Music Diary, Vol. 39

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 Sept. 29-Oct. 6, 2024

LYRICS: Kris Kristofferson, "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33"

SONG: Raoudha Abdallah’s voice is mixed very heavily to the front of this transfixing tune, but with a vocal instrument as expressive as hers, this is a feature, not a bug.

ALBUM: Like his peer Joni Mitchell, Neil Young is justly revered as a guitar hero who also happened to write great songs on piano, as on this rangy, haunting, quasi-apocalyptic 1970 record, which lilts and keens as much as it rocks.

LYRICS: The Postal Service, "Such Great Heights"

SONG: “Why do I live? Why do I die?” It hurts to hear Gavin Creel sing these words now. We know the answer to the first—his brilliant life bore witness—but the second? Where do we go indeed.

ALBUM: My 12-year-old just turned me onto the tuneful, tightly constructed, literate pop of PEGGY, so far only represented by a few singles and this jewel-like EP. I’d say she’s Chappell-adjacent, minus the mess.

LYRICS: Joni Mitchell, "Let the Wind Carry Me"

SONG: Just in case the snooping, jealous lover Etta James is telling off in this juicy deep cut doesn’t get that she means business, Jimmy Ray Johnson’s guitar comes in snarling at 1:24 and she lets out a disarming caterwaul.

ALBUM: To enjoy this concert of works by 19th-century American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, you don't need to know they're played (by Richard Burnett) entirely on pianos built when Gottschalk was alive. But it does add a certain sepia poignance.

LYRICS: Beck, "Nobody's Fault But My Own"

SONG: No shade on any of the other ex-Beatles, but which one but McCartney could have taken a stab at disco-adjacent funk without embarrassment? Instead he created one of his best, most melodically surprising songs since “Got to Get You Into My Life.”

ALBUM: These stunning early demos by Lhasa de Sala and Yves Desrosiers have a living room intimacy, even when her dusky, dramatic voice all but rattles the walls. As ever, her music somehow sounds both ancient and urgent, tactile and ethereal.

LYRICS: Lil Johnson, "Let's Get Drunk and Truck"

SONG: One point of a lifetime of music listening/playing, for me at least, is the storehouse of tunes in my head. One that pops up there frequently, unbidden and entirely welcome, is this 1926 Satchmo classic (which he wrote, note for note, in 1924).

ALBUM: Though sadly she dropped out of touring to support Remi Wolf, Rachel Chinouriri’s name on the bill is what led me to her exquisite debut record, an engaging mix of heavy and light, sunny and dark, that demands to be played loud.

LYRICS: Barry Manilow (w/ Jack Feldman & Bruce Sussman), "Copacabana (At the Copa)"

SONG: On this rousing country-soul banger, Audra Mae sounds a bit like a Southern-fried KT Tunstall, and her band, The Almighty Sound, delivers just the right smoky support.

ALBUM: As essential as her spare and pathbreaking UNKNOWN KURT WEILL record, this orchestral Teresa Stratas collection cements her mastery of Weill’s entire oeuvre, from the German to the French to the American. Her “Lonely House” hasn’t been topped.

LYRICS: Ian Munsick, "Caroline"

SONG: Somehow Leon Russell’s cover of this haunting, slippery George Harrison song about the spiritual dangers of modern life manages to be both trippy and bluesy, ecstatic and forbidding.

ALBUM: Busking indefatigably at the intersection of Brian Wilson and Sufjan Stevens, the Jesus freak folk of Half Handed Cloud, as heard on this slightly manic 2002 collection, sounds both endearingly homemade and teasingly cosmic.