Our latest Random Weekend selection is the first instrumental track of the series, and perhaps the first instrumental track I’ve featured on the blog (though I’m not as sure about that).
I’m wholly unqualified to speak intelligently about instrumental music, but this certainly strikes me as a lovely piece of work that captures the spirit of Pet Sounds (on which it’s the sixth track).
I wondered how long it would take the Random iTunes Man to settle on an Elvis Costello song.
I have 536 songs performed and/or written by Elvis Costello in my iTunes collection, even more than the 520-something I have by Bob Dylan. You’d think that those two would pop up with some regularity. But through three and a half months of Random Weekends, each of them has come up only once.
It’s hard to believe, but I’ve managed to post 1,379 songs without ever featuring a track by Tracy Chapman. You’d think she would have come up at some point.
True, I own only one Chapman album (her 1987 debut) but that record is a wonderful piece of work. And it’s an album of which I have very specific memories of exactly the sort I like to explore on this blog.
I guess she was just never high enough on my radar to break through. So thank you, Random iTunes Man, for the reminder.
Check out the admirable sense of symmetry by the random iTunes man. Last Saturday he served up a track from Eminem’s worst album, 2004’s Encore, and a week later he delivers a song from the rapper’s comeback album, 2010’s Recovery.
Listening to those albums back-to-back, it’s striking to note the difference sobriety makes. Eminem recorded Encore while hopped up on pain pills and Recovery after taking a couple of years to get clean.
I’ve written several times that I consider Paul Simon’s most recent album, last year’s So Beautiful Or So What, one of his best ever — an equal of The Rhythm of the Saints and withing shouting distance of Graceland.
That’s certainly high praise, the sort of thing that is sometimes said during the blush of excitement that accompanies a new album release. Months later you’ll return to the same record and enjoy it but not to the degree you’d advertised.
With this album, however, that hasn’t been the case.
Meet Me In Montauk 