Music Diary, Vol. 57

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. 3-9, 2025

LYRICS: Chris De Burgh, "Don't Pay the Ferryman"

SONG: There are no Beatles deep cuts, but I do think this moody, windswept McCartney tune gets overlooked. Its aching harmonies and wise-before-its-years lyrics have always made it a fave of mine.

ALBUM: If you like your pop at the intersection of lo-fi folk and the Brill Building, where girl group harmonies edge into chamber music and ecstasy has a faint whiff of menace, you need to check out Nashville singer/songwriter Tristen. Her 2021 collection is a great intro.

LYRICS: Françoise Hardy (André Salvet & Lucien Morisse), "Le temps de l'amour"

SONG: Mick Ronson’s debut with Bowie was this stunning eight-minute suite of low-hanging blues and trippy grandstanding. What stands out on a relisten: that Tony Visconti’s rock-solid bass rises to the occasion alongside Ronson’s melodic guitar assault.

ALBUM: Heard apart from the films they were written for, Bernard Herrmann's scores are no less emotionally engaging and dramatic, and this Esa-Pekka Salonen/L.A. Phil record solidifies their place as concert hall essentials.

LYRICS: The Velvet Underground & Nico, "I'll Be Your Mirror" 

SONG: Until today I’d never listened to the full Joplin piece titled “Solace - A Mexican Serenade,” which I know and love from the excerpt on The Sting soundtrack. Now I can hear where Stephen Flaherty got a signature chromatic riff for Ragtime.

ALBUM: One of the all-time great pop records, this Elvis Costello classic from 1982 was self-consciously made with Sgt. Pepper's-level ambition (producer Geoff Emerick had engineered the earlier album). Costello and the Attractions, in top form, pulled it off.

LYRICS: Paula Kelly, Shirley MacLaine, Chita Rivera (Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields), “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This” from Sweet Charity

SONG: Some songs are so gorgeous it’s almost ridiculous. This new Innocence Mission chanson, with its odd phrase lengths and vertiginous major-minor shifts, is the kind of gentle but enveloping swirl I could get lost in for days.

ALBUM: The underrated chanteuse Lucy Woodward released 2 records last year; one, Stories From the Dust, is another lovely entry in her unique brand of sophisti-pop. The other, a wild, warped, but precision-tooled Big Band suite, hits a whole new level.

LYRICS: Squeeze, "Piccadilly"

SONG: Retrospective lyrics aside, what makes this mid-period Bowie classic so haunting is its odd, unsettling three-bar prepared-piano loop. When that collides with the four-bar nursery rhyme chant of the fade-out, we’re in a very peculiar orbit indeed.

ALBUM: Jeepers, how I love this Maude Maggart live record from 2007, in which she pays tribute to her maternal grandparents by telling a bit of their bittersweet love story and singing standards that meant a lot to them in a vibrato so retro it sounds modern.

LYRICS: Cab Calloway (J. Russel Robinson/Andy Razaf), “Have You Ever Met That Funny Reefer Man”

SONG: I can’t quite explain why this Percy Grainger folk dance pleases me so, but I can try: Its Mozartean combination of bubbly lightness and harmonic concision always puts a spring in my step. I especially like this chamber version.

ALBUM: No album sounds like this 1980 Talking Heads masterpiece, including anything else by them. And few records are as bifurcated—rolling Afro-beat jams on Side A, bubbling pop and itchy drones on Side B—yet simultaneously cohesive. Divide and dissolve indeed.

LYRICS: Nelly Furtado, "Childhood Dreams"

SONG: Not even half joking when I say I hear the entirety of the Gospel in this deceptively simple, aching Jesse Winchester ode to the inherent strength in weakness. I especially hear myself in the second verse: a doubtful man’s tribute to faith.

ALBUM: This mind-blowing, soul-expanding record by Alice Coltrane feels to me like a spiritual cousin or sequel to her late husband's A Love Supreme, and not just because one track is dedicated to him. Like that classic, this is music of the cosmic divine.