Few things are more comforting on a lazy summer morning than the sound of Tom Petty delivering a lighthearted country ballad.
‘House of Stone’ is a deep cut from the self-titled 2008 debut album by Mudcrutch, a band Petty formed in 1970 as a teenager. They played live gigs in their hometown of Gainesville, Florida, up through southern Georgia, but disbanded a few years later without recording an album. Petty and some Mudcrutch members went on to form the Heartbreakers and the rest is history.
Shockingly, this is the first Beastie Boys song featured on this blog in the 13 years I’ve been posting daily. Not that I’m a big fan or anything, but it’s hard to believe they haven’t popped up on a Random Weekend before now, or that I didn’t find room for one of their hits.
The band’s 1986 debut, Licensed to Ill, was certainly a hit. It sold more than 10 million copies in the U.S. and became the first rap album in history to reach #1 on the Billboard 200. The first rap single to reach #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 was Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby,’ meaning white dudes own both of those milestones. Go figure.
Today is one of those Random Weekend days that aligns with a special occasion, giving me the opportunity to spin the dial and hope for an appropriate or hilariously inappropriate match of song and event.
In this case, today marks two such special occasions. One is Fathers Day, and the other is the 19th birthday of my older daughter, Sophia.
The 2011 album Josh Rouse and the Long Vacations somehow slipped entirely past my radar. Not to the point that I don’t own it (obviously I do, because it showed up on a Random iTunes Weekend) but, given that Rouse is one of my favorite artists, it’s bizarre that it’s completely new to me.
This album came out during Rouse’s Mediterranean phase, when he was living in Spain and dabbling in world music. His previous album, 2010’s El Turista, consisted almost entirely of songs sung in Spanish. So maybe I mistakenly thought this one was more of the same.
‘Panic’ is one of the better-known tracks from Louder Than Bombs, The Smiths’ 1987 compilation of singles and B-sides that hadn’t had a U.S. release. Pound for pound, this album rivals any of the band’s studio releases.
The story goes that Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote ‘Panic’ after listening to coverage of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster followed immediately by a silly pop song. The opening verses describe a chaotic scene as people react to world events, before the chorus shifts to a call to arms against the DJ whose music choices are too frivolous.
Meet Me In Montauk 