This is how I saw it: Liz Phair needed to reclaim some of the energy that surrounded her out-of-nowhere indie sensation debut, Exile in Guyville. By most measures, her follow-up effort, Whip-Smart, was an even greater success, climbing higher on the album charts, selling more copies (at least initially, though Exile in Guyville has outpaced it by now), and yielding a couple of decent modern rock radio hits. But her coolness quotient took a pretty sizable hit. She became a Rolling Stone cover girl instead of a Village Voice icon. That’s not inherently bad — and there are plenty of indications … Continue reading One for Friday: Liz Phair, “California”

One of the things I appreciated about my particular era of college radio was the sense that we were still allowed to reclaim artists. I get a sense — perhaps incorrectly — that the denizens on the left end of the dial, few as their number may be these days, no longer view that as part of the mission. Once an artist crosses over to more commercial terrain or otherwise falls out of favor with college radio programmers, they seem to be gone forever. The notion of college radio acts still had just a little lingering wisp of that new … Continue reading One for Friday: Joe Jackson, “Stranger Than Fiction”

Anton Fier was a weirdly mythic figure to me when I was in college, plying my trade at the student-run radio station. He existed within the nation of independent music that was beyond my personal level of coolness, like distant figures on the vista. He was a founding member of the Feelies, a band I loved immediately, but he left after the band’s acclaimed, obscure debut, Crazy Rhythms, an album I’d never heard because its status as a low press run, long out of print artifact of greatness put it well out of reach. He was a member of John Lurie’s Lounge … Continue reading One for Friday: Golden Palominos, “Omaha”

I plied my college radio, at least initially, in the Upper Midwest, spinning records at a happy output smack dab in the middle of Wisconsin. Existing in the midst of that frozen landscape stirs a certain kinship with those musical artists toiling at roughly the same latitude. There were simply some bands that sounded right, like they were coming at the world from a vantage point that was recognizably a product of frosty nights and taverns with interiors cloaked in wood panelling. They were of a world we knew. It’s not only the existence of a song all about aspirational … Continue reading One for Friday: Gear Daddies, “Color of Her Eyes”

I’ve featured the Darling Buds in this space once before, writing about the way my affection for the band was compounded by their recording life cycle synching up exactly with my tenure as an undergraduate student who basically set up camp in the college radio station. At that time, I included a track from the band’s swan song. Today, it’s time to consider their debut. I don’t recall with certainty when I first encountered Pop Said… but online sources suggest it was released very early in 1989. That would certainly help explain why it locked in so solidly with me. … Continue reading One for Friday: The Darling Buds, “Burst”

My favorite story about the BellRays doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to my friend Jon. As I remember it, he was attending one of the rare but wondrous music festival catering to trashy garage rock and rockabilly-tinged punk that were a little more prevalent a decade or two ago, when the concept of a band like Southern Culture on the Skids having a minor radio hit wasn’t entirely absurd. As one does at festivals, my friend wandered a bit, a little aimlessly and a little attuned to finding the good beer on what was surely a hot day. He … Continue reading One for Friday: The BellRays, “Pinball City”

There were only three nominees in the Best Original Song category at the 61st Academy Awards, presented to films released in 1988. This was the first time I can recall hearing the argument that it was time to eliminate the category altogether, the proposal accompanied by the insistence that it was a relic of the time when Hollywood was still cranking out original musicals on a regular basis. Even though the nineteen-eighties were boom years for soundtracks, there was a sense that the process of assembling a batch of pop songs that could be slapped onto cassettes (that was the … Continue reading One for Friday: Cyndi Lauper, “Hole in My Heart (All the Way to China)”

When this post goes up, I will be in a cart pointed southward, heading back to a state I once thought I’d abandoned forever. (Well, I didn’t really think that, but Im pleased to have an opportunity to link to that animated gif again). There’s good reason to cross into that land of ridiculousness, though. We have two great friends who are getting married, the blessed members of a sudden, surprising, and yet totally logical love affair, the sort of out of the blue announcement that prompts happy replies of “Well, of course.” Shortly after the wedding was announced and my household … Continue reading One for Friday: Hot Chip, “One Life Stand”

I believe I’ve used this exact phrasing previously in a One for Friday post, but it’s useful enough to be worth repeating: some days you just need a damn good cover. Even as I acknowledge covers can be cheesy and overly opportunistic, devoid of any evident meaningful connection between the appropriation artist and the original song, I have a level of helplessness when confronted with one. This is especially true when it’s a song for which I have an outsized fondness (like, say, the Pretenders single “Don’t Get Me Wrong”) performed by an artist at at time when they are … Continue reading One for Friday: Lily Allen, “Don’t Get Me Wrong”