It’s been a good week or two and my new music folder is getting filled up again, making it more difficult to pick what to share than to scare up enough songs to share. It helps we have an anniversary song, an old song that is new to me, a new version of an old song, and a calendar song all in this week’s PL.

“September” – Earth, Wind & Fire
It’s that time of year, y’all!

“BLACK DOG / WHITE HOUSE” – BIG SPECIAL
ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME!!!! Despite being about deep depression and all that comes with it, this is a pretty cool song.

“Crystals” – Sea Lemon featuring Benjamin Gibbard
A near-perfect modern shoegaze track, and Gibbard’s contribution surprisingly excellent.

“Hard to Accept” – Trace Mountains
“Eating the Whole Egg” – Wild Pink
These two The War on Drugs adjacent bands continue to impress with advance tracks from their new albums. Each of these hits a different side of the TWOD sound here. Trace Mountains release their album next Friday, Wild Pink the week after that. Good fall music.

“NEW MOON (DARK PHASE)” – Duran Duran
Again with the CAPS. While making their upcoming album, DD messed around with this classic, adjusting it to fit the sound of their new music. I’m not sure if I like it that much – “New Moon on Monday” is my favorite of their songs – but when the second chorus hits, I admit it does get me interested. Andy Taylor, who is no longer officially part of the group, contributed to this track. I don’t know if that means they used something he played on the original or he actually re-recorded something for them.

“Alligator” – Of Monsters and Men
I heard this sometime this week on The Bridge and was bummed to learn that it is five years old, and not a new song that they will be playing a lot.

“Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” – Arcade Fire
Twenty years ago this week AF released their debut album Funeral. When I listed my ten most influential albums during Covid, it was on there. It was the first album of the MP3 Blog era that I discovered via the new wave of music websites. There are better songs on the disk. But this was the one that appeared on pretty much every music site that fall. When you would scroll through sites like The MP3 Machine, that aggregated what dozens/hundreds of blogs were posting, this showed up over-and-over. It took me a while to get into it, but eventually it clicked with me and led me to getting Funeral later in 2004.

“Strut” – Sheena Easton
I’ve been reluctant to include any ’84 videos from songs I’ve written about in RFTS. But this week the pickings were a little slim and this became my default selection. At #40, on its way to #7. I looked ahead, and starting next week through the end of the year, pretty much every week has some amazing choices. There are a couple weeks where I may have to double-up because there are three legendary songs in the bottom ten. Our late summer lull is over!