Author Archives

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Song of the Day #3,160: ‘Here Comes the Groom’ – John Wesley Harding

harding_groomToday I pick up on my Decades series, where I dive into the albums of a given year in the 70s, 80s, 90 and 00s. I started with my birth year, 1972, then featured 1982, ’92 and ’02. Then I backed up a couple of years to cover 1970 and 1980, and starting today I’ll tackle 1990.

This is the year I turned 18 and started college, a time when I started expanding my musical horizons, and yet I had a hard time coming up with albums I really like from the year. I found a lot more that I missed out on, and I’ll cover those over the next couple of weeks, but this week I’ll count down my five favorite 1990 albums.

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Song of the Day #3,159: ‘Love Having You Around’ – Stevie Wonder

stevie_wonder‘Love having You Around’ is the opening track of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album Music of My Mind, the first Motown album on which he had full creative control. The record marked Wonder’s first extensive use of synthesizers.

As he would on most of his records, Wonder contributed almost every sound on Music On My Mind. On this track, for example, only the trombone work of Art Baron didn’t come from Wonder himself.

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Song of the Day #3,158: ‘So Like a Rose’ – Garbage

beautiful_garbageGarbage has a muscular industrial sound that could be accurately described as hard rock with an electronic flavor. They’re not exactly balladeers.

But the band has a tradition of ending each album with a slow, usually sad, song. On 2001’s Beautiful Garbage, the band’s third album, that song was ‘So Like a Rose.’

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Song of the Day #3,157: ‘Wait For Me’ – Tift Merritt

tift_stitch_worldToday wraps up my track-by-track look at Tift Merritt’s latest album, Stitch of the World. I hope it was less taxing for some readers than last year’s Lucinda Williams deep dive.

The album closes with a third song featuring Sam Beam on backing vocals, and as in the other two, his contribution is sublime.

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Song of the Day #3,156: ‘Eastern Light’ – Tift Merritt

tift_stitch_worldAs I mentioned in my first post about Tift Merritt’s Stitch of the World, the album was written in the wake of her divorce. In general, the record is more about the recovery than the break-up, with the exception of today’s SOTD, ‘Eastern Light.’

Again accompanied by Sam ‘Iron & Wine’ Beam, Merritt delivers a gorgeous and haunting elegy to a failed relationship, assigning blame to neither party but longing for a feeling she can never reclaim.

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