Music Diary, Vol. -30

For the rationale behind this mad effort, explanations here. The full series of Music Diary posts are here. The full playlist is above, also here.

Week of June 12-18, 2023

LYRICS: William Tabbert (Rodgers & Hammerstein), "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught"

SONG: My favorite Shins track has a kind of companionable lilt to it that belies the lyric’s wariness, but what seals it is the surprise sunburst of the flat sixth chord on the bridge (under “but your lips”). This guy’s a goner, and so are we.

ALBUM: I guess it's heresy in some circles, but this tuneful, rangy, surf guitar-drenched 1990 classic is by far my favorite Pixies record.

LYRICS: Townes Van Zandt, "For the Sake of the Song"

SONG: As much as I like later dispensations of Midlake, I have a special place in my heart for their weirder earlier work, like this gripping tune, which swirls a mopey incantation around an unsettling F-diminished chord, with magnetic results.

ALBUM: Often you can’t choose which record introduces you to a fave band. In the case of the Roches, it wasn’t their ingratiating debut but their ambitious third release, with its sweeping chorales and extra Fripp-ery, that I heard first and loved.

LYRICS: April March (Gainsbourg), "Chick Habit"

SONG: It won’t supplant or surpass the original, of course, but this unlikely Madison Cunningham cover of Tina Turner’s signature hit has an eddying triple-time intensity that’s all its own.

ALBUM: My fave Joni record is this killer follow-up to the record most folks think of as her best.

LYRICS: Frank Sinatra (Kaempfert/Rehbein/Sigman), "The World We Knew (Over and Over)"

SONG: For some reason this Jean Knight classic from 1971 kept popping into my head yesterday, wholly unbidden and entirely welcome. Love everything about this, not least Wardell Quezergue’s tight, bright horn chart.

ALBUM: Sting’s first post-Police solo effort got all the attention, but for my money Stewart Copeland’s 1985 foray into world music, fusing African field recordings and songs by Congolese musician Ray Lema to his own eclectic percussion, surpassed it.

LYRICS: The Police, "Synchronicity II"

SONG: When I first heard this witty Dua Lipa track, the tossed-off vocal made me think for a minute I was hearing Remi Wolf. I can still hear the affinity, and that’s all to the good in my book.

ALBUM: This isn’t Salt-N-Pepa’s best collection, and I would make no claims that it’s a great record. But it has some essential tracks and even the filler is fun to revisit now and then. And it does have one of the great album titles of all time.

LYRICS: Anika Noni Rose (Tesori/Kushner), "I Hate the Bus"

SONG: Summer isn’t here until I’ve heard this Sly Stone classic, with its mind-bending A-flat-to-E-flat progression under “Hi, hi, hi there” and the gratifying moment when the groove kicks in under Rose Stone’s “I cloud nine when I want to.”

ALBUM: In an alternate timeline Björk is a Cafe Carlyle chanteuse with 10 records of artful jazz pop like this one. Make no mistake, I’m grateful for the miraculous Björk we actually have…but how I love this glimpse into what could have been.

LYRICS: Regina Spektor, "Blue Lips"

SONG: Ostensibly a song about the nature of God, I mostly hear this slightly dippy late Sinatra meditation (written by Lan O’Kun and Lois Irwin) as a song about fatherhood, and either way it never fails to work on me.

ALBUM: Among the many reasons I love this Milhaud ballet from 1923 is that his besotted infatuation with American jazz is so clearly fresh, irrepressible, and infectious. Given the theme of the piece, you might even call it inspired.