‘The Best of Everything’ is the final track on Tom Petty’s excellent 1985 album, Southern Accents.
Having always been a huge fan of this album, I was surprised to see that it received generally tepid critical reviews. Individual tracks receive high marks (‘Rebels,’ ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ and the title track, specifically) but the album as a whole was dismissed as an uneven hodgepodge.
Here’s a quick song from Neko Case’s 2009 album Middle Cyclone.
Not much to this one other than the rustic, majestic sound she captured on this record and its predecessor, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, but I do find a lot to like in the lyrics.
Lines like “I’ve been away for so long I’ve lost my taste for home” and “that’s a dirty, fallow feeling to be the dangling ceiling from when the roof came crashing down” are evocative and sad in the best way.
When this track from Garbage’s 1985 debut popped up as today’s Random iTunes Selection, I was positive I’d featured it on the blog before. I almost skipped to the next track without checking.
Turns out I was half right. I did feature the song, but not the studio version. Rather, I blogged about the live MTV Video Awards performance during a week on singers I find sexy. Having watched that performance again just now, I can confirm that I still find Shirley Manson sexy.
Has anyone ever been as simultaneously laughed at, despised and revered as Kanye West?
He is often portrayed as a joke for his tremendous ego and outrageous statements, not to mention his marriage, and yet his last four albums have all topped critics’ lists and received praise so lavish it borderlines on absurd.
I like Rob Thomas as a person (based on some interviews I’ve seen and read) and I like a few of his songs (‘Smooth’ is still brilliant 15 years later), but this white-boy soul track just doesn’t do it for me.
Thomas hasn’t released an album in five years, and the last reference on his Wikipedia page is to 2010, so I wonder what he’s up to. Playing the festival circuit? Chilling with his pretty, lupus-afflicted wife?
Meet Me In Montauk 