Sometimes I wish I’d kept absolutely everything from my college radio days. My time as a student broadcaster predated the point when hefty archives could be handily condensed down to a dinky drive the size of exhausted cigar stub, so any exhaustive collection would have been a bulging box of papers and audio tape. No matter the pack rat tendencies that lurk inside me, dragging my history from home to home (and eventually state to state) simply wasn’t feasible. I know that. Still, I’d love to load up different slices of bygone broadcast days. I’m often surprised at just which … Continue reading One for Friday: Daisy Chainsaw, “Love Your Money”

By the time I reached my second college radio station, a splendid subterranean outpost where I served as the advisor, I was luckily primed to accept the songwriting talents of precocious teens named Ben. That preparedness prevented me from being needlessly dismissive of a favorite singer-songwriter with key student staff members. This might seem a small accomplishment — and, truly, it probably was — but, let’s face it, I needed all the cool kid points I could accumulate. Where I warmed to Australian Ben Lee several years earlier, it was Texan Ben Kweller who had an honored place in the … Continue reading One for Friday: Ben Kweller, “Commerce, TX”

I remember a spring afternoon in 1997. I was standing in Strictly Discs, as fine of a record store as can be found in Madison, Wisconsin, as a learned music fan was browsing the new releases and chatting with the guy behind the counter, as learned music fans are wont to do. And the shopper’s stack grew larger, he was talking about the upcoming releases that he’d already had a chance to somehow hear, declaring that Something to Remember Me By, the sophomore full-length from Ben Lee was a masterpiece. I was filled with envy. I’d happened upon Lee while … Continue reading One for Friday: Ben Lee, “End of the World”

Ben Folds unwittingly threw me a lifeline at precisely the moment I most deeply lamented what was happening in music. Ben Folds Five, the debut album from the trio that bore his name, arrived in the summer of 1995, just as “alternative rock” was peaking as a commercial radio format and simultaneously destroying itself with a thuddingly monotonous approach to playlists. As I listened from a bunker of a radio study, drowning in dispiriting, lifeless grunge knockoffs, I longed for something that just sounded different. One of the things I most valued about college radio was the sense that it … Continue reading One for Friday: Ben Folds, “Landed (alternate mix)”

It only made sense. A trio of Bens — with the last names of Folds, Kweller, and Lee — emerged on the alternative music scene at about the same time, in the mid-nineteen-nineties. (It’s not quite accurate to term them peers since two of the three were literally kids and the third could accurate reference multiple ex-wives in his lyrics.) Besides a forename, all three songwriters had a propensity for clever, genially comic lyrics. Around ten years later, the music business landscape around them had changed dramatically: album sales started their precipitous plummet, the once hot alternative radio format was … Continue reading One for Friday: The Bens, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”