This track appears on Morrissey’s 1994 album Vauxhall and I, his fourth solo release.
The four Smiths albums plus Morrissey’s first four solo records make up the universe of my appreciation for him and the band. I listened to his next couple of releases with diminishing enthusiasm, and jumped off the bandwagon entirely by the mid-2000’s. I’m surprised to see that Morrissey released his 13th (!) solo album just this year.
This track from Guster’s 2006 album Ganging Up on the Sun is apparently about the G.W. Bush administration’s propaganda surrounding the war with Iraq.
That was a bad period in American politics, to be sure, but it’s hard to look back at any of the national crises pre-Trump and not think we were all completely oblivious to what a true Oval Office threat to American democracy would look like.
One of the more disposable tracks from Simon & Garfunkel’s classic 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water, ‘Why Don’t You Write Me’ falls on Side Two after the excellent trio of ‘The Boxer,’ ‘Baby Driver’ and ‘The Only Living Boy in New York.’
An early Paul Simon experiment with reggae that hinted at his future exploration of world music, this track has mistakenly been lumped in with ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ as a reference to Art Garfunkel leaving for Mexico to film Catch-22 during the beginning stages of the album.
Shelby Lynne won the Best New Artist Grammy in 2001, the year she released her best album, I Am Shelby Lynne.
Lynne had released five albums prior to this one, and had been recording for more than a decade. The criteria for the Best New Artist awards is this: “For a new artist who releases, during the Eligibility Year, the first recording which establishes the public identity of that artist.”
When this song popped up as today’s Random Weekend selection, I realized that as much as I love Side One of Kate Bush’s 1985 album Hounds of Love, I’ve never paid much attention to Side Two.
In fact, until I read about today’s SOTD, the album’s final track, I didn’t know that Hounds of Love was conceived as two individual suites: Side One, ‘Hounds of Love,’ contains five songs, while Side Two, ‘The Ninth Wave,’ contains seven. The album’s four hits (‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),’ ‘Cloudbusting,’ ‘Hounds of Love’ and ‘The Big Sky’) all appear on Side One, along with a favorite of mine, ‘Mother Stands For Comfort.’ I guess that explains why I know that half of the album so well.
Meet Me In Montauk 