Music Diary, Vol. 56

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 Jan. 27-Feb. 2, 2025

LYRICS: Emmet Otter cast (Paul Williams), "Riverbottom Nightmare Band"

SONG: This Midlake deep cut somehow manages to be both rollicking and unsettling, with flute-like synths that sing like a human voice and a voice that sounds a bit synthetic, as they unspool a matter-of-factly harrowing story about anonymous slaughter over a clattering beat.

ALBUM: It's hard to overstate how formative this Simon & Garfunkel record was in my teen years. Until I got into the harder stuff, this tender, finely etched, occasionally wry but fundamentally earnest parlor-folk sound typified the 1960s to me.

LYRICS: Zager & Evans, "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)"

SONG: No joke, this coy, courtly, but touchingly ardent flirtation between 2 past-middle-age Berliners, in which they sing about the gift of an exotic fruit and a Hawaiian slide guitar helps paint the scene, may be my favorite love duet from any musical.

ALBUM: No shade on the others in The Meters—Art Neville’s smoking organ, Leo Nocentelli’s spiky guitar, George Porter Jr.’s sinewy bass—but Ziggy Modeliste’s drumming, with its New Orleans shuffles and fatback beats, was the band’s unmistakable leading voice.

LYRICS: Carly Simon, "You're So Vain"

SONG: Like most Little Feat, this song goes down so smooth it's easy to miss its savvy construction—like the way it withholds the song's irresistible chorus after the second verse. It knows not to overplay a strong hand, in much the way its narrator, a possible cuckold, holds his cards close.

ALBUM: When my day job leads me to great tunes: Reading Mfoniso Udofia's The Grove for a podcast about its upcoming staging in Boston, I saw a reference to Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe. I'm now happily imbibing his 1970 debut with the Nigerian Sound Makers.

LYRICS: Rob Kendt, "Do You Think You Have a Twin?"

SONG: One of my fave Hendrix tunes is this headlong jam about feeling trapped inside own's mind: bass and drums race a blistering lead to a draw, slide guitars bloom like sunflares, a cowbell rides shotgun. This playlist details its development from a spare blues into final mind-blowing form.

ALBUM: Holly Cole's new record offers her signature blend of standards and pop, bent into new shapes with unlikely sonic angles. Maybe it's the slightly pronounced country feel of the record, but I kept thinking of k.d. lang's Drag as I listened.

LYRICS: Marianne Faithfull, "Broken English"

SONG: This Richard & Linda Thompson tune has an edge in its sound to match the grit and spite of its lyrics about shady doings, slander, and revenge. And the wild closing jam somehow sounds both festive and menacing.

ALBUM: To me, Marianne Faithfull was a British heir to Lenya. She made the connection gloriously explicit with a mid-1990s tour of the Brecht-Weill catalog and other chestnuts. This album captures that show, which I saw her do at the Henry Fonda Theater in 1995.

LYRICS: Jefferson Airplane (Marty Balin), "Comin' Back to Me"

SONG: What gives this Chloe x Halle earworm its menacing edge, apart from the cheerfully threatening lyrics, is the tritone substitution on the third chord—it bops along in A, Bm, then a kind of Bb instead the expected E. You can feel the ground shift every time.

ALBUM: TV Girl is a bit of a guilty pleasure. They have Fatboy Slim-level taste in vintage samples & sonic textures, so much so that I don’t really mind that the songs they lay over those great grooves are fairly anodyne. Their first LP is a low-key delight.

LYRICS: Bob Dylan, "Ring Them Bells"

SONG: A lot of gospel songs can work as love songs if you replace “God” with “baby” or the like. This prickly, bittersweet Mindy Smith tune takes that principle to the dark side, personifying the devil as a faithless lover, or vice versa.

ALBUM: Sister Rosetta Tharpe didn’t just anticipate or influence early rock ‘n’ roll: On the evidence of this blazing 1956 record, in which her electric guitar and blues shouter voice get rollicking band and choir support, she was the whole rock star package.