Tag: country

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 66: Country Special

This months episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio was a country special, a sequel to the previous one which you can find here. It’s largely my favorite kind of Golden Age country: mostly from the 50s and 60s, lots of reverb, warbly with ghostly backing choirs and hazy heatwavey pedal steel guitar. It also features “Wichita Lineman,” an all-time favorite which I sometimes think is the most beautiful song ever written. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Marvin Rainwater – Gonna Find Me A Bluebird
2. Brenda Lee – The Grass Is Greener
3. Loretta Lynn – Fist City
4. Jerry Lee Lewis – You Win Again
5. Hank Williams – Lovesick Blues
6. Jeannie Seely – Don’t Touch Me
7. Eddy Arnold – Cattle Call
8. Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton – Last Thing On My Mind
9. Bobby Helms – My Special Angel
10. Webb Pierce – In The Jailhouse Now
11. Davis Sisters – I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know
12. Marty Robbins – Singing The Blues
13. Glen Campbell – Wichita Lineman
14. Lucille Starr – Heartaches By The Number
15. Don Gibson – I Can’t Stop Loving You
16. George Jones – The Race Is On
17. Wanda Jackson – Right Or Wrong
18. Little Jimmy Dickens – May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose
19. Roy Clark – The Tips Of My Fingers
18. Louvin Brothers – I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby
19. Jim Reeves – Welcome To My World
20. Connie Frances – Your Cheatin’ Heart
21. Dave Dudley – Six Days On the Road

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 37: Country Special

I made an all-country* special for my most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. I grew up thinking I didn’t like country music because the woman who effectively raised me listened exclusively to the contemporary country radio station and it, uh, wasn’t very good. I didn’t get into the good stuff until I was 19 or so, and still regret being so late to the party. This is a mix of my favorite kind of Golden Age country: mostly from the 50s and 60s, swimming in reverb, warbly with ghostly backing choirs, hazy heatwavy pedal steel guitar, and some of the most gorgeously tortured vocals. I hope you like it! You can download an mp3 version here.

*For the purists, a few of these tracks aren’t strictly country, but are definitely country-adjacent!

Tracklist:
1. Slim Whitman – Cool Water
2. Brenda Lee – Break It To Me Gently
3. Patsy Cline – Lovesick Blues
4. Don Gibson – Sea of Heartbreak
5. Connie Francis – Tennessee Waltz
6. Wanda Jackson – One Teardrop at a Time
7. Waylon Jennings – Love’s Gonna Live Here
8. Houston Wells – All For The Love of a Girl
9. Dolly Parton – Gonna Hurry (As Slow As I Can)
10. Roy Orbison – Blue Bayou
11. Kitty Wells – I Can’t Stop Loving You
12. Patti Page – Dark Moon
13. Conway Twitty – It’s Only Make Believe
14. Billie Jo Spears – It Makes No Difference Now
15. Lonnie Donegan – Nobody’s Child
16. Loretta Lynn – Any One, Any Worse, Any Where
17. Jack Greene – There Goes My Everything
18. Ray Price – Crazy Arms
19. Brenda Lee – Fool #1
20. Charline Arthur – Please Darlin’ Please
21. Connie Francis – Second Hand Love
22. Sammi Smith – Help Me Make It Through the Night
23. Patsy Cline – Sweet Dreams (Of You)

25 Favorite Releases of 2018

In the spirit of the season, I wanted to share some of my favorite releases of the year. Such a nuts year for music, with huge leaps of brilliance happening in so many radically different genres! Obviously this isn’t meant to be exhaustive or authoritative; just some personal highlights. Quite a few of these are giant major label releases, so I’ll be taking down those download links quickly or leaving them off accordingly. Let me know if links are broken. Happy new year!

Previously: 2017 | 2016 | 2015
Baby Ford – Ford Trax, 1988
download
Brian Keane with Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Dinçer Dalkılıç, & Emin Gündüz – Süleyman The Magnificent OST, 1988
buy / download
Cocteau Twins – Blue Bell Knoll, 1988
buy
Cowboy Junkies – Trinity Session, 1988
buy
Dead Can Dance – The Serpent’s Egg, 1988
buy
Enya – Watermark, 1988
buy
Eric B. & Rakim – Follow The Leader, 1988
buy
Fingers Inc. – Another Side, 1988
download
Geinoh Yamashirogumi – Symphonic Suite AKIRA, 1988
buy / download
Harold Budd – The White Arcades, 1988
buy
Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man, 1988
buy
Lorad Group – Sul Tempo, 1988
buy / download
Maria Rita – Brasileira, 1988
buy / download
Mary Margaret O’Hara – Miss America, 1988
buy / download
Motohiko Hamase – #Notes Of Forestry, 1988
buy
Nuno Canavarro – Plux Quba, 1988
buy / download
Prefab Sprout – From Langley Park To Memphis, 1988
buy / download
Prince – Lovesexy, 1988
buy
Public Enemy – It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, 1988
buy
Sade – Stronger Than Pride, 1988
buy
The Sugarcubes – Life’s Too Good, 1988
buy
Talk Talk – Spirit Of Eden, 1988
buy / download
Vangelis Katsoulis – The Slipping Beauty, 1988
download
Womack & Womack – Conscience, 1988
buy
Yoshio Ojima – Une Collection des Chainons I & II: Music For Spiral, 1988
download

 

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 27: 60s Special

My most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio is an all 60’s special, which means that in addition to making a good case for the comeback of short songs, I was able to fit a lot into an hour. Featuring: a teenage Dolly Parton, a spaced out Joe Meek oddity, brutal heartbreak soul, a take on “Bend Me, Shape Me” that weighs a thousand tons, Peruvian garage rock, Ronnie Spector spitting pure rage at an unnamed man, an absolutely deranged Brian Wilson-produced version of “In The Still of the Night,” a cameo from the queen of rockabilly, an Indonesian Beegees cover, and of course, plenty of girl groups.

I love how 60s vocals sound as if everything is being sung with the caps lock on and too many exclamation points–they really grab you by the throat. I love how a song about a woman being disinterested in having sex manages to be anything but prudish or coy, and instead sounds like a venomous, gravelly diatribe delivered from somebody’s dirty basement. I love the unabashed melodrama and the blown-out, gritty production. I love how markedly less prim the musical ethos was than what preceded it, how much more raw and punk. This is one of my favorite musical eras and a lot of these songs make me cry–perhaps least explicably, “Egyptian Shumba,” which is still one of my all-time favorites–so I hope you enjoy this music as much as I do! You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Lou Christie & The Tammys – Outside The Gates Of Heaven
2. The Exciters – Get Him
3. Timi Yuro – What’s A Matter Baby (Is It Hurting You)
4. The Cookies – Softly In The Night
5. The Cats Meow – La La Lu
6. Little Frankie – I’m Not Gonna Do It
7. Claudine Clark – Party Lights
8. The Models – Bend Me, Shape Me
9. Screaming Lord Sutch – Don’t You Just Know It
10. Wanda Jackson – Fallin’
11. The Ronettes – He Did It
12. The Honeys – In The Still Of The Night
13. Joe Meek – Orbit Around The Moon
14. Rosie Lopez – I’ll Never Grow Tired
15. The Crystals – He’s A Rebel
16. Dream Team – There He Is
17. Los Saicos – Ana
18. The Ikettes – I’m Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)
19. The Tammys – Egyptian Shumba
20. Dara Puspita – To Love Somebody
21. Ben E. King – Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)
22. The Shannons – Little White Lies
23. Solomon Burke – If You Need Me
24. Dolly Parton – Gonna Hurry (As Slow As I Can)

[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 11

My newest mix for NTS Radio was inspired by spring, melodrama, seasonal affective disorder, women looking at men with suspicion, heartbreak, long hair, and Ennio Morricone. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version here. Thanks for listening!


Tracklist:
1. Glenn Copeland – Ever New
2. Arthur – Valentine Grey
3. Linda Smith – I So Liked Spring
4. Sammi Smith – Help Me Make It Through The Night
5. Connie Converse – How Sad, How Lovely
6. Connie Francis – Vaya Con Dios
7. Dusty Springfield – The Windmills of Your Mind
8. Shirley Collins – Adieu To Old England
9. Judee Sill – Lady O
10. Barbara Moore – Drifting
11. Claire Hamill – Speedbreaker
12. Renée Fleming – The Trees on the Mountains (comp. Carlisle Floyd)
13. Joyce Heath – I Wouldn’t Dream Of It
14. Bessie Griffin & The Gospel Pearls – I Believe
15. Patsy Cline – Sweet Dreams
16. Elena Ledda & Mauro Palmas – Sett’ispadas
17. Hollins & Starr – Cry Baby Cry

Van Dyke Parks – Song Cycle, 1967

Another one from the canon. Song Cycle is deranged. It riffs on all things Americana: gospel, bluegrass, orchestral ballads, folk, show tunes, marching bands, movie scores, ragtime, waltzes, girl groups, and pop rock, but it never settles into any of these shapes. People call it impenetrable, but I think it’s, ahem, too penetrable, too open and slippery and rife with forks in the road. It’s psychedelic insofar as every measure seems to want to tug away and break off into several different songs, leaving the listener in many places (and times!) all at once, volatile and hanging off of a musical precipice. It’s nauseating, beautiful, and a tiny bit misanthropic.

As a teenager, my first dozen listens left me unable to remember anything about what I had just listened to, what had just happened, and yet despite it being so elusive, you can’t stop listening, trying to grab hold of it. I’m sure this is a pretty typical response, and Parks himself sums it up best in this anecdote:

When I played the album for Joe Smith, the president of the label, there was a stunned silence. Joe looked up and said, “Song Cycle”? I said, “Yes,” and he said, “So, where are the songs?” And I knew that was the beginning of the end.

A massively expensive commercial flop, the record was originally supposed to be entitled Looney Tunes, and it does feel cartoonish and larger than life. Most of it is accompanied by Parks’s reedy, androgynous vocals–he sounds like a jaded, aging chorus girl who’s smoked a few packs too many, singing sardonically to an empty theater. Clearly he’s amused by this whole thing. The opener, “Vine Street,” is Steve Young covering a Randy Newman song, and it fades in midway through the song and fades out before it’s finished. Track six, the cheekily titled “Van Dyke Parks,” is a minute long clip of a gospel hymnal, almost completely masked by what sounds like a helicopter making a water landing. The closer, “Pot Pourri” (probably another joke title, given that it’s the least hodgepodge track in the cycle), finds Parks alone with a piano, padded by a thick hiss of room tone, and the song doesn’t exactly end so much as stop–presumably leaving it open-ended and the cycle unbroken, ready for another go round.