Music Diary, Vol. -51

For the rationale behind this mad effort, explanations here. The full series of Music Diary posts are here. The full playlist (minus the Bowie memorial tribute, which is a Facebook video) is above, also here.

Week of Jan. 16-22, 2023

LYRICS: Sam Cooke, "A Change Is Gonna Come"
SONG: This Nina Simone-Billy Taylor classic is a study in dynamics: from a cool, almost doleful wish for liberation to a full, soaring embodiment of it. Civil Rights requires politics, but freedom also has an ontology; that deserves an anthem too.

ALBUM: I'm not a fan of Fleetwood Mac's later stuff and I'm mixed on its members' solo work, so I was pleasantly surprised how gratifyingly good this 2017 album by the band's two pop polymaths is. It's comfort food, sure, but not mush.

LYRICS: Margo Price, "Landfill"
SONG: Released just after her untimely death, this Selena bop, with its hip-hop and dancehall inflections and a tossed-off earworm of a chorus, still sounds like it was recorded yesterday. It's almost rude the way music outlives its makers.

ALBUM: With no more than clarinet and accordion and a deep bag of Kurt Weill tunes, Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia manage to sound like a café orchestra playing the saddest, wisest film score ever. A miraculous record.

LYRICS: Dua Lipa (w/ Kennedi, Justin Tranter, Jason Evigan), "Boys Will Be Boys"
SONG: No biggie, just 2 of my fave pop artists killing it on The Late Late Show with James Corden: guitar goddess Madison Cunningham in raucous harmony with the indispensable Remi Wolf, taking a great blues rock jam to the stratosphere. I can’t get used to something so right.

ALBUM: In addition to having one of the greatest album covers ever, this 2022 SASAMI record somehow whipsaws between scorching nu-metal and Aimee Mann-esque folk pop and makes it all seem natural, integral. Not a bum track in earshot.

LYRICS: Angela Lansbury (Sondheim), "The Worst Pies in London"
SONG: I love a lot of what I’ve heard by Margaret Glaspy but this track just leapt out: It sounds a bit like Adrienne Lenker doing T Rex, but that’s just one entry point into this thorny, thrashing, ultimately moving should-we-break-up song.

ALBUM: Good taste and great art don’t always go together, but for this perfect 1988 record, Nashville sound architect Owen Bradley constructed an elegant, bespoke frame—a whole gallery, really—for one of the all-time great song interpreters, k.d. lang.

LYRICS: Carson & Gaile, "Something Stupid"
SONG: Sometimes a favorite creeps up on you after decades. I've always liked Elvis Costello's Stax-steeped Get Happy!!. but never realized till now how much I love this loping quasi-reggae track, an ideal showcase for his band and his lyrical cunning.

ALBUM: Randy Newman's next 2 albums (Sail Away and Good Old Boys) rightly sealed his rep as a latter-day Mark Twain, but don't sleep on the spare, smoldering 1970 collection that preceded them, every bit as good and just a bit rawer and rockier.

LYRICS: Art Garfunkel, "Barbara Allen"
SONG: If Stevie Wonder's "We Can Work It Out" is the best Beatles cover ever (and it is), I nominate this Donny Hathaway track as the best cover of an ex-Beatle. It makes Lennon's wrenching chords really pop and its plea for mercy all the more searing.

ALBUM: This record is a peerless tribute to a musical theater songwriter who never got her due, rendered by many of the songwriters whose work she paved the way for (Dave Malloy, Heather Christian, Michael R. Jackson, Taylor Mac, Shaina Taub, The Bengsons). A real gem.

LYRICS: Leslie Phillips, "Your Kindness"
SONG: Can a prayer be confused, cross-purposed, irresolute, distractingly sexy? If it's by D'Angelo, forever and ever, amen.

ALBUM: The Staples Singers were my kind of Christians, seeing (and hearing) no contradiction between secular prophecy and religious feeling, protest art and praise music, the struggle and the journey, R&B and gospel.