I’m taking a little Christmas break this week while I prepare the countdown of my favorite 2015 songs.
To get everybody in the holiday spirit, I’ll post five renditions of my favorite Christmas song, ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,’ starting with Old Blue Eyes.
I haven’t done an in-depth analysis of Random Weekend selections (though I’d love to) but I have a feeling that Beck is overrepresented.
Yes, he is relatively prolific. I own nine of his albums and 99 of his songs. But I feel like he shows up in the random mix more often than those numbers would suggest.
The Random iTunes Fairy must have seen my mention of Counting Crows’ 2002 album Hard Candy a couple of weeks ago and gotten in the mood to hear it again.
There isn’t a weak track on this album, easily the band’s best work. In fact, every track is so good I’m hard pressed to name a favorite. Maybe ‘Miami’ or ‘Up All Night.’ The title track or ‘American Girls.’ The plaintive ‘Carriage’ or drunkly melancholy closer ‘Holiday in Spain.’
Wrapping up my look back at 2002 is a song from Low’s sixth studio album, Trust. Low is a Minnesota-based trio that performs a genre sometimes called slowcore or sadcore.
Think crawling tempos, lots of reverb, depressing lyrics. You know, for kids.
Allow me to pause to acknowledge my parents’ 50th anniversary, which they’re celebrating today. I hoped to find an appropriate song with which to acknowledge the milestone, but I wound up with a 8-minute dirge about heroin addiction. Sorry, mom and dad!
Australian band The Vines released their debut album, Highly Evolved, in 2002 to critical acclaim. They were hailed as one of the best new rock bands to emerge during the period where The Strokes and The White Stripes were also earning raves.
I never really got on board with that slate of garage band revivals. I dabbled in The White Stripes several years later when Jack White took their music in more interesting directions.
Meet Me In Montauk 