Music Diary, Vol. 81

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 July 21-27, 2025

LYRICS: Keith Carradine, "I'm Easy"

SONG: There’s something special about Lindsay Buckingham’s covers of Stones deep cuts. As with his revelatory, gently obsessive take on “I Am Waiting,” his quiet rendition of this triple-meter gem makes it sound like the ageless, courtly folk dance it was meant to be.

ALBUM: It's easy to hear this lovely collection of Fauré piano pieces as a day-and-night program: First Katia and Marielle Labèque's duets on the sunny, pastoral Dolly Suite, then Pascal Rogé's solos on the thornier, stormier nocturnes, barcarolles, impromptus.

LYRICS: The Everly Brothers (Felice & Boudleaux Bryant), "Wake Up Little Susie"

SONG: I was a fan of this David E. Kelley legal potboiler when it was on, and I would never have skipped its opening credits even if I’d had the option—Tom Hiel & Peter Scaturro’s skittering, sonically adventurous theme was always a welcome jolt.

ALBUM: I never took it to heart like some of his other records, but I definitely drank deep of this ambitious Paul Simon soundtrack back in the 1980s. At times the songcraft is overwrought and the sound somnabulant, but there are so many gems, I can't quit it.

LYRICS: Black Sabbath, "War Pigs"

SONG: I love the baroque poise of this catchy Em Beihold poison-pen letter to a successful rival. Amid its bouncy self-deprecation and airtight harmonies, I hear a thread of sincere fellow feeling.

ALBUM: I became a fan of Ethio-jazz singer-songwriter Meklit Hadero based on her lively 2017 record When the People Move. Yesterday I spent the day with her more subdued but just as lovely 2010 debut. Recommended tracks: “Soleil Soleil” and “Call.”

LYRICS: Elvis Costello, "Brilliant Mistake"

SONG: Since Lucinda Williams and Plant & Krauss made this Randy Weeks country blues classic their own, what more could possibly be done with it? Lucy Woodward and Charlie Hunter show how with this spare, smoking, funk-adjacent rendition.

ALBUM: Entirely based on Stephen Metcalf’s Culture Gabfest endorsement, I sampled and relished this noisy, rangy 2001 live set by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, which gives equal prominence to all the players. I’m especially knocked out by “Bowling.”

LYRICS: Marcia Lewis and Bebe Neuwirth (Kander & Ebb), "Class" from Chicago

SONG: Not an ASMR person but this mesmerizing Bobbie Gentry track, with its low, breathy, palpable fricatives and weird alchemy of shame and sympathy, could almost make me one.

ALBUM: Another streaming casualty: this gloriously idiosyncratic Wim Wenders soundtrack record, which far surpasses the film it was compiled for (and which I've here rebuilt as a playlist). Highlights: "Calling All Angels," "Fretless," a Nick Cave deep cut.

LYRICS: Simon & Garfunkel, "I Am a Rock"

SONG: One of my fave Dylan deep cuts is this droll, barely-two-chord exercise from John Wesley Harding, which repeats the same dominant-seventh-led melody over and over yet somehow conjures a whole fable-like world in miniature—a characteristic of the plainly majestic album it’s part of.

ALBUM: On her 1957 debut record, Cleo Laine’s debt to Sarah Vaughan and Lena Horne is obvious, but she’s already on her way to her own uniquely plummy, perceptive interpretative style. Fave cuts: “My One and Only Love,” “‘Tain’t What You Do.”

LYRICS: Peter, Paul & Mary, "Early in the Morning"

SONG: For a song of mine that never made it past the demo stage, I imagined Lazarus’s second death and his mixed feelings about having been raised. The opening chords remind me I’d probably been listening to a lot of PJ Harvey.

ALBUM: Just discovered yet another essential Brazilian guitarist, the forbiddingly precise yet boundlessly soulful Luiz Bonfá. This gorgeous 1972 collection is a great intro to his limpid, transfixing sound, heavy on the rubato, light on the effects.