song of the week

Sometimes, around midnight, if the sky was clear, and everything worked just right, I could get this Toronto station on the little radio I kept by my bed.

That night, the static was bad, and I was about to give up, to turn it off and go to sleep, when I heard this faint tiny voice. I could barely hear it. It was like listening for truth at the bottom of …

O Charles, I don’t know why it’s so hard, I really don’t, even if I thought I did I’d be too embarrassed to say, any blues this loud is always a helplessly rhetorical question, like the soggy Chinese takeout menu bow-tied around my apartment building’s doorknob under what Weather.com calls “freezing drizzle,” like the Baltimore placekicker last night becomes for now the only goat to damn for years of blighted …

I should be more embarrassed to admit that my first exposure to this song was Bette Midler’s version in the movie Hocus Pocus. About a decade later my high school English teacher played that scene from Stanger Than Paradise in class for reasons I no longer remember. But Eszter Balint was swaying around the kitchen in a turtleneck, rejecting dresses, smoking too much while Screamin’ Jay cackled like a madman …

Back in high school, my friend asked for Depeche Mode’s Strange Too for her birthday, a VHS collection of music videos directed by Anton Corbijn. The songs were from Violator, arguably one of the band’s best albums, if not the best.

We did a lot of things together that felt risqué. We watched disturbing films like Strange Days, wrote erotica for fun and compared notes. Sitting in her basement and watching …

Hip-hop has always done self-aggrandizement well, and hip-hop from the mid-90’s may have had it perfected (I’m thinking of Biggie’s “Hypnotize” video and basically everything ever put out by No Limit Records). In their heyday, the Wu-Tang Clan bragged and boasted along with the best of them, and the Killa Bees give us no better example than “4th Chamber.” Here we happen upon Ghostface “sipping wine …

Warm chords. “Have you seen him?
Have you seen him? Have you seen
him?” Brass horns. Then the voice,
her voice a yellow tobacco field
wide & dry deep summer deep South.
In Florida, in the backseat of
a taxi, she wrote the first notes
during a three-hour drive, an epic
eighteen-minute acoustic tune she
pared then amplified—it sounds
finest on vinyl—, I have listened
(no exaggeration) at least once
every day since 2006. And you can
hear the …

I’ve never forgotten Husker Du’s “I’ll Never Forget You,” when Bob Mould’s vocals ripped the title lyric eight times through vinyl fabric and into my bloodstream.  Like everyone else I loved hardcore, but this song was about emotion unleashed—both anger at a friend’s betrayal and agonizing remorse at the friendship’s loss.  Looking at the lyrics by themselves over the past couple of days, I’ve come to believe the song was …

My family moved to Los Angeles when I was five and I left when I was a teenager.  1980’s Los Angeles and I were never a good fit, and I generally dislike songs about L.A.  They too often romanticize a glossiness I can’t stand, even when they are trying to get to the grit of things.  I rarely miss Los Angeles (although there are people there I miss quite a …

I knew what a weasel was, and I knew what a woman was, but what was a weasel woman? Billy Joel knew, I thought, and it seemed taboo, maybe even weirdly sexual. Of course I was mishearing “She’s Always a Woman.” The song played often on the soft rock radio station my mother liked, its piano opening quieting me, getting me to focus my attention for clues that might give …

Does anyone else miss the 90s?  Maybe it’s not fair to write an ode to a song for what it represents as opposed to its innate characteristics, but how to separate a song from the emotions it triggers? Buffalo Tom peaked a bit before my high school years, but to me, everything about “Late at Night” recalls growing up—the noisiness we use to fill the unknown, the way the tempo seems to …