And now today, on the first sweltering day of summer in the northern state where I currently reside, my mind casts back to similar seasons past, landing inevitably in 1989. That was my first summer at the college radio station, which felt like the true and proper beginning of my adulthood. The whole school year prior, living in a residence hall and going to classes, was still somehow an extension of what I’d always done, just with an odd sleepover component. But that first summer, I lived in an apartment, figured out my own meals, and balanced the competing schedules of a … Continue reading One for Friday: Hoodoo Gurus, “Where’s That Hit?”

Paul Kelly was a major figure for me during my inaugural year at the college radio station. His was a name I carried in with me, largely because a couple of his albums made unlikely appearances deep in the album review section of Rolling Stone, well past the point most readers had probably determined the artists and titles were getting too obscure to bother with and flipped the magazine closed. (I can’t find digital versions of those reviews, but there’s some circumstantial evidence that the column inches were courtesy of the championing of David Fricke, who still takes every reasonable … Continue reading One for Friday: Paul Kelly and the Messengers, “You Can’t Take It with You”

Like a lot of other DJs at my college radio station, I gravitated to covers. It was commonplace in the nineteen-nineties, which is part of the reason labels we’re always pushing artists to include revamps of familiar songs on their albums. In a crowded marketplace, it was one of the surest ways to grab the fickle attention of student broadcasters. With limited spots on a playlist, anything with a whiff of the familiar held an appealing safety. And yet I didn’t actively chase covers, not until years later. That’s when my splendid partner-in-all-things made it clear that she found covers … Continue reading One For Friday: Kasey Chambers, “Better Be Home Soon”

  At the college radio station, I was always firmly committed to the idea that we were supposed to dig deeper onto albums. Our commercial competitors up the dial were the sad souls that could only be bothered with one or two tracks from most artists, blandly following the directive of label executives who deemed certain songs more likely to burrow their ways into the minds of helpless listeners. Those of us who staffed the student-run outlet were no sycophants. We still believed rock ‘n’ roll was about rebellion and open expression. Personal choice dictated our playlists, not craven market-researched grasping … Continue reading One for Friday: Texas, “I Don’t Want a Lover”

As I spend my first spring back in my native state of Wisconsin, I am reminded of the unique feelings that well up when it finally seems that winter, that harshest season, is irrevocably over. Those who’ve never endured the weather of the Upper Midwest perhaps don’t understand that snowy assaults can continue happening well past the point that seems at all reasonable, that these blustery heartbreaks might occur after a the false promise of a long stretch of beautiful, warm days. To live here, one acquires a defensive readiness to face down the cold yet one more time, as … Continue reading One for Friday: Great Lakes Myth Society, “Summer Bonfire”

In my earliest couple of years at the college radio station, I mentally differentiated between those artists who completely belonged to us kids — those that I could see as rough contemporaries — and those who were, for lack of a better term, “adults.” This wasn’t always based purely on chronology. The Cure, for example, released their fourth studio album at around the same time Marshall Crenshaw released his first, but it was the Detroit native who I automatically slotted into a sort of college rock elder statesman role. After all, the Cure were still crafting songs that spoke directly … Continue reading One for Friday: Marshall Crenshaw, “Whatever Way the Wind Blows”

Though I grew up when Prince was at the height of his chart-dominating powers, I came to Purple One’s music late. It was my own fault. I listened to that melange of inverted pop, fiery funk, rafter-rattling rock, and provocatively challenging lyrics and I couldn’t find my entryway. I even remember standing in a record store holding vinyl copies of both Sign o’ the Times and Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones, mulling which one to purchase, only to have a friend essentially tell me I wasn’t ready for Prince’s double album masterwork. He was right. (By now, I own it; … Continue reading One for Friday: Ani Difranco, “When You Were Mine”

There’s an interesting choice on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the live album released by the U.K. band the Godfathers, in 1989. To the best of my knowledge, this full-length wasn’t issued for sale in record stores, at least not in the United States. Instead, I believe it was a promo-only release, largely targeted at college radio, Epic Records’ means of keeping the band in the minds and hearts of fickle student programmers, many of them already coming down from the energized highs of the group’s debut release, Birth, School, Work, Death. That album’s title cut served as the perfect angry anthem, after all, for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death (Live)”