Music Diary, Vol. 13

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 April 1-7, 2024

LYRIC: Beyoncé, "Daughter"

SONG: I revere the Ronstadt version, of course, but I’ve soft spot for this Billy Bragg cover of Anna McGarrigle’s searing heartbreaker, which follows the original lyrics more closely and adds a literal lump-in-the-throat sound to the song’s yearning.

ALBUM: There’s no use pretending it wasn’t Ms. Knowles’s new record that led to me to the excellent 1970 debut of Black country pioneer Linda Martell. A countrybilly delight, it’s also the bittersweet sound of a road not taken.

LYRIC: Elvis Costello & the Brodsky Quartet, "I Thought I'd Write to Juliet"

SONG: The Scherzo from “Eroica” has long been a favorite, and this ebullient Liszt piano transcription captures its perfect blend of knotty and propulsive, dense and dancing. If it’s possible for a piece of music to laugh, this does.

ALBUM: Sometimes you don't know how much you need a balm till you apply it. That's definitely how I feel every time I spin this transcendent collection of Hawaiian slack key guitar, a river of sound I'm always happy to sail away on.

LYRIC: David Bowie, "When I Live My Dream"

SONG: The mesmerizing, shoegaze-adjacent closer of Sinéad’s debut album has always sounded to me a bit like Patti Smith going metal at 16 rpm.

ALBUM: Oddly enough (or not), the epochal 1958 German recording of Brecht and Weill’s DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER was my true gateway to full-blown Weill-mania. As I wrote some years ago, I blame (thank) the Hawaiian guitar. #dailyalbum 

LYRIC: Bradley Kincaid, "Barbara Allen"

SONG: Power pop fans who don’t know the Spinto Band, what are you waiting for? This chiming plea makes an ideal intro.

ALBUM: A scalding, invigorating bath; the sound of synapses firing, anxiously but purposefully; a swarm of bees learning to sing; folk music from the future—please forgive my attempts to describe this formidable collection of Bartók’s string quartets.

LYRIC: Johnny Paycheck, "Take This Job and Shove It"

SONG: Elvis Costello’s vocal vibrato has widened with age, not always to ideal effect, but on this cover of an Italian standard with the Spanish pop star Vega, it is ideally suited to the song and the Romance language.

ALBUM: In addition to its many appealing Sade-esque jazz/R&B sonic textures, what really powers this new record by Cuban singer Daymé Arocena is her ace sense of harmony, both vocal and compositional. I expect a Jacob Collier collab any day now.

LYRIC: Prince, "Sometimes It Snows in April"

SONG: One reason among many I love this bitchy cut song from “Anyone Can Whistle”: The brassy, odd-metered accompaniment conveys these two ladies’ escalating aggression as well as any of the lyrics. The music makes you *see* this faceoff.

ALBUM: It’s all about the vibes, literally and figuratively, on this revelatory collection of Ethio jazz by Mulatu Astatke. If I were a pop producer I would be stealing grooves right and left from this mesmerizing brew.

LYRIC: Bob Dylan, "Man of Peace"

SONG: Cécile McLorin Salvant’s whole stunning “Mélusine” album is eminently worth your time, but the track that jumped out at me was this sunny, percolating original, whose lyrics fuse the Mélusine legend with Vodou and the apocryphal book of Enoch.

ALBUM: If one of the rules of bluegrass is that the bleaker the lyric, the cheerier the music, the corollary is that the more apocalyptic the theology, the sweeter the sound, as on this great Louvin Brothers collection. Blood harmony indeed.