I’ve always been a sucker for pop references, at least pop references I was fluent in. Throughout college, I had a strong band of friends, many of whom regularly seasoned conversation with lines of movie dialogue or quoted song lyrics. We built metaphors around obscure television characters and routinely proclaimed one another “like school on a Saturday” in tribute to Fat Albert. Since this was my daily language, I was always very pleased when I would discover a kindred approach to such communication somewhere within the music I built into my playlists at 90FM, some band namechecking Alan Moore or … Continue reading One for Friday: Trotsky Icepick, “El Kabong”

For a while when I was in college, Smart Studios was famous. It wasn’t as well known as Abbey Road or Electric Lady, but I don’t recall the names of any other recording studios from the era of the late eighties and early nineties. It was the one-two punch of Nirvana’s Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish that did it. Both records were produced by Butch Vig and recorded, at least in part, at Smart Studios, and the seismic thump that both releases had on college radio caused it to seem like there was a little bit of magic existing inside … Continue reading One for Friday: Young Fresh Fellows, “Sitting on a Pitchfork”

In some respects, the most difficult time I had keeping up with and discovering new music correlated with my occupational era working in commercial radio. This wasn’t because I was working at some oldies station or some other crypt on the dial devoted solely to the music of the past. Quite the contrary, in fact. While I did my time with a couple different stations simultaneously, most of my hours were claimed by a “new rock alternative” station, ostensibly focused on the cutting edge of music. This was in the aftermath of the shock success of Nirvana, and their Seattle … Continue reading One for Friday: Tanya Donelly, “Mysteries of the Unexplained”

I like to say that it all started with a girl, but that’s not precisely accurate. Yes, there was a Robyn Hitchcock fan who won my susceptible little heart during my freshman year of college, and she professed her affection for the man in an open and charming fashion. She had first encountered him in Greece, where he played a show before a largely indifferent audience. She was enchanted by his socks. Robyn Hitchcock was one of those names that I knew before finding my way to the college radio station, one of those odd, enticing monikers that promised a … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock ‘n’ the Egyptians, “Swirling”

I think most students who gravitate to their college radio station do so because, first and foremost, they love music. Taking their first crack at the real world, or a simulacrum of such, they’re finally able to assert that inner part that connects to certain guitar chords or electronic beats or tangles of angular lyrics. Often it’s music that their high school compatriots didn’t get, dismissing it as weird as they pondered whether to vote for Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” or REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” for the prom theme. If commercial radio bothered to play it at all, it … Continue reading One for Friday: Uncle Green, “Pass It By”

I had a few unofficial rules when I assembled my shows during my college radio days. One of the oddest was this: when in doubt, look to the H’s. That’s the section of the library that I generally gravitated to when I was momentarily at a loss as to what to play next. This may be in part because my most dependable standby, Robyn Hitchcock, had an impressive bevy of albums there in the music stacks, but there were other performers there, like Husker Du and Hunters and Collectors and the Housemartins, who were equally well-equipped to help turn the … Continue reading One for Friday: Hoodoo Gurus, “Come Anytime”

I don’t really like Christmas music. I did when I was a kid. Like a lot of kids, I suppose, I was always pretty happy when the calendar pages flipped up to the point where it was reasonable to pull the worn copies of Christmas albums out of the stacks and starting giving them regular airplay, usually on the big console stereo of my grandparents, the one that allowed for six or seven big black discs to be stacked up on top of the spindle, waiting for their chance to plummet to the turntable and start spreading cheer. That affection … Continue reading One for Friday: Will & the Bushmen, “Blow Me Up”

Usually this electronic space is devoted to sharing individual songs every Friday (as opposed to the weekly diversion at the site that otherwise mirrors this one). Several months ago, I shared an offering from the band that was one of the signature artists of my college radio station during the years that I was there as a student, a band called Too Much Joy. This past week, the band’s lead singer, Tim Quirk, posted a royalty statement from Warner Brothers that he’d fought long and hard to get. The statement details the amount the band has earned from sales of … Continue reading One for Friday: A Digression

In this weekly space, I write a lot about music I procured fifteen or twenty years ago. Back then I was getting albums on vinyl, on CD, and, if desperate, on cassette. While it was no harder to find the newest U2 or R.E.M. record than it was to find Milli Vanilli or Aerosmith, a significant amount of the music that captured my interest required some hunting to get a copy (or sometimes pleading with whatever small label originally serviced the radio station with a second copy that could be added to a poor radio station staffer’s collection). Often the … Continue reading One for Friday: Ed Haynes, “Splash”