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Song of the Day #1,040: ‘Samsonite Man’ – Alicia Keys

I’ve featured only one other Alicia Keys song on the blog so far and that was during a week in which I posted songs with no commentary. Sitting here wondering what to write about this one, I can see why that’s the case.

I simply don’t have much to say about the 30-year-old R&B sensation who was raised in Hell’s Kitchen and went on to study classical piano before recording her multiple Grammy-winning first album.

You could make a movie about that backstory, but I can barely tap out a blog post. Why is that?

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Song of the Day #1,039: ‘Blister in the Sun’ – Violent Femmes

Today’s SOTD is one I’ll always associate with my college years, the early 90s, even though it was released nearly a decade earlier.

For one thing, that’s when I first heard it. But I also just can’t lump Violent Femmes’ ‘Blister in the Sun’ in with more typical 80s fare. It has a punk spirit more in line with the early 90s. I see the band that recorded this song on a double bill with Exile in Guyville-era Liz Phair.

Violent Femmes recorded off and on for 28 years, starting with their 1983 self-titled debut (still their most famous collection) and officially hanging it up in 2009, eight albums later. I briefly owned their second record, Hallowed Ground, but it really starts and stops with this first album.

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Song of the Day #1,038: ‘Clown in Broad Daylight’ – Ron Sexsmith

Despite the playful implication of its title, Ron Sexsmith’s Other Songs was far from a sophomore slump. I’d rank it up there as one of his two or three best albums.

It features several beautiful little slices of life, such as ‘Pretty Little Cemetery,’ in which a father and son share a moment while walking through a cemetery on vacation, and ‘Strawberry Blonde,’ in which the singer spots a childhood crush on a bus years later.

I imagine today’s song came to Sexsmith all at once after spotting a clown in broad daylight at a car wash — an odd, incongruous image that made him smile. And he turned that into a couple of minutes of jaunty delight, adding in a horn part that’s appropriate to the circus theme.

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Song of the Day #1,037: ‘Thinking Out Loud’ – Ron Sexsmith

I’m not sure exactly when I was first introduced to Ron Sexsmith. I know it was thanks to Elvis Costello, who for years has trumpeted Sexsmith so effusively that he should be getting a cut of the man’s album sales. But I don’t recall the year or the album.

However, I remember buying Other Songs, Sexsmith’s second studio album, released in 1997, and figuring it would help me determine whether or not this guy was the real deal. And when the opening track, ‘Thinking Out Loud,’ poured out of my car stereo speakers, I became a fan for life.

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Song of the Day #1,036: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ – Indigo Girls

My final song in this two-week theme is the second Dire Straits tune. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ appeared on the band’s excellent 1980 album Making Movies (you can hear the original version here).

I’ve been in love with this song since I first heard it on the band’s 1988 greatest hits collection, Money For Nothing. So four years later, when Indigo Girls cut their own version on their album Rites of Passage, I was skeptical. Why cover a song as beautifully conceived and executed as this one?

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