By some cosmic coincidence, I had a Taylor Swift song scheduled yesterday as a Random Weekend selection. It’s a coincidence because, as the world knows by now, Swift dropped a surprise album — folklore — just a day earlier.
The random song was ‘Sad Tragic Beautiful’ from the 2012 album Red, and I did not have kind things to say about it. In fact, I called it her worst song.
Keeping that post up in light of Swift’s new album release felt particularly tone deaf, so I shuffled some things around.
Joe Jackson’s 1981 Jumpin’ Jive — his fourth studio album — features a dozen covers of 1940s Swing-era classics.
This album was sandwiched between the punk-tinged New Wave of his first few albums and the more musically sophisticated pop he would deliver on his next album, Night and Day.
The final featured song introduced to me by my daughter Fiona is ‘East of Eden’ by Zella Day, a pop singer who hails from Arizona. Almost every one of these artists has been from a different state, which must say something about how the internet has democratized the music business.
You used to see acts from New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Nashville… but not much in between. It’s nice to see the small town of Pinetop-Lakeside, Arizona, get in the game.
This artist might be the lowest profile of any I’ve featured the past two weeks. Little Hurt has only four songs available for streaming and the band doesn’t even have an official website or a Wikipedia page.
This “band” is actually a solo project by Colin Dieden, founder of the Los Angeles band The Mowgli’s. Dieden left The Mowgli’s in 2019 to start this project, with a goal of writing “really happy sounding music with pretty sad lyrics.”
One of the catchiest songs Fiona has unearthed, ‘Mind Eraser’ is a 2018 single from the band CRUISR, a Philadelphia-based pop trio.
activism,
CRUISR has released a few EPs and, according to their out-of-date website, has a studio album due in 2019. Guess that didn’t happen. The band’s Twitter account is pretty active, though it doesn’t have much to say about music, instead bashing President Trump and promoting social justice. Nice job, CRUISR!
Meet Me In Montauk 