When I started working at the college radio station in my freshman year, the first regular shift I held was Monday night’s edition of “Soundstreams.” This was the all request program that 90FM aired (and still airs!) every weeknight from 10:00 p.m. until it was time to conclude our broadcast day at 2:00 a.m. While “all request” was a misnomer (as it is for just about any radio program that uses it, frankly), there were nights when the phone was especially active and huge chunks of my playlist were given over to listener suggestions. It made me dig into music … Continue reading Two for Friday: “Sex With You”

So I’ve been having some technical difficulties today, necessitating a little bit of a cheat for this week’s One for Friday. I’m working on something that will hopefully allow me to make up for it next week. The other day I realized that I have a remarkable number of different versions of Billy Bragg’s “A New England” on my iPod. Unfortunately, that epiphany was quickly followed by the sad realization that I don’t have this version of it. There may be no better way to ensure I have a touch of a crush on Kate Nash than for Billy Bragg … Continue reading One for Friday: Cheating Off of Someone Else’s Paper

At 90FM we used to have these stretches of programming that we called, admittedly without much ingenuity, Free Music Weeks. Making one of these happen started with us pulling something that was especially tricky for a little station like ours. We needed to convince a label to give us fifteen copies of a new release. That was our minimum for running a Free Music Week, the number of freebies we decided were needed to make it feel like the programming week was suitably inundated with one particular new album. Since our protocol at the time involved the DJ playing a … Continue reading One for Friday: Kingmaker, “Really Scrape the Sky”

I feel very fortunate to have landed in college radio just when I did, but I must admit that sometimes I wish I’d gotten there just a couple years earlier. There was a lot to get excited about during my tenure: the emergence of Sonic Youth as a left of the dial powerhouse, the flaring Madchester scene, the seismic impact of Nirvana, and I’ll always remember the spring of 1989 with great fondness as a time when there was an overwhelming avalanche of great records. Still, I never had the pleasure of seeing a brand new album by either Hüsker … Continue reading One for Friday: Chris Mars, “Popular Creeps”

My college radio career was filled with bands that were staples at the time only to fade into the mist in the years after. I suspect that’s fairly common. Even putting aside the artists that took their turn at the top of the CMJ charts and faced eternal indifference outside of the blissful bubble of noncommercial radio, each college radio station always seemed to have their own set of favorites with each new record by the performers in question treated with the same adoration usually reserved for the likes of R.E.M. and Sonic Youth. Often these were local (or at … Continue reading One for Friday: The Darling Buds, “If”

WWSP-90FM now concludes its broadcast day. The college radio station I worked at throughout my undergraduate years always signed off for the day at 2:00 a.m. We occasionally kicked around the idea of changing to a 24-hour schedule, but that was discouraged by our faculty advisor. Sometimes it’s a good idea, he’d explain, to shut down the station rather than worry about what DJs might be doing or saying when they’re fairly certain that the powers-that-be are asleep. I later worked a fair number of overnights in commercial radio, and I can attest to the wisdom of his statement. WWSP … Continue reading One for Friday: Pell Mell, “Mopping Up”

There are two relative recent developments on the live music landscape that I find equally interesting and curious. One is the return of the cult heroes of my college radio years, often playing sizable venues that would have been out of their reach during their heyday. The Pixies had a lot of fans back then, but they weren’t playing big rooms unless they were opening for U2. The other thing is the emergence of single-album concerts as a viable option, with all sorts of artists taking the stage to move track by track through one of the seminal releases. Sometimes … Continue reading One for Friday: Tommy Keene, “Nothing Can Change You”

Last week’s One for Friday post got me thinking about all of the songs about Janes, which rapidly led to me to the song that I often paired with The Icicle Works’ pop gem on the air. Trying to establish indie, college-radio-friendly cred in the late eighties with the last name Astley was as tricky then as it would be now. Even with an terrifically-titled debut album, the association to the unrelated Jon Astley and, by extension, his aggravating earworm of an anthem was going to be strong for some to even drop the needle and sample the music. It … Continue reading One for Friday: Jon Astley, “Put This Love to the Test”

I’ve known a couple great people named Jane, but I never got around to making the mix that provided a song by song tribute to their name. I’ve long felt like there were an abundance of songs about women named Jane (not to mention a few fine offerings by women named Jane), but maybe its just that there are enough absolutely great songs about Janes that it skews my perception. Even though I never actually sat down to assemble the mix, I was always certain that “Understanding Jane” by The Icicle Works would have a spotlight position. It bold and … Continue reading One for Friday: The Icicle Works, “Understanding Jane”

Usually a song appears in this space because I have some cause or desire to expound upon it at length. More accurately, I suppose, I have an old, nostalgic story to tell, a dusty nugget from the corners of my shady memory that may provide some amusing insight into my affection for the song or may simply be a bunch of words that people have to scroll past looking for the hyperlink that will take them to the uploaded MP3. I’m guessing it’s usually the latter. Regardless, I don’t really have any stories about Dramarama’s “Last Cigarette.” I know that … Continue reading One for Friday: Dramarama, “Last Cigarette”