Fingertips: Recent Episodes

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Honest, I started this playlist last month, intending to upload it in October. But plans changed, and now the post-Election-Day timing renders the opening song all the more haunting. The tracks that follow may or may not relate; you decide.

And I will otherwise spare the hand-wringing; there’s enough of that going around, and I for one aim to keep the deranged manbaby from invading my headspace over the coming weeks, months, (sigh) years. I will just note this: the election of a convicted felon, cheater, and predator who had previously attempted to overthrow an election indicates that there is something terribly wrong with our basic, collective ability to inform, organize, and govern ourselves. And that something has everything to do with unregulated capitalism and its various discontents, most specifically the widespread inclination to prefer revenue to virtue. Things fall apart precisely from there.

Anyway, the music:

1. “When the Devil’s Loose” – A.A. Bondy (When the Devil’s Loose, 2009)
2. “Pinned” – Unknown Venus (single, 2024)
3. “That’s the Way” – Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin III, 1970)
4. “You Gotta Be” – Des’ree (I Ain’t Movin’, 1995)
5. “Cry Baby” – The Motels (Careful, 1980)
6. “Lorlir” – Kaki King (Modern Yesterdays, 2020)
7. “Play With Fire” – The Rolling Stones (b-side, 1965)
8. “Salt Eyes” – Middle Kids (New Songs For Old Problems EP, 2019)
9. “Black Star” – Gillian Welch (single, 2005)
10. “The Card Cheat” – The Clash (London Calling, 1979)
11. “Australia” – Manic Street Preachers (Everything Must Go, 1996)
12. “The Witch” – Kaia Kater, featuring Aiofe O’Donovan (Strange Medicine, 2024)
13. “Helplessness Blues” – Fleet Foxes (Helplessness Blues, 2011)
14. “Bring Back the Love” – The Monitors (Greetings!…We’re the Monitors, 1968)
15. “Half Asleep” – School of Seven Bells (Alpinisms, 2008)
16. “Cornerstone” – Richard X. Heyman (Cornerstone, 1998)
17. “In Between Days” – The Cure (The Head on the Door, 1985)
18. “Afraid of Everyone” – The National (High Violet, 2010)
19. “Swampland” – Alex Winston (Bingo!, 2024)
20. “I’m Going to Tear Your Playhouse Down” – Ann Peebles (I Can’t Stand the Rain, 1974)

Random notes:

• This is very likely the least classic-rock-y playlist on the internet that nevertheless manages to include songs from both Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.

• Gillian Welch’s incandescent cover of Radiohead’s “Black Star” is a classic, presenting the song in a totally different setting while retaining and enhancing its poignant essence. I’ve poked around a bit and still can’t determine how she came to record this and why it exists as a standalone single but she did and it does and it moves me every time I hear it. I don’t think I’ve previously featured a live recording on an EPS mix but this only exists in a live version and it’s pretty much perfect as is.

• I am not inherently a fan of instrumental tracks but I can’t help being ongoingly fascinated by what the experimentally-minded guitar virtuoso Kaki King has released over the course of her iconoclastic career. Her 2020 album Modern Yesterdays was recorded just as COVID-19 was identified and lockdowns beginning; everyone who worked on the album came down with it (and recovered, thankfully). The album itself arose as a side effect of a planned live project called Data Not Found, which got scrapped due to the lockdown. While Modern Yesterdays finds King finger-picking in the Fahey/Kottke lineage, the album also expands into evocative electronic soundscapes, incorporating alternative guitar sounds and spacious synthesizer beds created by sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson. “Lorlir” offers King’s brisk finger work on top of electronics so gentle that they seem, somehow, part of the guitar itself. While the song’s title is a mystery–I can find nothing that explains it–other titles on the album bring the listener straight back to that disastrous time (e.g., “Can’t Touch This or That or You or My Face,” “Sanitized, Alone”)–a time which, I might add, seems to have been forgotten by the misled half of the US population who voted to bring back the cruel and inept leader who tragically bungled the country’s response (and pretty much everything else). In this context an instrumental seems about right, as words become inadequate.

• There exists an all but endless trove of R&B tracks from the 1960s that were not hits but one wonders why the heck not. “Bring Back the Love” has the melodic drama, confident vocals, and sure groove of a classic Four Tops tune–perhaps not a complete coincidence, as one of the four songwriters credited here is Brian Holland, the music-oriented Holland of the famed songwriting trio of Holland-Dozier-Holland (his brother Eddie did the lyrics). Those three were responsible for some of the finest songs recorded by the Four Tops–not to mention the Supremes, and Marvin Gaye, and a number of other first-tier Motown acts. This one sounds like a winner, even if it wasn’t.

• Not a lot of information is available online about the singer/songwriter calling herself Unknown Venus, which is probably (given the moniker) how she wants it in this day and age of intrusive, overzealous fandom. (Perhaps there’s a new generation of musicians arising who intend to forge a road back to some semblance of reasonable privacy.) In any case, what she has revealed online: her name is Annie Lancaster, she is based in Los Angeles, plays the harp, and has released five singles to date, most recently “Pinned.” The song is at once dreamy and straightforward, complete with an actual instrumental hook by way of the distorted guitar line that we first hear in the introduction. Who does this anymore? Not enough people, that’s who. Not enough people make this sort of well-constructed, effortlessly melodic music either, but they’re out there and I always aim to find them. Hat tip to the Luna Collective’s weekly, off-the-beaten-path playlist for this one.

• There are a half-dozen or more well-known, widely-regarded songs from the Clash’s seminal London Calling, and then there’s “The Card Cheat.” A loping, keyboard-driven song, launching off a decisive Hal Blaine drumbeat, “The Card Cheat” is pleasingly enigmatic in a Dylanesque sort of way–vague characters speak, specific locations are cited, you sense something important is going on but you can’t put your finger on it. A little burst of horn adds to the mystique along the way, and Joe Strummer’s urgent/friendly voice holds it all together. Perhaps part of my attraction to the song has to do with the fact that it isn’t as well-known as the album’s other highlights, but for one reason or another it remains a big favorite after all these years.

• Richard X. Heyman made an appearance here last year when I pulled the Doughboys’ oddly endearing “Rhoda Mandelbaum” out of obscurity for EPS 10.8. Heyman, the band’s drummer, was a teenager during the Doughboys’ late-’60s, garage rock heyday, but re-emerged as a power pop-oriented singer/songwriter in the late ’80s. He got as far as signing a deal with the prestigious Sire Records label, which released one album of his then dropped him for lack of sales. He had to finance Cornerstone himself, and played most of the instruments on most of the tracks. Since then he’s been releasing albums regularly on his own label, most recently 2022’s 67,000 Miles an Album. The man has a preternatural knack for melodic rock’n’roll, an appealing baritone, and, unhappily, little to no commercial appeal. But maybe he’s okay with that, doing his own thing for his own audience in his own corner of internet. (Some of us are.) Note too that the Doughboys have had a second wind in the 21st century, reviving their garage rock sound–fine if you like that kind of thing but I’ll stick with Heyman’s solo albums, which I aim to investigate further in the days to come.

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“Candles” – Sunset RubdownA dash of compositional complexity in an otherwise catchy song is my kind of good time. The Montreal band Sunset Rubdown, fronted by Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug, emerges from a long hiatus to offer this syncopated bit of what sounds like prog pop, which is apparently a (minor) thing. It’s intricate, engaging, and does its business in just over three minutes. Prog pop!

The first thing to notice is the stop-start-y keyboard lines, which both introduce and underpin the song. A heavy bass tone adds deep ground while the flowing, descending melody of the verse, working on top of and against the ascending keyboard figures, gives the song its signature feeling of compelling intricacy. Another feature that pits one characteristic against an oppositional counterpart are the backing vocals provided by keyboardist Camilla Wynne, which add warmth to Krug’s edgier tone. Just as you’re getting the hang of it, and perhaps noticing that there’s no guitar involved, the edifice pretty much breaks down halfway through (1:29) via a short, muddy bridge that makes a veiled reference to the pandemic. Order returns when the keyboard lines re-establish themselves (2:02) and accompany us to the end, with a cheeky few plinks on the piano seeing us out.

Spencer Krug first made his mark on the indie rock scene at the head of the band Wolf Parade, which launched back in 2003, and has been active as recently as 2022. He debuted Sunset Rubdown in 2005, initially as a solo project but soon enough as a band, only to put it to bed by 2009, despite critical acclaim for the three full-band albums. “Candles” was originally recorded in 2020 as a solo effort by Krug, but when the band found themselves reunited–minus a guitarist–they decided to give the song another go and this is what happened. “Candles” is the third track of nine on the band’s new album, Always Happy to Explode, which was released last month. You can listen to it, and buy it, on Bandcamp.

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“Condensation” – Sports TeamSo here we’re back to a standard backbeat (see previous review for context)–although maybe not quite. The emphasis is on the two and the four, the very definition of a backbeat, but at the same time the beat also manages, somehow, to swing. I think this has to do with the way lead vocalist Alex Rice toys with the melody, regularly hitting his marks ever so slightly ahead of the actual beat. (Don’t try this at home; it’s harder to do than it seems.) Consider it part of the song’s sloppy-tight vibe–just like the lyrics themselves, in the verse, which spill out in something of a stream and yet, if you pay attention, scan perfectly with the energetic melody.

Somewhat unusually, Sports Team is a six-person band, and everyone is surely doing something here, in service of the crowd-friendly ambiance, although it’s difficult to know who’s doing what when. There are melodic leaps, horn charts, gang-style backing vocals, keyboard glissandos, you name it. (There’s even a reference to “fingertips,” which I can’t help hearing.) Enough is happening such that we only get the verse melody twice, as the song’s busy construction provides us with what sounds like not only a pre-chorus and a chorus but, potentially, either a two-part post-chorus (is that even a thing?) or a post-chorus and a bridge. We can leave the structural analysis to more exacting minds than mine; I’ll take the welcoming beat and agile melodicism and be quite happy.

Based in London, Sports Team was founded in 2016, when five of the six bandmates were studying at Cambridge University. “Condensation” is a track from their forthcoming third album, Boys These Days, slated to arrive in February.

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“Broken Ceilings” – Morgan SwihartSmoky and deliberate, “Broken Ceilings” simmers with intention, unfolding on top of a wide-ranging if elusive instrumental palette. The drums are front and center, the electric guitar occasionally steps forward, a piano vamps a bit and disappears; strings, too–or synthesized strings?–provide texture and drama; an athletic bass line lends subtle movement. Are there horns, actual or digital, in here too? No matter. It turns out to be far less about individual lines and more about how the amalgam produces a swelling, wall-of-sound feeling, of a sort you might get from putting a rock band into a blender with a small orchestra. (Don’t try that at home either.)

The song launches, minus introduction, straight into the verse’s melody, with its languorous ascent, Swihart’s resonant voice extending her notes out there on the borderline between shy and coy. You can sense from the start that the song is aiming in the direction of Big, and cumulatively, we get there, even as Swihart seems surely to be holding something back, in a good way. I’m an ongoing fan of restraint, and, counterintuitively, that’s what is ultimately on display here, despite the buildup, the eventual volume, the unbridled bashing of drums. You can hear it in the way the melody ongoingly steps down to resolve, in the spaces Swihart leaves from line to line, and, a closing touch, at the very end, in the way she modestly slides away.

Morgan Swihart is a singer/songwriter based in Brooklyn. “Broken Ceilings” is a song from her short, appealing album of the same name, released in June. You can check it out on Spotify. A previous album, The Grave, was released last year.

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Summer may be over, but tell me if there isn’t a dark-ish, summer’s-over feeling coursing through the Santo & Johnny version of the Gershwin classic “Summertime.” The famed sibling instrumental duo, from Brooklyn, turned a song that typically evokes languid sunshine into something introspective, spooky, intermittently discordant, and, somehow, maybe, autumnal. In any case, I didn’t manage to get a playlist up in August so here it is one way or another.

There are two other evocative covers in among the mix this month, and one fake cover: the Concretes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” is not the Motown nugget but its own incisive thing. The real covers are discussed below, along with many other things, so I’ll keep the intro short this time. For those who don’t like surprises, here’s what’s on tap in 11.07:

1. “Becoming All Alone” – Regina Spektor (Home, Before and After, 2022)
2. “Revolutionary Kind” – Gomez (Liquid Skin, 1999)
3. “The Riddle” – Nik Kershaw (The Riddle, 1984)
4. “Cathedrals” – Cry Cry Cry (single, 2018)
5. “La Bambola” – Patty Pravo (Patty Pravo, 1968)
6. “Big Tears” – Elvis Costello & the Attractions (b-side, 1978)
7. “You Can’t Hurry Love” – The Concretes (The Concretes, 2003)
8. “Coast” – Kim Deal (single, 2024; Nobody Loves You More coming 11/24)
9. “Every Shining Time You Arrive” – Sunny Day Real Estate (How It Feels To Be Something On, 1998)
10. “Everybody Plays the Fool” – The Main Ingredient (Bitter Sweet, 1972)
11. “Any Way You Want It” – Clem Snide (Clem Snide’s Journey EP, 2011)
12. “Annie” – Kirsty MacColl (Real, 1983; released 2023)
13. “Get Yourself Together” – Small Faces (Small Faces, 1967)
14. “Not a Job” – Elbow (Cast of Thousands, 2003)
15. “What Now” – Brittany Howard (What Now, 2024)
16. “Life is Sweet” – Natalie Merchant (Ophelia, 1998)
17. “Amor Fati” – Washed Out (Within and Without, 2011)
18. “You Never Come Closer” – Doris (Did You Give the World Some Love Today Baby, 1970)
19. “Summertime” – Santo & Johnny (Santo & Johnny, 1960)
20. “Middle Cyclone” – Neko Case (Middle Cyclone, 2009)

Random notes:

• Clem Snide front man Eef Barzeley has proven over the years to be a master of rock’n’roll covers. Nowhere was the skill in more evidence than in his specially-released 2011 EP, Clem Snide’s Journey. A tour de force of transformational interpretation, the all-Journey EP was inspired by his version of the song “Faithfully,” covered as part of the intermittently wonderful AV Club Undercover series. I featured this song at the time, and stand by my characterization of the man as some sort of mad genius. These days the EP is available to his Bandcamp subscribers only, with no playback options. However, three of the six songs are available to listen to on Spotify, including “Any Way You Want It.”

• The Swedish pop singer Doris Svensson was a curious case. Billed by her first name only, she released one solo album in 1970 and pretty much retreated from performing after that. The album initially was a commercial flop, but a re-release in 1996 captured the attention of hipsters, and hip-hop artists, and brought the album back into the cultural flow. The album is an idiosyncratic mix of pop, soul, funk, psychedelia, and jazz, with a Dusty Springfield-esque vibe–well worth a listen if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s not only available on the streaming services, the whole thing can be downloaded for free via the Internet Archive. Svensson died last year at the age of 75. Thanks to the blog James Writes Stuff for the head’s up on this one, which I otherwise hadn’t heard of. And yes it’s very ’00s of me, offering a hat tip to another blog, but James like me has a very ’00s thing going over there, with his observant, personal, well-written album reviews; his blog is a relatively rare example of an algorithm- and commercial-free web site just doing its thing here in the corrupted, over-stimulated world of internet 2024.

• The brilliant Kirsty MacColl was taken from us, tragically, some 24 years ago. But it was only last year that we saw the long-awaited release of an album she had recorded in 1983 that was shelved by Polydor, her then record company; they felt it wasn’t commercial enough. It would have been her second album. She and Polydor parted ways after that. She had a UK hit single in 1985, with a dazzling version of Billy Bragg’s “A New England,” recorded for Stiff Records, but soon it got complicated: Stiff went bankrupt, there were contractual complications and personal complications, leading to a lot of session work–including her indelible star turn on 1987’s “Fairytale of New York”–but no record deal. The song “Annie,” from Real, was one of three songs from the ill-fated LP that Polydor saw fit, in 1985, to tack onto a re-released version of her debut album. A handful of other songs from Real surfaced years later on a posthumous 2005 compilation album. I’m not sure what took quite so long for Real to emerge as its own thing, but I’m glad we finally have it–it’s not a classic but a treasure for Kirsty fans nonetheless. The album is available on its own digitally; for the devoted fan, all the album’s tracks are on CD as part of the lavish, eight-disc, 161-song box set called See That Girl 1979-2000, released by Universal Music in a limited edition last year. But good luck finding it: I don’t see any for sale in any of the usual places at this point.

• “Cathedrals” was something of a radio hit for the North Carolina band Jump, Little Children back in 1998. The dormant singer/songwriter trio Cry Cry Cry ended a long hiatus in 2018 with a cover of the song, and they did three helpful things in the process. First, they removed the strings, which had added a bit too much saccharin to a song teetering already on the edge of schmaltz (if I may mix my food metaphors). Second, Dar Williams sings lead, transforming the somewhat overwrought original into something more pensive and substantial. Lastly, the stellar harmonies provided by band mates Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell lend warmth and depth that the original’s vocal performance lacked. Oh and as a bonus, the Cry Cry Cry version is 20 seconds shorter, almost always a good thing.

• I’ve put Elvis Costello songs on a playlist more or less once a year here, but I’ve been leaning in the direction of his 21st-century output. I’ve done that consciously, because I feel his later-career stuff is relatively overlooked–wide-ranging musically, his 21st-century albums are maybe harder to pin down than the “angry young man” material of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and so over the years they’ve kind of piled up into a corner that his loyal fans have pretty much to themselves. So I like to give the newer songs some sunlight here. That said, I haven’t meant to entirely ignore his seminal work from back in the day. But as ever I tend to avoid the obvious. You don’t need me to give you the likes of “Pump It Up” or “Watching Detectives,” but maybe slipping a muscular B-side like “Big Tears” into the mix is a fine idea every so often. The man is surely one of the great songwriters of our time; I wish this were more universally recognized, but it remains one of those “if you know, you know” things.

• “Coast” is such an effortlessly confident song: quirky, inscrutable, and mysteriously catchy, with smile-inducing horn charts and the lackadaisical charm of a one-off jam session. Kim Deal, as you likely know, was an original member of the Pixies and the front woman for the Breeders. While she has released a few solo singles, “Coast” is a song that will be on her debut solo album, called Nobody Loves You More, which is due out in November.

• Patty Pravo is the stage name adopted long ago by the Italian singer Nicoletta Strambelli. Pravo, now 76, was in her heyday in the late ’60s through the late ’70s. One of her signature songs, “La Bambola” was number one on the charts in Italy for nine straight weeks. To my ears, it retains its energetic appeal these many decades later. Pravo has had a long and idiosyncratic career, not to mention personal life, including a stretch where she lived in the United States and recorded a new wave adjacent LP in the early ’80s. Her most recent album, Red, came out in 2019.

• The mighty Neko Case closes us out. I guess I like quirky and inscrutable songs; this one’s power comes from its restraint, its poignant turns of phrase, and Ms. Case’s ever potent voice. Her most recent album of new material remains 2018’s vibrant Hell-On. She’s got a memoir coming out in January, entitled The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, and, apparently, a new album on the way shortly thereafter.

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“Rob Me Blind” – Sweet Unrest“Rob Me Blind” is a brisk, charming bit of neo-Britpop, with ukulele. Owing something to the Strokes and/or early Cure, the London-based Sweet Unrest smash a lot of melody and guitar into three minutes, including a closing section that all but flies off the rails before getting tidily swept back up into the song’s stalwart instrumental hook and sweet “ooh-oohs,” and leaving me with a smile on my face, even as I’m not at all sure what all they’re singing about or why I’m smiling.

The same sweet “ooh-oohs” are in fact the first thing we hear, and the aforementioned ukulele. Normal enough instrumentation–guitar, bass, drums–then lead us into the song’s head-bopping rhythm and clipped, sing-song-y melody, delivered by a very British Jack River. But something feels a little off kilter here, in a good way. I like the ear-catching “hiccups” in the melody (e.g. 0:49-0:59); the dreamy background vocals heard shortly thereafter are at once lovely and kind of wacky. And what these vocals are accompanying is the song’s most incisive element: the ringing lead guitar line (first heard at 1:02). Hearing it prompted the realization that this sort of guitar line, which functions as a full-fledged hook, has all but disappeared as the 21st century has aged; it’s concise, melodic, up front, and emerges unexpectedly but organically in the song’s middle section. As for River’s semi-unhinged vocals in the song’s final third, they align with the band’s embrace of a certain amount of commotion, and for me the payoff is the falsetto note Rivers hits in the middle of the carrying-on (2:18), a pitch-perfect melodic enhancement at a surprising moment.

Self-proclaimed fans of classic poetry, Sweet Unrest derived its name from the Keats poem “Bright Star.” Following their self-titled debut EP in 2023, the band has released four singles in 2024, of which “Rob Me Blind” is the most recent.

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“Tamarindo Sunsets” – Sam WeberWith its feathery piano playing, gently emotive vocals, and lovely melodies, “Tamarindo Sunsets” feels like slow, melancholy solace in a moment overwhelmed here in the U.S. by rapid-fire digital idiocy. The lyrics are precise but evade direct comprehension. The singer sings from a place of hurt; the titular phrase are the first words we hear but they don’t recur. Tamarindo is a beach town in Costa Rica, and (maybe?) stands in for something more enticing in the imagination than it turns out to be. In addition to the soft, evocative piano, I’d draw your attention to the muted bass notes, so velvety they all but melt into the song’s tender ambiance.

The repeated lyric that sticks most obviously out is the singer’s claim to be “going offline ’til the end of time,” which I’ll admit sounds more and more like a lovely idea. I can’t be sure of singer/songwriter Sam Weber’s intent here but it feels like an example of failed will in the face of life’s disappointments. Who after all can go offline ’til the end of time? Especially as the song’s narrator still wants to know what’s going on (“When there’s something new/Can you text it to me?”)

“Tamarindo Sunsets” is the lead track on Clear + Plain, Weber’s fourth album, released last month. He also has an EP and a couple of singles. You can check everything out on Bandcamp.

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“July 4” – Mondo CozmoI’ll admit I’m a sucker for the Hal Blaine drum beat (think “Be My Baby”), but that’s not the only thing going for the moody, purposeful “July 4,” from the new Mondo Cozmo album. There is a clear whiff of Springsteen in the air here as well–in an encouraging, homage-y way rather than a retread-y way. The title is part of it (July 4 might be seen as referencing two different Bruce tunes) but there’s also Cozmo’s world-weary, determined vocals, which build from a Nebraska-esque mumble/whisper to the higher register urgings of the chorus. One might also consider the song’s narrative a bit on the Boss-y side–an elusive story that appears to involve ne’er-do-wells in over their heads. And oh yeah there’s a river in here too.

While the song simmers with its persistent beat and offers partial build-ups, note that we never get any Bruce-style, full-throated deliverance. Instead, the chorus keeps to the same steady thump while the verse melody is inverted but retains the disciplined, in-between moments, now augmented with some sonorous synth flairs in the background. Keep an ear on those synth sounds moving forward–beginning around 1:57 they have this lovely way of sustaining notes before and through the verse that are not part of the underlying chord, providing a background hint of atonality that, somehow, grounds the music all the more resolutely. And then, as the song approaches a would-be climax, the sound peels back at 3:18 with some distant asynchronous arpeggios, leading us, unexpectedly, into something that sounds like a children’s chorus, delivering a poignant series of wordless “ahs.” We get one more taste of the chorus to wrap things up, and while I’m not sure much has changed it sounds all the more heroic this last time through.

Mondo Cozmo–birth name Josh Ostrander–is a singer-songwriter/producer based in Philadelphia. He began recording as Mondo Cozmo in 2016; “July 4” is a track from It’s PRINCIPLE!, the fourth Mondo album, released at the end of August on Last Gang Records. MP3 via Last Gang. Ostrander was previously featured on Fingertips in 2007, when he fronted the band Eastern Conference Champions, who played together from 2005 to 2015.

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What a difference a month makes. The mood is (cautiously) lighter. I remain stupefied that a convicted criminal who orchestrated an attempted coup can be considered a viable candidate for president of this country. Can be popular despite his track record of various despicabilities. Is continuing to be treated by mainstream media as pretty much normal. This is not just frightening but also goddamned puzzling. How did we get here? But wait a minute: I said the mood is lighter, and it certainly is. The dreaded rematch has been short-circuited. I’m with her.

Now then, I can’t claim that this month’s playlist has anything to do with this. Or does it? “If I Can’t Change Your Mind”; “The Next Time Around”; “Don’t Change On Me”; “Don’t Come Running to Me”; “Then Came You”: a suggestive batch if looked at a certain way. But seriously unplanned. Consider it the zeitgeist at work. In any case, here’s where we’re going together this month:

1. “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” – Sugar (Copper Blue, 1992)
2. “Patterns” – Laura Marling (single, 2024; Patterns in Repeat, coming 10/24)
3. “The Next Time Around” – Little Joy (Little Joy, 2008)
4. “Gag Reflections” – Wild Moccasins (single, 2012)
5. “Don’t Change On Me” – Ray Charles (Love Country Style, 1970)
6. “Don’t I Know” – Sinéad Lohan (No Mermaid, 1998)
7. “Nowhere” – Swaying Wires (I Left a House Burning, 2016)
8. “A Little Respect” – Erasure (The Innocents, 1988)
9. “Don’t Come Running to Me” – Madeline Bell (Bell’s A Poppin’, 1967; bonus track on the 2004 re-issue)
10. “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” – Klaatu (3:47 EST, 1976)
11. “Shenandoah” – Anaïs Mitchell (The Brightness, 2007)
12. “Hot Sun” – Wilco (Hot Sun Cool Shroud EP, 2024)
13. “Zoeira” – Joyce (Hard Bossa, 1999)
14. “You Can’t Take Love For Granted” – Graham Parker (The Real Macaw, 1983)
15. “Then Came You” – Dionne Warwick and the Spinners (single, 1974)
16. “Like I Say (I runaway)” – Nilüfer Yanya (single, 2024)
17. “Red Rubber Ball” – The Cyrkle (Red Rubber Ball, 1966)
18. “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” – Spoon (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, 2007)
19. “Afternoon in Kanda” – Jesse Harris (Sub Rosa, 2012)
20. “Find My Love” – Fairground Attraction (The First of a Million Kisses, 1988)

Random notes:

• The Houston indie outfit the Wild Moccasins had a bit of an internet moment earlier this century. Fronted by Zahira Gutierrez, the band started up in 2007, released three albums between 2010 and 2018 on the reasonably high-profile New West label, got some love from NPR among other places, but quietly disappeared after their last release. Gutierrez has recently reemerged as a solo artist, with more of a pop orientation, using only her first name. “Gag Reflections” was a single released in between their well-regarded first and second albums. You won’t find it on Spotify.

• Sinéad Lohan recorded two albums in the mid- to late-’90s, the first of which was released only in Ireland, the second of which got full distribution on a major label and earned her a good amount of attention and airplay back in the day. And that was pretty much that: she got married, had two children, and at one point sooner than later decided that she had zero interest in continuing on as a professional musician. Wikipedia reports that she did work on a third album in the 2004 to 2007 range but it never saw the light of day. Her one widely-released album, 1998’s No Mermaid, remains a quiet classic of sorts, full of songs of depth and quality. “Don’t I Know” is the third song from the album that I’ve featured in an EPS mix over the years.

• Well known by now as the composer, playwright, and brain child behind the hit Broadway show Hadestown, which won eight Tony Awards in 2019, Anaïs Mitchell began her career as a singer/songwriter in the early ’00s. Hadestown started as a concept album in 2010; it was Mitchell’s fourth release at the time. Then came a long and winding road to the Broadway stage, which occupied a lot of Mitchell’s time and creative energy along the way; she’s only released two albums of original material since then, in 2012 and 2022. “Shenandoah” is a song I’ve always loved, from 2007’s The Brightness. I’m a bit of a sucker for songs with asymmetrical melodies–and here I mean the way the first line of the verse stops, melodically, at 0:30 but when the melody repeats in the next line it extends itself (0:40). There’s something timeless in that, with the vibe of an old folk song. Mitchell has a confident, distinctive singing voice, which sounds at once innocent and full of wisdom. A longtime visitor or two might remember seeing the beautiful “Flowers (Eurydice’s Song)” featured here back when it first appeared, on the 2010 Hadestown concept album.

• The new single from Laura Marling is gorgeous. What a songwriter she is. And she can sing, too.

• Madeline Bell was born in New Jersey and began singing gospel as a teenager; her professional career, however, took her in another direction. On tour with a gospel act in Europe in 1962, Bell ended up being introduced to a number of notable British performers, including Dusty Springfield, who not only went on to employ Bell as a backing vocalist but by some accounts began to model her singing style after Bell’s. Bell stayed in the UK, recorded a few more albums, and later became known as vocalist for the pop group Blue Mink, which had a half-dozen hit singles in England in the early to mid-’70s. You’ll definitely hear something Dusty-ish in “Don’t Come Running to Me,” a track included on the 2004 re-issue of Bell’s 1967 solo debut Bell’s A Poppin’. While Bell moved into more of a smooth pop-soul direction later on, this debut album is much more of a Bacharachian pop recording, very much an artifact of a particular (and particularly wonderful) moment. For those with a soft spot for the so-called “Swinging London” era, check out this performance of the song from British TV in 1967“.

• The background story of many a long-ago rock band can be more interesting than anticipated. Take the Cyrkle, a one-hit wonder ensemble from Easton, Pennsylvania. Originally called The Rhondells, they ended up being managed by none other than Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who changed their name to the Cyrkle–exotic spelling suggested by none other than John Lennon. They even opened 14 times for the Beatles on their 1966 tour, including the Fab Four’s final-ever concert performance, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. “Red Rubber Ball,” meanwhile, was a song co-written by Paul Simon and Seekers’ guitarist Bruce Woodley, offered to the Cyrkle when the band was opening at one point for Simon and Garfunkel. Cyrkle singer and bassist Tom Dawes had a subsequent career writing commercial jingles, including Alka-Seltzer’s omnipresent “plop plop fizz fizz” refrain. According to an over-long, un-sourced write-up on Wikipedia, the band managed to reunite in 2016 and were still performing live as recently as 2022. Over on Spotify, there are four new singles posted since 2023, including the nostalgia-laced “We Were There,” which was released in May.

• Speaking of bands unexpectedly reuniting, the Scottish group Fairground Attraction, fronted by the wonderful Eddi Reader, has reemerged here in 2024 with their first new material in 34 years. Known best for the soft, swinging single “Perfect,” from their 1988 debut, the group offered up only one follow-up release–a collection of b-sides called Ay Fond Kiss (1990)–before disbanding. Reader went on to an artistically rewarding if off-the-beaten-path solo career, which has slowed down in recent years–there were 10 albums released from 1992 to 2009, and only two since then, most recently Light Is In The Horizon (2022). Meanwhile, Fairground Attraction has put out two singles in 2024, including “Beautiful Happening” in June, the title track to a forthcoming album.

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“Evening Dream” – Mo KenneyEverything about “Evening Dream,” in all its toe-tapping melancholy, speaks to attentive craft and artful detail; this is one structurally sound, melodically incisive, smartly produced song. Look how easily the listener is swept in, first with the crisp acoustic strums and then a quickly introduced verse that barely allows the singer a breath, employing an unbroken stream of trochaic rhythm to accentuate a sense of movement. (A trochee is the opposite of an iamb: ONE-two, ONE-two versus one-TWO one-TWO.) Note if you will how the single place at which the opening verse allows for a breath follows the phrase “evening dreams”–and that this, in turn, is the only time the title presents itself in the song. Most pop songs, conversely, pretty much pound their titles into your head–or, in any case, utilize as a title the most often repeated phrase in the song. While doing it as Kenney does here may not guarantee the quality of a song, I’ll suggest that songwriters who know and care enough to use this device are a self-selected group of thoughtful artists, likely to be creating thoughtful, worthwhile art.

So the chorus doesn’t give birth to the title. What it does do, smartly, is offer up a metrical contrast to the verse: as opposed to the run-on vibe created by the relentless trochees, the chorus consists of two lines of clipped, two-syllable chunks (these appear to be called spondees, but I definitely had to look that up). The chorus ends with one more metrical shift as Kenney sings “I can take/I can take care of myself.” That this ultimately becomes the most repeated phrase in the song but is not the title suggests, however subtly, that the song’s narrator is actually not quite so sure about taking care of themself. Later, the second time through, the chorus leads us into some elegant bass lines and a wistful bridge–because of course this well-constructed song has a bridge. Don’t get me started on the vanishing art of the bridge.

Kenney is a singer/songwriter based in Nova Scotia. “Evening Dream” is the first track made available from their fifth album, From Nowhere, which is slated for a September release. You can check out the Kenney discography on Bandcamp.

photo credit: Matt Horseman

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“Wishful Thinking” – Julia-SophieI’m fascinated by an offbeat bit of synthesized percussion that you can hear in “Wishful Thinking” if you stop to listen for it. The song itself starts with a smooth, propulsive beat, possessing the vibe of a calming burble. Then, at 0:31, a sound, somewhere (sort of) between a scratch and a cymbal choke, starts up and goes on to hit at a regular interval that does not–interestingly; weirdly–align with the song’s beat. (When I called it “offbeat” I meant that literally.) It’s a background sound, easy not to notice consciously. But its gentle if determined persistence to mark out an unrelated beat adds texture and mystery to a song that initially presents as a smooth ride. It also sets up later sections of the song when most of the instrumentation is stripped away; the first time we hear this, at 1:07, that offbeat percussion sound comes to the forefront, and here it subtly regularizes, somehow, momentarily, into the beat of the song. This is the kind of thing that I can end up delighted by. You?

Meanwhile, floating above everything is Julia-Sophie’s breath-filled voice, which entices not merely in its variegated lead role, which includes some spoken interludes, but in the differing ways she accompanies herself. I especially like how some of her vocals, both in lead and backing iterations, appear to meld into synthesizer washes, which happens throughout the song–yet another subtle touch that requires active listening to notice. But–this is an ongoing point I’ve been making here for 20-plus years–even if not registering consciously, subtle production and/or compositional features contribute to a song’s disposition and, ultimately, its allure (or lack thereof). When all is said and done, it’s what I’ve been here all these years trying to discern–not just to say “I like this” but “Let’s figure out why I like this.”

The half-British, half-French singer/songwriter Julia-Sophie Walker has a recording history dating back to the mid-2000s, when she fronted the Oxford, UK-based band Little Fish. She was known as Juju Heslop at the time. She eventually married bandmate Ben Walker, and they went on to form the electro-pop band Candy Says, at which point she was using the name Julia Walker. After 2019, Julia-Sophie adopted her full birth name as her stage name and began a solo career, with a more experimental brand of electronic pop. “Wishful Thinking” is a track from her latest release, the full-length album Forgive Too Slow, which comes out tomorrow. Check out all her solo work on Bandcamp.

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“Collies” – Tennessee KamanskiIf Fingertips is in many ways an ongoing salute to quality over virality, and if I could be somehow more effective at informing the wide world of my mission, an artist like Tennessee Kamanski would be on my promotional poster. What carefully written and beautifully performed music she produces! Agile guitar work; an unconventional sense of melody and hook; sweet vocal presence: she’s got the goods. Me, I don’t care if someone has millions of YouTube streams; I don’t care about TikTok sensations. I care if someone writes terrific songs; I care if they perform with heart and soul. I’m on board with Tennessee Kamanski, who does both of these things.

Based in Southern California, Kamanski first came to my attention as part of the wonderful if short-lived duo Allen LeRoy Hug, whom I featured first in a review and next in a playlist, both times in 2021. With the duo disbanded, Kamanski has released two new songs since: last year’s lovely “Red Sun” and now the inscrutable and fetching “Collies.”

Launching off a graceful, cascading guitar lick, “Collies” also sports a firm backbeat, subtle melodic flair, no apparent chorus, and tantalizing lyrics that seem obviously to make sense to the songwriter while eluding explication from the casual listener’s point of view. I enjoy this type of specific-but-enigmatic lyric; it tells me I’m in good artistic hands, and encourages and rewards repeat listening. Yes there’s a passing reference in the lyrics to a border collie, but why is the song called “Collies”? What’s with the blood loss? The bag of apples? The nimble guitar lick–heard only three succinct times in the song–provides the ear with a sturdy if quirky hook, a musical anchor that gives the lyrics permission to mystify. And even as the acoustic guitar is front and center those three times, the song doesn’t present otherwise as acoustic, featuring that strong beat and a variety of instruments and production touches. I like the offhand electric guitar gurgle at 1:25, and the space-age synth flares at 1:03 and 2:07, to point to a few notable flourishes.

You can as always download “Collies” via the above link (thanks to the artist for that), but allow me to encourage you to visit Bandcamp and download the song there and support her directly; you can pay anything you’d like. While there you can also read and ponder the lyrics yourself and see what unfolds in the song for you as you follow along.

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I see the statistics, from Mixcloud, and they are very clear: not all of you guys listen to these playlists all the way through. In fact, it’s quite the overwhelming majority of listeners who listen to some but not all of the songs, playlist after playlist. And I get it: it’s human nature–or, at least, human-on-the-internet nature; twenty-song playlists may prompt the aural equivalent of TL;DR in this click-happy, distraction-filled environment.

But I intermittently feel compelled to point out that these playlists are not like an album front-loaded with its best songs only to fizzle out on side two. They are, instead, packed with excellent songs from top to bottom. What’s more, I often find myself installing a particular favorite as the last track–I suppose this is me in “always leave them wanting more” mode, aimed towards the intrepid few who take the whole journey with me. But a lot of listeners, alas, don’t hang in there long enough to hear it.

Consider this a long-winded way of urging you not to miss the last song this month, which is an unassuming gem from newcomer Selma Eriksen called “By Now.” I won’t further describe; go listen and discover it for yourself. Even if you just want to skip right down to it.

Repeat reminder from last month: for an overview of (almost) all songs featured to date in an Eclectic Playlist Series mix, check out the master EPS playlist that I update on Spotify every month. As noted in the past, Spotify does not have available every song I place on every list–it’s almost always missing one or two songs every couple of months (this time, for instance, “I Don’t Wanna Lose Him” is unavailable). Another obvious drawback is that you don’t get the contexts of the original mixes with this master list, or the crafted segues. But what you do get is a unique, super-long-lasting listening experience presenting as a quirky, genre-free radio station, minus any interruptions. And at 1,900 songs, it’s a playlist many times larger than most 21st-century radio stations would dream of offering.

As for this month, here’s what you’re in for:

1. “That Great Love Sound” – The Raveonettes (Chain Gang of Love, 2003)
2. “Susannah’s Still Alive” – The Kinks (single, 1967; The Kink Kronikles, 1972)
3. “Lights Light Up” – Fenne Lily (Big Picture, 2023)
4. “Don’t Look” – Nervus Rex (single, 1978)
5. “Possession” – Sarah McLachlan (Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, 1994)
6. “It’s Not My Place (In the 9 to 5 World)” – The Ramones (Pleasant Dreams, 1981)
7. “Tomorrow Today” – Kippington Lodge (single, 1968)
8. “Comet” – Lonely Drifter Karen (Poles, 2012)
9. “Red Pepper Blues” – Art Pepper (Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, 1957)
10. “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” – Radiohead (In Rainbows, 2007)
11. “I Don’t Wanna Lose Him” – Gigi and the Charmaines (unreleased single, 1966)
12. “Running Back” – Thin Lizzy (Jailbreak, 1976)
13. “Heartbeat” – King Crimson (Beat, 1982)
14. “Rains Came” – Shelby Lynne (Tears, Lies, and Alibis, 2010)
15. “Violent Times” – St. Vincent (All Born Screaming, 2024)
16. “Burning Down the House” – Tom Jones and the Cardigans (Reload, 1999)
17. “Takatanga” – Antônio Carlos Jobim (Tide, 1970)
18. “Le Salon” – Autour de Lucie (Faux Mouvement, 2001)
19. “As If You Read My Mind” – Stevie Wonder (Hotter Than July, 1980)
20. “By Now” – Selma Eriksen (single, 2024)

Stray commentary:

• A few internet music veterans out there may remember “That Great Love Sound” being a bit of a blog-based sensation back when MP3 blogs were a shiny new thing. The Raveonettes–whose name was based on the Buddy Holly song “Rave On”–were and are a Danish duo who clothe their neo-garage rock in layers of noise. And if “That Great Love Sound” has the inexorable vibe of a classic, consider that the song’s co-writer was none other than Richard Gotterher, who wrote or co-wrote some actual classics, including “Hang On Sloopy” and “I Want Candy,” before becoming a trailblazing producer of acts such as Blondie, The Go-Go’s, Marshall Crenshaw, and many others. Gotterher produced this first Raveonettes album, Chain Gang of Love, which is interesting also for the oddity that every song on it was written in the key of B-flat major. The Raveonettes, meanwhile, press on as an active band; a cover album called The Raveonettes Sing… is due out next month.

• Gigi and the Charmaines were another hard-working ’60s R&B group that struggled to make it commercially, recorded a number of songs, including some–such as “I Don’t Wanna Lose Him”–that went unreleased for decades, and ultimately faded away without fanfare. It strikes me that the less well-known the group, the more complex their backstory can be. I can’t summarize quickly; read the notes for a compilation put out by the UK label Ace Records, in 2006, if you’re interested. All I will report is that Gigi was the nickname used by lead singer Marian Jackson, that the group started in Cincinnati in 1960, and landed in Canada at some point. They lasted in one form or another until 1974.

• This Talking Heads cover by the unlikely partnership of Sir Tom Jones and The Cardigans is bizarrely compelling. Jones’ allure is not to be underestimated, ever. The song appeared on his 1999 album Reload, which featured mostly cover versions and mostly had the dynamic Welshman singing with a variety of guest artists, including the Pretenders, Van Morrison, Robbie Williams, and Portishead. Wikipedia reports that Reload is the best-selling album of Jones’ career; at the time it was his 34th studio album. That number is now up to 40.

• Kippington Lodge was the psychedelic/baroque-pop-ish forerunner to the venerable pub rock band Brinsley Schwarz, and was itself an outgrowth of a band Nick Lowe and Brinsley Schwarz had previously formed named Sounds 4+1. When Lowe left the country for a while after that, Schwarz formed a new band, called Three’s A Crowd, which got signed to EMI Records, and subsequently changed their name to Kippington Lodge. When Lowe returned to the UK, he joined the band, which proceeded to release a series of singles, including “Tomorrow Today,” but never a full album. (Much later, in 1998, an album emerged which gathered in one place all pre-Brinsley Schwarz recordings.) For the uninitiated, I should note that Brinsley Schwarz is the name of the lead guitarist but was also used as the name of the band after they jettisoned Kippington Lodge. What’s more, two members of Brinsley Schwarz–Schwarz himself and keyboardist Bob Andrews–went on to form the core of The Rumour, for a number of years Graham Parker’s ace backing band.

• I highly recommend the new St. Vincent album. Lots of good tracks including the James Bond-y one tucked into this mix. All Born Screaming isn’t any sort of concept album, and the music varies from song to song, yet there’s something subtle in the air that creates a consistent feeling by the time you’re through. And it definitely encourages repeat listens.

• A recent article in the New York Times profiling Sarah McLachlan reminded me what a big deal she was back in the day, and rightly so. McLachlan’s star run didn’t necessarily last that long, but the highlights reward the ears all these years later. I especially like her second album, Solace, one album before her songs began to hit the charts. But there’s little wrong with Fumbling Towards Ecstasy as well, and “Possession” remains one of her most fully-realized and absorbing compositions.

• “By Now” appears to be the first release by the aforementioned Selma Eriksen. Eriksen was born in Norway but has lived for some time in the U.S., in Los Angeles and New York City. She is both a singer/songwriter and a model; at this point online information seems more oriented towards her modeling than her music. “By Now” was released in May. Hat tip to the Luna Collective’s weekly Spotify playlist for this one.

• The Vin Scelsa reference in the Ramones song is there for those who know. I will always be musically and creatively indebted to that man.

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With the Eclectic Playlist Series now in its 11th year (!), I still aim to populate each mix with a good number of artists who have yet to appear on a prior list. I shoot for seven or eight new artists every time; this month there are 12. Sometimes artists new to an EPS mix are people I’ve previously featured with an MP3 review (as, for instance, Becca Richardson this month, among others). Other times a debut artist here is someone relatively new to the music scene (Jenny Owen Youngs this time, as an example). Another category can be a seemingly random band from the past with a song I happen to feel like plugging into the mix; the British post-new-wave band Haircut 100 qualifies this time around. A long-ago figure from the jazz world can become another first-timer (see Gil Mellé, below). One last interesting (and less common) category is the massive pop star who sneaks in with a song that somehow fits into the EPS flow more than what they usually put out (enter, here, Beyoncé).

Unrelated reminder: for an overview of (almost) all songs featured to date in an EPS mix, you can check out the master EPS playlist that I update on Spotify every month. As I have noted in the past, Spotify does not host every song I place on every list–typically it’s missing one or two songs every couple of months (this month, for instance, “Once You Know” is missing). But there are at last count nearly 1,900 songs on the playlist. You don’t get the contexts of the original mixes with this master list, but you do get many hours of entertaining listening out of the deal–the equivalent of a very quirky radio station, without any announcers.

As for this month, here are the goods:

1. “Fallout” – Yo La Tengo (This Stupid World, 2023)
2. “A Bird in the Hand (Is Worth Two in the Bush)” – The Velvelettes (single, 1965)
3. “Nothing To Be Done” – The Pastels (Sittin’ Pretty, 1989)
4. “Free Ride” – Nick Drake (Pink Moon, 1972)
5. “Once You Know” – Le Reno Amps (LP, 2004)
6. “If I Were You” – k.d. lang (All You Can Eat, 1995)
7. “Alliigator Tears” – Beyoncé (Cowboy Carter, 2024)
8. “Etc” – Francis and the Lights (single, 2013)
9. “Ode to Billie Joe” – Sinéad O’Connor (The Help Album, 1995)
10. “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)” – Haircut 100 (Pelican West, 1982)
11. “Under Capricorn” – Gil Mellé (New Faces – New Sounds: Gil Mellé Quintet/Sextet, 1953)
12. “Avalanche” – Jenny Owen Youngs (Avalanche, 2023)
13. “On Top of the World” – Cheap Trick (Heaven Tonight, 1978)
14. “Mathematics” – Cherry Ghost (Thirst For Romance, 2007)
15. “Wanted” – Becca Richardson (We Are Gathered Here, 2017)
16. “It’s Wonderful” – The Rascals (Once Upon a Dream, 1968)
17. “Take Me As I Am” – October Project (October Project, 1996)
18. “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” – Roy Ayers Ubiquity (Everybody Loves the Sunshine , 1976)
19. “The Bike” – Amy Correia (Carnival Love, 2000)
20. “Stop Hurting People” – Pete Townshend (All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, 1982)

Stray commentary:

• If “A Bird in the Hand (Is Worth Two in the Bush)” sounds a little familiar–sounds, perhaps, a bit like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”–that’s because the two songs were both co-written by the Motown songwriter/producer Norman Whitfield. And this song came out first. If you think about it, the songs are similar not only in sound but in subject matter: in each case, the lead singer is saying “I love you more than that new person who says they love you.” The Velvelettes were yet another high-quality Motown singing group that seem to have deserved wider success than they ultimately achieved. Their best-known song, in retrospect, was “He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin’,” which was a minor hit for them in 1964, and a bigger hit for the group Bananarama (re-titled as “Saying Something”) in 1982. The Velvelettes started as a quintet, and later performed as both a quartet and a trio. After dissolving at some point in the 1970s, the group was re-assembled in the 1980s and intermittently toured into the 2000s.

• Le Reno Amps was a good-natured, They-Might-Be-Giants-adjacent duo from Scotland, active between 2004 and 2011. They are not, as noted, to be found on Spotify, but you can discover their appealing, slightly skewed, DIY-ish pop on Bandcamp. (And, you can buy any of their albums there on a name-your-price basis.) An example of their general approach to things: the band’s name was devised as an acronym of the bandmates’ two surnames (Maple and Nero), with an added “s.” I featured “Once You Know” here back in 2005, and retain a soft spot for this one.

• Gil Mellé was an interesting cat. As a 19-year-old baritone saxophonist he was signed to Blue Note Records–the first white musician on that storied label’s roster. At the same time he was a visual artist, who created covers not only for his own albums but for albums by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk. After recording a series of albums between 1953 and 1957, he abandoned jazz performance for a long and busy career as a composer for film and TV; he wrote some 125 scores in all, including work for Ironside, Night Gallery, and Columbo. He was known in particular for being a pioneer in the use of electronic music in film and TV scores, building his own synthesizers and, by some accounts, the world’s first drum machine. Later in his career he returned his focus to visual art, working in the ’90s with computers to create widely-acclaimed digital paintings. He died in Malibu in 2004.

• For the uninitiated (which includes me), that is not a typo in the Beyoncé song title. All song titles on Cowboy Carter that have words with the letter “i” in them are spelled with double “i”s; the song titles are, furthermore, capitalized on the album, so each “i” looks like this: “II.” This is an inside reference to the fact that the superstar singer/songwriter considers this album to be “Act II” in a three-act sequence, which began with 2022’s Renaissance. Cowboy Carter presents a lot to sort through, and while not much of it has clicked with me so far, I felt drawn to “Alliigator Tears” right away, so here it is.

• As if we needed more evidence of the late Sinéad O’Connor’s majesty as a singer, give a listen to her commanding take on the Bobbie Gentry chestnut “Ode to Billie Joe.” O’Connor’s use of her breath as part of her vocal tone is all but heartbreaking. And don’t miss the choice she makes on the word “spring” about 45 seconds before the end. Big props here too to the minimal, eerie arrangement, which keeps a flowing, menacing undercurrent throughout. The song can be found on The Help Album, which was released in 1995 as a fundraiser for a charity called War Child, which provides assistance to people in war zones around the world. The artists featured on the album were all British or Irish, and included Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Oasis, Blur, and Paul Weller.

• As a single, “It’s Wonderful” was initially credited to the Young Rascals, but the band was about to officially become, simply, the Rascals by the time Once Upon a Dream came out. If remembered at all here in the history-challenged 21st century, the band has been pretty much reduced to their R&B-flavored hit singles “Good Lovin’,” “People Got to Be Free,” and “I’ve Been Lonely Too Long.” But as the Rascals evolved through the later ’60s they had more complex aspirations. Front man Felix Cavaliere was quoted in an interview at the time referring to Once Upon a Dream as “Sgt. Pepper-ish”; clearly the band was aiming for a previously unattained sophistication in the music and general presentation. The album was marked by some between-song effects and a number of tracks that flow together without pause–you’ll hear some of that both before and after “It’s Wonderful” if you listen carefully. I’m not sure how successful the whole thing is–it’s no Pet Sounds–but it is a worthy artifact of the time.

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“You Know What You’re Doing” – Orbix Max and Tim IzzardThis is a community service announcement to remind you that there are plenty of interesting and accomplished people doing interesting and accomplished things, online, that do not attract the attention of the viral-infatuated masses and/or clickbait-oriented websites. I would venture to say that some if not most of these people may be entirely satisfied avoiding the harsh glare of virality. At least, I hope they are. Me, I remain maddened as ever by our collective penchant for assessing worth via instant popularity. And I grow increasingly intrigued by talented souls plying their trade in the relative dark.

Take Orbis Max, a so-called “internet recording collective” that, as it turns out, long predates the internet. Launched as a regular, in-person band in California back in the 1970s, Orbis Max band members drifted into different locations over time, but re-formed once the internet made recording separately from a distance a viable option. The band retains two original members, has four ongoing bandmates, while also working collaboratively with a rotating cast of outside musicians as the spirit moves. And no, they are not setting the world on fire in terms of streams and views. But they put together something like “You Know What You’re Doing” and yes, it’s clear from the opening guitar riff, jaunty and melodic, that Orbis Max themselves know what they’re doing. The melody, with its well-placed minor chords, shimmers with an early-rock’n’roll nostalgia even as it sounds fetching in the here and now. Dw Dunphy’s vocals are at once sturdy and vulnerable, with the tone of a classic rocker wandering into vaguely unknown territory.

And what a smartly crafted song, the construction of which includes, by my estimation, not merely a robust bridge (in these bridge-deprived times) but a bridge that arrives early in the song, where the second verse might otherwise be. At this point, on the words “Even now” (1:08), the voices become layered, gang-vocal style, with an unexpected but congruous whiff of Springsteen in the mix. (Dunphy is based in Monmouth County, New Jersey; could be something in the water.) The early bridge, if that’s what it is, is in any case, aurally, part of the song’s ongoing sense of continuing development; listen in particular to the intermittent sprinkles of lead guitar (including an incisive coda) and to the changing nature of the backing vocals.

“You Know What You’re Doing” was co-written by guitarist Don Baake and guest musician Tim Izzard, who is based in the UK. Recurring core Orbis Max members are currently located in Texas, California, and the aforementioned New Jersey; other regulars are located in North Carolina, Arizona, and Liverpool, among other places. Dunphy is new to the band in the scheme of things, having joined in 2022, following a long stint as a singer/songwriter/one-man-band. “You Know What You’re Doing,” was released as a single at the end of March. A new single was just released on May 1, entitled “Fields,” which you can check out on Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

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“Blue Tuesday” – Francis of DeliriumHow is it that some singer/songwriters sing about their personal angsts and it comes across as kind of small and whiny while other singer/songwriters sing, as well, about their personal angsts and it soars into something weighty and inspiring? It’s a mystery. And obviously my personal perspective on any given musician is just my own, and often at odds with cultural consensus. But Jana Bahrich, who fronts the project Francis of Delirium, strikes me as the real deal. Nothing small and whiny about what she does.

From the ringing guitar and pulsing backbeat of the intro, “Blue Tuesday” propels us forward with itchy resolve. We are pushed directly into the middle of a story via the opening line’s unusual kickoff: “And it starts in the back of a cab.” This demonstrates the kind of stout assurance that supports the song beginning to end–an assurance perhaps best epitomized by the audacious slant rhyme upon which the chorus pivots:

It’s a blue Tuesday
I could use babe some of us

In another setting, in someone else’s hands, this (sort of) near rhyme might seem an awkward blunder; here it feels sly and subversive. She’s kind of daring you to call her on it and not caring if you do. Throughout, the 22-year-old Bahrich sings with a tone alternating between airy and grounded, between vulnerable and assertive. You buy what she’s selling; the underlying bash and drive leaves you almost no choice. This a concise song both musically and lyrically, with a seemingly straightforward meaning: the narrator is feeling down and desires her partner’s presence as a balm. But being down often leads to passive indecision, while in this case, the singer knows what she wants and asks for it, not something everyone has the presence of mind to do. She offers a second slant rhyme in the process, in the second half of the chorus: “It’s a blue Tuesday/I could use babe some of your touch.” It’s an even slantier slant, matching two syllables (“your touch”) against one in the previous line (“us”), so the lyrics scan differently too, with Bahrich hesitating on the second word, landing it on the backbeat of the next measure, sweeping us back into the song’s adamant flow.

Based in Luxembourg, Francis of Delirium was previously featured on Fingertips in April 2022. “Blue Tuesday” is a track from the outfit’s excellent debut album Lighthouse, which was released in March. I like by the way that the song is the fifth track on the album–another move, in a world of side-one, cut-one singles, that speaks to Bahrich’s underlying confidence. MP3 via KEXP.

(A sad side note: KEXP’s “Song of the Day” feature, which has fed Fingertips a significant number of free and legal MP3s over the years, has been discontinued. The MP3s they’ve uploaded still seem to be online at this point, but it’s unclear how long that will last.)

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“Jacket” – Sam Evian“Jacket” has an affable tunefulness about it, with a loose-limbed, Ram-like vibe bespeaking on the one hand singer/songwriter/producer Sam Evian’s long-standing adoration of the Beatles, and on the other the fact that he recorded this latest album in his idyllic-sounding studio in the Catskills, in a renovated barn, live on vintage tape–“No headphones, no playback, minimal overdubs or bleed,” in his words. The guitar sounds are straight out of the 1970s, as is the perky, midtempo, Nilsson-esque melody, with its easy-going wanderings up and down the scale.

Structure-wise, the song has a sneaky convolution to it, with a verse and chorus that sound somewhat but not precisely alike; it’s especially easy to get disoriented when a song starts with the chorus, as this one appears to. Bonus bewilderment points here for removing the first line of the chorus after one iteration, thereafter replacing it with a cheerful set of female-voiced “La-la-la”s. Lyrically this is one of those songs where the words are at once legible and incomprehensible: you can read along with the song and still have little sense of what’s transpiring. And then, in the middle, a verse pops as meaningful, even though it has no apparent relation to anything previously sung:

I trace it back and find a twisted memory
A loose end coming back to haunt me, it’s getting older and older
You know our trouble has a way of finding more
Like we were soldiers in a war so long ago

First off, he traces what back, exactly? We don’t know, pushed as we abruptly are into the middle of a thought without any context. Listen next to how perfectly “A loose end coming back to haunt me” scans with the music; it’s the parade of iambs in the lyrics that does it–except for the “it’s getting older and older” addendum, all the lines here offer perfect one-TWO stresses. The words glide effortlessly, all but forcing our attention to the stanza’s gloomy conclusion, contradictorily presented with the song’s ongoing peppiness. I’m not sure what it all adds up to–by the way, there’s not a single mention of a jacket–but it keeps me listening, and re-listening. Perhaps the song is being sung to an old jacket? Or by one?

Plunge, Evian’s fourth album, came out in March, and is the first he’s released on his own label, Flying Cloud Recordings. Collaborators on the album include El Kempner (Palehound, Bachelor), Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief), Sean Mullins, and Liam Kazar, among others. Meanwhile, Evian has for some years been an in-demand producer, having recorded albums with a wide variety of indie rock acts, including Widowspeak, Cass McCombs, Blonde Redhead, Cassandra Jenkins, Big Thief, and Hannah Cohen, who happens also to be Evian’s partner.

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The two Grateful Dead-adjacent songs that have rather randomly wandered into this month’s mix happen, both, to be songs that are not available on Spotify. Let this serve as a gentle but important reminder of the value of owning your own music, the value of having songs and albums that are yours (even if “just” digitally). These, then, become songs that are yours regardless of how good a Wifi connection you have, yours regardless of the vagaries of licensing arrangements and other capitalism-generated obstructions that keep songs off of streaming services (any one of which may go out of business someday). I have a rather extensive digital music library and while it’s a (much) more unwieldy beast than my CD and LP collection were, and are, it’s still a roped-off, self-selected aggregation of music that is easily and directly accessible, without the pesky barriers of menus and suggestions that streaming services build, purposefully, into their interfaces. I can organize my library according to my own sense of order, and find things instantly. And, as a bonus, I’m not feeding the Big Tech data machine every time I click on something; within the bounds of my own library, I escape the implacable eyes of the algorithm, the relentless fog of the feed.

To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of abandoning Spotify or Apple Music. While I have (very) mixed feelings about the company, I still do lean on Spotify to check out music I’m curious about, either old or new. But then I buy the albums that move me. (I just this month picked up the Katie Von Schleicher album–see below–as an example.) And believe me, I know that one uninfluential person’s quirky behavior vis-à-vis the 21st-century music scene is not going to make a whit of difference to the way music is “consumed” (ugh, I hate that word) here in 2024. But so-called “influencing” in our world is a performative sham, a virtual maelstrom of thankless activity. I’ll settle for the idea that two or three of you out there are paying actual attention, and perhaps I’ve given one or two of you some food for thought, as opposed to facile images to “like” and immediately forget.

End of soapbox; meanwhile, the playlist!:

1. “For Emma” – Bon Iver (For Emma, Forever Ago, 2007)
2. “Overjoyed” – Katie Von Schleicher (A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night, 2023)
3. “Living on Borrowed Time” – Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (Express Yourself, 1970)
4. “Cemetery Gates” – The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead, 1986)
5. “Floating On A Moment” – Beth Gibbons (Lives Outgrown, 2024)
6. “Hold (Alternate Take)” – Nubya Garcia (Nubya’s 5ive, 2017)
7. “Martha My Dear” – The Beatles (The Beatles, 1968)
8. “Friend of the Devil” – Lyle Lovett (Deadicated, 1991)
9. “Undone” – Amy Cooper (Water/Fire, 2005)
10. “Since You’ve Been Gone” – Cherie and Marie Currie (Messin’ With the Boys, 1979)
11. “Barbara H.” – Fountains of Wayne (Fountains of Wayne, 1996)
12. “Balboa” – Eileen Allway (Love Water, 2024)
13. “Irrésistiblement” – Sylvie Vartan (La Maritza, 1968)
14. “Too Many Losers” – Bobby and the Midnites (Bobby and the Midnites, 1981)
15. “This Time” – Land of Talk (Life After Youth, 2017)
16. “Who Is It” – Björk (Medúlla, 2004)
17. “Something About You” – The Four Tops (Four Tops Second Album, 1965)
18. “4316” – Isobel Campbell (Bow To Love, 2024)
19. “Aimless Love” – John Prine (Aimless Love, 1984)
20. “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” – Warren Zevon (Warren Zevon, 1976)

Addenda:

• Pretty much everything Beth Gibbons sings sounds iconic. She just hasn’t been very widely heard in a long time: believe it or not it’s been 16 years since the last Portishead album, with the band performing only sporadically since then, and releasing only two stand-alone singles during that time. Although Gibbons did give us a non-Portishead album, in 2002, it was a collaboration with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, who performs as Rustin Man. And so the forthcoming album, Lives Outgrown, will be the 59-year-old Gibbons’ very first solo offering. The album’s 10 songs were recorded over the course of 10 years; it comes out May 17.

• Lyle Lovett’s plaintive take on the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” is impeccable, an all-time great cover. While there’s nothing wrong with the original, it sounds over-caffeinated and tossed-off by comparison. Lovett keeps the heartbeat moving but gives the song space to breathe; the spotless arrangement enhances the poignancy. This version can be found on the 1991 Grateful Dead tribute CD Deadicated, which was one of the earlier and more commercially successful tribute albums, of which since then there have been countless. And yet Deadicated is out of print and is not available on the standard streaming services, although of course is floating around on YouTube. The Los Lobos cover of “Bertha” is another highlight from that album.

• Amy Cooper was featured on Fingertips so far back in the day (circa 2005) that I can’t find the post: over the course of various site updates and platform changes, some items from the first few years here have vanished. No great loss, perhaps, but there are some excellent songs involved, including this, the lead track from Cooper’s debut album, 2005’s Water/Fire. Turns out Cooper is in general a bit hard to track down. She released the follow-up EP Mirrors in 2006 (or 2007, depending on your source), and that’s where the trail goes cold. (It doesn’t help that she shares a name with the internet-famous “Central Park Karen,” of bird-watching-related notoriety.) Some extra poking around led to the discovery that our musical Amy Cooper has more recently been part of a duo called Naked Hearts, a band that began in the early ’10s but with songs online as recently as 2020 (including the appealing “Only For You”; it’s nice to hear her again–check it out!). She should ideally link her disparate Bandcamp identities together, but I am in any case happy to see that she isn’t one of those talented singer/songwriters who simply faded without a trace.

• Sylvie Vartan is a veteran French superstar, associated most closely with the yé-yé movement of the 1960s. Born in Bulgaria, she’s had a long-lasting and wide-ranging career as both a singer and an actress. Her most recent album is 2021’s Merci pour le regard.

• Eileen Allway is an L.A.-based singer/songwriter that I featured here with an MP3/review this past November. While I have a long-standing policy of not featuring an artist more than once within a 12-month period when it comes to the review section, that doesn’t prevent me from following a review with a song on a playlist, especially when the artist in question has released an album as packed with excellent songs as is Allway’s 2024 album Love Water. “Balboa” calls to mind the incandescent Canadian singer/songwriter Jane Siberry, which is a high compliment in my book. I encourage you to check the whole album out on Bandcamp, and buy it too (it’s reasonable!).

• The other Grateful Dead-adjacent track in the mix this month is as noted another one that you won’t find on Spotify. This is the unusually riffy (for him) “Too Many Losers” from Bob Weir, fronting the ’80s band Bobby and the Midnites. They put out two albums, in 1981 and 1984, and went their separate ways. Interestingly, the band’s drummer was Billy Cobham, a renowned jazz/fusion musician who played with Miles Davis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and many other notables.

• Careful readers might remember a Katie Von Schleicher reference earlier this month (she produced the Max Blansjaar song featured in the last batch of downloads). I mentioned at the time that I had featured Katie as a singer/songwriter back in 2013. What I did not mention is that she continues to record wonderful music herself; a particularly fetching album is the one she released in October of last year, the archly titled A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night (look up the reference if you don’t recognize it). I had a hard time deciding which song to feature, so I encourage you to check out the whole thing over there on Bandcamp.

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“Right Back To It” – Waxahatchee (featuring MJ Lenderman)Katie Crutchfield is operating in an impressive groove in recent years; everything she touches strikes me as some version of awesome. Even as she is working with new collaborators–including, as seen here, MJ Lenderman, from the band Wednesday–she sounds as herself as ever on this song from her new album.

The banjo here quickly conveys a country flavor, but the deliberate pace of the finger-picking runs counter to cliched expectations. There will be no hoedown today; the mood is pensive, the melody earnest, alternating between double time and half time, as Crutchfield ponders the forces at work in relationships, albeit allusively, as is her wont. (Like many gifted songwriters, she always gives the impression that she knows exactly what she’s talking about even if the words defy straightforward understanding.) One particularly brilliant line, presented off-handedly, is: I lose a bit of myself/laying out eggshells, which is an eye-opening way to acknowledge one’s own contribution to an unhealthy interpersonal dynamic.

Lenderman’s harmony vocals add poignant texture to the chorus, which resolves–typically a downward movement–via a repeating ascending melody line. This sounds natural on the one hand, but registers as somewhat unusual. Chalk it up to her aforementioned songwriting prowess.

Katie Crutchfield is a solo artist performing since 2010 as Waxahatchee, with a rotating supporting cast. “Right Back To It” is a track from her eagerly awaited new album Tigers Blood, coming out this week on Rough Trade. This is Katie’s first solo album since the brilliant Saint Cloud, a release that arrived, on March 27, 2020, as an oasis of tuneful thoughtfulness in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I leaned on it heavily during the lockdown’s disconcerting first weeks and months, and still revisit it regularly. MP3 via KEXP.

Waxahatchee was previously featured on Fingertips in May 2017.

photo credit: Molly Matalon

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“Victoria” – UnproductiveA rough-edged stomper with appealing personality, “Victoria” carries on with a bit of a screw loose. The song’s simple, head-banging backbeat thuds out an intro that belies the playful nature of the melody and lyrics to follow. It’s a tale of woe, but an off-kilter one, which lead vocalist Declan Hills splutters out sounding only intermittently unhinged (in a good way). Pay attention to the words, which alternate between the bleak and the cheeky. At one point he sings–

Oh Victoria take your hand in mine
And we won’t let those white collar criminals
Make off with those reduced mortgage primes

–which is one of the more unorthodox ways to say “We’ll be great together” that I can think of. But the aforementioned Victoria is neither an easy catch nor necessarily a healthy one for our narrator, who, later, sings: Don’t make me compromise/My morality for hydrated skin. It’s that kind of relationship.

The lyrics call for and reward attention due to the song’s unconfined melodicism, featuring leaping and descending intervals, and spurts of (at least) double-timed lines to accommodate the garrulous declarations of the song’s narrator. And despite its vaguely manic ambiance, the song’s structure is rock solid, with verses that lead logically into the distinct but complementary chorus, and a chorus that both frays at the edges and resolves with clarity. Oh and be sure to tune into the squalling guitar break, starting at 1:51, which epitomizes the song’s half-crazed gusto.

Unproductive is a quartet based in Saskatoon, comprised of Hills singing and playing guitar, Nathan Henry on percussion, Steven Adams on bass, keyboards, and backing vocals, and the surname-free Zoë on keyboards. “Victoria” is the lead track off the band’s debut EP, released this month, which is, according to Hills, either actually untitled or titled Untitled; they’ve been leaving it open to discussion. You can check it out, and buy it for any price you’d like, over on Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

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“Anna Madonna” – Max BlansjaarCrisply mixed and brightly melodic, “Anna Madonna” offers just enough major- to minor-key transitions to read as bittersweet, despite its foot-tapping vibe. Blansjaar’s voice is particularly clear in the mix, which steadily acquires layers of sound–first just a muted guitar, then some snappy drum (machine) beats, later a glistening keyboard, all leading into a kazoo-like synthesizer solo halfway through this perky yet melancholy composition.

“Anna Madonna” turns out to be coincidentally related to the Waxahatchee song likewise featured this month, being another tune about the value of holding onto a long-term relationship. Mature thinking for a 21-year-old, but singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Blansjaar is nothing if not precocious, having begun performing and recording at 15.

Born in Amsterdam and raised in Oxford in the UK, he released two self-recorded and self-performed EPs of lo-fi indie pop in the late 2010s. For his first full-length album, he worked with Katie Von Schleicher, a singer/songwriter/producer with her own recording studio in Brooklyn, along with her frequent producing partner Nate Mendelsohn. The producers have done a spiffy job maintaining Blansjaar’s quirky energy while adding some shrewd dynamics to his repertoire, such as the stripped-down moment we get at 1:42. (Von Schleicher by the way was featured on Fingertips back in 2013.)

“Anna Madonna” is a track from the forthcoming album False Comforts, due out in June.

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The extra day this month allows me to sneak February’s playlist in under the wire, if just barely. Running out of time here, I’ll keep the introduction to a minimum. Here’s what you’re in for this month:

1. “Sometimes, I Swear” – The Vaccines (Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations, 2024)
2. “Love is Gone” – Carlene Carter (Carlene Carter, 1978)
3. “Alpha Shallows” – Laura Marling (I Speak Because I Can, 2010)
4. “Miami” – Randy Newman (Trouble in Paradise, 1983)
5. “I Don’t Know What to Do” – Richard Anthony (single, 1965)
6. “The Turning Ground” – Tara Clerkin Trio (On the Turning Ground, 2023)
7. “Holland, 1945” – Neutral Milk Hotel (In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea, 1998)
8. “Firewalker” – Liz Phair (Liz Phair, 2003)
9. “Anna (Go To Him)” – Arthur Alexander (single, 1962)
10. “Greatest Dancer” – Nadine Shah (Filthy Underneath, 2024)
11. “Strange Angels” – Laurie Anderson (Strange Angels, 1989)
12. “Rod’s Song” – Shelagh McDonald (Stargazer, 1971)
13. “I Don’t Want to Let You Down” – Sharon Van Etten (single, 2015)
14. “Walk a Straight Line” – Squeeze (Play, 1991)
15. “Someone Great” – LCD Soundsystem (Sound of Silver, 2007)
16. “Goodbye” – Dusty Springfield (originally unreleased, 1970; much later available as a bonus track on Dusty in Memphis)
17. “Charlotte Anne” – Julian Cope (My Nation Underground, 1988)
18. “Poem for Eva” – Bill Frisell (Good Dog, Happy Man, 1999)
19. “Our Time” – Dear Euphoria (single, 2019)
20. “Carpet Crawlers” – Genesis (The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, 1974)

Random notes:

• Short anthemic rock’n’roll is still occasionally being delivered here in the 2020s, and few late-stage rock bands are as adept at it as the London-based Vaccines. Their new album, Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations, released last month, is a candy box full of reverby nuggets of succinct catchiness (longest track time here is 3:49). Check the whole thing out, and buy it if you like it, at Bandcamp. I particularly like “Sunkissed” and “Another Nightmare” as well.

• I’ve said it before but it always bears repeating: no one in rock history has written songs like Randy Newman. Above and beyond a fluky hit single or two, his albums over the years are sprinkled with offbeat musical treasures that have been largely forgotten by now, including “Miami,” from the 1983 album Trouble in Paradise. “I Love L.A.” was that album’s big hit, and is surely fun, but “Miami” is the real pièce de résistance. The arrangement alone is stunning, a wonderful match for a song that masks its complexity via effortless melodicism. The structure eludes easy explication–there’s a verse, and a sort of secondary verse, and then also maybe a pre-chorus, leading to a chorus that cuts the rhythm abruptly in half and offers one of Newman’s great instrumental countermelodies–a musical gift that no one in the non-classical world would even think to do, never mind have the arrangement chops to pull off. He’s so good at it that he even uses this instrumental refrain as the basis for musical joke later in the song, when the motif delivers a false entry into the chorus at 3:00.

• A somewhat indescribable ensemble from Bristol, the Tara Clerkin Trio traffics in atmospheric jazzy folk, or maybe folky jazz, with elements of electronic music and, even, classical music thrown in for good measure. “The Turning Ground,” hypnotic and captivating, is from their five-song EP On The Turning Ground, released last year. I found this one via Said the Gramophone’s annual list of favorite songs, always an enlightening read.

• Liz Phair has I think (I hope) had the last laugh regarding her self-titled 2003 album. Lambasted by hipsters at the time for how it supposedly abandoned her lo-fi roots, the album 20 years later sounds like a pretty wonderful batch of well-produced songs. And, sheesh, doesn’t anything she sings sound great? That voice. The one thing that stands out in retrospect about the haters is that the idea of “selling out” was apparently still something you weren’t supposed to do back in 2003. Times have surely changed.

• The young Shelagh McDonald was either an early fan of the young Joni Mitchell or was tuned into a similar wavelength over there in Scotland; in any case, “Rod’s Song” is a wonderful, energetic, Joni-like creation (think “Chelsea Morning”). McDonald’s is an odd story: she released two albums in the early ’70s, when she was in her early 20s, and seemingly a rising star on the British folk-rock scene. In the middle of recording her third album, in 1971, she disappeared. As in left the business, no contact info, whereabouts unknown. Fast forward forty-some years, to 2005, when a reissue of her first two albums prompted some newspaper coverage, which she eventually saw. She decided to tell her story to a Scottish newspaper, revealing that her departure from the music scene was due to the after-effects of a bad LSD trip. It wasn’t until 2013 that she at long last released a new album, but it was sold only at her concerts, and isn’t available digitally. Another album was reported to be in the works around 2017, but has yet to see the light of day.

• I used to think I didn’t like LCD Soundsystem’s music, but I finally realized I mostly just haven’t connected to how unnecessarily long James Murphy’s songs tend to be, at least to my ears. I just don’t think one needs quite so much repetition if you’re not on MDMA in a club at three in the morning. So when I stumbled on a sub-four-minute version of the song “Someone Great,” I could enjoy it without getting to where I’m just waiting for it to end. An excellent song, when properly lengthed.

• As a FYI, the well-known Genesis song that closes out the mix here has been alternately titled “Carpet Crawlers” and “The Carpet Crawlers,” at various points of release, re-release, and re-recording. There was, among other things, a new version recorded in 1999 as “The Carpet Crawlers 1999.” And while it was (sort of) fun to hear Peter Gabriel reuniting with Genesis, and sharing lead vocals this time with Phil Collins, the cover, with its series of small but annoying changes, was entirely unnecessary, to my ears. Stick with the awesome original, which appeared without the “The” on the 1974 double LP.

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“Mirrors” – BabelIntroduced over a series of delicately fingered piano chords, “Mirrors” begins as a minimalist, moody ballad before refashioning into a sprightly piece of (still) minimalist synth-pop. It’s a lucid, appealing song start to finish, with slowly accumulating parts and no sound wasted or out of place. What holds everything together, to my ears, is the recurring sidestep the melody takes, a motif first heard at 1:00 when vocalist Karin Mäkiranta sings the phrase “where nothing goes wrong.” This quiet but potent musical moment seems both to resolve and not resolve at the same time, and weaves through the piece like a shy friend.

While the piano continues underneath, the synthesizers move to the center of the song beginning at 1:23, when an electronic tone with the feel of a plucked string provides a syncopated pulse that picks up the pace. At 2:00 a synth wash begins to fill the back of the mix, while at 2:24 we get a descending synthesizer countermelody; both are elements that keep the vibe electronic but also light-footed. An extra payoff arrives at 2:55, when Mäkiranta begins cooing a wordless vocal line, which continues underneath the song’s coda-like final verses.

Babel is the duo of Mäkiranta and Mikko Pykäri, who are based in Helsinki. Each of them have been involved with other musical projects; this is their second release as a twosome. “Mirrors” is the title track to an EP that came out back in August. You can check it out, and buy it, over on Bandcamp.

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“Monts et merveilles” – Le Collage de France“Monts et merveilles” is an easy-going French-language head-bopper with an unhurried backbeat and a wistful undercurrent. While acoustic at its core, the song is enhanced by soft and knowing electric touches–a plucked guitar here, a chiming synthesizer chord there. The title is part of the French idiom promettre monts et merveilles, which literally means to promise mountains and marvels–in other words, to declare that you’re going to deliver something especially awesome to someone. If this is akin to the English expression about promising the moon, the phrase likely has a baked-in sense of disappointment about it: no one who promises the moon, after all, ever delivers the actual moon. In translation the song’s lyrics evade close explication, offering instead a general sense of resignation at the whims of the universe and the injustice of so-called civilized society. Front man and songwriter Rémi Nation tells me the song has to do with the failure of trickle-down economics as well as the more general failing of Western society in its relentless equation of success with wealth. Still, the more I listen to the music, the more I sense, maybe, an insouciant sort of fortitude in the overall vibe.

A highlight among the song’s charms is the sing-song-y chorus, which finds Nation backed by Marie Pierre singing in unison rather than harmony, an effect one doesn’t often hear, especially with a male-female combination. I also really like the guitar break (2:21 to 2:41), in particular the low-register solo that begins at 2:32. It’s from the “less is more” school to be sure, but the tone and character is precise and, in this day and age, quite refreshing.

Le collage de France is the latest musical project helmed by Nation, who delighted us here while leading the band Orouni, featured on Fingertips in January 2017. Le collage de France’s bio reveals love and politics and language, and the ambiguities inherent in all three intertwining arenas, as areas of focus for this intriguing endeavor. “Monts et marveilles” is a track from Le collage de France’s debut LP, Langage Ment (“Language lies”), which was released late last month. Check it out, and buy it in various formats, on Bandcamp.

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“Beside You” – MaganaA bashy midtempo rocker with instant character, “Beside You” has a circular melody, a distorted wall of background sound, and the compelling voice of Jeni Magaña leading us through a very ’20s narrative of personal and cultural uncertainty. And while these are themes that could strike a listener as over-familiar, there is something about Magaña’s tone and resolve that grabs at the soul here. Give it a few listens and see if you don’t feel it too.

A central, potent feature is the juxtaposition of a double-time verse with a half-time chorus, the latter of which gives the song a recurring place of aural (and lyrical) solace to land. And take a listen to the variegated guitar work. First, there’s the ringing guitar line that provides the instrumental hook in the introduction; next we get some blurry guitar noise in the second half of the verse, contributing to the aforementioned wall of sound; we also get some high squawky notes livening the verses starting around 0:58, sounding nearly (but not nearly) like mistakes, and then, not to be outdone, some low buzzy accents rising up around 1:48.

Another of the song’s primary characteristics is its outpouring of lyrics in the double-time verse, which seems an of-the-moment singer/songwriter technique (an excellent model here is “Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers). Magaña puts such tender heart into both the words and the performance that she finds the authentic core in a songwriting mode that can veer towards the stale or robotic in the wrong hands.

Jeni loses her first name, and her tilde, to perform as Magana. Originally from Bakersfield, and now in Los Angeles, via Brooklyn, she has most recently been on stage as the touring bassist with Mitski. She is also part of the intermittent duo pen pin, with Emily Moore. As a solo artist, she was previously featured on Fingertips in October 2016. “Beside You” is the lead track from her new album, Teeth, which comes out in a month on the Audio Antihero label (whose tagline, for the record, is “Specialists in Commercial Suicide”). You can check more of it out, and pre-order it, on Bandcamp.

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The year 2023 didn’t come and go with much that resembled joy but let’s at least recognize that it was a pretty darned good year for music. Then again, independent of the dreadful news that afflicts our global community month after month, one year to the next, music seems always to deliver–which is to say, every year turns out to be a pretty darned good year for music. (We receive at least that consolation, and it’s no small one.) Note that I am speaking from neither the thoroughly mainstream nor the rigorously avant garde; I’m talking about quality music that rises up somewhat but not entirely left of center. Music that’s accessible but thoughtful, engaging but interesting, music that hasn’t given up on the organic involvement of human bodies and human consciousness. That kind of music. You may not see in the “What’s Hot” playlists but it’s out there, thriving artistically (if not financially).

All of which is a roundabout way of acknowledging the presence of four 2023 songs in this first playlist of 2024. Typically, in seeking balanced chronological distribution among the 20 songs, I aim not to have more than three songs from any given decade in each playlist. So much, this month, for that rule. In and around the new-ish music you’ll encounter the usual admixture of decades and styles, a 20-song journey that hangs together, however elusively, from start to finish.

As discussed last month, the artist roster resets in January–any artist featured in 2023 (or before) is free again to populate a playlist in 2024. Even so, for what it’s worth, this month’s mix hosts 12 artists who never previously had a song featured in an EPS playlist dating all the way back to 2014. Here is what’s in store to start the new year; extra notes as usual below the widget:

1. “She Moves On” – Paul Simon (The Rhythm of the Saints, 1990)
2. “All Night Long” – Peter Murphy (Love Hysteria, 1988)
3. “Cars and Parties” – Edith Frost (Wonder Wonder, 2001)
4. “Monticello” – The Monty Alexander Trio (We’ve Only Just Begun, 1972)
5. “XO Skeleton” – La Force (XO Skeleton, 2023)
6. “Talking Backwards” – Real Estate (Atlas, 2014)
7. “You’re Gonna Make Me Love You” – Sandi Sheldon (single, 1967)
8. “I Love You Honey, Give Me a Beer” – Blondie (demo, 1980)
9. “Hudson” – Allison Miller (Rivers in our Veins, 2023)
10. “Make You Better” – The Decemberists (What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, 2015)
11. “Nearer Than Heaven” – Delays (Faded Seaside Glamour, 2004)
12. “To Cry You a Song” – Jethro Tull (Benefit, 1970)
13. “Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba ” – Fito Páez feat. Mon Laferte (EADDA9223, 2023)
14. “6 Underground” – Sneaker Pimps (Becoming X, 1996)
15. “My World is Empty Without You” – The Supremes (single, 1965)
16. “Hard to Explain” – The Strokes (Is This It?, 2001)
17. “Someone to Talk To” – The Police (B-side, 1983)
18. “Our Town” – Iris DeMent (Infamous Angel, 1992)
19. “Spanish Dancers” – Bob Welch (Rebel Rouser, 1979)
20. “Requiem” – Allison Russell (The Returner, 2023)

Random notes:

• The above-mentioned artist reset gave me the opportunity to find a slot for a great, lesser-known Blondie song just a couple of months after the band’s last appearance here. I have a giant soft spot for Blondie, a band that seems to me underrated despite the mass popularity of a few of their biggest hits. The song here is a demo version of something that was re-envisioned and re-titled before making it to an album–as “Go Through It,” it landed on 1980’s Autoamerican. The lyrics were fiddled with and a semi-gratuitous, Mexican-style horn section was added on the LP version; the demo version is punchier, looser, and happily reminiscent of some of the band’s earlier recordings. I have nothing against trying new styles and directions, but was happy to discover how Blondie could sound like a classic version of themselves even in a time frame in which they were beginning to re-imagine themselves into nonexistence.

• While the unusually literate music blog Said the Gramophone has gone dormant as a regular source of posts for a number of years now, the site’s founder, novelist Sean Michaels, still assembles at year-end his annual list of favorite songs. Each year there are 100 of them, and they veer towards the 21st-century hipster’s characteristic mix of the blatantly popular and the inscrutably offbeat. The descriptions are singular, worth the trip alone, and even as most of the songs listed edge beyond the range of my own peculiar musical taste, I always locate 10 or 15 among them that transform into favorites of mine as well. One of which, now, is “XO Skeleton,” from the Canadian singer/songwriter Ariel Engle, who does musical business as La Force. Michaels calls it “a tune about mortality and care that flexes, shimmers, iridescent as a beetle.” Engle is also a current member of the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene. Note that only one song featured on Fingertips in 2023 made the STG list, but it was up there at number seven: Debby Friday’s “So Hard to Tell.”

• Fito Páez is an acclaimed and popular Argentinian musician; his profile here in the U.S. is decidedly lower. He peaked commercially with his 1992 album El Amor Después del Amor (“Love After Love”), which sold some 750,000 albums in Argentina, but he has nevertheless had a long and busy career since then, with more than two dozen studio albums to his name to date. He’s won a number of Latin Grammy Awards over the course of his career, and in 2021 was given a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, he released the album EADDA9223, which is a song by song re-recording and re-vamping of his previously mentioned hit 1992 LP. Paéz has been quoted as saying that this project aimed to prove “that there are no sacred, untouchable albums.” The new version of the album–I’ve yet to discover where the album’s title comes from–features a variety of Spanish-speaking guest musicians, among them Ángela Aguilar and Andrés Calamaro, and also Elvis Costello. (Costello had previously worked with Paéz on Spanish Model, Costello’s 2021 Spanish-language version of This Year’s Model. That album features all the original Attractions backing tracks, topped by new vocals sung in Spanish by Spanish-speaking artists. Paéz sings “Radio, Radio.”) The vocalist sharing the spotlight with Paéz on the single “Sasha, Sissí y el Círculo de Baba” is the Chilean-born, Mexico-based singer/songwriter Mon Laferte, a musical star in her own right.

• Andy Summers sang only four or five lead vocals while with the Police; “Someone To Talk To” was one of them, and it was only a B-side to the 1983 single “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” (The piquant and more outre “Mother,” another Summers composition and lead vocal, did make it onto the Synchronicity album that year.) A skilled and inventive guitarist, he had had a busy career, largely as a session player, before joining the Police in 1977, replacing the band’s original guitarist, Henry Padovani. Since the Police’s hiatus in 1984 and effective dissolution by 1986, Summers has released 13 solo albums (all instrumental except for the first), along with eight albums in collaboration with other musicians. His most recent is 2021’s Harmonics of the Night.

• There is a music industry cliché about the so-called sophomore slump; the often expressed idea is that a musician has 20-odd years to make their first album, and six months or so to make their second. Thus, in theory, the lesser quality. Whether generally true or not, Allison Russell has easily escaped the trap, following her sparkling 2021 debut, Outside Child, with an equally impressive second album in 2023, The Returner. Spanning the emotions from the mournful to the jubilant, the album features a good number of songs that sound like instant classics, so sturdy are the melodies and arrangements. The timeless and uplifting title track is a particular triumph, but I’m also partial to the closing track, “Requiem,” which I’ve likewise employed as a closer this month. And by the way if you happened to miss Outside Child, you might want to correct that oversight.

• A reminder that you can have this delivered to your inbox every month if you sign up for the newsletter–details to the right in the sidebar. The email version features a couple of bonus notes each month, for the information hungry.

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“Bone Dry” – BloodChunky. guitar-driven, and intriguing, “Bone Dry”–song length, 1:44–ends before you can get your arms around its off-center rhythms and elusive declarations. Despite–or perhaps because of–the song’s evanescent idiosyncrasies, the thing is thoroughly appealing, to my ears.

As a composition at once short and knotty, “Bone Dry” may be similar in length to a certain amount of current pop, but is dissimilar in vibe and resolve. Short songs have become more common in the TikTok era, in which exposure to music often comes in sub-1:00 fragments; many pop hits of the current day clock in not only under three minutes but under 2:30, and some even under 2:00. The first thing jettisoned in these pithy songs is any sense of a bridge; another short-song strategy is to offer just one verse and then a short, repeated chorus. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, if artistic considerations drive the decisions. I suspect, however, that the shortening of songs is, mostly, happening via a death-circle feedback loop of streaming stats generated by our collective, information-overload-driven short attention spans.

But I digress. “Bone Dry” is in any case an example of a creatively satisfying short song: rather than present itself as a beat-forward, bridge-less, chorus-heavy earworm-wannabe, here’s a song that revels in its craggy folds and discrepancies. One consistent feature is a relentless avoidance of the first beat of a measure: neither the recurring guitar lick nor any of the lyrical lines start on the downbeat, which is traditionally the strongest beat of the measure and the foundation of a song’s rhythm and melody. That’s out the window here, which is what creates an ongoing sense of things being off-kilter, to the point where the time signature, while (I think) mostly a standard 4/4, feels ambiguous. Another way “Bone Dry” achieves its shortness without oversimplification is its elimination of anything resembling a coda; the ending is sudden, all but in mid-sentence.

Blood is a four-piece band based in Philadelphia that used to be a six-piece band based in Austin. “Bone Dry” is the latest of a handful of singles the group has released since 2019. You can check them all out on Bandcamp.

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Eclectic Playlist Series 10.8 - August 2023

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Instrumental-forward journey

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Whispery vocals, echoey arpeggios

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Jangly, catchy, concise

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Eclectic Playlist Series 10.7 - July 2023

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Melodic mojo

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Fuzzy and buzzy

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Swoony early rock vibe

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Eclectic Playlist Series 10.6 - June 2023

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Bittersweet allure

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Noisy and welcoming

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The fine line between mysterious and ominous

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While there is an ongoing policy here never to feature the same exact song by the same artist twice, however many years go by, there is no restriction about featuring the same song recorded by different artists. This month, in fact, there are two such entries, about which more below. There are a few other cover songs mixed in here as well, including Cassandra Wilson’s astonishing transformation of an operatic, potentially cheesy Neapolitan classic into a haunting, immaculately arranged marvel. The best cover versions perform the magic trick of revealing something fresh and unexpected while maintaining the familiar core. I’d say the Watson Twins’ Cure cover qualifies as well, as does The Flaming Lips’ overhaul of “Borderline.”

I should note that having a policy is one thing, maintaining it is another: I have twice, to date, featured the exact same song by the same artist in two different mixes, by mistake. The answer to this particular trivia question: “Are You With Me Now?” by Cate Le Bon, and “Fat Man and Dancing Girl” by Suzanne Vega. Oops.

As previously noted, this month marks the 20th anniversary of the first tentative posts on Fingertips. So I guess it’s only appropriate that They Might Be Giants is in the mix this month. (It’s their eighth time here, for those keeping score at home.) But they’re one of only five artists this month who have previously been featured on a playlist, ranging back nine-plus years. So, a particularly eclectic bunch to mark year 20, as follows:

1. “Alex Chilton” – The Replacements (Pleased to Meet Me, 1987)
2. “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind” – Vashti Bunyan (single, 1965)
3. “Security Check” – Sophie Hunger (Halluzinationen, 2020)
4. “I Don’t Wanna Cry” – Ronnie Dyson ((If You Let Me Make Love To You Then) Why Can’t I Touch You, 1970)
5. “The Sad Sound of the Wind” – Jules Shear (The Great Puzzle, 1992)
6. “Just Like Heaven” – The Watson Twins (Fire Songs, 2008)
7. “I Bet High” – Pop and Obachan (Misc. Excellence, 2016)
8. “Second Choice” – Any Trouble (Where Are All The Nice Girls, 1980)
9. “She Cracked” – The Modern Lovers (The Modern Lovers, 1976 [recorded 1972])
10. “Helen Reddy” – Trembling Blue Stars (The Seven Autumn Flowers, 2004)
11. “The Fairest of the Seasons” – Nico (Chelsea Girl, 1967)
12. “O Sole Mio” – Cassandra Wilson (Another Country, 2012)
13. “Taillights Fade” – Buffalo Tom (Let Me Come Over, 1992)
14. “Don’t Let’s Start” – They Might Be Giants (They Might Be Giants, 1986)
15. “Just Look at What You’ve Done” – Brenda Holloway (single, 1967)
16. “Runaway” – Dwight Twilley (Twilley, 1979)
17. “Blood and Butter” – Caroline Polachek (Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, 2023)
18. “The Queen of Hearts” – The Unthanks (Last, 2011)
19. “Comedy” – Shack (H.M.S. Fable, 1999)
20. “Borderline” – The Flaming Lips (with Stardeath and White Dwarfs) (Covered, A Revolution in Sound: Warner Bros. Records, 2009)

Stray comments:

• Dwight Twilley will be forever be linked to the power pop standard “I’m On Fire,” recorded by the Dwight Twilley Band on the 1976 album Sincerely. But the Tulsa-born singer/songwriter has an extended back catalog as a solo artist, following the breakup of his relatively short-lived band–including, seemingly, more “rarities” and offbeat cover projects than proper album releases at this point. (Among other things, he has recorded two full albums of Beatles songs.) For all the pile-up of music available for the committed aficionado, not everything can be found on the major streaming services; one flagrant missing release is his 1979 solo debut, simply entitled Twilley. So you won’t find the earworm-y “Runaway” on Spotify but it’s yours to enjoy here.

• Ronnie Dyson’s impassioned “I Don’t Wanna Cry” offers up a rhythmic (and grammatical) revision of the Chuck Jackson original, “I Don’t Want to Cry,” from 1961 (as heard in Eclectic Playlist Series 7.01, from January 2020). The Jackson version, interestingly, was the lead and title track of an album on which all songs were about crying. While Jackson’s recording had an attractive whiff of late-autumn doo-wop about it, Dyson’s take, from 1970, is something of a proto-disco number. Dyson, for his part, had an occasionally notable (if unfortunately short) career, hitting the big time at 18 as a featured performer in the Broadway musical Hair; it was his voice that iconically opened the show, singing “Aquarius.” (“When the moon is in the seventh house…”) Dyson soon after landed roles both in the movies and on stage and recorded a debut album, entitled (If You Let Me Make Love to You Then) Why Can’t I Touch You?; the title track was a top-10 hit in the U.S. “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” the follow-up single, hit number 50, and that was as high as any of his subsequent releases charted. He died at age 40 in 1990.

• The other song previously featured here but by a different artist is “Borderline,” which was Madonna’s first top-10 hit (see Eclectic Playlist Series 3.02, February 2016). The song arrived during that short moment when her music was considered “alternative” (mostly just because she had been signed to the new-wave-oriented label Sire Records). I’ve always been partial to “Borderline” for its multi-faceted musicality: there’s the instrumental hook, the melodic shifts, the two-part verse plus the pre-chorus (those “Just try to understand” chords get me every time), and then the nuanced chorus with its one-word first line. The song was written by Reggie Lucas, who produced most of the debut album. A guitarist who played with Billy Paul and Miles Davis, among others, Lucas started producing and writing with partner James Mtume in the late ’70s; the Madonna debut, in 1983, was his first solo production. According to the internet, Lucas and Madonna had a strained relationship as the recording unfolded. But he did give her what is arguably the album’s best song–a song so solid it delightfully survives unpacking and repacking by the Flaming Lips, a version the band recorded for an offbeat Warner Bros. compilation album released in 2017. The album commemorated the label’s 50th anniversary and featured currently-signed Warner artists covering songs by legacy Warner acts. It’s a motley collection both in terms of songs and artists but it culminates marvelously with this slow, increasingly furious Madonna cover. The Norman, OK-based band Stardeath and White Dwarfs, along for the ride here, has collaborated a few times with the Flaming Lips; among the band’s members is Dennis Coyne, nephew of Wayne.

• I love how effortlessly the Watson Twins transfigure the Cure’s boppy, late new-wave hit into a plaintive C&W-inflected ballad. You’ll find “Just Like Heaven” on their 2008 album Fire Songs; it also appeared on the HBO series True Blood. The twins–who are in fact actual twins–have a new album due out next month entitled Holler, which is their first release in five years.

• Brenda Holloway recorded for Motown in the ’60s, but never quite hit it big, despite the quality of her singles. At one point poised to step into Mary Wells’ shoes as Motown’s major female solo artist, Holloway also was one of only a handful of Motown artists who wrote their own songs. Issues arose between her and the label, leading to her departure from Motown in 1968; the next year, she sued Berry Gordy, who had made some minor changes to her song “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and gave himself a writing credit on the song, which became a huge hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears. She recorded a few times post-Motown, including a gospel album in 1980, but eventually left the music business. She is one of many lesser-known artists to have found her early work embraced by the Northern Soul scene in the UK; she re-emerged as a recording artist in the 1990s, releasing three albums between 1990 and 2003. “Just Look What You’ve Done” was co-written by Frank Wilson and R. Dean Taylor, each with colorful and convoluted histories of their own; I’ll let the internet fill you in if you are interested.

• I am still getting my musical arms around the phenomenon that is Caroline Polachek, who arrives from outside my comfort zone in terms of her wholehearted embrace of sounds associated with 21st-century pop. And yet she clearly is using that vocabulary for intriguing artistic purposes. Her new-ish album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is a grower–The New Yorker has called it “a spellbindingly deranged collage”–compelling re-listens even as I’m not sure, always, how to absorb what I’m listening to. “Blood and Butter” is one of the songs I clicked with first, thanks to the instantly engaging pre-chorus (the “And what I want is…” part). One of Polachek’s defining attributes is a powerful voice that she has trained to flip registers in such a way as to imitate what Auto-Tune can do artificially. While I remain intuitively skeptical of Auto-Tune I can’t help but approach with an open mind a gifted vocalist who finds something aesthetically satisfying in the effects it can produce. Clearly she is also processing her voice intermittently. Note that I’ve never ruled processed vocals out of my realm of interest, I just generally find Auto-Tune’s robotic tinge unpleasant and its mindless employment irritating. But Caroline Polachek I listen to, finding in her approach and vibe a worthy successor to Kate Bush as a singer/songwriter trafficking in unabashed, auteur-like pop drama.

• As usual, this month’s mix features a handful of songs that were previously featured as MP3s here on Fingertips. May’s “alumni” class: Pop and Obachan, The Unthanks, and, going way back to 2004, the London-based collective Trembling Blue Stars. Follow the links if you’re curious on the details.

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With equal parts optimism and naivete (sometimes but not always the same thing), Fingertips was launched 20 years ago this month. Because of some format and template changes over the years, some of the earliest posts are no longer available, but the extra curious can find an archive featuring the very first, very tentative posts (from May and June 2003) here, via the Wayback Machine.

That’s a long time, 20 years. Needless to say, the world has changed. Facebook didn’t exist in 2003; neither did iPhones, or Twitter; the phrase “social media” had been tossed around for about a decade at that point but it was not a mainstream coinage (in fact, it was still not quite clear what it meant). “The Apprentice” had yet to rear its poisonous head; little did we realize where that would lead us.

One thing that did exist in 2003, with increasing prominence, was the music blog. Fingertips wasn’t the first, but I was in the early mix; Fluxblog, self-identified as the first MP3 blog, had launched in 2002, as had the indomitable Largehearted Boy, and a handful of others, most of whom are long gone.

The original mission here was straightforward, if offbeat: there amidst the internet’s piracy party of the ’00s, Fingertips featured only free and legal downloads. What a concept! The early posts, which came weekly, were merely a sentence or two; I think my initial intention was to be a clearinghouse more than a review compendium. “Hey,” I was saying, “do you realize that there’s a bunch of really good, free music available legally?” “And hey,” I guess I was also saying, “maybe everyone can stop stealing so much music?” As noted: optimistic, naive.

Within a few months, the songs were each receiving a paragraph, and my fuller purpose was becoming clear: I wanted not only to alert people to the existence of high-quality free and legal downloads, I wanted to write about why any given song was so good, in as concrete a way as possible. This was based on a long-standing pet peeve of mine: music reviews that don’t talk much, if at all, about what the music actually sounds like. To this day, many album reviews focus disconcertingly on lyrics. This has bothered me for two reasons. First, it downplays the aural reality of the recording; second, it overlooks the fact that not every listener necessarily tunes in to the lyrics when they listen to music. I’m describing myself here, and I assume I’m not alone. In any case: if a song was only supposed to be considered for its lyrics there would be no need for there to be music in the first place.

The stream of warm impermanenceAs such, the reviews here increasingly began to focus on distinct aspects of a song’s sound, often pointing to specific moments, via the time clock readily visible on your MP3 player of choice. At the same time, there was a fair amount of other content on the site in those early years, including guides to where you might find artistically satisfying free and legal MP3s in various locations around the web. I did album reviews for a while too. The weekly newsletter was launched relatively early on. Every so often there would be a contest to give away stuff I was receiving, back when record companies had stuff to give. By year-end 2007 the song reviews had expanded into two or three paragraphs, and I had gotten it into my head to post essays every so often about some digital-music-related topic or another.

Eventually, the weekliness broke down. (I’m surprised in retrospect it lasted as long as it did.) Likewise lost in the first half of the ’10s was all extraneous content (except the essays, as you can see); in the 2014-2015 time frame, the reviews became a monthly occurrence, along with the playlists, which began in that same era.

And that’s been the model ever since, complete with intermittent self-questioning about why I continue to do this and who is paying any attention. Some things just don’t change.

As for the music itself, the description on the home page still stands: “Fingertips seeks out 21st-century music with heart and spirit, grounded in one sort of rock’n’roll lineage or another but with feet planted solidly in the here and now.” Fingertips was launched during rock music’s one last burst of cultural semi-relevance–the indie rock boom of the early ’00s. While other blogs grounded in similar ideas at the time have since ventured into different soundscapes, aiming to ride the wave of whatever’s most popular, I’ve stayed focused on that “rock’n’roll lineage” idea because it’s the music I know the most about and feel most connected to. As long as there are still people making it (which apparently there are) and some handful of people still interested in listening to it (ditto), that’s the music you’ll hear here. But only the really good stuff.

So. Here we are in 2023, in a culture (world?) that feels to be both slowly and quickly coming apart at the seams. And I don’t know about you but I most certainly am not getting any younger–I was already the “old guy” among the early music bloggers, some of whom only now are moving through the age I was back then. Which is to say there are all sorts of reasons for me to wonder, even if I am continuing, which apparently I am, how much longer this ship will keep sailing.

I walk along darkened corridorsBut sail on it does for now. Having long ago abandoned the idea of attracting a large audience, I have in recent years learned to embrace the “boutique” nature of this endeavor. If my dreams of earning a useful income this way proved to be idle fantasy, what I’ve realized over the years is that a small audience is, in important ways, a more real audience than a super-large one. I can absorb and be grateful for every single person who finds their way here; and you can be sure that each of you is appreciated for your (excellent) taste far more than you could ever be appreciated or even perceived as an individual by any company or publication running a site with thousands or millions of visits, clicks, likes, whatever. You are not a real person there but you are a real person here. And maybe that means less and less in the dawning age of generative AI. But it’s meaningful to me; it’s really why I’m still here, 20 years and counting.

Perhaps the most important consequence of Fingertips’ persistence as a boutique music site, a one-man band as it were, is the site’s lack of the sorts of pernicious features long since accepted as normal most everywhere else online. The content is not only free but free of the strings usually attached to free web content; and say what you might about the underwhelming site design, there is, here, none of the mendacious tricks employed by most other sites to force you to scroll or make extra clicks simply to read what you came to read or listen to what you came to listen to. And of course no distracting ads. I am operating as a human being respectful of other human beings and ever hopeful of connecting to those with similarly humanistic inclinations. (This is needless to say an algorithm- and AI-free zone.)

These past 20 years have seen technology reach fascinating new heights and disconcerting new depths. The same might be said for the country where I was born and where I am based. (Short version: we had Obama, we had the next guy.) Fingertips has mostly operated as something of an innocent bystander, occasionally aiming to be a quiet voice of reason in a world dominated by loud and unreasonable entities, be they people, avatars, billionaires, websites, corporations, what have you.

And, a voice ever advocating for quality in this quantity-crazed world of ours. Whether the creation of a mainstream artist or a band with a relative handful of followers, each song featured here is a song of notable quality. I stand by every one of them, regardless of the views or clicks or likes they have received either here or anywhere else. Think of it: how many web sites can you name that have quality as their one and only content guideline? I understand the problem: to offer this attribute in the digital realm in which we socio-culturally exist requires a rejection of the capitalism on which we base pretty much everything we do. I am in the relatively luxurious life position of not requiring income from this enterprise (although donations do help!). Most of the icky features sprayed up and down and across the web are the direct result of the need and/or desire for profit. So none of them are here.

My ultimate hope is that I have created something of a digital oasis: an online location where you can forget about what makes more tentacled online experiences either overwhelming or off-putting or both. It was a conscious decision from the outset to keep “community” features to a minimum and by now that makes Fingertips a refreshingly quiet corner of a very noisy medium. You can come here to read about and/or listen to good music, and think your own thoughts, and feel your own feelings. Once you remember that web sites encourage active comment sections not because they care about your input but to increase their engagement metrics, it kind of takes the bloom off that particular rose. In any case, I think we as a culture have grown by a number of factors a little too concerned with having and expressing opinions. It’s okay just to read; it’s okay just to listen.

To anyone reading this, your presence and attention is truly appreciated. I don’t know where we end up on this idiosyncratic ride but I know that there will be a lot of worthwhile music to listen to, still, as the path yet unfolds. Stay strong and be a good human, because that is one thing the robots can never be.

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We’ll launch this month’s mix with one of rock’n’roll’s all-time great singles and then take the usual trip through decades and genres to land, ultimately, in a pretty-much genre-less 21st-century instrumental inspired by the poetry of e.e. cummings. You know, just another run-of-the-mill internet playlist. Stick around for the whole ride and you’ll hear power pop, classic R&B, Americana, some pre-Beatles rock’n’roll from an unexpected source, a couple of generations of indie rock, and maybe something in there qualifying around the edges as classic rock too. There are even a couple of bonafide hit singles in here this time. Note that I have nothing against hits, they just have to be good, not merely popular, and there is no arguing the all-time quality of “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” however familiar (to some) it might be. Head to the widget below the playlist to listen, and head down below the widget if you’re interested in a smattering of background notes about what you’re listening to.

Here’s what you’ll hear:

1. “Going Underground” – The Jam (single, 1980)
2. “Hunter” – Jess Williamson (Time Ain’t Accidental, 2023)
3. “Daphne” – Squeeze (Ridiculous, 1995)
4. “I Just Don’t Understand” – Ann-Margret (On The Way Up, 1962)
5. “I Can’t Stay Long” – Ultravox (Systems of Romance, 1978)
6. “Learn to Say No” – Lydia Loveless (Indestructible Machine, 2011)
7. “Captain” – Shapes of Race Cars (Apocalypse Hurts EP, 2004)
8. “Sing Me a Love Song” – The Glories (single, 1967)
9. “Dorina” – Dada (Puzzle, 1992)
10. “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” – Linda Ronstadt (Heart Like a Wheel, 1974)
11. “Holding On” – Body Type (single, 2023)
12. “Heaven” – The Walkmen (Heaven, 2012)
13. “Reach Out I’ll Be There” – The Four Tops (single, 1966; Reach Out, 1967)
14. “In a Manner of Speaking” – Martin Gore (Counterfeit EP, 1989)
15. “Come and Hold Me” – Fanny (Fanny, 1970)
16. “Ghost of York” – As Tall As Lions (As Tall As Lions, 2006)
17. “John I Love You” – Sinéad O’Connor (Universal Mother, 1994)
18. “Magnolia Blues” – Adia Victoria (A Southern Gothic, 2021)
19. “You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance” – Bruce Cockburn (Inner City Front, 1981)
20. “the rain is a handsome animal” – Tin Hat (the rain is a handsome animal, 2012)

Smattering of background information:

• Yes I do consider “Going Underground” to be one of rock’s all-time best singles; in my own peculiar world I’d rank it in the top 10 if not top 5. Adding to its powerful charm is the fact that it was a single through and through, never placed on an album (except of course on after-the-fact compilations). The Jam, like the Beatles before them, were inclined to release songs as stand-alone singles, which in retrospect seems at once urgent and romantic. “Going Underground,” released in March 1980, appeared while the trio were at the height of their powers, in the middle of a three-album run of exceptional quality; it went to #1 in the UK and solidified their huge rock-star status there–a condition never close to being realized here in the US. Engaging from the offbeat, staccato intro through to its fading bass note, the song is solidly built musically and confident lyrically, with its signature flip-flop: a pre-chorus that asserts, first, that “the public gets what the public wants” but, the second time, that “the public wants what the public gets.” That’s about as subtle and incisive an indictment of capitalism as you’re going to get in a pop song. Curiously, “Going Underground” was originally intended as the B-side to a song called “Dreams of Children,” but the single apparently got misprinted as a double A side. Radio programmers gravitated to the catchier and more forceful “Going Underground,” as did the UK public.

• No you’re not missing anything: “Heaven” by the Walkmen does not have the word “heaven” in the lyrics. And it’s even the title track to their 2012 album, which turned out to be the band’s last.

• Ridiculous, from 1995, was once upon a time considered a late-career release for the intermittently brilliant British band Squeeze; whoever anticipated that they’d be releasing albums 20-plus years later? (They had three in the 2010s, most recently 2017’s The Knowledge; and in 2022 came an EP with one new song, two re-recorded older songs, and three live recordings.) While not as widely heard as their late-’70s/early-’80s LPs, Ridiculous was a strong effort, with a handful of memorable songs, including this quirky bit of relationship observation. Don’t miss the signature Tilbrook/Difford octave harmonies in the chorus. And while few here in the US, these days, are likely to have any idea who Nana Mouskouri is, the Greek singer (and, at one point, politician) had a hugely successful international career for decades. And for a long stretch there, even people who probably never heard her sing knew her name and her enduring look: the severe, middle-parted dark hair and those large, dark-framed, rectangular eyeglasses. You basically never saw popular singers with glasses back in the day, and mostly still don’t. Leave it to Glenn and Chris to work her so vividly into a song lyric.

• The Glories remain a soul group from the ’60s with an uncommonly small internet footprint. It doesn’t help that their name is rather too generic for search engines; you’re as likely to come up with references to the movie The Glorias and/or a batch of religious literature as anything about this elusive but terrific trio. They can be found neither on Wikipedia nor, for all intents and purposes, on Allmusic. But the compilation Soul Legend that someone or another released in 2011, apparently only digitally, is the place to go to hear pretty much everything the group recorded during their short, commercially negligible, but aesthetically powerful run.

• Dave Gahan gets all sorts of well-deserved credit for the deep distinctive voice with which he has fronted Depeche Mode for decades on end. But bandmate and principal songwriter Martin Gore brings some decent pipes to the table as well when he occasionally steps up to lead vocals for the band. He has released a handful of solo recordings over the years, opting either for covering other people’s songs or penning atmospheric electronic music without vocals. Here he finds the spacious dark ballad hiding within Tuxedomoon’s prickly composition from earlier that decade. Fifteen years later, Nouvelle Vague gave it a bittersweet bossa nova twist and that’s the one that really hit (60 million Spotify streams and counting).

• Sinéad O’Connor has one of rock’s most indelible singing voices, and this tender but intense song off her somewhat disregarded Universal Mother album shows it off brilliantly. Spiritually and psychologically complex, she has for decades presented as someone neither critics nor the mainstream public quite know what to do with; her career has in any case ricocheted through any number of controversies. But that voice. And let’s not overlook her capacity for writing some mighty tunes. Last year she announced her retirement from the music industry. And yet (there’s always more with her) this year she surfaced with a new version of “The Skye Boat Song,” which has been the theme song for the show Outlander; O’Connor’s version will be heard during the upcoming seventh season of that popular TV series.

• Fanny was the first all-female band to release a major-label album, and while they experienced a certain amount of commercial and critical success in the early to middle ’70s, they somehow never really stuck in terms of widespread legacy or long-term industry recognition. I say “somehow”; I mean flagrant sexism. They were serious and talented musicians, and yet of course had to keep resisting record-company executives who wanted them to play up their sex appeal. They worked with producers Richard Perry and Todd Rundgren; they toured around the world, opening for big-name bands like Jethro Tull and Humble Pie. Even as they faded quickly from our mainstream cultural memory, they did inspire later generations of female rock’n’rollers, including the Runaways, the Go-Go’s, and the Bangles. The band has received a new round of overdue attention here in the 21st century. A long-awaited reunion is in the works, which will include at least one live performance and a new major-label album.

• The song “Captain” by the LA-based band Shapes of Race Cars was one of Fingertips’ early precious finds, a song that convinced me there were unrecognized treasures floating out there on the internet if only one had the patience and wherewithal to track them down. The song, a first-rate power pop gem, appeared originally on their debut EP in 2004, and re-appeared in a revamped and shortened version on their first full-length release, 2006’s Power. The band released one more album in 2010 and seemed to fade away–until resurfacing during the pandemic with their 2020 single “Say Yeah.” Oh and perhaps there are one or two longstanding Fingertips visitors among you who remember that “Captain” was one of 13 songs featured on the one and only CD project produced here, the elusive Fingertips: Unwebbed disc, released late in 2006. I may still have a few copies if anyone is curious these many years later!

• While Midge-Ure-era Ultravox and John-Foxx-era Ultravox both have their charms, I think that Systems of Romance functions as a really satisfying transitional work. (Note that both Systems, from 1978, Foxx’s last with the band, and the first Ure-fronted album, 1980’s Vienna, were produced by Conny Plank, most well-known for his work with Kraftwerk.) In Systems you can pretty much hear where things are heading, even as the band was as yet trafficking in spiky electronics more than achy, synth-driven melodrama. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In any case, check out “I Can’t Stay Long,” which is the exact kind of lost classic these playlists exist to uncover and highlight.

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“Flash of Light” – Tugboat Captain“Flash of Light” may be the most expansive, fully-developed two-minute song I’ve ever heard. It unfolds without any sense of hurry: fully 43 seconds of the two minutes operates as the introduction; there is, additionally, an instrumental break, an engaging structure, and a sophisticated sense of melody. At the same time, there is no chorus, which is one sly way to shorten a song. The imagistic lyrics are haiku-like in their brevity and allusiveness, hinting at unexplored depths with impressive conciseness–another way of creating an impression of something weightier than the time clock might seem to indicate.

Let’s get back to that drawn-out introduction. I’m not often a fan of long intros, and initially looked askance at the unusual intro/body-of-song ratio. But this one launches with a pleasing mixture of mystery and urgency: first, an in-the-distance keyboard pounding around some synth squiggles in a sort of pre-introduction; this swells at 0:21 into a more dramatic soundscape, a siren-like electric guitar now reinforcing the pounding motif; and everything now engaging the ear so thoroughly that the pull-the-plug ending at 0:42 feels momentarily disconcerting. But this drop is its own kind of wonderful, the song collapsing on the third beat of a measure idiosyncratically expanded to 6/4 as the singing starts. This might better be framed as a new, 2/4 measure, which adds emphasis to a melody otherwise being offered on the downbeat. In any case, what a melody it is, brought to melancholy life via the wistful tones of front man Alexander Sokolow, punctuated by some Beatlesque chord changes (cf. 0:46-0:48). Also, there’s a bassoon in here somewhere. The band has a bassoon player.

And hm–I risk explicating out of proportion to the song’s succinctness don’t I? It’ll only take two minutes of your time to investigate so go do. And maybe you’ll figure out on your own the location of “the first ever four-part bassoon drop in the indie-rock genre,” as noted by the band on their Bandcamp page. They take their bassooning seriously.

Tugboat Captain is a four-piece from London. “Flash of Light” is a single released in January. A second single, “Deep Sea Diving,” was released in mid-March. The band’s debut album, Rut, appeared in 2020. You can check everything out on Bandcamp.

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“So Hard to Tell” – Debby FridayAfter hitting the Canadian music scene a few years ago with glitchy, club-oriented bangers (her first two EPs were entitled Death Drive and Bitchpunk, for what it’s worth), the Nigeria-born, Montreal-raised DJ-turned-musician Debby Friday unveils a gentler side with this single from her new album, Good Luck.

An electronic ballad with distorted backing vocals and washes of reverberant sound, “So Hard to Tell” centers on a soothing, circular melody that induced Friday to find a previously unutilized singing style; she usually hits the mic with a lower, speaking-voice-like register. This song finds her addressing and advising her younger self, which invited the vulnerable vocal–although she has said she was initially surprised by the sound coming out of her mouth here. There’s still some underlying glitch in the air, which to my ears is part of the appeal, as is the swirly, quasi-psychedelic atmosphere in general. It’s a hypnotic dream of a song, with a sturdy core but a tender spirit.

MP3 via KEXP. Good Luck came out March 24 on Sub Pop; the rest of the record is a good bit more forceful. You can check it out, and buy it (digital, vinyl, CD), via Bandcamp.

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“Slow Passage” – Thomas Charlie PedersenHere’s another song that packs a lot of presence into a relatively short package. Like many people alert to life’s bittersweet qualities, I’m partial to minor-key compositions, so I’m on board here from the song’s opening arpeggios; syncopated finger picking adds to the appealing vibe of upbeat melancholia. Thomas Charlie Pedersen’s forthright vocal style recalls something intangible about rock’n’roll records from the late ’60s or early ’70s, and this elusive nostalgia, too, feeds the song’s bittersweet complexion.

The song’s aural impact, in fact, is strong enough to do what many great rock songs do, which is render lyrical specifics unnecessary: the sound of the words is not only enough but in its own way more necessary than intelligible meaning. I’m never sure if this aligns with a musician’s intention or not but I enjoy songs like this in which you can easily enough discern individual words and short phrases but can’t decipher the bigger picture lyrically speaking. This forces the listener away from concrete analysis and into a looser state of attentiveness, in which the song might more easily induce an emotional rather than an intellectual response.

Thomas Charlie Pedersen is Danish musician who showed up last year on Fingertips as half of the sibling duo Vinyl Floor. “Slow Passage” is the third of 15 tracks on the album Employees Must Wash Their Hands, set for release next week. This will be Pedersen’s third solo album; Vinyl Floor, meanwhile, have five full-length releases to date. You can check out Pedersen’s previous albums on Spotify; the new one will be up there on April 14.

MP3 via the artist.

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“FOMO” – Small MillionIndie pop with a misty grandeur, “FOMO” manages to drift and insist at the same time. The trick here is the double-time melody: while the song ambles to a steady beat, rendered all the more deliberate by sustained bass notes, whether synthesized or otherwise, the verse melody comes at us in a twice-as-fast flow. The subtle ache in Malachi Graham’s voice echoes the emotion baked into the title, while a touch of reverb reinforces the sense of empowered solitude the song appears to be exploring. With the chorus (first heard at 0:44) the song spreads back out, luxuriating in the unhurried vibe of the foundational rhythm, with countermelodic backing vocals loosely layered underneath.

Graham’s voice is in a fact a highlight, its airy tone underpinned by something steely, which she keeps largely but not entirely under wraps. To hear what I’m talking about check out the pent-up surge in her delivery of the line “So what’s it like at the end of the line” (0:41-0:43). That’s a voice to be reckoned with. And unlike the song reviewed previously, “FOMO” does appear to be more directly about something, even as the words, in Graham’s handling, do often dance just out of the reach of comprehension. (For those less comfortable in living with the mystery, the lyrics are available here.)

Note how the introduction’s stately synth riff retreats so delicately that you don’t really notice its presence below subsequent choruses, only to return at 2:10 for an emphatic 12-second recapitulation. With just a restrained bass line as accompaniment, this solo of sorts retroactively illuminates how mindfully arranged the entire song has been; however lush the overall feeling, there aren’t actually a lot of moving parts in play. Less, as the modernist architects used to assert, often is more.

Small Million is a Portland-based band that recently expanded from a duo to a foursome. They have released two EPs to date, in 2016 and 2018, and two singles in 2019. They have re-emerged this year with two singles so far, and an LP slated for release later this year. Check everything out on Bandcamp.

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So we’re going through another stretch of time during which, among other disconcerting things, AI is receiving a lot of renewed attention. It looks serious this time, huh? Robotic programs creating content on demand that appears to mimic human output, generated by appropriating existing material (with or without permission), launched off the capacity to crunch data at a superhuman level with no awareness of human context, and utilizing truly off-putting amounts of energy in the process. What could possibly go wrong?

I will tiptoe past the many and varied moral, psychological, sociological, and technological issues posed by this brave new world we’ve stumbled into and shoot right to the overlooked heart of the matter. Which is: do we as human beings care to be communicated to by machines? Of course we already are, all the time. There’s Siri, there’s Alexa, there are those robotic voices that answer customer service calls. An algorithm, likewise, is robotic communication; the songs that Spotify has “chosen” for you, that’s a machine doing the choosing. These new AI bots, however, offer a new level of machine communication because in these cases what the machine spits out isn’t just a list of recommended objects or preprogrammed sound bites but written words or graphic images or music that didn’t previously exist, and that may look and/or sound like something a living breathing human being might produce.

That a living breathing human being did not produce these things is, in fact, a profound difference. For template-oriented writing and commercial graphics this is not necessarily a big deal (except of course for people who may lose jobs in the process). But for anything resembling a creative effort the difference as I see it is chasm-like. My personal bottom line is: if a human being, with a depth of consciousness, a network of personal and familial relationships, and (important) awareness of their own mortality is writing a book or a song or painting a picture or doing any other variety of artistic endeavor, there’s a good reason to look and/or listen. This is one consciousness reaching out to another. That’s what art exists to do. If a machine–with no capacity to understand what it’s communicating, no depth of consciousness, no organic existence in our inter-relational world–is “creating” something, I have little interest in what it’s “saying.”

All of this is a (very) roundabout way of noting that these monthly playlists are the conscious effort of one human being reaching out to any other human being who finds their way here. Even if AI could assemble this exact list of 20 songs in the same order (ha! I dare it), this would not be the same experience. Or, correction: to the casual listener, I suppose it would be the same–same songs, same order, what’s the difference? But to an attentive music lover, how can this be the same? Doesn’t it matter that the songs are selected by a human being with a history, an idiosyncratic knowledge of the music being presented, an intuitive sense of what fits together, and a heartfelt interest in connecting with other similarly-minded humans? If we’ve gotten to the point where surface is all that matters, then we have surrendered an important part of our own humanity, which is our depth. I suppose another word for this is “soul,” which is precisely what AI lacks and will never acquire simply through the prodigious capacity to crunch data. (For a more developed series of thoughts on the matter, I’ll refer you to an essay I wrote three years ago entitled “Yeah, but is it art?”.)

And look: no doubt AI has the capacity to stimulate genuine human creativity based on what it produces; this may well lead to fruitful expression rooted in human effort and sensitivity. But chatbot output, of the kind the internet is currently marveling over, while fascinating at a surface level, is just extra noise as far as I’m concerned–and as such another excellent reminder to limit my screen time and make ongoing efforts to interact with the physical world and, even if online, actual individual humans.

End of soapbox. Note that this is the second playlist released in March, as I aim to be back on track numerically speaking, after February eluded me. As always, the widget for listening is below the list of songs. If you are not a robot and are interested in some extra notes about this month’s assortment, scroll down past the widget.

Here’s what you’ll hear:

1. “In France They Kiss on Main Street” – Joni Mitchell (The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975)
2. “Cash Machine” – Hard-Fi (Stars on CCTV, 2004)
3. “Sharp Words” – Original Mirrors (Original Mirrors, 1980)
4. “The Pins” – Sara Radle (Same Sun Shines, 2012)
5. “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage” – Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (Make It Happen, 1967)
6. “You’re in a Bad Way” – Saint Etienne (So Tough, 1993)
7. “Last Train Home” – Pat Metheny Group (Still Life (Talking), 1987)
8. “The Runner” – Allison Russell (Outside Child, 2021)
9. “Paris 1919” – John Cale (Paris 1919, 1973)
10. “You’re Not Alone” – People and Stars (People and Stars EP, 2016)
11. “Look Outside” – Broadcast (The Noise Made By People, 2000)
12. “Heartbeats Accelerating” – Kate and Anna McGarrigle (Heartbeats Accelerating, 1990)
13. “Souvenir” – Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (Architecture & Morality, 1981)
14. “LA Rain” – The Mynabirds (What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood, 2010)
15. “Expressway to Your Heart” – The Soul Survivors (Absolute Torch and Twang, 1989)
16. “Bag of Hammers” – Thao & The Get Down Stay Down (We Brave Bee Stings and All, 2008)
17. “Pay As You Go” – Wayne Shorter (Second Genesis, 1960/1974)
18. “Drown” – Son Volt (Trace, 1995)
19. “Grand Central Station, March 18, 1977” – Steve Forbert (Alive on Arrival, 1978)
20. “The Worst is Done” – Weyes Blood (And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, 2022)

The fine print:

• It’s 46 years nearly to the day from the slice of time captured in Steve Forbert’s poignant “Grand Central Station, March 18, 1977,” from his mighty debut album, 1978’s Alive on Arrival. However long-ago a moment he is chronicling via song here, the cool and somewhat comforting thing is that his light-footed descriptions sound all but timeless: there’s nothing in the scene he paints from a day spent busking in Grand Central that couldn’t describe the same scene these many years later. Sure, there are prominent contemporary specifics he couldn’t have written about–notably, the phone-scrollers and ear-bud-talkers–but by and large Grand Central was and is Grand Central, recognizably so to this day and beyond.

• I’m still waiting, hopefully, for another album from Laura Berhenn, who does musical business as The Mynabirds. Her 2010 debut, What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood, remains a retro-fueled joy from start to finish; her most recent release, 2017’s Be Here Now was another strong effort, with more of an ’80s than a ’60s flair in this case. Long-time Fingertips visitors may recall any one or another of the four times the Mynabirds have been featured in the MP3 section here (see Artist Index for details); Berhenn has also been tapped twice previously for inclusion in a playlist. While I know that the real-life LA rains have caused no minor amount of havoc and distress this year, the rain also had at least a bit of a bright side vis-à-vis the area’s long-standing drought. Berhenn’s song seems well pitched between tragedy and detachment, with its plaintive swing and matter-of-fact fortitude.

• Here’s another chance for you to be reminded of the glory of Allison Russell’s 2021 debut album, the painful yet triumphant Outside Child. No offense (necessarily) meant to 14-year-old TikTokkers (or to AI robots, for that matter), but the output of a mature, life-experienced artist is music coming to us from another, much weightier plane of existence and authenticity than the attention-seeking twaddle craved by audiences trained by now not to know any better, or even care. More than ever it’s up to you and me to acknowledge and honor the difference–to remember that even here in the inferno live some who “are not inferno,” as per old friend Italo Calvino, and to salute and encourage them.

• The short-lived British new wave band Original Mirrors laid down some indelible tracks before dissolving due to commercial disinterest. Personally I’m not sure why a song like “Sharp Words” didn’t become a new wave classic, along with their incisive cover of the Supremes’ oddly psychedelic tune “Reflections.” You can check out their self-titled debut album on Spotify; the one follow-up, Heart Twango and Raw Beat, has no digital existence. At the end of the day, the most notable thing about Original Mirrors is probably that it was co-founded by Ian Broudie, who later went on to some bit of fame and fortune as mastermind behind the Lightning Seeds. His co-founder was Steve Allen, a semi-known quantity back in the day as front man for the somewhat influential art rockers Deaf School.

• Speaking of which, the new wave era introduced me firsthand to the delightful quirks and charms of the British pop charts. The idea that a loping, melodic, synth-filled song such as “Souvenir” could be a smash hit in the UK in 1981 (it peaked there at #3) delighted me. The US charts from that same time frame had some half-decent stuff and some (let’s just say) fluff, but nothing that sounded like OMD. The band would not hit the top 10 in the US until 1986, with the smoother, poppier “If You Leave,” a song launched to the big time by its prominent use in the popular movie Pretty in Pink.

• This playlist’s seemingly inevitable memorial entrant comes from saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who died this month at age 89. While his jazz pedigree is impeccable, with early-career experience with both Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, he is probably best known to rock’n’roll fans as founder of the celebrated fusion band Weather Report, and soon after for playing extensively with Joni Mitchell, appearing on all 10 studio albums she released between 1977 and 2002. Another rock-fan highlight: Shorter’s memorable tenor sax solo three-quarters of the way through the Steely Dan epic “Aja.” “Pay As You Go” is a short, spiffy track from the second solo album Shorter recorded, in 1960. For whatever reason, the album, Second Genesis, was not released until 1974. Note that I don’t listen to jazz as aficionados seem to; I’m not tracking the sounds and tones of the instrumentalists or the explicit manner of their interactions. I hear energetic playing and an engaging (and concise!) tune and I’m happy.

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I know not everyone has time to listen to a 20-song playlist, especially when said playlist is comprised of a certain amount of unfamiliar music. But I do hope that those of you who have the inclination to start at least occasionally find the stamina to finish. This doesn’t mean you have to do it all in one sitting! But look: my playlists are not albums front-loaded with hit singles, quickly to peter out after that. I believe in every one of the 20 songs that populate each list, which means that songs that land near the bottom aren’t there because they are somehow weaker or less appealing than the first few songs. But I see the stats and I see that listening lengths tend not (at all) to be the full length of the playlist. This is the internet, people are flitty, I get it. But I’m often sad to see what great songs people are missing out on just because they weren’t among the first few.

Take this month, for instance. Anyone who bugs out before the final stretch will miss, among other excellent things, the short but distinctive David Bowie track “So She,” mysteriously left off the standard version of 2013’s The Next Day; rather, it ended up one of four songs added to the “deluxe” version of the album. To this day, however, it is not to be found on Spotify; remember the mantra about streaming: use it but don’t rely on it!

As always, the widget for listening is below the playlist. The extra curious can scroll further and find extra notes about some of what you’ll be hearing.

On to the music:

1. “Glorious” – A. Graham and the Moment Band (This Tyrant is Free, 2004)
2. “Things We Said Today” – The Beatles (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964)
3. “Instrumental Introduction/Don’t Look Down” – Lindsey Buckingham (Out of the Cradle, 1992)
4. “Sweetheart” – Jennah Barry (Young Men, 2012)
5. “If Looks Could Kill” – Camera Obscura (Let’s Get Out of This Country, 2006)
6. “Livin’ in Love” – Sheila Anthony (b-side, 1970)
7. “Can’t Get Used to Losing You” – The English Beat (What Is Beat?, 1983)
8. “Diamantes” – Carla Morrison (El Renacimiento, 2022)
9. “Nevermind” – Leonard Cohen (Popular Problems, 2014)
10. “Rome (Wasn’t Built in a Day)” – Sam Cooke (Ain’t That Good News, 1964)
11. “Anniversary Song” – Cowboy Junkies (Pale Sun, Crescent Moon, 1993)
12. “Always” – Tom Verlaine (Dreamtime, 1981)
13. “Icarus” – Paul Winter Consort (Icarus, 1972)
14. “Walkin’ In and Out of Your Arms” – k.d. lang (Absolute Torch and Twang, 1989)
15. “Stop Pretending” – Deep Sea Diver (single, 2020)
16. “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” – Burt Bacharach (Burt Bacharach – Hit Maker!, 1965)
17. “American Heartbeat” – Duncan Browne (Streets of Fire, 1979)
18. “So She” – David Bowie (The Next Day [deluxe], 2013)
19. “It’s In Our Hands” – Björk (Greatest Hits, 2002)
20. “Magnificent Bird” – Gabriel Kahane (Magnificent Bird, 2022)

The fine print:

• Back in Fingertips’ formative years, I used to keep a running “Top 10” of favorite songs from the recent months of postings. I remember “Glorious” as riding at #1 on that list for a good while. These many years later, it remains as user-friendly and good-natured a song as it sounded to me back in the day. I long since lost track of front man Andy Graham but a quick poke around the intertubes informs me that he is still out there singing and recording in his user-friendly, good-natured style. He now calls his ensemble A. Graham and the Worlds of Fun; their album, Rides, came out in November. Check it out on Bandcamp. The album includes a new recording of “Glorious,” identified “Glorious 22.”

• An original Buttercup Records pressing of Sheila Anthony’s 1970 single “Woman to Woman,” the b-side of which is “Livin’ in Love,” is currently selling on Discogs for £325.00. Several re-issues, from 1975, are somewhat cheaper. The previously obscure track has become a Northern Soul standard but remains virtually unknown outside of that well-intentioned but somewhat fetishy scene. As for Anthony herself, I can find nothing online with even a hint of her history or biography. I guess the song, which is wonderful, will have to suffice.

• Duncan Browne had a few different musical incarnations in his cancer-shortened career. On the scene first in the late ’60s as a baroque folkie, he emerged in the mid-’70s as half of the would-be glam-rock-ish duo Metro, only then to find his most compelling voice as a solo act with two fine late-’70s albums. However excellent, neither album sold very well, and Browne in the ’80s ventured into the somewhat more remunerative field of TV and movie scoring. The sad ending came in 1993; Browne was just 46. I featured the haunting title track to his 1978 album The Wild Places on EPS 4.05 in May 2017. “American Heartbeat” is a standout track from 1979’s Streets of Fire.

• Björk’s singular, unearthly vocals are in full command of “It’s In Our Hands,” a song that showed up on her 2002 Greatest Hits LP without previously appearing on any release of hers. Sonically it lands in an awesome sweet spot: a near-ideal blend of her commanding Homogenic sound and the quieter, glitchier world of Vespertine. Her subsequent albums have gotten at once more complex and more abstract–not necessarily a bad thing but also not necessarily music that’s easy to absorb without careful and repeated listens. Sometimes the ear just needs simple and accessible to get through the day. But being a little weird at the same time is usually a bonus.

• When last we heard from the Mexican singer/songwriter Carla Morrison (see EPS 4.07), she was touring in the aftermath of two Grammy-nominated albums, which were her first two full-length releases, coming in 2012 and 2015. A lot has changed since then. By the end of 2017, she had burnt out from writing and performing and was battling depression. She moved to Paris in 2019 and started to find new inspiration, moving her music in a more overtly pop-oriented direction, while lyrically confronting her mental health battles. A new wave of depression descended in 2021 after losing her father to COVID. But she has since emerged and finished her first album in five years, El Renacimiento (which can be translated as “The Rebirth”), which came out in the spring of 2022. My ears are not often attuned to what passes for pop in the 2020s but when it emerges from a musician with deeper roots and musical chops I take it more seriously.

• Is Leonard Cohen a downer or what? But an incisive and formidable downer to be sure. I did however feel compelled to shut the door on old Leonard with an immediate shot of Sam Cooke. The songs don’t quite match up but I wanted a quick change of pace so that’s where we ended up.

• Two memorials wove their way, back to back, into this month’s mix. First up is Tom Verlaine, who left us in January at the age of 73. He’s most well-known for co-founding the seminal NYC band Television in the 1970s. (And call me thick but I just the other day realized the connection between the band name and Verlaine’s initials.) Influential and iconoclastic, Verlaine released nine solo albums after Television’s initial breakup, in 1978, but only two after 1992 (the year Television reunited; they never officially broke up again but never recorded again either). It’s not clear exactly how he passed the final few decades of his life, but a hint comes from his answer to the New York Times when asked, in 2006, to summarize his life. He replied, “Struggling not to have a professional career.” I can relate.

• The second “in memoriam” entry is of course the Burt Bacharach song. Bacharach, 94, died last month and the outpouring of appreciation was potent and well-deserved. If you’re curious, you can read a lot more about him all over the internet at this point. I can’t help but recall from my distant youth his snazzy, harmonically astute ’60s hits, often for Dionne Warwick, but what drew me towards him as an adult was the collaboration album he did with Elvis Costello in 1998, Painted From Memory–an album that has only grown in stature over the years. (It’s a bit of a masterpiece.) “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” is an early Bacharach nugget, at once lazily sophisticated and over in a blink. This was another case in which I judged the somewhat mismatched segue as worth it for the overall effect. By the way, the vocals here were handled by a British trio called The Breakaways, considered top-flight session vocalists at the time; they worked with Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield, and (yes) Jimi Hendrix, among others. They were uncredited on the Bacharach song.

• But hey if you want a nice segue check out #19 into #20. That works pretty well.

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“Sunday” – WinterAbout as dreamy as dream pop gets, “Sunday” begins all gossamer and twinkle, with desultory guitar chords and piano plinkings and, eventually, singer/songwriter Samira Winter singing languidly about something that’s in your head that you can’t resist. The song proceeds to set the same lyrics to a brisk backbeat and yes it is hard to resist, that juxtaposition of happy rhythm and melancholy affect.

Because make no mistake: Winter, however airy the voice, isn’t singing about shiny happy people here. First there’s a reference to “years of trauma”; then we get the chorus: Where’s the truth?/It’s slipping loose/Getting abused/So confused. And yet, right after that comes a prominently articulated guitar melody, warm and low-registered. Then there’s that light-hearted instrumental after the second iteration of the chorus (3:17), a bubbling up of space-age synthesizers that augments the song’s shimmer even as Winter closes the tune out on the repeated lyric “So confused” via a series of layered harmonies marked by unresolved chords. A final touch: more of those lackadaisical piano tinkles that we heard in the introduction. Is the confusion referenced by the lyrics mirrored in the happy/sad mixed signals delivered by the songwriting? Or is this just dream pop being dream pop, in which the glistening soundscape is often contradicted by lyrics that may be disaffected, hallucinatory, or tenaciously indecipherable (cf. Twins, Cocteau)? Could be both. Me I’m chalking the whole thing up as an homage to Harriet Wheeler and her seminal semi-dream-poppy band the Sundays. I’m probably wrong about that but any time I get to write about the Sundays I’m more happy than sad.

Samira Winter was born and raised in Brazil and moved to the U.S. to go to college. Winter began as a duo in 2012, evolved into a band a few years later, and depopulated into a solo project for Winter herself by the time of the 2019 album Hazy. “Sunday” is a track from What Kind of Blue Are You?, the sixth full-length attributed to Winter, released in October. It’s a nice listen end to end.

MP3 via KEXP. Winter was previously featured on Fingertips in 2015.

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“Jennifer Valentine” – Field SchoolPower pop is never too far below the surface here on Fingertips, and early-ish 2023 gives us another wistful/tuneful bit of the same, this time of the fuzzy/lo-fi variety. “Jennifer Valentine” is a song exquisitely in tune with itself, telling an archetypal story of unrequited love with the powerfully shy tenderness of an introverted teen-ager. Power pop is the perfect vehicle, as the genre all but aches with innocent, unrealized passion, with its characteristically sweet, succinct melodies, often tinged in minor keys, forever hinting at the despair that lurks below desire.

This representative power-pop vibe hinges frequently, if not always, upon a vocalist with some bit of sugar mixed with the melancholy (or melancholy mixed with the sugar, depending on the individual circumstance). On “Jennifer Valentine” it embodies via the awkward combination of hesitancy and assertion in singer/songwriter Charles Bert’s reedy, mixed-down delivery. That opening salvo about how the singer wrote the name of his beloved “a thousand times” is quintessentially middle-school (you need a handy notebook and pen, after all), as are the progressively grandiose sentiments the song expresses: the singer goes from “Your name should be up in lights/Above the city burning bright” to “Electromagnets realign/Whenever you were walking by.”

And let’s not overlook the flawless choice of name here, with its sing-song-y dual dactyls and guileless imagery; what after all is more innocent and passive-assertive than sending a valentine to someone you have a crush on? This song is a valentine to a Valentine.

Field School is the pandemic-induced solo project launched by Bert during lockdown; its initial output consisted of three five-song cassettes, which were eventually released as digital EPs in 2022. Bert has otherwise been a member of the Seattle-based band Math and Physics Club since 2004. “Jennifer Valentine” was originally on the Hey Satellite EP, released in April 2022; it reappears on the full-length When Summer Comes album, from November 2022, which collects recordings from the original cassettes onto one album. MP3 via KEXP.

(And hey if you are a power pop fan you might want to go back and check out my Power Pop playlists on Spotify, which aim to unite both classic and contemporary power pop into one seamless listen. You’ll see there that I enjoy stretching the genre a bit to get beyond the usual suspects: while every song on these mixes features sparklingly catchy, power-pop-infused melodies, not every song is going to be found on standard power pop playlists. (Which is just as well because a lot of standard power pop playlists are just plain off base. Don’t get me started.) Anyway: Volume 1 is here; you can look for Volumes 2 and 3 once you’re there. Note a news flash: the original studio recording of “Starry Eyes,” as seminal a power pop song as there is, is no longer available on Spotify. This should tell you all you need to know about the efficacy and stability of streaming if you’re a committed music fan. Use it but don’t count on it!)

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“Wichita Rx” – Alpha CatA laid-back strummer in 3/4 time, “Wichita Rx” has an old-time sensibility and attention to craft. Take the opening lines of the first verse as an example. Elizabeth McCullough (who does musical business as Alpha Cat) sings, in her resonant alto, “Somewhere past Wichita/That girl caught up with you.” Already there’s so much going on! Listen to how she adds a melismatic syllable to the end of Wichita, subtly complicating the campfire melody; listen next to how she takes the three syllables of “up with you” at a different pace than the three syllables at the end of the first line (“Wichita”). So, these first two lines scan the same but are sung differently–another subtle and fetching complication. These may be tiny things but they fully impact the musical impression. That’s what I mean by attention to craft. Then, ponder the words themselves, which achieve something you don’t hear in a lot of 21st-century songs: an implied, engaging story from the get-go. Eight words and we already know there are two characters on a road trip, probably a long one, and that the narrator’s companion is tracked down by a woman who seems at best an annoyance, at least to the narrator. We get action, we get drama, and McCullough has been singing for all of six seconds.

And then, a turn: after that tantalizing start and that lived-in musical setting, McCullough keeps the story ever so slightly out of reach and the music subtly off-kilter. With a mix of evocative lines and elusive phrases, we keep circling back to “that girl from Wichita” who now is “using up your time.” The story eludes precise comprehension, but the weary resignation of the narrator implies a less than happy ending. “The mirror she broke/But she never did lie,” she sings, a succinct but enigmatic epigram. All the while, McCullough has been specializing in expressive musical sidesteps, such as you can hear on the word “wire” (0:23) or on the phrase “finds you” (0:58), or, maybe best of all, in the way she finishes the phrase “another one’s eyes” (2:23). Combined with the song’s fill-in-the-blanks story line, such touches cumulatively transform what might appear to a casual listener as a leisurely-paced slice of Americana into a mysteriously potent journey. Which, I might guess, the two characters in the song themselves had, one way or another.

“Wichita Rx” is a track from the EP Venus Smile… retrograde, which is a remastered version of the EP Venus Smile. The original Venus Smile was released in June 2022, while the remastered “retrograde” version came out in October. McCullough’s recording history with Alpha Cat goes back to 1999, with the release of the album Best Boy, which made something of an impact in the college radio world. Alpha Cat was initially a band, but became a solo project. McCullough was, sadly, sidetracked for more than 10 years by serious depression. As a result, the Venus Smile recordings date originally back to music written in the ’00s.

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For those keeping score at home, I operate here under the self-imposed rule that Eclectic Playlist Series artists may only appear once in any given calendar year. January is when everything resets, and all artists are available again. It’s fun to regain the unlimited choice but this does make the January list troublesome in that anyone I feature in this initial mix is immediately excluded for the rest of the year. If I over-eagerly populate the January playlist with some of my all-time favorites (e.g., Elvis Costello, Liz Phair, and Suzanne Vega, to name three), then poof, I’ve already used them up for the year. It’s a first-world problem.

While I’m in new year introductory mode, I’ll offer another couple of tidbits that you may or may not have figured out on your own over time. First: the horizontal graphic you see at the top of any playlist post is excerpted each month from the cover of one of the albums featured (via one song) on each mix. Next: the playlist’s title likewise is a phrase from a lyric in one of the songs in the mix. Usually these two things do not derive from the same song but I think it’s happened once or twice (for those keeping score at home).

As always, the widget for listening is below the playlist. The extra curious can scroll further and find extra notes about some of what you’ll be hearing.

Lastly, regarding the Mixcloud situation: I am leaving everything available there, at least for the next month or so. Feel free to pipe up if you have any helpful input on the matter; for all I know nobody is going back to listen to the older lists in the first place. I do tend to be more of an archivist than is seemingly necessary in an online realm oriented towards what’s next rather than what was here last month (or last year, or last decade). And yet I remain hesitant to have only 10 mixes live at any one time. Still, to keep all the playlists online is going to be pricey moving forward, and Fingertips is–go figure–hardly a money machine. If I take them down it’ll render this page largely superfluous, but maybe that’s not a big deal.

On to the music:

1. “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum)” – The Fun Boy Three (single, 1981)
2. “Collider Particles” – Madison Cunningham (Revealer, 2022)
3. “Say Something” – James (Laid, 1993)
4. “Zebra” – Beach House (Teen Dream, 2010)
5. “Somebody Who Loves You” – Joan Armatrading (Joan Armatrading, 1976)
6. “The Death of Magic Thinking” – Elvis Costello & The Imposters (The Boy Named If, 2022)
7. “Wish I Was” – Kim Deal (b-side, 2013)
8. “Perfume” – Sparks (Hello Young Lovers, 2006)
9. “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” – Lou Johnson (single, 1964)
10. “West Gwillimbury” – Ron Sexsmith (The Last Rider, 2017)
11. “Giving It All to You” – Liz Phair (Somebody’s Miracle, 2006)
12. “She’s In Love With You” – Suzi Quatro (Suzi…And Other Four-Letter Words, 1979)
13. “The Ways of the Wind” – P.M. Dawn (The Bliss Album…?, 1993)
14. “Satellites” – Rickie Lee Jones (Flying Cowboys, 1989)
15. “Keep On Dreamin'” – The Arcs (single, 2022; album coming in 2023)
16. “Sophie” – Jeff Beck (Wired, 1976)
17. “Fat Man & Dancing Girl” – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°, 1992)
18. “Long and Lonesome Road” – Shocking Blue (At Home, 1969)
19. “Reynardine” – Isobel Campbell (Milkwhite Sheets, 2006)
20. “Hope” – Bauhaus (Burning From the Inside, 1983)

The fine print:

• Two prominent but unrelated factors led to this month’s opening track. There was on the one hand the sad news of the death of the British singer/songwriter Terry Hall, best known here for his prominent role in the bands The Specials and The Fun Boy Three. And there was on the other hand the clown show that opened for business earlier this month in the U.S. House of Representatives. I’m not sure what they were specifically addressing in 1981–it sounds like they had an understandable beef with Ronald Reagan, among other things–but honestly, the lyrics to this debut single strike me as more on point than ever. (Note that the band over time lost the “The” in front of their name, but initial releases were in fact credited to “The Fun Boy Three.”)

• Speaking of newcomers to the EPS univertse: obviously one way to go is to select artists who are relatively new to the music scene. One of my favorites of this group is the singer/songwriter Madison Cunningham, whose songs can be knotty and catchy at the same time. As a bonus, she plays a mean, jazz-inflected guitar. The song “Hospital” was my introduction to her, and it’s a great one if you don’t know it, but it turns out the album, Revealer, is packed with goodies. Check it out if you get a chance.

• All the songs as he’s already written, all the musical paths he’s wandered down, and he still comes up with something like this? I’m talking Elvis Costello and this selection from his most recent LP, 2022’s A Boy Named If, which is as fresh and interesting as his best songs always are. And hey if you’re one of those people who has vaguely good feelings about EC but has maybe lost touch with his 21st-century output, have no fear: my “Elvis Costello: the 21st century” playlist is the thing for you. Twenty-one songs from his 21st-century oeuvre that range widely away from his “angry young man” phase and why shouldn’t they? He is no longer young and no longer angry, but he’s still as good a songwriter as rock’n’roll has ever produced.

• I am not a Pixies superfan and I don’t know a whole lot about Kim Deal and nothing about what prompted a series of five seven-inch singles she released, without an album, between 2012 and 2014. But I do know that the instrumental “Wish I Was” is weirdly magnetic to my ears, and I suspect that anyone fond of subtle droning guitar lines will feel similarly. The song establishes a deliciously laid-back groove and doesn’t deviate; the deep charm is in Deal’s ongoing choices in both the lead and rhythm parts (I assume she plays both). There are hesitations, minor atonalities, fuzzy patches, fitful melody lines, and an imprecise island vibe. Marvelous from beginning to end.

• “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” is about as Burt Bacharach-y a song as there is (check out those modulation!; and that eccentric opening parentheses!), and later versions are better known, the Naked Eyes cover in 1983 most of all, it was first a modest hit for the singer Lou Johnson back in 1964. It became a big hit in the UK when covered by Sandie Shaw later that same year. Dionne Warwick is also associated with this song; she recorded a demo version in 1963 but didn’t put out a full recording of it until her 1967 album The Windows of the World. Everyone does a pretty good job with this song but I’m especially enjoying Johnson’s take, with its unburdened, almost offhanded arrangement and the singer’s nonchalant delivery.

• I am not aiming to turn these playlists into requiems–my goal is to be as outwardly appreciative as possible while some of these older musicians are still with us–but it seems only natural to mark notable passings from time to time. There was Christine McVie last month and now the news about the so-called “guitarist’s guitarist,” Jeff Beck. I’m not a big fusion fan but only a grump is going to resist the various memorable guitar riffs baked into the eight songs on his 1976 album Wired. “Sophie” is a bit on the long side but it earns the ear space for its engaging, split-personality unfoldings, and the undeniable appeal of Beck’s soaring lead lines, here playing off some extra show-off-y stuff from Jan Hammer.

• If known at all, the Dutch band Shocking Blue gets pigeonholed into the “one-hit wonder” category based on their indelible 1969 song “Venus,” as sneaky-great sounding today as ever. But there was a good deal more to the band than that, thanks in large part to front woman Mariska Veres’ effortless vocal charisma. With a bluesy-folksy psychedelic palette that places them squarely in their late-’60s/early-’70s time frame, Shocking Blue carved out something of their own sound, at least for a while–the later few of their nine studio albums, released between 1967 and 1974, veered often towards either a more generic sound, as if the band were simply running out of ideas, or songs too deliberately evocative of “Venus” (see “Eve and the Apple,” from 1972’s Attila)…as if the band were simply running out of ideas. Through it all, however, Shocking Blue maintained an appealing, home-baked charm that mixed menace and innocence in an especially ’70s sort of way.

• How can you not love “West Gwillimbury”? As noted at Ron Sexsmith’s last appearance here (EPS 9.08), his 2017 album The Last Rider is a keeper, and this song is too delightful for words, featuring the sort of laid-back but insistent melodicism that characterizes his finest efforts. Ongoingly prolific, Sexsmith has not only released two more albums since then, but has another one, entitled The Vivian Line, his eighteenth, coming out next month.

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“Some Of Us Are Brave” – Danielle PonderA heartfelt knockout of a song, “Some Of Us Are Brave” is one part gospel, one part old-school soul, and one part acute, up-to-the-minute clarion call for empathy and empowerment. Singer/songwriter Danielle Ponder is a former public defender from Rochester, New York who turned full-time to music in 2018. “Some Of Us Are Brave” is the title track to her 2022 debut album; it takes its name from a landmark Black feminist essay collection from 1982 entitled All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.

There’s much to love about this song, beginning with the potency of Ponder’s voice, which is introduced through a filter that nods at vocal stylings from the ’30s and ’40s. The filter fades after thirty seconds, and Ponder proceeds to use her obviously powerful instrument with artful restraint–super appealing to my ears, which have always been allergic to the sort of singing a music teacher I once knew referred to, with delightful disdain, as “con belto” (cf. bel canto). With Ponder, the wonderful moments are moments of phrasing–such as her “what a pity” at 0:44, or the “I know” at 1:37, among many others–that might glide by an inattentive listener and yet cumulatively contribute to the overall magnetism of the performance.

On point as well are the production choices, which reinforce the theme of potent restraint. I especially like the way the song shifts at 0:53, and not necessarily in the direction one might anticipate. The introductory section as it develops might seem to be leading to something explosive; instead the song slides into a velvet groove that begins with subtle electronic touches before opening into the bass-forward, trip-hoppy soundscape that dominates the rest of the song. One last indication of the song’s predilection for subtle power is the outro (starting at 3:09), which features a meditative, arpeggiated synth line and lyrics of calm but persuasive force.

MP3 via KEXP. And hey if you can’t help wanting some stormier vocalizing, be sure to check out the entire album on Bandcamp, where you can buy it either digitally, on CD, or on vinyl. Ponder does in fact cut loose from time to time, and in her hands it’s pretty great as well.

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“Anna” – Cloud CukkooAfter a gentle, lullaby-like opening, “Anna” develops into a brisk, melodic composition that, backbeat notwithstanding, I’m tempted to call a ballad. What, after all, is a ballad? Traditionally, it’s a poem, typically suitable for singing, in which a story is told, often a romantic and/or tragic one. Note too that ballads often are set to an ABCB rhyme scheme, which is what “Anna” employs as well. I say it’s a ballad, and a splendid one at that.

The story being told, obliquely, is worth unpacking. The Dutch singer/songwriter Jori, who records as Cloud Cukkoo, tells of seeing a homeless man on a Dublin street, on a cold day, collecting coins in a Starbucks coffee cup with the name “Anna” on it. “Not even the cup was his,” she says. She wrote this song in response; in it, she alludes to his hardships as the man addresses the (imagined) woman whose name graces the discarded cup. It’s a simple but striking premise, brought to life with even-handed production, an incisive chorus, and Jori’s deceptively formidable voice–don’t let the song’s catchiness distract you from her lovely depth of tone. I especially appreciate the clean soundscape, driven by rhythm guitar, unfussy percussion, and well-placed keyboards: a beautiful aural counterpoint to the hyperactive, over-processed pop songs that grab clicks and followers in our mixed-up world.

Originally from a country village in the Netherlands, Jori relocated to Berlin in 2022 to be able to take part in a more diverse and vibrant creative community. She has some older material up on Bandcamp but doesn’t seem to be using that site at this point; your best bet for checking her music out is over on Spotify. “Anna” was just released last week; MP3 courtesy of the artist.

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“Forever Far Out” – Dot DashOne of the reassuring things about power pop, besides its indelible if elusive charm, is that it never quite goes away–largely because it never fully arrived in the first place: a relentlessly niche-y genre, power pop has yielded relatively few big hits over the decades. And although you may see a recurring set of words and phrases used in efforts to describe the sound–upbeat, melodic hooks, often of the sing-along variety; jangly and/or crunchy and/or chunky guitars; sweet-sounding vocals; concise songwriting–we always land eventually in “I know it when I hear it” territory.

So, even here in the year 2023, a good 50 years on from power pop’s formative era, the song “Forever Far Out,” from the veteran DC band Dot Dash, reads as power pop all the way: there’s the chunky guitar line, the upbeat ambiance, a lot of melodic resolution, sweet-toned vocals, and succinct craftsmanship, with the song clocking in under three minutes. Favoring melodies that repeatedly resolve is an underrated commonality among most power pop songs, and Dot Dash does that here before you know what’s hit you: the first verse unfolds in three lines, taking you from tension to resolution in 10 seconds flat. The chorus is a bit cagier on the resolution front but resolution still arrives, and is followed up with some wordless “oo-oos”–a feature, it should be noted, that is rarely out of place in power pop.

Bonus: there’s a bridge (1:39), apparently an endangered concept in 21st-century songwriting, and (extra bonus points) it’s an instrumental bridge, as in no singing. As with everything here it doesn’t waste time. That squalling guitar note that leads us back to the chorus is worth the price of admission, simply as something you pretty much never hear these days.

Dot Dash is a D.C.-based trio, formerly a quartet, with six previous albums to their name. “Forever Far Out” is the lead track from their seventh, entitled Madman in the Rain, released in November. You can check the whole thing out, and buy it, via Bandcamp. The band was previously featured on Fingertips in 2015; read the review and you’ll find out where the name came from and other fun facts. MP3 via the band.

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I’m going out on a limb here and posting a December playlist that is not a holiday playlist. I challenge you, in fact, to find anything here that says “holiday season” in any straightforward way. I’m not aiming to be a Grinch per se–I’m actually in a pretty good place of late all things considered–but the so-called “holiday spirit” isn’t doing it for me this year. The world is a lot; it’s all one can do to find a little clearing in it to stop and feel grateful for something or another. To crank all the way to deck the halls and ho ho ho is not in the cards for me this time around.

As for the rest of what’s in store, I sense an unconscious blending of the happy and the wary, the rousing and the wistful, a bit messy around the edges: life, in other words, via a 20-song playlist. Anticipate the possibility of a slightly jarring segue or two, which I will justify in two ways–first because sometimes songs that work well together as neighbors don’t abut each other comfortably, second because that’s life too.

As usual, the widget for listening is below the playlist. Faitihful listeners should note that Mixcloud, where the playlists live, has made a new corporate adjustment and as of December requires a paid membership, as a curator/creator, in order to keep more than 10 shows actively online at any given time. (It’s still free to listen to.) I decided to spring for the membership at least for the next few months, if only because I felt funny about abandoning eight-plus years of mixes quite so abruptly. I’m not sure it will be worth it in the long haul, given how, um, let’s say “specialized” the audience is. Still, I don’t love the idea of taking all the old playlists offline. We’ll see how it goes. Anyhow, here’s the latest, with some explanatory notes, as usual, below the widget:

1. “Queen Jane Approximately” – Emma Swift (Blonde on the Tracks, 2020)
2. “What You Said” – The Decks (Breath and Bone, 2009)
3. “The Walls Came Down” – The Call (Modern Romans, 1983)
4. “Baby, Don’t Cry” – Ray Charles (Sweet and Sour Tears, 1964)
5. “Time is a Healer” – Jesse Baylin (Jersey Girl, 2022)
6. “I’m Over You” – The Silos (The Silos, 1990)
7. “Now It’s On” – Granddaddy (Sumday, 2003)
8. “Memories of Madrid” – Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass (What Now My Love, 1966)
9. “Broken Circle” – Sam Phillips (Solid State: Songs From the Long Play, 2011)
   10.”I Can’t Make It Alone” – Maria McKee (You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, 1993)
10. “Out Of My Head” – First Aid Kit (Palomino, 2022)
11. “When My Baby’s Beside Me” – Big Star (#1 Record, 1972)
12. “Un Poco Loco” – Bud Powell (The Amazing Bud Powell, 1952)
13. “Pull Up The Roots” – Talking Heads (Speaking in Tongues, 1965)
14. “Snap Out Of It” – Arctic Monkeys (AM, 2013)
15. “Skin, Bone & Silicone” – Susan Enan (Plainsong, 2009)
16. “Rain” – Bruce Ruffin (Rain, 1971)
17. “What Friends?” – Bettie Serveert (Dust Bunnies, 1997)
18. “The Challenge” – Christine McVie (Christine McVie, 1984)
19. “Pollen Seeking Bees” – Saadi (Bad City EP, 2009)

The fine print:

• Emma Swift’s album of Bob Dylan covers, from 2020, seemed like just the thing my ears have wanted to listen to these last few weeks. I guess it ties in my mind to the release of Dylan’s odd but captivating book, The Philosophy of Modern Song; something about going through a book where Dylan talks about other people’s songs steered me towards an album where someone else was singing his songs. Or some such thing. Swift has a lovely voice full of effortless shadings, and the arrangements are unfussy, with Swift’s partner Robyn Hitchcock doing all sorts of nice, restrained guitar work. Check it out if you’re curious.

• The sad news of the death of Christine McVie prompted all sorts of well-deserved online eulogies, most focusing, with good reason, on the pivotal if often understated role she played in Fleetwood Mac. I decided to pay tribute via her lesser-known solo work, opting for a characteristically upbeat/melancholy number called “The Challenge,” from her self-titled 1984 album. The challenge she refers to? Love, what else.

• Susan Enan is a British singer/songwriter with one album to her name, which was released back in 2009. I spent a little time digging and could find nothing that suggests she is still active as a musician. I heard this song two or three times a number of years back on Radio Paradise and it stuck with me. If Enan is no longer singer/songwriter-ing I hope she has found a gratifying path; it always pains me to imagine talented musicians having simply to give up based on how hard it can be to make a living this way.

• Originally presented, in 1966, as a melancholy but forceful ballad in a Phil Spector-ish soundscape by the histrionic American singer P.J. Proby, “I Can’t Make It Alone” is yet another indelible Gerry Goffin/Carole King composition. Dusty Springfield recorded what may be the most familiar version of this on her landmark Dusty in Memphis album in 1969. (Lou Rawls did a convincing cover that same year.) No offense to Dusty or Lou but to my ears, Maria McKee owns this song, via a 1993 recording that unearthed the song’s backbeat and didn’t let up.

• The music of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass could not be made in this day and age, for any number of reasons. And while I am not at all insensitive to issues of appropriation, I have to give a pass to music this innocent and joyful and sonically respectful. If Alpert knew how to package and market this to middle-brow Americans in the mid- to late-’60s, more power to him. It was super appealing to me as a kid and I still have a big soft spot for those whirlwind banner TJB years of 1965 to 1967, with Alpert releasing an album every six or so months; four of the six records that came out during that three-year stretch went to #1 on the US chart, including What Now My Love.

• Another, entirely different musical soft spot for me is anything Sam Phillips puts out. Phillips is not only deeply thoughtful and creative as a songwriter, she has been creative with the business end of things as well. Back in 2009, she launched a fee-based subscription service called The Long Play, which offered members regular downloads of new songs, along with blog posts, interviews with her musical collaborators, and an array of other original content. All in all, she sent out 42 songs this way, distributed over five EPs and one LP, before shutting the service down in 2011. After the fact, she curated an album featuring 13 of those 42 songs, entitled Solid State: Songs From The Long Play. I never subscribed to the service but I bought the compilation album, from which “Broken Circle” is one of many highlights.

• The Arctic Monkeys have evolved into a somewhat different-sounding (but still great) band since the release of their widely-praised 2013 album AM. While the ubiquitous “Do I Wanna Know?” received the bulk of the attention (it’s got 1.5 billion streams on Spotify), the album is engaging throughout, and even included a few hints at where they would be heading, sonically, especially on the closing track “I Wanna Be Yours.” I’m still absorbing their new album, Car, but I think I like it a lot.

• One last soft spot in a mix overloaded with them, apparently: I love the vocal tone and texture of Carol van Dijk, front woman for the long-running Dutch band Bettie Serveert. There’s something at once friendly and imperious about her voice; match it with the band’s flair for crunchy guitar lines and punchy melodies and what’s not to love? “What Friends?” is a cleverly punctuated song from the band’s third album, 1997’s Dust Bunnies (the full lyric reads “You still don’t know what friends are for”). There have been eight albums released since then, most recently 2016’s Damaged Good, all worthy of a listen. The band has been featured three times to date on Fingertips, dating all the way back to 2003; this 2010 review gives you some more background on what they’re about.

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Heartfelt & sophisticated

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Offbeat frenzy, with horns

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Large & meditative at the same time

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.10 - October 2022

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Rumbly, insistent slice of indie rock

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An energetic sense of melancholy

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Hepped-up power pop

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Crafty touches

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.09 - September 2022

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.08 (August 2022)

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.07 - July 2022

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.06 - June 2022

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Along with this playlist comes a larger announcement: Fingertips will be taking a summer hiatus starting with the unofficial start of the our American summer this coming weekend. I’m not sure whether the MP3s are drying up or whether it’s just me in need of a break but I know that as I tried over … Continue reading "No matter who you are (Eclectic Playlist Series 9.05)"

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.04 - April 2022

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Maybe you're the only one trying

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Brooklyn duo shows no sign of letting up

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Edgy '90s guitar rock via a 2022 filter

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Surviving as a qualitative enterprise in a quantitative world

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.03 - March 2022

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Unique, captivating

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Melodic flair w/ old-school production

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Lovely, sensitive cover

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Eclectic Playlist Series 9.02 - Feb. 2022

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“Sunday” – Sea Lemon Shall we pretend, at least for the length of time it takes to read a couple of paragraphs, that we are here for the music, for the way it makes us feel, the alchemy involved in the interaction of melody and chords and arrangements of sound with our own individual physical and metaphysical presence? We are here, in other words, for the inner experience of listening versus the outer experience of posturing, marketing, keeping up with what’s “trending” and who’s “rising” and all of that technology-induced bullshit. Oh I know the social-media hustling is (sadly) its own real thing that plenty of people are caught up in, some quite happily, but that doesn’t make it reasonable or humane or (more to the point) remotely music-oriented. Just stream the song, and download if you’d like to. You don’t have to share it, you don’t have to tell anyone else what you’re doing. Just have your own experience; enjoy the internal adventure instigated by a wonderful song.

And “Sunday” is indeed a wonderful song, its sprightly, Cure-ish air belying a melancholy center. One of the song’s signature musical moves is how consistently the lyrics enter past the first beat of the measure. There must be a music-theory name for this but in any case the ongoing effect is both engaging–your ear is unconsciously anticipating a melody once the measure starts without it–and subtly bittersweet, for the same reason. It happens throughout the song but most prominently in the chorus (first heard at 0:42), where the initial hook is the bouncy guitar line, its six careful notes filling up two measures and then the first beat of the third before the lyrics rush in. I’ll point your ear as well to the satisfying way the nearly one-note vocal melody feels like the ideal response to the guitar’s prelude.

Sea Lemon is the musical alias of Seattle singer/songwriter Natalie Lew. “Sunday” is her debut single, self-released; an EP is expected some time later this year. MP3 via KEXP.

photo credit: Raphael Gaultier

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“Greenhill” – Naomi Keyte Unlike many listeners with an affinity for acoustic-oriented singer/songwriters, I do not embrace this style of music indiscriminately. In fact, as much as I can appreciate musicians with acoustic guitars up front, I am more often than not unmoved by performers of this type, who seem frequently to allow the intrinsic sonority of their instrument to stand in for musical value. Which I guess is a kind way of saying “using pleasant sounds to cover up mediocre songwriting.” By that measure, however, when I do come across a musician presenting in this setting with a strong sense of self and craft I am overjoyed. Someone’s still got it.

The Australian singer/songwriter Naomi Keyte, from Adelaide, definitely has it. “Greenhill” is an understated gem, which first and foremost requires the direct attention of the listener. You’ll have to bring it on your own; Keyte has too much integrity and composure to pander or preen like so many of the TikTok-addled musicians who clutter my inbox. Keyte, rather, sings lyrics resonant with domestic details in a near hush, relying on propulsive finger-picking to add momentum to a song replete with what presents as a sort of still-life-in-motion. She herself has described “Greenhill” as “a love song to a house and its inhabitants,” written specifically about life during lockdown. The melody’s downward pattern feels as introspective as the lyrics, lower notes sometimes all but swallowed out of earshot.

The chorus is a particular thing of beauty, from the lovely subtle upturn Keyte’s voice takes at the end of the word “road” (e.g., 0:54) to the elegant way she eliminates the stopping point between the second and third lines, which grabs the ear on the one hand but also mirrors the words she’s singing about the air rushing in through the windows. The second time we hear the chorus (1:59) the arrangement opens up to include drums, piano, and double-tracked vocals, which settles the song into a deep new place. Listen too, at this point, for the male voice blended deftly into the background, via Ben Talbot-Dunn, who also produced the song.

“Greenhill” is a single released in October; Keyte recently dropped a new single, “Gilian”; both songs are slated to appear on a forthcoming LP, and both are available via Bandcamp. The new album will be her second; her first, Melaleuca, was released in 2017, and can also be found on Bandcamp.

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“Smile” – Whoop Right away the intro hints at this song’s crooked charm: what kind of guitar tone is that, and is it even in tune or on the beat? We don’t have long to ponder these inscrutable questions, as the song is overtaken, at 0:08, by the distinctive presence of Fal, the band’s one-named leader. With a voice that sounds at once like a whisper and a shout, she massages words and syllables into enjoyable new shapes, lyrical lines running into and over each other, enthusiasm bleeding into urgency and back again. The song is worth a listen for Fal alone.

At the same time let’s not give the fellows here short shrift. Playing together only since the fall of 2020, the band seems quickly to have fused into one of those units that can sound like they’re flying apart precisely as they’re pulling tightly together. A tell-tale sign of Whoop’s sharp musicianship is the space they leave for themselves in the mix—often here we get not much more than drum and bass; and when the guitar shows up it’s more to blurt and wobble into the texture than to steal the spotlight. Even the solo (1:58) is a woozy affair, half off the beat, grabbing only 15 seconds of your time, but not before nailing a brief vivid lick, heretofore unheard, into the onrushing tumble of Fal’s narration.

Whoop is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Smile” is a track from the band’s exclamatory, self-titled album, Whoop!, which was released in November. You can check out the whole thing, and buy it, via Bandcamp.

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January always strikes me as the most elusive of months; it takes the entire 31 days to grow used to it and then, poof, it’s gone. Yes the weather is brutal and the general news is desperate, as usual, but I try to hold onto January, without ever the hope of succeeding. By the way, semantic sleight of hand aside, Yoda was wrong. There not only is “try” but that’s about all we’re ever really doing when we “do.”

I digress. I meant merely to offer the usual January boilerplate here about how the Eclectic Playlist Series works—how my self-imposed rule decrees that no artist appears in more than one playlist in any given year (at least not on purpose; I’ve done it by mistake at least once), and how in January everything is reset and all artists are up for grabs again. The EPS is now in its ninth year, and doing a quick survey of the past mixes I can report that only one artist has so far placed a song in a playlist in all previous eight years, and that artist is David Bowie. I’m surprised that none of my other favorites have managed the same feat, not Radiohead (seven), not Kirsty MacColl (seven), not Elvis Costello (six), not Kate Bush (seven). It’s kind of encouraging, to me, that I haven’t had to lean too heavily on my stalwarts, that the diversity upon which these playlists are founded has kept the mixes truly mixed. The other ongoing dictate here is a conscious spread through the decades, with each mix offering at least two and usually three (sometimes four) songs from each decade of the rock’n’roll past—typically starting with the ’60s but sometimes going further back. It’s been fun these past two years to begin to incorporate yet another decade into the canon as we now start the third year of the 2020s.

I do these for myself—my master Spotify list incorporating nearly every song featured to date has become my in-house radio station when I can’t decide on something specific to listen to—but I am really happy to offer them as well to whatever small number of like-minded music fans who find their way to this off-the-beaten-track, non-commercial, anti-algorithmic musical oasis. I’m okay on my own but a little bit of company is nice too.

“Sorry About That” – Michael Guthrie Band (Direct Hits, 1981)

“Can’t Hide It” – Curtis Harding (If Words Were Flowers, 2021)

“Like a Woman Can” – Kim Taylor (Love’s a Dog, 2013)

“Who Gets Your Love” – Dusty Springfield (Cameo, 1973)

“Come to Me” – Björk (Debut, 1993)

“What I’m Trying To Say” – Stars (Set Yourself on Fire, 2005)

“Space Age Love Song” – A Flock of Seagulls (A Flock of Seagulls, 1982)

“When Will I Be Loved” – The Everly Brothers (single, 1960)

“The Calculation” – Regina Spektor (Far, 2009)

“I Wanna Be Your Lover” – Prince (Prince, 1979)

“Girl of My Dreams” – Charles Mingus (Mingus Ah Um, 1959)

“Dishonor the Stars” – Elvis Costello & The Imposters (Look Now, 2018)

“Guinnevere” – Crosby, Stills & Nash (Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1969)

“Paprika” – Japanese Breakfast (Jubilee, 2021)

“Somebody to Shove” – Soul Asylum (Grave Dancers Union, 1992)

“Remember Me” – British Sea Power (The Decline of British Sea Power, 2001)

“The Name of the Game” – ABBA (ABBA: The Album, 1977)

“Dear Prudence” – Siouxsie and the Banshees (Hyæna, 1983)

“It’s Cold Outside” – The Choir (single, 1967)

“Tomorrow” – Waxahatchee (El Deafo original soundtrack, 2022)

Random notes:

• There were all sorts of regional and semi-regional bands in the US and the UK churning out some pretty sweet power pop during the new wave years and the Michael Guthrie Band, a trio from Virginia, was one of them. Their debut album, Direct Hits, isn’t streaming anywhere (a mint copy of the LP is selling on Discogs for $99.99), and their much-delayed follow-up, 1994’s Right Honourable Friend, has disappeared entirely. “Sorry About That” was the lead track on the debut album and works as the lead track here as well. The band appears to have had a bit of a 21st-century re-emergence; a 2011 song called “Now We’ve Started” is on Spotify, and their Facebook page is active, with 1,000+ followers.

• Speaking of melody (power pop being the most melody-forward genre in the rock universe), Elvis Costello is on hand to deliver a couple of melodies so strong and appealing I almost can’t believe my ears. And maybe neither can he, since he breaks “Dishonor the Stars” into disparate sections, as if the main melodies, like food that’s both amazing and a bit too rich, can only be taken in limited portions. Initially this frustrated me but I’ve learned to embrace the entirety of this short but intricate composition. It’s not clear what is verse and what if anything is chorus, and it’s not clear what he is singing about specifically. But, when he allows you to hear them: those melodies! Note that Elvis & the gang have another new album just out; this one comes from their briefly-paid-attention-to-but-since-forgotten 2018 album, Look Now.

• Might as well not waste time getting a 2022 release into the EPS, and also might as well not waste time getting Fingertips favorite Waxahatchee back into a mix here as well. Katie Crutchfield has been in quite the groove these past few years and can do no wrong as far as I can hear. This song comes from the just-released soundtrack, an EP, to the new Apple+ TV series El Deafo.

• If you are familiar only with Linda Ronstadt’s top-10 version of “When Will I Be Loved,” from 1974, I think you’re in for a treat when you hear the Everly Brothers’ 1960 original. Ronstadt did a fine job, don’t get me wrong, but she sped up and regularized a song that, in the Everlys’ hands, was full of nuanced, behind-the-beat singing and subtle hesitations. The song is both immediately recognizable and, compared to the ’70s cover, marvelously transformed.

• Curtis Harding is a singer/songwriter who was born in Michigan and raised in Atlanta. He’s been recording since 2014 but I only managed to come across him recently. I’m eager now to catch up on his work, which walks a wonderful line between the retro and the contemporary, with psychedelic undertones (or overtones; and hm what’s actually the difference?). “Can’t Hide It” is a song from his third album, 2021’s If Words Were Flowers. Harding cites an impressive variety of influences, from Mahalia Jackson and MC Lyte to Bob Dylan and (them again!) the Everly Brothers.

• Bonus note for the Elvis Costello curious: I just posted a playlist on Spotify featuring the best of his 21st-century releases. Despite his ongoing output and prodigious capacity for growth and variety, Elvis seems culturally stuck in the past, with his early output being the only music people seem able to remember and refer to. And yet to my ears the breadth and ongoing quality of what he’s been up to for decades now renders his later work even more notable than the early stuff. I offer up 20 songs in support of this idiosyncratic argument.

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“California Baby” – Carrie Biell With dusky charm and old-school vibes, “California Baby” is a bittersweet, irresistible head-bobber. Sometimes it’s just not complicated: a crisp, unassuming acoustic strum acquires percussion at 0:06, vocals two seconds later, and we’re off; this, friends, is how you handle an introduction if you have a modest ego and would rather not waste time. The moment Biell opens her mouth, the song coalesces around her warm, slightly-raspy tone, reminiscent of Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) minus maybe a smidgen of edginess. The instrumentation, anchored by good-timey piano vamps, rocks and rolls with nostalgic panache, underscoring lyrics hinting at the isolation imposed by the pandemic and/or the poignancy of the unrecapturable past. You choose. An electric guitar twangs in for a quick solo halfway through but does not overstay its welcome. Nothing about this sad-breezy gem overstays its welcome, making it all the more welcome.

Based in Seattle, Carrie Biell released four LPs between 2001 and 2007, did a bunch of touring, and took time off in the 2010s to concentrate on being a mother to her newborn son. In 2016 she formed the band Moon Palace with her twin sister Cat. The band still exists, but the lockdown of 2020 and 2021 gave Biell both the time and the inspiration to write and record enough songs on her own to give rise to a new solo album. “California Baby” is a track from that forthcoming record, entitled We Get Along, which is scheduled for release in February.

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“About Imagining Things” – La Loye At once introspective and expansive, “About Imagining Things” is never as quiet and unassuming as it may seem. Turn your radar on and from the outset you’ll sense a song pushing at its constraints, beginning with that itchy-echoey synth loop that starts us up and serves as the rhythm section for the first 1:50. While this and an acoustic guitar comprise the only accompaniment heard for a good long while, that scratchy background sound, increasingly mechanical in demeanor, hints at spaces and ideas that outstrip the “singer/songwriter with a guitar” trope.

The melodies—subtle but sturdy—are also a hint. While the verse might sound like an ordinary chatter-style lyric—I said this thing to that person and now it’s a song–La Loye elevates matters by crafting a melody with grace to it, an eight-bar line with some soft but gratifying resolution. And it sets up the gentle chorus (0:49), a repetition of the line “I can’t figure this out/I can’t figure this without you,” which finds some artful descending intervals to land on as a cello floats into earshot. The first clear sign that we may be heading in unforeseen directions is how the cello ends up droning itself to the front of the mix as the verse starts up again (1:11). At 1:50 we glide into a spacious new landscape, percussion soon kicking in with a half-time stutter, guitar and maybe a mandolin creating with the drumming an oceanic momentum underneath a bridge-like extension to the earlier melodies. We are in pretty much a different song now, driving forward as the guitar gets heavier, a synthesizer sweeping some arpeggios into existence before things de-clutter towards the end and we are left only with that throbbing mechanical rhythm that started us going three and a half minutes earlier. And a lovely, adventurous, rewarding three and a half minutes it was.

La Loye—for the record, she appears to prefer to stylize this in lower case: la loye—is the 24-year-old Dutch singer/songwriter Lieke Heusinkveld. “About Imagining Things” is a song off her debut EP, To Live Underwater, which was released at the beginning of the month.

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“Candy + Curry” – Erin Rae A heartwarming example of the good stuff that can emerge from bad circumstances, the woozy, unhurried “Candy + Curry” was written in the Tennessee countryside by Nashville-based Erin Rae in the midst of 2020’s disconcerting and long-lasting lockdown. The song grabs and holds attention to an unusual degree for such a languidly paced piece of music. This seems to relate to textural touches employed—including a persistent high-hat “drone,” boosted by a bicycle-bell-like chime—that convey a feeling of being carried along on a gentle breeze on a blue-sky day, or maybe just turning slow circles in a fragrant meadow, watching puffy white clouds float by. For 50 seconds or so the bass is the most prominent instrument heard, the other vague sounds providing a bare, white-noise-y background. A cello is the first to make its presence known (around 0:50); and, just when you’ve settled into the dreamy pace, a siren sounds at 1:27. No doubt a synthesizer of some sort but it starts as a genuine-sounding siren, only to perform a bit of a magic trick by transforming what is typically an alarming sound into something friendly and encouraging.

The smart, poignant lyrics, full of resonant short-cuts, reflect both the uncertainty of pandemic life as well as some of its hidden if quirky charms–or, at least, the potential charms available to those lucky enough to have shelter and good health in the midst of the widespread disaster (which, thankfully, was/is still most of us). Rae’s clear, somewhat quizzical tone serves both the words and music fabulously. I urge you to listen to this one a few times; it gets better and better as you grow familiar with it.

“Candy + Curry” is the lead track from Rae’s forthcoming album, Lighten Up, scheduled for a February release. She has two previous full-length albums to her credit, dating back to 2015. You can check her out on Bandcamp, where you can listen to two more pre-release songs from the very enjoyable Lighten Up.

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Even as there are 14 artists on this month’s playlist who had not yet appeared in any EPS mix to date, you’ll also find in this mix a handful of all-time favorites who are now among the most often featured musicians in the eight-plus years these lists have been operational. So I guess it’s an intriguing blend of the old and new both chronologically and aesthetically. In any case, the all-time favorites in question—Sam Phillips, They Might Be Giants, Jane Siberry, and Cassandra Wilson—are all truly among my personal musical heroes through the decades; I’m kind of startled and delighted to find them all together here. And although we live, it would seem, under graver and graver collective shadows, I ended up with a number of songs this month that are not just peppy but in a few cases rather playful—in search of the kinder light, you might say. Besides which, we lose our playfulness and there’s not much hope for us. Man o nam indeed.

“Bad Reputation” – Freedy Johnston (This Perfect World, 1994)

“That Man” – Caro Emerald (Deleted Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor, 2010)

“Head On” – The Jesus and Mary Chain (Automatic, 1989)

“On The Run” – Scorched Earth (single, 1974)

“The Light Is Kinder In This Corner of the Corona” – Bill Nelson (Rosewood: Ornaments and Graces for Acoustic Guitar, Volume 2, 2005)

“Too Late To Say You’re Sorry” – Darlene Love (single, 1966)

“Love Is Everything” – Jane Siberry (When I Was a Boy, 1993)

“Queen of the World” – The Jayhawks (Smile, 2002)

“Hold Back the Night” – The Trammps (The Legendary Zing Album, 1975)

“Swift Arrows” – Shelby Earl (Swift Arrows, 2013)

“There She Goes Again” – The Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967)

“Baby Can I Hold You” – Tracy Chapman (Tracy Chapman, 1988)

“Hurt a Fly” – Squirrel Flower (Planet (i),2021)

“Don’t Tell Me” – Blancmange (Mange Tout, 1984)

“You See The Trouble With Me” – Barry White (Let The Music Play, 1976)

“Things I Shouldn’t Have Told You” – Sam Phillips (Push Any Button, 2013)

“Show Me A Love” – Cassandra Wilson (Belly of the Sun, 2002)

“Every Home Should Have One” – Millicent Martin (single, 1970))

“I Palindrome I” – They Might Be Giants (Apollo 18, 1992)

“Country” – Good Morning (Barnyard, 2021)

Random notes:

• Like a number of unexpected-in-retrospect musicians, Freedy Johnston flirted with commercial success in 1990s, most particularly with the album This Perfect World, which featured this simple and glorious lead track “Bad Reputation.” The world may not be perfect, the album itself may not have been perfect (although it was pretty good!), but this song is as nearly perfect as a four-minute piece of semi-popular music has any right to be, with one of those choruses that seem to transcend the idea of someone writing it, it seems just to have always existed.

• Guitarist extraordinaire Bill Nelson’s short period of semi-mainstream success came when he fronted the band Be Bop Deluxe in the 1970s. He’s always been prolific—Be Bop released five studio albums and one live album in a four-year stretch—but a look at Wikipedia will make you dizzy: listed there are some 140 or more (I lost count) solo albums released since 1981, including 12 since 2018 alone. I can’t begin to understand what this could all be about, outside of assuming he’s recording a lot of experimental/improvisational stuff. And I will admit that featuring one gentle instrumental tune from among the thousands he has recorded seems pathetically random. But I believe in synchronicity, and only after putting this list together noticed that the title has taken on quite a new meaning from when he first recorded it back in the good old days of 2005 (little did we know). I’ve always been fond of Be Bop Deluxe, feel that they are sorely underappreciated in the panorama of rock’n’roll history, and have featured them here a couple of times. Bill Nelson I have no idea what to do with but I’ve slipped one song in here if only to pay a bit of respect for the idiosyncratic path he has followed over the decades.

• Scorched Earth was the first band that Billy Ocean recorded with; this was 10 years before his international breakout hit “Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run),” which if you don’t recognize from the title you’d know if you heard it. “On The Run” has no apparent connection outside of the phrase itself but it’s quite a rousing number, the kind of song that completely could have been a hit but for the vagaries of ’70s-era record promotion. Note that Ocean recorded four solo albums from 1976 to 1982 that didn’t really go anywhere before hitting the big time, bigly, in 1984. Say what you will about the corruption of the old record company system, one admirable thing it at least sometimes did was stick with an artist while he or she was working to find their voice. That kind of corporate patience stopped pretty much in the ’90s, never (so far) to be seen again.

• Shelby Earl has a Neko Case-level voice, as sure and strong as you could want to hear. “Swift Arrows” is the title track to an album released in 2013, and was featured on Fingertips here. She was also by the way featured further back, in 2011. Her most recent release is 2017’s The Man Who Made Himself a Name.

• Cato Emerald is a Dutch singer (birth name Caroline Esmeralda van der Leeuw) whose album Deleted Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor spent 30 weeks at number one on the Dutch charts in 2010, beating out Thriller as the best-selling album of all time in the Netherlands. She hasn’t made much of a dent with audiences in the US but you can check here out on Spotify and see what you think. While “That Man” risks veering towards sounding like a retro-y gimmick, the song hits my ears as infectious fun and who can’t use some of that right about now?

• I hear “Every Home Should Have One” as an early entry in the “satirize consumer culture” category that grew as the ’70s wore on. Later in the decade we’d get things like “What Do You Want From Life?” from the Tubes in 1975 and, perhaps the quintessential song of this type, “Step Right Up,” from Tom Waits in 1976. “Every Home Should Have One” was the title song from a British movie released in 1970 and starring Marty Feldman, a farce poking fun at an effort to crack down on sexual images in advertising and culture by the conservative activist Mary Whitehouse (who also drew the direct attention of Pink Floyd a few years later; that’s the “Whitehouse” they address in “Pigs [Three Different Ones],” not the US presidency). The movie ended up being released here with the title Think Dirty but was much more popular in the UK than it was here. Millicent Martin, by the way, has had a long career as a singer and an actress both in the UK and the US. In the early ’60s, she was a featured singer of topical songs on the legendary British satirical news show That Was The Week That Was, but she has remained active for decades, including countless appearances on American TV in the 21st century—she had a recurring role on Frasier at the turn of the millennium, and most recently has been a regular on Grace and Frankie.

• As noted, I love Sam Phillips to pieces; all her releases are top notch, even when they seem to fall in the musical forest with comparatively no one there to hear them. While she, like Freedy Johnston, had a bit of a moment back in the ’90s, her albums over the succeeding years have been uniformly excellent, in particular 2013’s Push Any Button, from which comes the inimitable “Things I Shouldn’t Have Told You.” On the one hand I can understand why she’s an acquired taste but on the other hand I must briefly and pointlessly rail against a culture that would shunt an artist like Phillips off into the “acquired taste” classification in the first place. We are so often just too dumb, collectively, for our own good.

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“Ladder” – EERA Fuzzy, bass-heavy, and replete with unresolved chords, “Ladder” offers us a sharp, 2020s update on one of indie rock’s foundational sub-genres. In addition to its somewhat awkward name, shoegaze is a kind of betwixt and between category in that while it was never entirely in fashion it subsequently has never entirely gone out of fashion, either.

Singer/songwriter/guitarist Anna Lena Bruland is who we’re hearing from here, in the guise of her musical project EERA. With “Ladder,” Bruland seems inherently to understand what’s largely overlooked about the appeal of shoegaze, which is that for all the fuzz and reverb and distortion, most shoegaze songs have a backbeat holding them up. (Remember what the backbeat is: rock’n’roll’s defining rhythm, which stresses the second and fourth beats of a four-beat measure.) Here, the backbeat provides the structural solidity behind the song’s idiosyncratic chord patterns, as well as the propulsion underneath the droning guitar that plays here with a muted fury that never fully unleashes, sounding like someone playing extra-loud but in a room down the hall.

For all the sound happening around her, Bruland sings in a semi-blasé tone as the verse melody alternates between extended same-note repetitions and unexpected intervals; the short, insistent chorus, one phrase repeating, finds her in her lower register, sounding nearly like a different singer. The guitar arrives soon enough to sweep us back up into a backbeated wall of sound that seems to include some wordless male vocals but this could also be an interesting aural illusion. Crank it up and see what you think.

Born in Norway, Bruland is based in Berlin. “Ladder” is a track from her forthcoming album, Speak, due out in December on Just Dust Recordings. Her first album, Reflection of Youth, was released in 2017. You can check her out on Bandcamp. MP3 via KEXP.

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“Maybe” – Pseudonym Following the introduction’s ringing, ricocheting guitar line, “Maybe” gets right to it: “Sanity/When will you come to me/Truly does nobody/See what’s all around.” I can relate. The troubled lyrics are delivered by a voice with a comfortable, power-pop purity to it, which reinforces the song’s dual nature, its vibe both itchy and leisurely, an effect embodied by the way the half-time melody is set against a deft, double-time bass line. What hits the ear is a song at once upbeat and melancholy.

Fed up with the state of the world and/or his relationship, the song’s narrator seeks solace in the tried and true; “Side two of Abbey Road/I’ve come to put you on,” he sings. The song’s denouement pays additional tribute: “And in the end,” we hear, “the love you generate/Hopefully will negate/The hate.” One can always hope.

Everything you hear here arrives courtesy of Paul Desjarlais, who is not merely the singer and songwriter but in fact the only member of the “band” Pseudonym—which is, come to think of it, quite the clever and effective stage name. “Maybe” is a track from Before The Monsters Came, the sixth album Desjarlais has recorded as Pseudonym, which was released in August. You can listen to it and buy it, digitally, via Bandcamp. MP3 via the artist.