I was never all that adept at following my favorite music performers as they moved from band to band. This was in part because I became a music a fan at the time when there were still really only three steps in a music career: 1. be part of a band, 2. have a solo career and 3. realize you’re too old to be doing that crazy rock ‘n’ roll thing any more. And that unofficial though seemingly mandatory retirement age was actually pretty young. When rock musicians persisted into their forties or, egad, fifties, they were still viewed somewhat … Continue reading One for Friday: Luna, “Cindy Tastes of Barbecue”

In last week’s One for Friday, I expended quite a few words writing about a friend from my college radio days when I served as an advisor to the students who were running the station. In writing about the way I associate certain songs with certain people, I made an offhand mention of how thoroughly and pervasively that was the case back when I myself was a student, working away at our little broadcast outlet in the heart of central Wisconsin. In the comments, one of my old cohorts challenged me to name some of those songs that were locked … Continue reading One for Friday: Hoodoo Gurus, “1000 Miles Away”

One thing I learned fairly early on in my college radio career is that there’s ultimately too much new music coming out to keep up with it all on your own. That was the case in the late eighties and early nineties, before the grunge-led boom in “alternative music” occurred in rough symmetry with greater affordability for more DIY-inclined bands to produce and distribute their own material. When I later started my second, slightly different life on the left end of the dial, the number of new CDs that flooded into the station each and every week, often from largely … Continue reading One for Friday: Figurine, “Let’s Make Our Love Song”

I wish I were better at coming up with titles. There’s few things more satisfying than a great title for an album, a movie or a book, something that immediately grabs attention and is smart and memorable enough that it engenders goodwill right off the bat. There’s some added pressure with a song, of course, because the hope and expectation is that the cleverness of the title will fully and cleanly carry over to the track, especially if the title is actually used in the song. It’s easy enough to pile up an assemblage of clever words if they don’t … Continue reading One for Friday: Mental As Anything, “If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?”