Beck’s 1998 album Mutations remains one of my favorites. It’s a ramshackle, melancholy collection that proved to be a precursor to the lovely, sad-sack classics, Sea Change and Morning Phase, to come in the decades that followed.
Mutations isn’t as polished as those albums but it’s beautifully produced, sustaining an uneasy, almost post-apocalyptic, mood. It’s the soundtrack of the Earth depicted in the first half of WALL-E.
I don’t know much about Wings and I’ve never listened to Band On the Run — the only album of theirs I own — all the way through. So today’s Random iTunes selection was new to me.
Listening to it, it struck me as very much a cousin to late-era Beatles, something that would have felt at home on Abbey Road. Which makes sense, because it was presumably written by Paul McCartney.
Here’s my first Tom Waits song since February of 2013, when another track from Rain Dogs popped up as a Random iTunes Weekend selection. As usual, this is the first time I’ve heard a song from that album since that earlier post.
I’ve never paid much attention to Waits, though he’s clearly worthy of it. He’s particularly effective as a poet of the streets, a role Bruce Springsteen rode to much greater heights.
Meghan Trainor is an appropriate artist to help us recover from the painful election hangover. We can all use a little bubble gum right now, and Trainor is human Hubba Bubba.
Trainor’s throwback pop sound is as refreshing as her cheeky advocacy for issues tied to body image and female empowerment. There’s no guilt in this pleasure.
‘Knot Comes Loose’ is the penultimate track on My Morning Jacket’s acclaimed 2005 album, Z. I first jumped on the MMJ bandwagon with the release of 2008’s Evil Urges and later bought Z to catch up on the band’s catalog.
This album didn’t grab me right away and, though I have bought a couple of My Morning Jacket releases in recent years, I abandoned any possibility of going all fanboy over them.
Meet Me In Montauk 