Seven Song Spin: A Weekly Playlist

One of the missions, if not the prime directive, of this blog is to direct you, dear reader, to music I love that you may be unfamiliar with or have forgotten about. That's certainly the brief behind my Private Canon series. But I have so much more music I want to share than I can cover in depth, so I'm planning to drop a weekly playlist for you every Monday of songs I recommend, with a short precis for each rather than an extensive analysis. The more the merrier, I say.

The full playlist below can be found here.

Folk Lounge Fix: I discovered this Claudio Villa gem on the soundtrack of the masterful Stanley Tucci joint Big Night, in which the Italian singer takes a sunny folk tune, "Tic Ti Tic Ta," and gives it an almost suspenseful rockabilly/Big Band spin—listen for the stab of trombone at the top of each chorus.

Classical Banger: Everyone knows Carmina Burana for its ubiquitous dramatic opener "O Fortuna," but "Uf Dem Anger, Tanz" was probably the first piece I heard from it—this headlong instrumental interlude was a sort of theme for the classical radio station in Phoenix, KHEP, when I was a kid. I still get a rush from it.

Sneaky Soul Cut: I have to thank my friend Cinco Paul for turning me onto the shape-shifting pop polymath Richard Swift, who on many of his other tracks sounds a bit like a groovier version of Badly Drawn Boy, but on this amazing track sounds uncannily like a '60s soul singer. Actually, he sounds like two different singers: Listen for the change in vocal register from angelic falsetto to a kind of Dylanesque growl. It's a song as weird as it is smooth—a pretty unusual combo. (It's not Swift himself in the official video below, by the way; here he is performing the song live.)

Guitar Power Pop: Another artist Cinco turned me onto, who deserves her own post, is Britpop six-string genius Charlotte Hatherley, who until her recent turn to electronica turned out three great records of electric guitar-based rock/pop. Honestly there's not a bad track on Grey Will Fade, New Worlds, or The Deep Blue, and while she's best known for the slipped-time-signature rocker "Bastardo" (the one Cinco shared with me), "White," from New Worlds, is also a fine intro to her characteristic mix of sleek and gritty, pop and rock. Honestly, if you were to cook up a sound in a lab to align perfectly with a large portion of my taste, you could hardly do better. (Also, how great is this video?)

Guitar Power Pop II: A friend told me I might like Adia Victoria because she reminded him a bit of Kurt Weill. Sort of? What I hear, especially on her album Beyond the Bloodhounds, is another mix of tuneful vocal pop over electric guitar crunch—this really is a sweet spot for me. (Her more recent album, Silences, mostly abandons the guitar sound, except for this magnificent single.) The alternately angry and plaintive "Sea of Sand" is one I keep returning to.

Sweet-and-Sour Showtune: "The Road You Didn't Take" from Sondheim's Follies has always moved me, even if it does increasingly sound like a young man's idea of old age—he wrote it when he was 41, and I grew to love it in my 20s. It's not that he got anything wrong exactly, especially the part about the "blessed peace" that comes with waning ambition; it's that the song's bitter, protest-too-much dismissal of regret feels less like breaking news to me now. And of course there are other conflicts and strivings, as well as compensations, that arise as middle age encroaches that this song doesn't pretend to touch. Still, the glinting dissonances over the whirling arpeggios, the tender orchestration, and the wizened edge in John McMartin's voice—it still gets me, in more ways than one.

Haunted Lullaby: Elvis Costello's forays into the classical realm didn't just include his underrated string quartet album and his slightly awkward ballet; he also made For the Stars, an alternately stiff and inspired "crossover" album with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. Apart from a cracking mash-up of Tom Waits's "Broken Bicycles" and Paul McCartney's "Junk," and Otter's languid take on "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)", it's mostly not a must album...except for von Otter's simple, transcendent cover of a late Abba track, "Like an Angel Passing Through My Room." Honestly, this song is so painfully beautiful in its marriage of words and music, voice and piano, that I find it best to save it for the end of a listening day. It really does stir something in me, and I hope it does in you too.