I am a participant in the World’s Largest Trivia contest. My team is called The Cakers. And “Come On Eileen” is our song. Whenever it’s played–on the radio, over the supermarket loudspeakers, shuffled up by an iPod–it feels like it was played just for us. No matter who’s performing it. In that spirit, with no other fuss, I humbly present this week’s One for Friday song. Badly Drawn Boy, “Come On Eileen” (Disclaimer: Honestly, I spent no time whatsoever figuring out if this is out of print. It doesn’t really matter to me today. I’ll still take it down I’m … Continue reading One for Friday: Badly Drawn Boy, “Come On Eileen”

I used to relentlessly dig through music magazines to fulfill my information cravings about bands we played at the college radio station back when I was a student. Those were the resources we had. No MySpace pages, no Facebook, no Google searches. I don’t submit this as some 21st century variation on complaints about uphill treks through snow both to and from school (though I had to deal with that too), but simply as preface to noting how often I knew next to nothing about the bands that I played repeatedly on the radio. If their releases were significant enough … Continue reading One for Friday: The Chant, “I Don’t Ask For Much”

I would be deeply negligent if I didn’t begin this week by offering up fresh gratitude to Steve, Wayne, Jon, Colin and Andrea for their exemplary efforts filling in for me last week. The array of guest stars exceeded my high expectations, provided a set of completely unique perspectives in this space. These are definitely people who’ve influenced me greatly over the years, and they all managed to do so again with their respective approaches to the feature. That naturally got me thinking about how this weekly feature generated in the first place. At the time I hung an “open … Continue reading One for Friday: Small Factory, “Suggestions”

I used to be pretty good at making mixes. I was better with tapes than CDs, and the lack of time boundaries offered by digital playlists stymies me completely. I liked the process of sitting down in front of the stereo and building the mix track by track, listening in real time as it evolved. Even the physical act of pressing the buttons offered some additional satisfaction that’s lost when moving file names around on a computer screen. I still make mixes, but they take me forever. Ironically, the ease of building them now has turned it into a strangely … Continue reading One for Friday: Baxendale, “Music For Girls”

Part of the job of the Music Director at the college radio station during my days as a student was providing brief reviews of all the new releases. These upper left hand were handwritten onto little labels, approximately three inches by half-an-inch, that were then affixed to the upper left corner of the album cover. The limited space necessitated extreme brevity in the reviews (except for a couple of Music Directors I can think of who had remarkably compact handwriting that was also so legible it looked like it was produced by a special typewriter) making it sort of the … Continue reading One for Friday: Debbie Harry, “Liar Liar”

In writing about my time at the college radio station, I focus almost exclusively on my interactions with the music piled into the library that lined the walls of our main studio. All those records and CDs contained of wealth of music that we called modern rock before begrudgingly starting to call it alternative. While WWSP 90FM had and has, to its credit, a stronger focus than most college radio stations, there was a significant amount of programming centered on different styles of music than that which topped the college charts. There were programs that made weekly forays into blues, … Continue reading One for Friday: Mel Tormé and George Shearing, “I’m Hip”

A couple weeks ago, I posted the 100th One for Friday entry. It came and went without me noticing, even though I tend to be hopelessly geeky about such things. With so many of these weekly wallows in sonic nostalgia, I can easily lose track of which songs I’ve already celebrated with a few hundred typed words. A few weeks ago, I even broke down and worked up a spreadsheet to make sure I don’t repeatedly indulge in the same tired story about, say, a a crazy album cover being discussed on air during a year-end countdown show. Turns out, … Continue reading One for Friday: The Jack Rubies, “Be With You”

I spent a lot of top hopscotching across different genres and subgenres as I solidified my music fandom during my teenage years. I attribute this, in part, to my first exposure to radio coming during the nineteen-seventies, when programmers were so perplexed by the rapidly evolving music scene that it seemed as though practically anything could climb to top of the singles chart. There was a certain aural wanderlust that defined my taste, as I took extended spins around the dance floor with local radio stations that specialized in country, Top 40 and even adult contemporary (the canvas can do … Continue reading One for Friday: The Strawberry Zots, “Waste of Time”