlier this week with a glorious Dolly Parton shirt one of her partners had purchased for their group. She told me they were all wearing them today, since it is 9/25. Get it, 9-2-5? I checked and apparently this is a national thing, not officially sanctioned (of course).
“PBJ” - Kevin Morby Kevin does not miss. This is a leftover from the sessions for this year’s Little Wide Open that did not make the final track list. He just released it as a bonus track. It is wonderful.
“Spilt Milk” - Kate Nash Nash’s new album is a celebration of her Irish heritage, owing a lot to Sinéad O’Connor. Here she harnesses O’Connor’s anger and focuses it on how women’s voices are often ignored, especially when it comes to allowing them to make decisions for what to do with their own bodies.
“Ready! Steady! Go!” - Perennial NOT a cover of the Generation X song. This band should also not be confused with the wonderful Perennials.
“Rings of Saturn” - Soccer Mommy WAY better than “Drops of Jupiter.”
“Hand To The Flame” - GIFT Nothing wrong with this kind of danceable indie rock.
“RACER #23” - The High Curbs Dial the dance down a couple notches and the garage punk up a couple notches.
“Tom Will Smack Your Ass” - Sorry Worth inclusion for its title alone.
“Bird Laugh” - mildred I haven’t used the Country Or Not label in quite some time. Let’s bring it back for this. Twangy? Absolutely. But with a ragged, 2010s slacker rock vibe beneath. Plus the band is from Oakland, so can they really be called country? Regardless of where you think they fall, this is a twangy track I can get on board with. And lines up with the much cooler weather we’ve had this week perfectly.
“Flawed” - Swervedriver Swervedriver is about to tour with the focus on the tracks from the 1991 debut album Raise. With that tour comes an expanded edition of Raise that features pretty much everything they recorded before its release. This track appeared on one of their early EPs and on a 2020 rarities collection. However, the demo serves as the lead single for the newest album. You can hear where they were headed over their brief, early Nineties peak.
“Open Letter (To A Landlord)” - Living Colour Always happy when Shuffle spits out an awesome song like this I haven’t heard in too long.
“Promises, Promises” - Naked Eyes Pete Byrne, lead singer of Naked Eyes, died this week. Like a lot of artists of the New Wave era, it is weird to think of him as being 74 when he died, and to see pictures of him performing late in life. Unlike the Duran Durans and other bands that stayed in the public eye beyond the Eighties, most of us lost touch with Byrne in 1984 or 1985. Of course he aged, but to our minds he was frozen in his boyish look of his music videos.
The band’s cover of Burt Bacharach’s “Always Something There To Remind Me” was their biggest hit here, making it to #8. But I always preferred this follow up that peaked at #11 in the summer of ’83. Interestingly, Bacharach also wrote a song called “Promises, Promises,” but this was an NE original. I’ve always enjoyed the track’s surprisingly funky bass. RIP.