Seven Song Spin: Themeless Enthusiasm

It's been a while since I logged in here, and a while since my last playlist. I don't have any particular theme to organize this new list of tunes, just that I like them all and they have either recently come to my attention or resurfaced in my pantheon.

The complete playlist can be found here.

The liger's mouth: I discovered the Kiwi genius Kimbra entirely thanks to an episode of Strong Songs about her infernally catchy "Cameo Lover,"  from her 2011 debut album, Vows. I've since devoured the whole thing—there's really not a bad track on it—and also enjoyed her subsequent two records. The song that sealed it for me (in addition to "Cameo Lover," "Settle Down," and "Plain Gold Ring") is the retro noir trifle "Good Intent," which quotes a horn figure from Tom Waits' "Down in the Hole", features a Marc Ribot-worthy guitar solo, and shows a flash of Shirley Bassey diva spice (listen for "Down your wishing well" at 2:54) but is otherwise all Kimbra's own. Most of her songs are more ambitious formally but this one is just so confidently itself, it's perfection.

A place at my table: I have to also credit Strong Songs for this recommendation, though it was simply an offhand mention and clip from host Kirk Hamilton. Meklit, as she sings in this stirring triple-meter track, is an "Ethio-jazz" artist in the lineage of Mulatu Astatke, whom she name-checks in this tribute to her elders, "I Want to Sing for Them All." Andrew Bird is plucking away as she gives honor to an eclectic pantheon including, aside from Astatke, Michael Jackson, Prince, Mahmoud Ahmed, John Coltrane, Mary Armeday, Muluken Melesse, and Leonard Cohen, from whom she learned "words are your currency."

Nickname for life: This recommendation came via Carlo Lorenzo Garcia on Twitter, and it was dead-on for me. The Canadian singer/songwriter Andy Shauf makes the sort of smart, slouchy, vaguely old-timey folk pop I love (and have often made). The opener on his 2015 record Bearer of Bad News, "Hometown Hero," is irresistible.

Gonna breathe until you're gone: In a long line of jangly-guitar-wielding lady songwriters I've recently fallen for, Jay Som may be my favorite, and the jazz-chordy yet infectiously poppy "Superbike" was the song that closed the deal.

Road trip: For a recent long drive, I asked through my social media accounts for tracks I would consider "classical bangers"—i.e., orchestral works that demand to be played LOUD. (I gave this as my prototypical example.) Along with some great warhorses I also got this extraordinary recommendation from Heather Sommerlad, who told me that Maias Alaymani & the Qatar Philharmonic's "Longa Nahawand," an orchestration of a traditional Arabic tune, is one she always includes on her party playlists. I want to go to those parties!

This worthless lullaby: My old friend Laurel Green has lived in Nashville for years and is a good line to the hipper new country sounds. She turned me on to Logan Ledger, a Chris Isaak-esque crooner with an unapologetically throwback sound. Some of his stuff sounds like old-time country but a fair amount of it verges on '60s pop/rock in the Box Tops vein, as does "I Don't Dream Anymore."

No control and a crystal soul: Speaking of Nashville, it was its foremost chronicler, Tyler Mahan Coe, who turned me onto the genius of Bobbie Gentry with this epic episode, and in particular he made a case for her brilliant album The Delta Sweete, which he memorably described as "if the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper had fought for the Confederacy." I just discovered, btw, that this epochal record was released literally on my birthday in 1968—a bit of synchronicity akin to that relayed in her spine-tinglingly beautiful and eerie tune "Refractions." I dare you to make it to the end of this floating nightmare of a song without feeling a chill.