Usually, I reserve this weekly feature to pine nostalgically over some song that held special prominence during my college radio days or maybe to wax rhapsodic over a track I discovered in the wilds of the interweb, exposing me to an artist who’d evading my notice up until the digital windfall came my way. Today’s offering theoretically qualifies as the former, although I can’t say that stumbling upon this particular song from Canadian singer-songwriter Bonnie Dobson made me into an obsessively hunt for more of the sweet, sentimental folk music she plied back in the late-sixties and early-seventies, when this … Continue reading One for Friday: Bonnie Dobson, “Good Morning Rain”

Thinking back on it now, I suspect that Spooner was the first hometown band I ever heard on the radio. Growing up in and around Madison, Wisconsin meant I wasn’t exactly in the midst of a thriving music scene, but I still felt that our broadcasters could have done a little better job throwing some support towards the guitar-slinging local heroes. You never know when the next Oh-Needers might be out there. There were the occasional token local showcase programs–typically relegated to the Sunday night timeframe when the stations were fairly certain that practically no one was listening–but as far … Continue reading One for Friday: Spooner, “Mean Old World”

When I started the “Top 40 Smash Taps” series of posts, it was largely to push myself to write about music that was unfamiliar to me. Without the prompts delivered by decades of Billboard data, I can’t imagine myself having cause to write about Donna Summer. And now here I am, writing about her a second time in the space of three days. Part of the pleasure of writing the “Smash Taps” posts comes in discovering odd little details about the modern history of music that were previously outside my ken. For example, I was pretty fervently devoted to all … Continue reading One for Friday: Donna Summer, “Protection”