Rihanna has fallen quickly out of my good graces over the course of a couple of years.
She peaked with Rated R, the dark and emotional follow-up to the hit-filled Good Girl Gone Bad. That album followed her assault by deranged lunatic Chris Brown and it was angry, defiant and featured her strongest material yet.
Fifteen years before swing music hit mainstream pop culture through bands such as the Brian Setzer Orchestra, Squirrel Nut Zippers and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Joe Jackson put out his own album of swing covers called Jumpin’ Jive.
Jumpin’ Jive was Jackson’s fourth album and it was released just three years after his debut. It was followed a year later (in 1982) by Night and Day, his most successful record (which featured ‘Steppin’ Out’ and ‘Breaking Us in Two’).
Today’s track is one of my favorites from U2’s mostly forgettable 1997 album, Pop. It has a sleek, sexy groove, courtesy of Larry Mullen, Jr., and Adam Clayton’s subliminal rhythm section that kicks in about a minute and a half into the song.
I’ve always thought that this song is mixed too quiet for general consumption. If you listen to it on anything other than good headphones in an empty room, you’re going to miss half of it. And I think I mean that more as a compliment than a complaint.
My family and I always play the “what song will be first?” game when we attend concerts.
I remember seeing Lyle Lovett perform with his Large Band once in Pompano Beach and throwing out a bunch of great guesses only to have him take the stage and launch into ‘Penguins,’ a minor track nestled in the middle of I Love Everybody, itself a collection of odds and ends.
This is the second track from the Davd Byrne and Brian Eno collaboration, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, to show up on a Random Weekend.
And as much as I enjoy David Byrne’s work, both as a solo artist and as leader of Talking Heads, I just can’t make it through his work with Eno. This track runs six and a half minutes and I have yet to make it through three of them without turning it off.
Meet Me In Montauk 