Favourite “New” Music – June 2023

A Multitude of John Hendersons

When Liz Phair was first coming up in the music business, she worked with a man named John Henderson. They had a falling out over that timeless notion of “creative differences”, and Liz worked with other people on her first record. It turned out just fine: “Exile in Guyville” placed first in 1993’s Pazz and Jop (my write up on this record is scheduled to drop in April 2036), and ranked #56 on Rolling Stone’s 2020 poll of the best albums ever. (The Henderson version is also one of the great what-ifs of indie music history.) I expected learning more about Henderson, who was a figure of note in the indie scene of the time (he ran the Feel Good All Over record label, whose roster included Alternative TV and The Magnetic Fields), would be easy, but I was very wrong: other than in relation to Phair, there aren’t really any clues on the internet about what other music he has been personally involved with.

I turned to Spotify to see if I could find music by him, only to discover that there are a LOT of John Hendersons out there. 19 variations on the name, to be exact. (Five of them are verified artists, and the process for doing this seems so simple that I’m offended that no one has given me this yet as a Christmas present.) Setting up an artist account does not in fact require you to upload any music: both John T. Henderson and his equally prolific offspring John T. Henderson, Jr. offer zero tracks to potential listeners. This is also true of one of the several fellows going by Johnny Henderson.

For a few of the John Hendersons, I may be their first listener. One of them released a pair of repetitive instrumentals in 2019. (I suspect that John Paul Henderson – two tracks, also repetitive – might be the same guy.) Another has five tracks, but only one of them, “All Children Are The Same” (very lo-fi, guitar only with a strained vocal, but not a bad tune overall), is an actual song, while the other four are basically background noise from a party. Then we have Johnnie Henderson, who sings on One Son’s (120 listeners) 2021 single “Outta My Mind” – uninspiring raps, but Johnnie’s voice is fine and the song isn’t horrible, but it would likely pass by without you taking notice. There is also Johnathan Henderson, who appears in some unknown capacity on four tracks from a compilation called “Bangin’ Beats 2” (Marc Ferrari, with almost 30,000 listeners, seems to be the key player in this), and they aren’t really songs but there are some good beats, for sure. Finally, the zero listeners club fills its last seat with another Johnny Henderson, our first verified artist. This Johnny is represented by a two-sided single from 2022. “Love” is a soulful track about, well, you know. The lyrics are banal, but I sort of enjoyed the gentle beat – let’s just say that a lot of worse songs have been massive hits. “God is with me” is similar in vibe, and, again, I found it reasonably pleasant to listen to. Neither of these songs pop, but they’re competently produced (though a bit tinny) and would’ve fit in fine on late night AOR in 1979.

One of our John Hendersons has but 6 listeners, but this one is kind of interesting. He’s credited with Liam Melly, an Irish DJ with almost 20,000 listeners, on a propulsive, definitely-makes-you-want-to-move bit of (I guess) instrumental EDM from 2012 called “Take Control”. As is typical of this style of music, it goes on way too long, but there is enough variety within the tune to hold your interest, and if you’re horned up and tripping, who really notices that kind of thing? There’s also a second song, “Inner State”, that Spotify credits to him, but other sources make no mention of Henderson on this track, so I’m going to treat this as a Spotify labelling error. This John also has a second artist entry with 17 listeners, with a much shorter and way less club-friendly version of “Take Control” and what appears to be the same club-friendly version (it can be so hard to tell these types of songs apart, let alone when some slight change is made to one of them) but just released via a different compilation. Also, very strangely, Spotify links three tracks of a guy reading something in Gaelic from a record called “Scottish Tradition 27 – Sguaban a tir an eorna/Traditions of Tiree”. Clearly, another mistake has been made. Do better, Spotify.

One of my favourite songs encountered is a track from Johny (as he is named on “Hillbilly: Bop, Boogie & The Honky Tonk Blues, Volume 4 1956 – 1957”) or Johnny (on “Country Boogie” and volume 16 of “Boppin Hillbilly”, which are both weirdly linked to another Johnny who is so not this guy) called “Any Old Port in a Storm”, which is about exactly what you’re thinking right now. But this old hillbilly music is a lot of fun, and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole (sort of like this whole post). The Johnny Henderson who did not sing “Any Old Port in a Storm” has 9 listeners and released an album called “Humble Begining” (yep, it’s spelled wrong) in 2013. I was feeling JH fatigue by this point, so I did some scanning and found tracks that are mostly whispery slow jams that feel like the demos from a Color Me Badd album that the label sent back (that’s not much of a burn – I love “I Wanna Sex You Up”).

We come now to our last five John Hendersons:

I don’t know this verified John’s story or why he only has 4 listeners, but he released five albums between 2001 and 2014, and every track I’ve listened to so far has been a delight, just really diverse and catchy indie pop. Will absolutely be listening to more of this.
At 5 listeners, this John provides a single track, being a jazzy instrumental called “vamping for days” – piano in the fore, it’s kind of disjointed, which makes it a bit funky.
With 23 listeners, the next verified John does Christian pop/rock, so this was painful for me to listen to. I tried to ignore the preachiness, which I understand is part of the appeal of this kind of music to Christians. I want to be fair to it – it’s not like lots of non-Christian pop isn’t equally meh in other ways. But this is a hard pass (though I didn’t mind a few of the tracks on his 2019 album “Jesus Still Loves You”).
Matt John Henderson (our fourth verified artist) has 71 listeners, and is the opposite of father and son John T.: he released four albums between 2020 and 2022. I only dipped in, but found very pleasant guitar-based folk/pop, so I will likely give this more time down the road.
Finally, with 64 listeners, this verified John plays guitar-driven indie folk with a variety of female vocalists, and it’s all very pleasant, though it really feels like something you would barely pay attention to while it plays in the background at your favourite hipster coffee bar.

There you have it. My best candidate for the Liz Phair colleague is the last guy, based on his age, but his Twitter feed gives me the sense that music is a side gig, not his life’s work. So, the mystery continues.

And now, to my favourite music of last month. The four-listener John Henderson has a real shot at being on this in future.

Great Speckled Bird – Great Speckled Bird (1970) (Ian and Sylvia Tyson try out rock music, and the results are magnificent.)
Good Rats – Ratcity in Blue (1976) (A great band that never found a following outside their little chunk of New York.)
X-Ray Spex – Germ Free Adolescents (1978)
Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980) (I’ve been busy filling in gaps in my punk listening history.)
Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes (1983)
Pansy Division – Undressed (1991) (The first openly gay rock band, this album is frankly sexual (and X-rated sex at that), howlingly funny and just rocks really hard. One of the best surprises I’ve ever had listening to a record.)
The Divine Comedy – Promenade (1994)
Pulp – Different Class (1995)
Bikini Kill – Reject All American (1996)
The Verve – Urban Hymns (1997) (There is so much more to these guys than “Bittersweet Symphony”.)
The Coup – Pick A Bigger Weapon (2006)
M83 – Saturdays = Youth (2008)
Dr. Rubberfunk – Hot Stone (2010)
Adia Victoria – Beyond the Bloodhounds (2016)
Twen – One Stop Shop (2022)
Ravyn Lenae – Hypnos (2022)
Sparks – The Girl is Crying in Her Latte (2023)
Juan Wauters – Wandering Rebel (2023) (Adorably goofy.)
Janelle Monáe – The Age of Pleasure (2023) (Instagram took down my post of the album cover for being too sexual. I suspect the sensors at Meta have never actually used the app.)
Youth Lagoon – Heaven Is A Junkyard (2023)

Favourite “New” Music – May 2023

Mick Jagger famously said (though the exact wording is contested) that he’d rather be dead than playing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his 40s. Mick turns 80 this year and he’s still at it, but you can’t deny that there is a cult around youth in pop music. The so-called 27 Club of artists who died at that age includes Mick’s band mate Brian Jones, along with lots of people for whom last names are enough of an introduction, like Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain and Winehouse. The attention paid to this odd phenomenon is out of proportion to its reality as a mere cultural footnote, since it ignores the many, many more artists – such as, say, Mick Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones – who carried on making music into their 70s and beyond.

Two of those elder statesmen, Paul Simon and Smokey Robinson, released albums in May, and they reflect rather different approaches to life at its outer edge.

Unless you’re listening carefully, Simon’s album, “Seven Psalms”, can come across as ponderous and overly serious, the title pretentious enough before you get to the very pretentious apparent lack of song titles (which exist, he just makes you look for them) and lots of references to “the Lord”. But it’s actually rather fun: shambling and messy. Simon is like that guy in the corner at a party who brought his guitar for no good reason and is just picking away and accidentally stumbles onto a melody that works and just plays it out, coming back to it whenever energy or ambition flag. He even gets the pretty girl who he’s been side-eying all night to jump in a few times. It really is an older person’s record: he’s earned the right to tell the story his way: meandering, languid, taking his time – like your mother taking 20 minutes (including a stop for tea biscuits with jam) to tell you the 2-minute tale of your uncle’s medical concern. (Sorry, mom!)

Meanwhile, Smokey is also at that party, but while Paul is getting spiritual, Mr. Robinson is trying to get some action, if the title of “Gasms” didn’t already make that clear. His voice still sounds great (where Simon is basically talk-singing most of the time now), and the result is a lush, relaxed (he knows he’s going to score), bedroom-eyes-in-musical-form record. It’s like they are playing out the Prince duality – the spirit vs the flesh – and in this case, the flesh wins, at least initially. I liked the Simon record better on the second play (I was bored and barely paying attention the first time out), but Smokey held up nicely on replay, too. I suspect “Seven Psalms” will continue to grow for me, while “Gasms” will remain the lovely gem it is right now.

They don’t all go out this way. Anne Murray gave up singing for pay (I assume she still sings while working on her sourdough, or whatever the hell retired multimillionaires do with their days) at age 63 before she (her words, not mine) stopped being good at it. Tina Turner, having proven for any doubters her greatness, released her last full album of new material just before turning 60. But it’s hard to walk away like that: Frank Sinatra retired at 55, then was back two years later.

The artists below who are still with us are (mostly) much younger, and maybe some of them will still be making albums (or whatever we’re doing with music then) when they hit 80, too. For now, they at least pleased me more this past month than did the above masters, which is no small feat.

The Byrds – The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)
Young Black Teenagers – Young Black Teenagers (1991) (That none of them were Black was permissible only because Public Enemy had their backs.)
Gin Blossoms – New Miserable Experience (1992) (Knowing none of their songs, I saw them open for (I think) Elvis Costello while touring for this record. A group of teenage girls in front of us sang along to every tune and danced ecstatically, then left before the headliner came out. I didn’t understand it then. I do now.)
Material Issue – Destination Universe (1992)
The Muffs – Blonder and Blonder (1995) (I listened to a lot of female-fronted punk and post-punk this month, which is where this and the next three albums fit in.)
The Kowalskis – All Hopped up on Goofballs (1999)
Tina & the Total Babes – She’s So Tuff (2001)
Manda & the Marbles – More Seduction (2003)
Tinted Windows – Tinted Windows (2009) (I am unable to explain why it took me this long to listen to an album from members of Cheap Trick, Smashing Pumpkins, Fountains of Wayne and Hansen.)
Cossbysweater – Cossbysweater (2013) (Proving that Allie Goertz is much more than an object of nerd desire for Nerf Herder.)
Tacocat – This Mess Is A Place (2019)
Indigo De Souza – All of This Will End (2023)
The National – First Two Pages of Frankenstein (2023)
Joseph – The Sun (2023)
The Utopiates – The Sun Also Rises (2023)
Rae Sremmurd – Sremm 4 Life (2023)
Kesha – Gag Order (2023)
Alex Lahey – The Answer Is Always Yes (2023)
Blues Lawyer – All in Good Time (2023) (I don’t think they actually are blues lawyers, since a newish indie band can’t afford such a lifestyle, but maybe this record starts them on that path.)
Sleaford Mods – UK GRIM (2023) (There is something nutbar about these guys that I find irresistible.)

Favourite “New” Music – April 2023

I would never call myself a fan of Gordon Lightfoot, and I don’t have a story connecting me to one of his songs, because none of them ever played a part in a significant moment in my life. But they were always there, part of the CanCon 30% coming through my radio speaker, and I guess that means I took him for granted. That, of course, was a mistake.

My friend Alan Sutherland did not take him for granted: for our major English paper in Grade 12, he wanted to write about Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”. I should have taken that as a cue to listen more carefully, but overall I wasn’t giving Alan’s musical loves enough respect: it took me 40 years after all to clue in to the genius that was Ritchie Blackmore. At least I developed some appreciation for Lightfoot at a less leisurely pace.

I always liked “Sundown” (which my wife intensely dislikes) and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. I hated “If You Could Read My Mind” – my “Sundown” – and that was not helped by the dance version cover. But in recent years, it’s grown on me considerably, and I sort of love its grandiose (“In a castle dark or a fortress strong / With chains upon my feet”) expressions of love and heartbreak. If you just let yourself wallow in it, I’m pretty sure you’d end up babbling in the corner.

Lightfoot never seemed cool, but that was only because he was cool in that understated Canadian way: he was so cool that you never saw it happening. (His former neighbour Aubrey should’ve been paying closer attention.) He was a songwriter’s songwriter, and greats like Dylan and Prine respected his craft. His time at the forefront of pop culture – to the extent he ever was there – was over before 1980, but we never stopped hearing his old hits on the radio. He continued to write and record and perform, invulnerable to trends, still his own unique artist. His importance in Canadian culture never really dimmed even though the hits stopped coming: he remained to the end one of those artists who sort of defined the country. And though the music lives on, it feels wrong that he won’t be here anymore to perform it.

I didn’t listen to any Lightfoot in April, but here are some other records that I did love last month.

Tom Verlaine – Tom Verlaine (1979)
Wipers – Is This Real? (1980)
Slint – Spiderland (1991) (The soundtrack to the gloomiest Thursday afternoon you ever spent, this is bourbon-soaked shoegaze that burrows deep and drags you along in its melancholy wake.)
Material Issue – International Pop Overthrow (1991)
Tricky – Maxinquaye (1995)
The Dollyrots – Eat My Heart Out (2004)
Kid Confucius – Kid Confucius (2005)
Go Betty Go – Nothing Is More (2005)
Nerf Herder – Rockingham (2016) (These guys, like Bowling for Soup below, make me smile, and that’s more than enough – the high energy and bouncy tunes are a bonus.)
Pkew Pkew Pkew – Pkew Pkew Pkew (2016) (Canadian punks, including an ode to predrinking.)
Bowling for Soup – Drunk Dynasty (2016)
The Pretty Flowers – Golden Beat Sessions (2019) (They do such a great job of making these songs personal, it took four tracks before I realized that every cut was a cover.)
The Allergies – Say the Word (2020)
Mo Troper – Natural Beauty (2020)
The 1975 – Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022)
cheerbleederz – even in jest (2022)
The Greeting Committee – Dandelion (2022)
Dumb – Pray 4 Tomorrow (2022)
Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness – Tilt At The Wind No More (2023) (Catchy pop melodies with theatrical flair and emo bent.)
100 gecs – 10,000 gecs (2023) (Delightfully odd and oddly delightful, their sound is messy and overstuffed, but with a keen melodic awareness)

Favourite “New” Music – March 2023

My favourite movie, without question, of 2022 was “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. Not only was it a great science fiction/action/sort-of superhero movie, but it was funny and visually distinctive and a very heartwarming story that ultimately was really about family, and love, and finding your place in the world. So, when it dominated the Oscars last month, I took an unusual amount of joy out of an awards show (a thing I usually don’t give a crap about).

Heading into the awards, I knew one category it had no chance of winning: best original song for “This Is A Life”. I was rooting for it – my Mitski stanning has not yet reached its limit – but even I didn’t think it was anything special, and it was definitely odd by the usual standards of the Academy. It did occur to me, however, that I really didn’t know the other four nominated songs very well, so I set out to change that.

The eventual winner, “Naatu Naatu” from “RRR”, is a fun tune that’ll get your blood racing, but I question whether it is that much better than the literally thousands of other songs that are in Bollywood movies every year, none of which were ever even nominated. And I understood from the outset that “Applause” from “Tell It Like A Woman” wouldn’t win, because losing at the Oscars for writing a song from a film that almost no one has seen seems to just be Diane Warren’s fate. (They have now given her a special Oscar, so a competitive win could be close at hand. Stay the course, Diane.)

Had I been given a vote, it would have been between the two pop queens: Lady Gaga (“Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick”) or Rihanna (“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and their various co-writers. “Hold My Hand” is a power ballad that definitely taps into a kind of mid-‘80s vibe that makes it a worthy successor to the original film’s Oscar-winning “Take My Breath Away”. The song is very stirring, but it’s also pretty one-note, all large gestures and epic booms. It needs a big voice to match the sonic weaponry that backs it, and Gaga qualifies. It’s a song that will have couples swaying side by side at the Daytona 500 a decade from now, one arm wrapped around their partner’s waist, the other raising up a beer in celebration.

“Lift Me Up” is more subtle: with humming, single strike piano keys and gentle strings, the song generates an emotional response from Rihanna’s compelling vocal performance. The movie was weighed down by its need to mourn Chadwick Boseman, but the song feels free and unburdened. It’s just as emotional as “Hold My Hand”, but it doesn’t seem to be working quite so hard to get there, and that just feels like a bigger accomplishment, and one that’s more worthy of recognition with, as Dustin Hoffman said of the Oscar, a little gold man with no genitalia who is holding a sword.

In the end, it was a pretty good year for movie songs (Drake, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Jazmine Sullivan and Selena Gomez all made the 15-song shortlist, and I would’ve loved to see one of the tunes from “Spirited” get nominated), and “Naatu Naatu” is really growing on me. It’s a fun song from another year that needed levity wherever it could be found.

Here’s some other music that I loved last month:

The Rolling Stones – Out of Our Heads (1965) (I never played the whole thing before, though I was halfway through side two before that became clear to me)
Bob Weir – Ace (1972) (I’ve never much cared for the Grateful Dead, but Weir, separated from the jam band artifice, is a different animal)
Shigeru Suzuki – Band Wagon (1975)
The Jam – In the City (1977)
Van Halen – Van Halen II (1979) (I always like the DLR-era albums, so I can’t figure out why I don’t play them more often)
Television Personalities – And Don’t the Kids Just Love It (1981)
Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians – Globe of Frogs (1988)
Pixies – Doolittle (1989) (this 30 years overdue play is proof that I’ve never been a very serious music listener)
Green Day – Kerplunk! (1991) (yes, they were great before “Dookie”)
Jay-Z – The Blueprint (2001) (okay, so there are gaps in my hip hop knowledge, too – but I’m working on it)
The Format – Interventions and Lullabies (2003) (Nate Reuss’ former band before fun. was his former band)
Eddie Vedder – Into the Wild (2007)
Setting Sun – Be Here When You Get There (2013)
Ducks Ltd. – Modern Fiction (2021)
EarthGang – Ghetto Gods (2022)
The Beths – Expert In A Dying Field (2022) (one of my favourite indie pop bands right now)
Paramore – This Is Why (2023)
Pearla – Oh Glistening Onion, the Nighttime is Coming (2023)
Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) (2023) (a close winner over Pearla for most pretentious album name of the month)
Depeche Mode – Memento Mori (2023)

Favourite “New” Music – February 2023

I’ve ranted about the Grammys previously, and it remains as futile an endeavour now as it was then. The Grammys (and, really, all awards in the arts – I mean, have you seen “Bohemian Rhapsody”?) have never entirely been about rewarding creative achievements – commerce and personal relationships (with voters) also play a large part. But, somehow, the music industry’s leading prize has a stronger record than any other when it comes to rewarding blandness. Why is that?

Here’s my theory: it’s largely thanks to white men. (We get blamed for so much these days, but stick with me on this.) The music industry, like pretty much every business in the 20th century, was run by white guys, many of them not exactly youthful. And their collectively bland tastes are reflected in who was nominated for and then winning awards. If you doubt me, let’s start by taking a look at the nominees for the Grammys’ top prize, Album of the Year, for 1964, the year The Beatles took over the world. I have nothing against any of the chosen artists, but folks like Al Hirt and Henry Mancini were not on the cutting edge of contemporary music. (Barbra Streisand is an outlier from that year’s nominees, and even she was old school in style but with the kind of outrageously undeniable talent that is often honoured.) Now, take a look at the top 5 albums for 1964 at Acclaimed Music: Stan Getz & João Gilberto (the one Grammy nominee in the pack) made the cut (have to check that album out), as did some guy named Lee Morgan (ditto) and Eric Dolphy, along with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It feels like a transition year, with album-oriented rock on the rise, but jazz still a strong player. Surely, the Grammys would start to reflect this reality in years to come.

They did not. The Beatles remained a sure thing to pick up a nomination, but other nominees over the next few years included the likes of Eddy Arnold, Vicki Carr and Ed Ames while all-time great albums from Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, the Stones, the Beach Boys (yes, they failed to nominate “Pet Sounds”), Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison and The Band got passed over.

And my point is . . .? Pop music changes fast, but the music industry changes very, very slowly, as the old order is replaced by the new, who have their own soon-to-be-fossilized opinions. It’s happening right now, only with a different (probably still mostly white) group at the top: it’s the only way to explain why Kanye West (forget the crazy for just one moment), Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé have a total of zero Album of the Year awards, but Taylor Swift has three and Adele two. No knock on either of those women, but even they have to be wondering about this imbalance. And it will continue to happen in the major categories, because whatever the hot new thing is of a given year will always run up against the monolith of everything that came before.

Which brings us to Harry Styles. I like Harry as a singer. I have mixed feelings about his public persona (the “Don’t Worry Darling” publicity cycle was not kind to him), but his talent is significant and I enjoyed his first two albums. But, other than a few tracks (“Music for A Sushi Restaurant” sticks in my head), I found “Harry’s House” bland and unremarkable. Its win at the Grammys would suggest I am largely alone in feeling this way. I didn’t have a horse in this race – of the albums I know among the nominees, I would have voted for Kendrick, and I didn’t even like “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” that much – but when your choice as a voting body is this dull, let’s just give the damned thing to Beyoncé so we can stop talking about why she doesn’t have one. If anyone other than Harry Styles fans is playing this album 50 years from now, I’ll be shocked. Maybe we should check in with today’s Ed Ames fans (still over 25,000 monthly listeners on Spotify) so they can know what to expect.

And, with that, I turn to some music that I do love. After a fallow January, I had a good February, as I got my emotional mojo back. Did I love music last month because I was feeling like myself again, or was I feeling like myself again because I was listening to great music? This is my personal chicken and egg scenario. Hopefully, some of these will help you through the blah month that March will likely be.

Throbbing Gristle – 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979) (All the power pop that I listen to can start to blend together after a while. That is NOT this record, a delightfully weird mess with a very misleading title.)
Cake – Fashion Nugget (1996)
Fruit Bats – Mouthfuls (2003)
Hurry – Guided Meditation (2016)
Gentle Hen – Be Nice to Everyone (2018)
Sobs – Telltale Signs (2018) (Probably my favourite band right now – a lesser record than 2022’s “Air Guitar”, but it shows the pop masters that they were on their way to becoming.)
2nd Grade – Hit to Hit (2020)
The Boys with the Perpetual Nervousness – Songs from Another Life (2021) (Some bands you just know you’re going to love based on their name.)
Ovlov – Buds (2021)
Coco & Clair Clair – Sexy (2022)
For Tracy Hyde – Hotel Insomnia (2022) (Of course, I discover these Japanese shoegazers just as they’re calling it quits. Luckily, there’s a back catalogue to fall in love with and fuel my regrets.)
The Foxies – Who Are You Now, Who Were You Then? (2022) (Also check out the video for their 2020 single “Anti Socialite” – does the gym teacher look at all familiar to the over-50 crowd?)
Cakes da Killa – Svengali (2022)
Ladytron – Time’s Arrow (2023)
Fantastic Negrito – Grandfather Courage (2023)
RAYE – My 21st Century Blues (2023)
The Men – New York City (2023)
Beauty Pill – Blue Period (2023) (A bit of a cheat – this is a reissue of two records from the early 2000s, but I would have listed both separately, so this combo frees up a spot for someone else for you to discover. You’re welcome.)
Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy (2023)
Karol G – Mañana Será Bonito (2023)

Favourite “New” Music – January 2023

The unveiling of the latest list of nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame brought the usual outrage (“Willie Nelson is not rock and roll!”), confusion (“Is George Michael rock and roll?”) and disdain (“Sheryl Crow? Really?”, though I might’ve been the only one saying this). There’s definitely some weirdness in play. Is Cyndi Lauper’s brief but glorious run in the 1980s really Hall-worthy over, say, Beck, who isn’t even nominated this year? Joy Division and New Order are, despite the personnel overlap, two very different bands, yet they are nominated as a pairing. How is it that Warren Zevon was never nominated before?

But Beck, and his exclusion from this year’s list, is what I’m most interested in. He was a nominee last year – did he get worse somehow in a year in which he didn’t release any new music? Or what about Mary J. Blige, a first-time nominee in 2021 who didn’t make the cut in 2022, released her first new album in five years to good reviews (and an Album of the Year Grammy nomination), then was left out again this year. Then there is the Susan Lucci of the Hall, Chic, repeatedly left off the list since their 11th nomination in 2017. Finally, New York Dolls, who were nominated in 2001, disappeared until 2021, hung around in 2022, and are now off the ballot again. No shame in that, though: they’ve done better than Fela Kuti, who finally got to share the ballot with them the last two years and is now in purgatory again.

This isn’t like the Baseball Hall of Fame, where getting onto the ballot means 10 tries to get in, unless (1) you actually get elected or (2) your vote total falls below a certain defined threshold. The Hall’s yearly ballot is put together by a committee, and the shifting interests and loyalties in such a process guarantees flux. The committee is a pretty impressive roster of music industry luminaries: Steven Van Zandt has been on it since time immemorial, and Questlove, Dave Grohl and Tom Morello (and, in the recent past, Robbie Robertson) have multiple years of service, plus there are some excellent music journalists like Amanda Petrusich. These people know music: just some years (2012, for example), it appears, they love, say, Eric B. & Rakim, and other years (every year but 2012), they don’t.

In any event, fans can vote, even if our collective total equals but one measly ballot). George Michael and Joy Division/New Order were no-brainers for me. I love Cyndi Lauder but am uncertain whether she should be immortalised, and definitely not before (in addition to some of those mentioned above) the likes of Gram Parsons and The Smiths, let alone acts like Barry White, Television, The B-52s, Kool & the Gang, Diana Ross, The Commodores, The Guess Who, The Pet Shop Boys, INXS and Nick Drake who, collectively, have a grand total of zero nominations among them. (How is this even possible?) Most of the others I either don’t know well enough, or have never been much impressed with. That left me with The Spinners (tons of underrated hits and serious longevity), Warren Zevon (“Werewolves of London” should be enough, damn it) and Kate Bush (a reward for a 40-year commitment to her own idiosyncratic vision). Here’s the link for you to get some skin in the game.

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January was a crappy month for me, and if that hadn’t been obvious from how I was feeling (I ended it by getting COVID – ugh), my lack of interest in listening to new music and retreat to familiar aural comforts was further evidence. There’s nothing wrong with that – I could play old Elvis Costello albums all day and still hear things I’d never noticed before. But nothing beats the joy of hearing something fresh that makes you take notice. The volume was thin this month, but there were still plenty of gems that caught my attention.

Leon Russell – Carney (1972)
David Bowie – Young Americans (1975) (Bowie’s disco album, I don’t understand why this wasn’t met with the acclaim of its predecessors and immediate successors, although perhaps the phrase “Bowie’s disco album” offers a clue.)
Dire Straits – Communiqué (1979)
Fun Boy Three – Waiting (1983)
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Rattlesnakes (1984) (Shoutout to my friend Robert Barrie for putting this on my radar.)
Brian Wilson – I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times (1995) (Stripped down reimaginings of some classic Beach Boys tunes.)
The Vines – Wicked Nature (2014)
Leisure – Leisure (2016)
The Longshot – Love Is for Losers (2018) (I don’t find a heck of a lot of difference between Green Day and Billie Joe Armstrong’s side projects, but since I really like Green Day, that isn’t exactly a problem.)
Grace Ives – 2nd (2019)
Anyway Gang – Anyway Gang (2019) (The notion of a Canadian supergroup seems pretty un-Canadian to me, but the result is a delight.)
Vacation Manor – Vacation Manor (2021)
Tegan and Sara – Crybaby (2022)
Death Cab for Cutie – Asphalt Meadows (2022)
Why Bonnie – 90 in November (2022)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Cool it Down (2022)
Charles Stepney – Step on Step (2022) (A fascinating collection of home recordings from a long gone master, curated by his family.)
Father John Misty – Chloë and the Next 20th Century (2022)
Blackstarkids – Cyberkiss* (2022) (Just nutty fun.)
July Talk – Remember Never Before (2023)

Favourite “New” Music – December 2022

So, in the great tradition of starting a new year by looking back at the one just ended, I can say that 2022 sort of blew. This isn’t hindsight: I was very aware of its high degree of suckage while I was in the middle of it. It began with my wife and I both having COVID (mild and unenduring cases, thankfully, but even the weaker forms of this malevolent virus can kick your ass hard), and went down from there. We dealt with other medical challenges over the year, both personally and in others who we love, and those, at least in my own case, gave my mental health a ginormous pantsing. My work performance was well below what I expect from myself, I took suboptimal care of the aspects of my health over which I had some control, and I generally was largely unmotivated for big chunks of the calendar.

The good news is that, my health now restored, I am feeling pretty good about 2023. Yes, the world is still a cesspool and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But you can often (not always – all piles of shit are not equal) choose to only go in up to your knees instead of to your neck. And you can choose to focus on the things that matter to you – the people you love, the relationships that sustain you, the pursuits that give you joy – instead of those that don’t. Trying to do just that is my sole resolution for the year ahead.

As always, while travelling the 365 days of the metaphysical Sodom and Gomorrah just ended, there was music. I offer below a list of new songs that sustained me with repeated plays over 2022. If any of them were hits, that will be news to me: they (mostly) came to my attention as album tracks that stood out from their neighbours. What they have in common is that they triggered a response: to dance, to smile, to grimly contemplate the contours of my existence. But, mostly, hearing them just made me happy, in that inexplicable way that our favourite art does, and that’s more than enough.

Arcade Fire – Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) (The Art vs the Artist debate comes up here, of course. But Win Butler isn’t the only member of Arcade Fire, and I loved this hypnotic record.)
Caracara – Ohio (My favourite lyric of the year – “I remember playing your favourite song / hoping you’d hum along” – has that air of love mixed with despair that guts me every time.)
Charlotte Adigery & Bolis Pupul – Ceci n’est pas un cliché
Flo Milli featuring Rico Nasty – Payday (I don’t know if they are objectively “better” at rapping, but females are almost always a lot more fun to listen to than males.)
Mallrat – Teeth
midwxst – riddle
MØ – New Moon
Mura Masa with Leilah – prada (i like it) (Probably my favourite song of the year.)
My Idea – Popstar
Nilufer Yanya – stabilise
Omar Apollo – Talk
Santigold – Fall First
Say Sue Me – Around You
Sobs – Burn Book
Spoon – Wild
The Juliana Theory – Less Talk
The Linda Lindas – Oh!
The Wombats – Everything I Love is Going to Die
Years & Years – Starstruck
Young Guv – Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried

And, of course, here’s the usual roundup of my favourite albums of the past month.

The Cure – Seventeen Seconds (1980)
Lester Young – In Washington, D.C. 1956, Volume One (1980) (I still know next to nothing about jazz, but when a song like “D.B. Blues” gets you strutting around your kitchen at 6:00 a.m. like you’re Mack the Knife, you know you’ve stumbled onto something magical even if you don’t really understand it.)
The Jam – The Gift (1982)
Teenage Fanclub – Bandwagonesque (1991)
Yellowcard – Ocean Avenue (2003) (The title track is an all-time favourite, so the failure to play the whole album before now is inexcusable.)
The Cribs – The Cribs (2004)
Ben Kweller – Ben Kweller (2006)
Remington Super 60 – Go System Go (2006)
Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts (2018) (Kanye is always brilliant, even on throwaway side projects, but it is really hard to play his stuff these days and not feel queasy.)
100 gecs – 1000 gecs (2019) (So, so weird.)
Chinese Kitty – Kitty Bandz (2019) (See the comment on Flo Milli above.)
Wild Honey – Ruinas Futuras (2021)
Sobs – Air Guitar (2022) (My new favourite band, this album just guarantees me 32 minutes of happiness.)
Disq – Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet (2022)
Cola – Deep in View (2022)
Billy Woods – Aethiopes (2022)
Alex G – God Save the Animals (2022)
Asake – Mr. Money with the Vibe (2022)
Rich Aucoin – Synthetic: Season One (2022) (Maritimers: I hope you are supporting this guy. I hadn’t heard anything from him since 2011’s “We’re All Dying to Live” (the video for “It” is a delight), but he was just off making deliciously odd records like this one.)
Ari Lennox – age/sex/location (2022)

Favourite “New” Music – November 2022

Well, it’s December, and that means Christmas music everywhere you turn: on your television, in the shops you attend, at your doctor’s office, on your cab driver’s Sirius XM device. Even in this age of being able to have almost complete control over programming your listening life, it’s entirely unavoidable, which is unfortunate if, like me, you don’t much care for the stuff.

Let’s be honest, okay? A lot of the holiday’s music sucks. It’s saccharine and simplistic and preachy and waaaay too Christian. Yes, I know whose theoretical birth we are meant to be celebrating, but I’ve read a good chunk of the New Testament, and most people calling themselves Christian don’t seem to do a very good job of emulating the big kahuna. For the rest of us, the season is really just an excuse to overeat/drink, sleep in a few times, and have people buy us stuff, which is pretty awesome, but hardly worthy of a whole musical cottage industry.

And everyone sings the same damned songs over and over and over again. You could get from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve just listening to “Silent Night! Holy Night!” (What’s with the exclamation marks?) or variants thereof. That isn’t hyperbole: Second Hand Songs lists 3880 versions (and that’s probably gone up between writing this sentence and posting it), including from such luminaries as Chet Atkins, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, Nana Mouskouri, Can, David Hasselhoff (in German, of course) and the Queen of Christmas herself, Mariah Carey. Another Mariah cover, “O Holy Night”, has 2037 versions, including efforts from Petula Clark, Joan Baez, Andrea Bocelli and Skydiggers. I could go on and on – just like Christmas music does.

My wife, though she may protest a bit as to what degree, loves Christmas music. She isn’t a zealot or without discernment: she knows shit when she hears it. But she could not imagine going through the holiday season not listening to it, while I will likely start Christmas morning this year listening to something like Nirvana or the Sex Pistols.

We needed a compromise playlist, and to that end I offer my year-ending gift to those who are closer to my end of the Christmas music enjoyment level spectrum. Christmas Songs That Don’t Suck is (at this moment) roughly 7 hours of tolerable and sometimes even enjoyable holiday-themed songs. (My definition of a Christmas song may not always match yours.) It’s length varies from season to season, as I get sick of songs or find new ones that I like (I recently added 8 tracks from the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special – and, yes, that’s a real thing), and while it is a Mariah-free zone, it includes songs from Boyz II Men, Queen, Tom Petty, Dolly Parton, Fountains of Wayne, Carrie Underwood and – shiver – the Biebs, plus lots more. It isn’t all G-rated – you may choose to usher the kids out of the room when “Homo Christmas” starts up – but it’s a more diverse celebration of the season than what you can find on your usual radio station or Spotify playlist.

My 5 favourite songs on there, in no particular order, are probably:

Bare Naked Ladies – Elf’s Lament
The Pogues – Fairytale of New York
The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping
Run-DMC – Christmas in Hollis (To paraphrase Argyle, this IS a Christmas song and “Die Hard” IS a Christmas movie.)
Lydia Liza & Josiah Lemanski – Baby, It’s Cold Outside (#MeToo)

Merry Christmas!

Now, on to my favourite listens of the month just passed.

The Moody Blues – Days of Future Passed (1967)
Sly and the Family Stone – A Whole New Thing (1967)
Omega – 10000 lépés (1969) (The most successful Hungarian rock band ever. How could I not check them out?)
Curtis Mayfield – Curtis (1970)
Jimmy Cliff – The Harder They Come (1972) (My continuing search to discover reggae that I enjoy finally struck oil.)
John Lennon – Walls and Bridges (1974)
Journey – Journey (1975) (Never much of a fan during their chart-topping heyday, this rookie outing was a very different-sounding band.)
The Kings – The Kings Are Here (1980) (Good old Canadian new wavey rock.)
Was (Not Was) – Born to Laugh at Tornadoes (1983) (Yet another record that I owned, never played straight through, and now celebrate.)
Los Lobos – How Will the Wolf Survive? (1984) (On which I discovered that Mexican polka is a thing, and a pretty amazing thing at that.)
Cameo – Word Up! (1986)
Front 242 – Front by Front (1988)
Wendy James – Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears (1993)
Guster – Ganging Up on the Sun (2006) (I loved the two albums before this one, but for some reason stopped paying attention to the band, which was clearly a mistake.)
Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Surf (2015)
The Ballroom Thieves – Unlovely (2020)
JOSEPH – The Trio Sessions: Vol. 2 (2021)
Pool Kids – Pool Kids (2022)
Armani Caesar – The Liz 2 (2022)
Fousheé – SoftCORE (2022) (A delight from start to finish. Already a Grammy nominee as a songwriter, if she doesn’t become a major star, it won’t be for lack of talent.)

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash.

Favourite “New” Music – October 2022

I think it’s important to know what kind of nerd you are. Nerddom can be very arcane, a subculture with shared codes that is impenetrable to those not in the know, or more expansive, a mass culture experience that brings together people whose only commonality is, say, a love of manga or “Lord of the Rings” or old Sub Pop cassettes. (I made that last one up, but I bet it exists.) And while I have my attachments to the broader nerd world – music, of course, but also superhero movies – what I really am is a data nerd.

So, what does that mean? Well, I love numbers. I am in thrall to things with a quantifiable value. That means, of course, that I have a Fitbit, and have at times been obsessive about hitting my targets. I can get lost in sports reference books and websites – basically long lists of numbers detached from context. I have similarly wasted considerable time reviewing movie box office receipts and television ratings.

In music terms, it means I have a serious attachment to where songs rank on the hit charts. I bought RPM regularly in the ‘70s and ‘80s and Billboard in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and it was totally for the weekly charts, not the articles. The pleasure I got from seeing how long a song was on the chart, or what was rising with a bullet, or if a favourite song entered the chart, is inexplicable, and, yes, kind of weird. But I have always loved numbers and their cold objectivity.

The ultimate music data nerd was Joel Whitburn, who passed away in June 2022 at the age of 82. Whitburn started analyzing Billboard’s charts in college, then put his knowledge to work at RCA in the ‘60s before starting his own company, Record Research, in 1970. Since then, Record Research, through a deal with Billboard, has published a seemingly endless series of books for other music data nerds telling us what is in those charts.

When I started this blog, I quickly realized that if I was going to reference chart performance by a song, I needed a better source than Wikipedia, and naturally thought of Whitburn. I had owned one of his books forever ago, a compilation of Top 40 singles through 1984, and it was heavily thumbed until it finally fell apart and was discarded. There are lots of his books available in stores or from places like Amazon, but for a true nerdgasm, you need to order from the company directly, and pay a serious premium to get the 1,200-page monstrosity pictured above shipped to your home. It’s been worth every penny. Browsing its pages, I see the names of bands and songs that I had long forgotten, and it’s been a joy to revisit oddities like the whispy soft-core pop of Christopher Atkins’ “How Can I Live Without Her” from “The Pirate Movie” soundtrack. It is not a good record, but I liked it enough in the summer of 1982 to record it off CJCB for a mixtape, and was so very glad to experience its horribleness again. Only a true music nerd, a Joel Whitburn, would understand.

And with that, here are my favourite “new” albums from last month:

Faces – A Nod Is as Good as a Wink … to a Blind Horse (1971) (I am yet to have a bad experience listening to a Rod Stewart record, and, yes, that includes “Blondes Have More Fun”.)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1976) (Yeah, I know – I should’ve listened to this decades ago.)
Nick Lowe – Labour of Lust (1979) (See Tom Petty, above.)
Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra (1982) (I have always disliked the title song, but the album is a soaring meeting of power pop and new wave that feels like the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, which is high praise in my book.)
The Three O’Clock – Sixteen Tambourines (1983) (1960s Britpop/psychedelica filtered through an indie pop sensibility.)
Public Image Ltd. – This Is What You Want … This Is what You Get (1984) (I think the widespread dislike of this record is about the audience’s expectations for what John Lydon would give them instead of a comment on the great brooding pop record that he delivered.)
The Screaming Blue Messiahs – Bikini Red (1987)
The Posies – Frosting on the Beater (1993)
Nerf Herder – Nerf Herder (1996) (This is the band that would result if first cousins Bowling for Soup and blink-182 had a baby.)
Sloan – Action Pact (2003)
Ratboys – Happy Birthday, Ratboy (2021) (A strange blend of folk/country-tinged pop and early ‘90s female-fronted indie rock.)
Julia Jacklin – PRE PLEASURE (2022)
Sofie Royer – Harlequin (2022)
Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen (2022)
Melt Yourself Down – Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In (2022) (Jazz-funk with elements of Afrobeat, punk and hyperdriven ‘90s indie pop.)
My Idea – CRY MFER (2022) (Lily Konigsberg can do no wrong in my eyes.)
Shygirl – Nymph (2022)
BODEGA – Broken Equipment (2022)
Steve Lacy – Gemini Rights (2022) (Neo soul smashes up against psych pop and comes out the other side as its own distinct thing.)
Sorry – Anywhere But Here (2022)

Favourite “New” Music – September 2022

A well-known quote, typically misattributed to Albert Einstein (but likely originating with Rita Mae Brown), says that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. I’m pretty sure I’m not insane – who can really tell these days? – so, in the words of Castor Troy pretending to be Sean Archer, “When all else fails – fresh tactics!” (Side note: What’s not to love about a movie where John Travolta out-overacts Nicolas Cage?)

How this blog came to exist is set out here. Since writing those words, I’ve learned a few things. The most important of those is who I am as a music writer. I knew I wasn’t a critic – my pretensions have their limits, plus you have to be a pretty enormous asshole to have no musical ability yet still think you can tell people with such ability how to do their jobs. (Of course, such people do exist, I’m just not one of them. It’s a small victory.) But what was I? As it turns out, I’m a memoirist telling my story through the music I love (and sometimes don’t). (Rob Sheffield is possibly the master of this form.) Those are the pieces I most enjoy writing, and the ones that people engage with (which my recent George Jones/Wilfred Poirier post really brought home to me). So, let’s steer into that skid.

This started as a place to write about older albums I’d never listened to before. It was fun in the beginning, but it soon became clear that, no matter how many classic records came from people like Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan and Bob Marley, I didn’t have much to say about them after the first or second go-around. On the other hand, I have lots to say about singles from the 1970s and 1980s, and weird cover versions, and why Olivia Rodrigo is sort of awesome. Every Pazz and Jop/Not the Pazz and Jop post is one less chance to write about my irrational love for “Thunder Island” by Jay Ferguson (as well as to share some awesome Jay Fergusion trivia that I just learned).

So, that’s what this blog will now be – whatever I feel like writing about on a given day. There will be more Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited and more Cover Version Showdowns. There will be stories about songs that connect me to my daughters, and about the songs that got me through my divorce, and about songs that I love without a grand thematic connection to anything else. And, yes, I’m still going to work through the Pazz and Jop, but I’ll probably skip or bunch together the records I have less personal feelings about (save for one more Stevie Wonder post, since I already wrote that.) It will be personal and sometimes messy, like the best music often is. I am, at all times, a work in progress, and this space reflects that. I’ll try not to make it too awkward for anyone, but make no promises (my ex-wife probably shouldn’t stop by here), and you can always skip along without reading further if I go too far for your tastes. I failed (in part – there’s probably a talent issue in play here, too) at writing fiction because I wasn’t honest on the page. I’m too old now to give a fuck, and a blog is hardly the place to start censoring yourself.

I hope you’ll stick around.

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Now, to my favourite music of last month. I was in a bit of a rut in September, revisiting music I already love more than fresh listens. Yet, in my creative morass, I still found some gems. Edgar Winter gets this month’s photo for catching me completely by surprise and putting Dan Hartman back on my radar.

Johnny Cash – At Folsom Prison (1968)
The Edgar Winter Group – They Only Come Out at Night (1972) (My favourite Spotify suggestion of the month. It’s only one record, but they definitely feel under-appreciated.)
Joe Jackson – Look Sharp! (1979) (A bit of a cheat, since I probably already knew three-quarters of the songs, but too good to leave off.)
The Beat – I Just Can’t Stop It (1980) (A non-stop party, and another band that deserves a revisit. Also, R.I.P. Ranking Roger.)
J.J. Cale – Shades (1981)
Warren Zevon – Sentimental Hygiene (1987)
Julian Cope – Saint Julian (1987) (I had completely forgotten Cope even existed, but tracks from this record deservedly received heavy play on CFNY when this came out.)
New Order – Republic (1993)
Alex Chilton – Set (1999) (Released everywhere but the U.S. as the much cooler named “Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy”. American Puritanism triumphs again.)
Phoenix – Alphabetical (2004)
Lo-Fang – Blue Film (2014) (I had been wondering why he only released one album, only to discover this morning that a new record just dropped after 8 years. Very excited to check it out.)
Young Fathers – Cocoa Sugar (2018)
Slow Pulp – Moveys (2020)
Stella Donnelly – Flood (2022)
Tim Hicks – Talk to Time (2022) (No idea why Spotify suggested this, but I’m glad they did. Solid Canadian country music, with a real sense of place. “Whiskey Does” knocked me out.)
Martin Courtney – Magic Sign (2022)
Kiwi jr. – Chopper (2022)
Santigold – Spirituals (2022)
The Wonder Years – The Hum Goes on Forever (2022)
Mura Masa – demon time (2022) (Includes possibly my favourite song of the year, “prada (i like it)”.)