As must periodically happen, the One for Friday space this week is devoted to carrying the baton forward for the late, beloved (by me, anyway) blog Little Hits. The online space that shared notably obscure songs from a certain era — basically the power pop, post-punk, modern rock tsunami from the late nineteen-seventies to the late nineteen-eighties — was one of my favorite destinations when I first started assembling a pile of music onto a hard drive, building the automated radio station of my most blissful dreams. Besides admiring the taste of the blog’s creator, his selections spoke to a favorite … Continue reading One for Friday: The Dazzlers, “Lovely Crash”

One of the things I miss most about living on the air in college radio is the sense of perpetual discovery. This part of the experience is undoubtedly leavened somewhat by the intense availability of information about bands, music, and albums across the untamed wilds of the internet. Getting background and inside stories is mere keystrokes away at any given time. That’s useful, but it strips away some of the fun, some of the intense, thrilling mystery of it all. There was nothing quite like opening a slew of packages from record labels and promotion agencies to create a big … Continue reading One for Friday: Meow Meow, “All I Ever Got”

  Sometime during my first pass through college radio, the onslaught of tribute albums began. There may have been some genuine affection for certain performers that inspired such efforts or at least colored the performances by the acts recruited to fill out the grooves. The real driving force, though, was the dead certainty that the most direct way to a college deejay’s heart was with one of their ragamuffin rotation staples playing a really familiar song, likely from an artist they secretly loved but has no entry to their ultra-hip airwaves. This how we got, say, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones … Continue reading One for Friday: Neko Case, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”