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?”

Admittedly, I’ve sort of got beer on the brain these days, something that’s hard to avoid in my neck of the nation. But I swear there are other things my mind wanders to during the day. Like fabulously messy songs about drinking beer at unlikely hours of the day. While I’m anticipated that our household will drink more than its fair share of beer over the course of the next several days, I don’t think we’ll be resorting to beer for breakfast anytime soon, even though we have a couple remaining bottles of an especially suitable choice for that activity … Continue reading One for Friday: The Replacements, “Beer for Breakfast”

When I was an impressionable youth working in college radio, I know I was supposed to be learning to love the arch, indie abstractions of bands like Pavement and Guided by Voices. They were releasing their first records then and provoking genuflections from much of the music press, small and eager as it was. Authenticity was always a major criteria for those of us playing music on the left end of the dial, especially as we saw bands that used to operate solely in our territory achieve significant crossover success, a group led by U2 and R.E.M., but also including … Continue reading One for Friday: Nuclear Valdez, “Where Do We Go From Here”

When my new position in college radio in 2001 finally allowed me to freshly and fully explore new music for the first time in years, there was a dizzying array of unfamiliar artists to wrap my head around. Making it a little trickier for me, many of them were distinct, singular solo artists that adopted wholly different identities with names that would usually be affixed to a full band. This may have happened a generation earlier when I was a student DJ, but I surely didn’t remember it. Beyond the occasional, “Hi, my name is Steven Morrissey, but just use … Continue reading One for Friday: Badly Drawn Boy, “You Were Right”

Across all the various concerts and liver performances that I’ve seen over the years, I maintain that I’ve seen two genuine encores, two instances in which the band was done for the night and the enthusiasm of the crowd drew them back on stage. I’m convinced these two particularly encores weren’t contrivances of showmanship with the performers holding back one of their hits (or, in the case of the bands that I tend to go see, “hits”) to blow the roof off the dump when the lot of us went through the sham of clapping and cheering to bring the … Continue reading One for Friday: The Sundays, “Don’t Tell Your Mother”