‘Night Game’ is an odd and borderline silly song from the otherwise great 1975 Paul Simon album Still Crazy After All These Years.
This track recounts a baseball game during which the pitcher drops dead at a pivotal moment. I guess it’s about the triviality of things like sports in the face of mortality, probably as a metaphor for a lot of other things. But the seriousness of the delivery and the dirgelike music just make it kind of funny.
‘Return to Sender’ is an Elvis Presley track from the 2002 compilation 30 No. 1 Hits. At least that’s where it lives in my music collection. It was originally released as a single in 1962 and performed in the film Girls! Girls! Girls!, a clip from which is embedded below.
The song made it to only #2 on the U.S. charts but spent three weeks at #1 in the U.K. Indeed, 11 of the #1 hits on the compilation reached that pinnacle only in the U.K.
Our next 2019 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee is the British hard rock band Def Leppard, who have been eligible for inclusion since 2005. This is the first time they have been up for nomination, which is frankly shocking.
Def Leppard is one of only a handful of bands with more than one Diamond album (more than 10 million copies sold). Their company include the Eagles, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen, all of whom have been in the Hall for decades. They have sold 36 million albums overall, and every rock band in that ballpark is already in.
This year’s batch of new inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is varied and interesting enough to warrant a series of blog posts. In fact, looking back at the lineups from the past several years, I’m kicking myself for not doing this before now. Maybe I’ll start a new series and work backward.
Alphabetically, the first new inductee is The Cure. The English New Wave band has been eligible since 2004 and was nominated once before (in 2012) before making the cut this year. They released 13 studio albums in the 30 years from 1979 to 2008 and gave voice to a generation of disaffected mopers.
We’re definitely in a golden era for female songwriters, whether because there are more of them releasing material or just more of them given the chance. By pure coincidence, the last several artists I’ve written about (all of whom have dominated my playlists) have been women: Maren Morris, Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, The Beths and now Jenny Lewis.
Lewis has released On the Line, her first album since 2014’s The Voyager, a record that featured my #1 song of that year and that I named my #2 album of the year and my #8 album of the 2010’s up to that point. That’s quite an act to follow!
Meet Me In Montauk 