Discography Year Two - Week 27

Inshallah the esteemed Cyndi Brandenburg and I are bumming around downtown Amman, Jordan today. We'll be there with a different group of students, but doubtless they'll be just as foolish as this lot.  We'll see if CB gets comped again.  Of course, that's assuming that we even make it there.  We've just lost one student with a broken leg, and we need to make it through a nor'easter to even get to Boston (and that's even assuming a bunch of students who can barely make it to an 8:00 class are going to show up at 6:15 a.m.).  I should have had MK set the over/under on that one.

The excellent CB, herding cats in downtown Amman.

Dave Wallace

Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend

I'm not quite sure how I made it this far without posting Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet to the blog.   The title track for his power pop classic, Girlfriend features killer hooks, crunchy guitar riffs, and dynamic lead by guitar legend Robert Quine.  Fantastic stuff!

Kevin Andrews

This is second of what I think will be five posts on guitarists. These are my favorites, your millage may vary. What appeals to me in these artists is their sense of vocal phrasing or poetry in their playing and not how many notes per second they play, though they can keep up with anyone. They all have an original voice and style.

Through the seventies, Tony Rice was known as a top bluegrass guitarist and vocalist. He played with many musicians who today, like him, are considered Hall of Fame players: Ricky Skaggs (no relation to Boz), David Grisman, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, and Bella Fleck – sometimes all at the same time. After establishing his career, he studied jazz, music theory, and improvisation in the late seventies and went on to help establish the burgeoning genre of progressive bluegrass. Sometimes this was called Newgrass or Spacegrass, it was a fusion of Jazz and traditional acoustic music. At the time, this was rather exciting as this was a style never heard before. I’m guessing there may have been some mind-altering substances at work here, either for the musicians, audience or both.

This track, On Green Dolphin Street, was popularized by Miles Davis in 1958 and has been covered too many times to count.  Tony recorded this in 1982 with his band The Tony Rice Unit for the album Backwaters. The album also includes a very Coltrane-esque My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music.

Sadly, he rarely performs these days. After forty years on the road his hands and voice have paid the price. 

Phillip Seiler

Catherine Wheel

Ursa Major Space Station

When Dave Wallace posted about his love for shoegaze and Ride, I knew I needed to join the conversation with one of my favorites of the genre. I was in my early 20s during this phase so a lot of this music hit me right in the sweet spot of leaving an impression. Add in the brooding inherent in shoegaze, as I was in college 600 miles away from my girlfriend of the time, and you have everything I needed in music. Wonder what ever happened to that girl? 

I love so many bands from this era but Catherine Wheel is the one I felt transcended the whole scene and brought it to its zenith. They had all the pop sensibilities of Stone Roses or the Charlatans UK but were not afraid to drive heavy guitar riffs behind the music. Long time readers of my posts know I love bands that capture energy and intensity within a soft, restrained phrase that seems like it will explode at any time from the stress of being contained. Catherine Wheel had this in spades and their song "Crank" is the perfect example of all of this. 

But Ursa Major Space Station is the track that I love most. It has the heavy guitar riffs, the brooding vocals and lyrics (I follow you through time/'til it's not worth living) the wall of sound, and the sci-fi lyrical themes. It is really everything to me and in a just world they would have had more success then they did. 

Cyndi Brandenburg

I am writing this post on the eve of another trip departure with
Scudder and company, and I must acknowledge that once again, and as is
tradition, Lucinda Williams' Side of the Road resonates.
Earlier today, I tried to articulate to bunch of second year college
students how Sindbad the Sailor's questionable "heroics" might be best
understood through the complexity of feeling satisfyingly good and
grounded with life, punctuated by a deeply inexplicable recurring
sense of yearning and discontent.  The need to occasionally step away,
to know the touch of one's own skin against the sun, against the wind,
represents an honest exploration of unforeseen possibilities and a
recognition that there is always more out there than we can truthfully
have.  Unfortunately, my argument, and the Lucinda song reference I
dropped, both fell flat.  Youth is wasted on the young.

So I'll include a different Lucinda song here. Exactly one week from tonight, we'll be staring off towards the western sky, watching the sun set over the Wadi Rum desert, and
reading the Arabian Nights by campfire.  This song (West), slow and
simple as it is, and despite the occasional Karen-Carpenter-esque
feel, captures some essence of how I suspect we might all be feeling
in that moment.

Dave Kelley

"Good to Me as I am to You"  Aretha Franklin

Aretha has one of the greatest and most powerful voices in the history of popular music, and this tune is one of the best examples of her amazing talent.

The bonus is that she is backed on guitar by Clapton at his 1960's peak.  Apparently when he came into the studio his huge white man's afro and hippy clothes made Aretha laugh at him.  The producer told her that once he starts playing, you will stop laughing.  Indeed.

Gary Scudder

Cat Stevens, Father and Son

I've thought of way too many potential theme weeks, and one of them is songs which just seem linked, even if only in our own minds.  With that in mind, I was going to write something up on Father and Son by Cat Stevens and Anchorage by Michelle Shocked.  Now, the two have nothing in common, other than the fact that the songs are from singers whose careers were detailed by statements/views by the artists.  It brings up all sorts of interesting questions: Can you separate out the artist from the art?  What does the artist owe their audience?  Does the listener/viewer/reader owe more to the art or to the artist's views on broader social issues? If you go down the YouTube rabbit hole in a search for a version of Michelle Shocked's Anchorage you'll find a lot of nothing: mainly covers of the song or stories about Shocked's bizarre behavior.  After identifying, or being identified (which is a big distinction), as a bisexual for a decade Shocked, raised a Mormon but later a born again Christian, went on an anti-gay screed at a concert.  Watching a video of her trying to explain the incident is just painful.  The case of Stevens is more well known.  After he converted to Islam he made some remarkably clumsy statements in regards to the infamous Ayatollah Khomeini fatwah calling for the death of Salman Rushdie.  Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, made the classic mistake of many new converts, the dangerous combination of not being confident in your position (he could have pointed out that: a) Khomeini didn't speak for all Muslims, or b) Khomeini didn't speak for him, or c) Khomeini was a grumpy old asshole, or d) all of the above) and wanting to comment on what you have learned (he stated that the Ayatollah was within his right to issue a fatwa).  He tried to make a subtle argument when he needed to make a declarative statement, and in the process he essentially ended his career for decades.  In the last few years he's emerged again because I think people finally stopped to listen to what he said, and he did a better job explaining what he meant, and also because his Small Kindnesses charity has raised millions for good causes. Ironically, I also had a pretty negative response to his conversion, and also my overly simplistic understanding of his statements.  His Father and Son always rang very true with me, although my father used to use Harry Chapin's Cat's in the Cradle to make me feel bad for not coming home enough (I don't think he listened to the lyrics closely).