Happy Halloween! Robyn Hitchcock, with and without Egyptians, has been featured in this weekly spot more than any other artist, so I’m perhaps running out of insights to offer. I will note that this song comes from Hitchcock’s 1988 album, Globe of Frogs, which almost certainly provided my first exposure to an artist who looms as large as any for me. The single “Balloon Man” was a somewhat unlikely MTV mini-staple for a time, and the smack of novelty to the song got it some further play elsewhere. Naturally, then, when I got to campus radio station in the fall … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, “Sleeping with Your Devil Mask”

By the late-nineteen-nineties, my connection to new music was in dire shape. It had only been five years since I’d last had the opportunity to log some regular hours on a college radio station, but my instincts for sniffing out the top newcomers had atrophied thanks to some time toiling for a commercial alternative station, where only bands that had a sound within echoing distance of Pearl Jam need apply. I did what I could with the resources at hand — including the increasingly fruitful but not yet fully helpful land of web-based music coverage — but I was finding … Continue reading One for Friday: XTC, “Your Dictionary”

Everyone deserves to have an album like Sicilian Vespers’ self-titled debut in Heavy Rotation when they first join a college radio station. It should be wild and challenging. It should be tuneful but relentlessly weird. It helps if the lead vocals are best described as an acquired taste, especially if even that heavily compromised compliment is itself charitable. It should be, in short, something that could only be heard (and valued and respected) on college radio. For me, that record was the self-titled debut from Sicilian Vespers. The creation of David and Francis Rifugiato, brothers who were indeed born in … Continue reading One for Friday: Sicilian Vespers, “I Want to Talk to a Squirrel”

And now we come to one of those instances in which I can’t quite believe the song hasn’t been featured previously in this weekly space. I’m sure I had a reason, perhaps because it seems like it may be available for digital purchase. Or maybe I once found that the band was still selling copies directly, a surprisingly common occurrence with small-scale acts that I would otherwise love to celebrate with a “One for Friday” post (and may yet do someday, if only to direct people towards buying a full release). Today, I share one of the most wonderful gems … Continue reading One for Friday: See Dick Run, “Boy Meets Girl”

I can no longer dependably relate how I first heard about the band Sarge. I could have sworn I was told about the Illinois indie band by one of my friends after they’d seen them as an opening act at a Madison, Wisconsin concert. Over the years, though, I’ve specifically attributed it to the individuals who were the most likely candidates and over and over again I’ve been told, “No, I’ve never heard of them.” Their single “Dear Josie, Love Robyn” was briefly a small sensation among the cool kid set, although I think it was a song I longed … Continue reading One for Friday: Sarge, “The First Morning”

There was a stretch during the mid-to-late-eighties when I gently transitioned myself from the sort of stuff played on album rock radio stations to the material that had a more comfortable home at the left end of the dial. It helped that I had a hometown radio station that was a weird hybrid of the two, embracing select college radio artists (R.E.M. chief among them, but also the occasional Camper Van Beethoven or Robyn Hitchcock song) even as it leaned most heavily on the rootsy classic rock likes of Bruce Springsteen, Little Feat, and the seventies output of the Kinks. … Continue reading One for Friday: Peter Wolf, “Can’t Get Started”