Video of the Day: Making of "Home at Last"

Fun stuff from the studio masters about "Home at Last" from the Aja album:

Top 5 One-Hit Wonder Songs of the 1980s

1. Come On Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners
2. Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles
3. Where Everybody Knows Your Name by Gary Portnoy
4. I Melt With You by Modern English
5. At This Moment by Billy Vera & the Beaters

Get Back

Video of the Day: Thunder Road

Just found this version of one of my all time favorites songs and probably my favorite Springsteen song.

Springsteen on Elvis

"Elvis is my religion. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias."
via Spinner

Video of the Day: Two

For a dude who used to snort "a lot" of heroin and coke, Ryan Adams has been a very prolific (because of? or despite?). Here's one from last year's Easy Tiger - unfortunately, he's missing Emmylou but it still works:

Desert Island Discs - Part I

What I looked for in desert island discs: albums that I never tire of listening to. I may have listened to the albums below 100s of times each and yet can still put them on and listen the whole way through. To that point, I only wanted discs that work all the way through as a whole. Greatest hits albums are often fantastic to listen to but, due to the wide span of time, theme and motivation behind the album, there is no conceptual connection between the songs on the album.

Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys: Brian Wilson said that he was driven to write and record the Pet Sounds album by his reaction to Rubber Soul by the Beatles. He specifically reacted to the way the songs all tied together as part of a larger concept - something that wasn't prevelant in rock records at the time. Wilson agonized over every note that went on the record and it shows. The record gives us two of the greatest pop rock songs ever recorded, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "God Only Knows", "Sloop John B" and a number of others that were never popular hits but are well-crafted, beautifully arranged and that adhere to the theme of the album - the passing innocence of youth and the difficulties of a very complex life.

Abbey Road - The Beatles: AR was the last album the Beatles recorded and it reflected from beginning to end the many styles of the Beatles over the course of their too short but amazing run. There's a bit of White Album mixed into a bit of the Sgt Pepper mixed in with Rubber Soul. The nearly gapless run of songs on the 2nd side of the LP that starts with "You Never Give Me Your Money" - the Abbey Road Suite - is really the finest section of the album and is what makes it so listenable 40 years later.

Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen: What can you say? The boss rips off Dylan, Orbison, Van Morrison, Phil Spector, Elvis, Sam & Dave, etc. etc. and still makes it sound like he invented rock and roll. So much so, that 30 years later he performs a half-time show at the Superbowl and reserves 50% of the set for songs from this album. It's not bogged down with the politics of his later stuff - there's no attempt to be a Woody Guthry knock-off swimming in cash. Rather, it's his youth on a disc, a continuation of the themes he laid down on "Asbury Park" and "The Wild, the Innocent..." we don't know if the characters and the places described ever existed or were like they are portrayed. It doesn't matter. They still come to life 35 years later.

Aja - Steely Dan: If you've ever seen the hour long "making of" special on this album you will immediately understand what perfectionists Becker and Fagen were. They essentially played "Fantasy Band" on all of their later albums, inviting all of the best session musicians in to the studio to take a crack at their vision and then picked the best parts and folded them into their final product. Some may think that recording quality leaves the Dan's albums as boring and antiseptic but I disagree. "Aja" has some of the finest recording mixes of jazz, rock and pop fusion ever to be put to tape - "Peg", "Black Cow", "Deacon Blues".

One More

The Beatles box set is an absolute best seller and will likely top the charts for several weeks to come. This is unsurprising given their popularity as a band even though it has been 49 years since the band was started and 45 years after the band appeared on Ed Sullivan. Just to put that in perspective, that would be like looking at the pop charts in 1964 and seeing hit records from 1919 by Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor.

Hilter's First Springsteen Concert

Video of the Day: Listen to the Darkside

Video of the Day: Handshake Drugs (Live)

A Ghost is Born has really grown on me over the years - I can listen to the album end-to-end as a piece which is rare for any album. It and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are on my top 10 list of albums from 2000+ both poignant and richly layered evocations of an era and a point in life.

Video of the Day: Such Great Heights

A 7 year old single from The Postal Service that seems as fresh today as it was then:

Video of the Day: Watching the Wheels

From Double Fantasy, John Lennon's home movie version of Watching the Wheels, his song about criticism of his departure from the public eye in the late 70s.

Video of the Day: Waiting for the Sun

From 1992's Hollywood Town Hall by country rock Minnesota folk heroes, The Jayhawks

Video of the Day: Mistaken for Strangers

A fantastic song from an excellent album, The National's 2007, "Boxer"

Video of the Day: Witchy Woman

A few things about this video:

• You can hear the tension between Bernie Leadon and Glenn Frey at the beginning of the clip - "this is a song we used to hear a lot on the radio last summer, right around Halloween", "Halloween, that ain't the summer". Uh, who the f cares? Glen Frey comes across as a real dick and many others have said the same
• Don Felder wrote in his tell-all that Don Henley never played on the beat, he played just behind it. I've heard their songs 100s of times and never picked up on it. You can definitely hear it here.
• Finally, man they were high. And good.
• Why do I bother to read the comments on YouTube. Good god, 16 year olds certainly are sanctimonious aren't they?

Video of the Day: Into the Mystic

I couldn't find a solid version of Van Morrison doing his classic, "Into the Mystic" so we'll have to settle for another pretty solid version from another (half)Hibernian band, The Swell Season:

Video of the Day: Australia

Although James Mercer has recently made some major changes to the Shins lineup - I still haven't seen any real details on why he dumped Marty Crandall (keyboards) and Jesse Sandoval (drums). Here's a solid cut from their last album with the old lineup:

I hear you're mad about Brubeck

Since I'm in the early 60s mindset brought about by my trip to Sterling Cooper, here's some relevant music:



Update: And it all comes full circle. I googled, "I hear you're mad about Brubeck" because I couldn't place the exact Donald Fagen song it came from and came upon a piece on Brubeck from 1998. Key parts:

The song "The New Frontier" by Steely Dan's Donald Fagen puts the music of Dave Brubeck - who comes to Britain later this month for a major tour, tied in with the release of a rare new album - in a very specific cultural context. Fagen's innocent narrator recalls a pre-college idyll from the early 1960s. At a party, he's smitten by a girl with Tuesday Weld eyes. "I hear you're mad about Brubeck," Fagen sings. "I love your eyes, I love him too. He's an artist, a pioneer, we've got to have some music on the new frontier." The song is a sardonic take on the optimism of America in the Cold War period; the horn-rimmed, high-minded figure of Brubeck makes a potent symbol for the era's aesthetics. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Dave Brubeck Quartet was the acceptable face of jazz for America's white middle classes. Some people still haven't forgiven him for it.

...

Brubeck's music mixed jazz with classical references and complex time- signatures - "Take Five" is in 5/4 time. It was the kind of soundtrack that could have been designed especially for Mad magazine's parodies of East Coast suburban cocktail parties: narrow-tied advertising execs talked psychoanalysis over too many dry Martinis, before unwisely attempting the frug or the pony. You could even imagine President Kennedy getting down to "Take Five". The single that followed it, "Unsquare Dance", was equally charming, but less of a hit. And it dared to raise the question of whether Brubeck was, in the argot of the times, a bit of a square himself.

Long May You Run

"Maybe The Beach Boys have got you now.....Rollin' down that empty ocean road / Gettin' to the surf on time / Long may you run" - Neil Young/Stephen Stills

Lamentingly wishing the best for the departed... cars or otherwise.