Music Diary, Vol. 7

For the rationale behind this mad effort, the initial post is here. The full series of Music Diary posts are here. The full playlist is above, and also here.

Week of Feb. 19-25, 2024

Lyrics: Alec Benjamin, "Mind Is a Prison"

Song: A major-7th chord can convey bruised, bittersweet yearning like no other. Consider the protest-too-much 12-bar chorus of this shattering Matthew Sweet tune, which leans into a delicious Amaj7 on the words "love," "loved," and "okay."

Album: Some of The Millennium’s sole album from 1968 sounds like a library music version of psychedelic pop, but at its best it really is the ahead-of-its-time lost classic its adherents claim. Its rhythm tracks alone are a least a decade early.

Lyrics: R.E.M., "Seven Chinese Brothers"

Song: Come for Rhiannon Giddens killing it on banjo, stay for the Def Leppard call-out and the whistling break. I guess it's too early for this to be the song of the summer; I welcome the sunshine in any case.

Album: I was already a Dawn Upshaw fan when this perfect record of music-theater (mostly) deep cuts came out 30 years ago. Eric Stern deserves some credit for curation, but for the performances—well, it’s Upshaw’s world and we’re just listening in it.

Lyrics: Laura Marling, "Strange Girl"

Song: One thing you can say for him: Billy Joel still knows how to pump the old heart-tugger chords (in this case, especially the major-3rd-to-minor-6th turn). By now this past master of pastiche is just riffing on himself, but I'd say he's earned it.

Album: The portmanteau genre that Korean songwriter Mid-Air Thief has been tagged with is folktronica, but what I hear on their beguiling 2015 debut is rackety-but-goes-down-smooth acoustic jazz/pop; you might call it bossa supernova.

Lyrics: César Alvarez, "Every Egg Broke"

Song: No one can cloak a sarcastic, even vicious lyric in sweetness like Paul Simon, as on this triple-time gospel-style ode to divorce. It's not all icy putdown, though; movingly, he implicates himself and gets convincingly worked up.

Album: I could say that the 7 tracks Caroline Polachek added for the new "Everasking Edition" of her 2023 masterpiece DESIRE, I WANT TO TURN INTO YOU deepen or reframe the original record, but really, it's just another excuse to bask again in its grandeur.

Lyrics: Rufus Wainwright, "Damned Ladies"

Song: Somehow both sultry and ice-cold, this jazzy Margo Guryan kiss-off about the uselessness of men is pure Peggy Lee. While it amuses me to imagine an alternate reality in which Lee covered it, Guryan sounds so much like Lee, it's as if she did. (Correction: It's not Margo on vocals but her friend Nina Landenbaum.)

Album: The mention of her name in passing in PUBLIC OBSCENITIES last night was enough to send me back to the music of the iconic Lata Mangeshkar, whose bright, supple voice is just one of the attractions of her sumptuously orchestrated Bollywood pop.

Lyrics: Barbra Streisand (Jones/Schmidt), "Soon It's Gonna Rain"

Song: I remember loving the falsetto melancholy and tortured metaphors of this gorgeous, dippy Bread tune when I was a tween; heard again all these years later I’m moved anew by its descending bass, sad chords, and apocalyptic ending.

Album: Joan Armatrading isn’t given her due as a singer, songwriter, or record maker. To my ears this rangy 1976 album, which alternates introspective ballads with gritty rock and soul, belongs in the conversation with Joni or Springsteen.

Lyrics: Lightnin' Hopkins, "It's a Sin to Be Rich, It's a Low-Down Shame to Be Poor"

Song: One of Lily Boulanger's last works, this setting of a Buddhist prayer for the universe sounds both of its time (the whole tone scale and delicate orchestration strongly evoke Debussy) and blessedly suspended in time and space.

Album: Alice Coltrane recorded these songs in Sanskrit for a cassette given to students of L.A.'s Vedantic Center's Avatar Book Institute, and the modesty and purity of that devotional intention shines through in her gospel-inflected organ and vocals.