My routine for picking these Random Weekend selections is to fire up iTunes, close my eyes and click the ‘next’ button. I like to hear the lucky song before I see what it is, and to see how many seconds I’ll need to identify it.
When I heard the first guitar notes of today’s SOTD, I couldn’t help but smile. I knew instantly that I was listening to the opening track of Tift Merritt’s first album, Bramble Rose — the only CD in my collection that is signed by the artist who recorded it.
Elvis Costello’s many reissues have gotten a lot of play on these Random Weekends, with both good and mediocre results.
Today’s song, a sped-up — practically disco — version of ‘Town Cryer,’ the stately closing track of Imperial Bedroom, is definitely worth a listen. The contrast between this song and its official counterpart is hilariously extreme. This is so bad it’s good… or maybe it’s just good.
It’s been seven years since Fiona Apple’s last album, the much-delayed Extraordinary Machine. That record was initially leaked in one form before being officially released in another, and speculation was rampant that studio pressure had forced Apple to give the songs a more mainstream sound.
She denied that, and it doesn’t really seem like her. I’d expect her to never release another album in her life rather than something she wasn’t 100% behind.
Until I heard the album that sits on top of this list (only a few weeks ago), I didn’t think anything would unseat The Shin’s Port of Morrow as my favorite album of the year.
This is the band’s fourth album and far and away their best, though if you listen to many of their fans you’ll hear just the opposite. For some people, the presence of monster hooks and indelible choruses is somehow a bad thing.
Like John Mayer, Rufus Wainwright released a “comeback” album this year inspired by pop songwriters of the 1970s. In Wainwright’s case, the influences are more Elton John and David Bowie than Neil Young and Joni Mitchell — more glam-rock than folk-rock.
And Wainwright isn’t coming back from a creative slump but a personal one: the death of his mother in 2010, shortly after the release of his sixth studio album, All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu. That record was written while she was hospitalized, with several songs referencing her impending demise, and it’s a stark, sometimes difficult listen.
