Category Archives: song of the day

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Song of the Day #3,434: ‘Drew Barrymore’ – SZA

SZA is another artist I discovered through my daughter Sophia. While I haven’t listened to her debut full-length album CTRL (released this summer) in full, I like what I’ve heard.

SZA is the stage name of Solána Imani Rowe, a 27-year-old soul singer born in St. Louis, Missouri, but raised in a predominately white suburb of New Jersey. Raised by a Christian mother and Muslim father, she hopped between their faiths as a kid and now practices Islam. As a girl, she wore a hijab until bullying following the September 11th attacks forced her to stop.

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Song of the Day #3,433: ‘American Teen’ – Khalid

I haven’t done a week of ‘What the Kids are Listening To’ songs in awhile, largely because I’m so unimpressed with what passes for hit music these days. ‘Bodak Yellow,’ seriously?

But I thought this would be a good time to dedicate a week to songs that my actual kids are listening to, specifically my 15-year-old daughter Sophia.

Sophia likes her share of music I find horrible (again, ‘Bodak Yellow,’ anyone?) but she has introduced me to a number of songs I quite enjoy. This week I’ll highlight five of them.

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Song of the Day #3,432: ‘Complicated Shadows’ – Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello’s 1996 album All This Useless Beauty featured mostly songs he had initially written for other artists. ‘The Other End of the Telescope,’ for example, was written with Aimee Mann and first appeared on ‘Til Tuesday’s fine album Everything’s Different Now.

Today’s track, ‘Complicated Shadows,’ was written for Johnny Cash, though the Man in Black opted not to record it. He did, however, record two other Costello tunes, ‘The Big Light’ and ‘Hidden Shame,’ during his career.

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Song of the Day #3,431: ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ – Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams has released a dozen albums during her 38-year career, four in the first 18 years and eight in the last 20. She stepped up the pace after 1998’s Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (still her best album), releasing a record about once every other year.

My guess is that if 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone had come after a lengthy hiatus, rather than during the relatively productive streak Williams was on at the time, it would have been received with more critical fanfare.

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Song of the Day #3,430: ‘Evergreen’ – Ron Sexsmith

Yesterday’s featured artist, Beck, has never made two albums that sound alike. Today’s has never made two that sound different.

If you played songs from all of Ron Sexsmith’s 14 albums on random (and I’ve done this), you would have a hard time differentiating the tunes on his 1991 debut from those on this year’s The Last Rider, let alone the dozen in between.

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