Music Diary, Vol. 75

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 June 9-15, 2025

LYRICS: Darren Criss & Helen J. Shen (Will Aronson & Hue Park), “The Rainy Day We Met” from Maybe Happy Ending
SONG: n/a

ALBUM: Up on the Sun remains my fave Meat Puppets record, but its immediate predecessor—a grittily tuneful punk-psychedelic map of Arizona—will always be a close second in my book. The woozy, wobbly "We're Here" is the disc's cactus-skeleton key.

LYRICS: Sly and the Family Stone, "Stand!"
SONG: This breezy Sly Stone classic was my morning alarm ringtone several years ago, and it still wakes me up every time I hear it—especially the brain-bending A-flat chord on “Hi,” the blissful aural equivalent of heat distortion.

ALBUM: Some of the paradoxes that made Sly enduringly great, as heard on this, his second record with the Family Stone: deep grooves that are light on their feet; rock edge and funk bounce; a crowded but uncluttered sound; twee goofing and badass attitude.

LYRICS: The Roches, "The Train"
SONG: Jerry Goldsmith famously had little more than a week to churn out the iconic score for the film Chinatown, but you'd never guess that from the film's languorous love theme, with its skein of harps, louche trumpet, and twinkling pianos evoking a glimmering L.A. skyline.

ALBUM: As demanding and rewarding as a great Broadway cast album, this bonkers, brilliant 1968 record by Laura Nyro still towers at the top of her formidable catalogue, and over most of the output of her singer-songwriter contemporaries. God is a jigsaw timer.

LYRICS: The Beach Boys, "Surf's Up"
SONG: Co-written with Roger Christian, this 1964 Beach Boys classic features one of Brian Wilson's most gorgeous vocal performances: both bracingly straightforward and lightly ornamented, ardent and aching. And the modulation up a full key into the chorus hits my heart every time.

ALBUM: A song-by-song comparison of the original Smile sessions with Brian Wilson's later revisit reveals a lot about the strange, delicious workings of his musical brain, even as it shows how much his bandmates also contributed, even to his weirdest excursions.

LYRICS: R.E.M., "Welcome to the Occupation"
SONG: "Les fleurs tremblantes de l’écume" ("the trembling flowers of foam") isn't just a key line from this exquisite, Debussy-inspired Lili Boulanger piece for soprano, chorus, and piano; it's an apt description of its delicately feverish ebb and flow. Sirens indeed. 

ALBUM: I don't want to oversell the comparison, but I get strong Springsteen vibes from this great Sam Fender record from 2021—i.e., raw, often anguished lyrics about personal and class struggle set to soaring music that makes me want to stand up and sing along.

LYRICS: Barbra Streisand (Styne/Merrill), "Don't Rain on My Parade"
SONG: While Brian Wilson is on my mind, I return to a fave Beach Boys deep cut, another Van Dyke Parks co-write: this somewhat creepy yet transcendent neo-Baroque meditation on lost innocence. As usual with Wilson, the voice leading is as dazzling as the melodic invention.

ALBUM: Spent the last few days replaying Stevie Nicks’s rock-solid debut, which has many more shades than I had recalled, from high drama to wizened swagger to tender vulnerability. More than a white winged dove—there’s a whole aviary on this record.

LYRICS: Sweet Honey in the Rock (Bernice Johnson Reagon), “We Are”
SONG: The music Eddie Vedder and Ry Cooder made with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for Dead Man Walking is some of the best music. I swear by the beatific “The Face of Love”; this tune is also terrific, making the “long” of the title feel like both an adjective and a verb.

ALBUM: Come for James Dee Crowe's bright banjo and Vernon Derrick's piquant mandolin, stay for the tight vocal harmonies on this vintage collection of Jimmy Martin's Sunny Mountain Boys. Not a minor key in earshot, but for now I'm happy to bask in the sunshine.