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Song of the Day #4,128: ‘Angie’ – The Rolling Stones

I’ve spent a fair amount of time with The Rolling Stones’ catalog, after coming to them a little late in my musical life. I know seven or eight of their albums very well, including the half-dozen classics they released between 1966 and 1972.

Somehow, though, I never got around to 1973’s Goats Head Soup. Maybe that’s because, as the follow-up to Exile on Main St. and the start of a half-decade period considered their first creative slump, it just doesn’t have the cachet of the rest of their work.

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Song of the Day #4,127: ‘Concrete Jungle’ – Bob Marley and The Wailers

Bob Marley and the Wailers’ 1973 album Catch a Fire was their fifth, but it feels like a starting point. It was their first album with the Island label, and the first to have the distinctive instrumentation and production with which casual fans are familiar.

If you’ve owned and loved the classic Legend collection, those songs started here.

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Song of the Day #4,126: ‘You Sure Love to Ball’ – Marvin Gaye

Our next 1973 album comes courtesy of Mr. Marvin Gaye, who followed up his seminal 1971 political album with one of the greatest albums ever made about sex: Let’s Get It On.

Gaye grew up physically and emotionally abused by his minister father, who instilled in the young man a deeply troublesome view of sex that contributed to bouts of impotence. Not exactly the mental image you get of the man who sang ‘Let’s Get It On’ and the rest of the slow-funk love jams featured on this album.

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Song of the Day #4,125: ‘Don’t Touch My Hat’ – Lyle Lovett

This is the ninth track I’ve featured from Lyle Lovett’s excellent 1996 album The Road to Ensenada, still his finest ever moment on record and one of my all-time favorite albums.

This is where I have to express my incredulity and dismay that Lovett hasn’t released an album of any sort in seven years, and no album of largely original material in 12. I’d like to think he has another Ensenada in him, but I don’t know if he’ll ever record again.

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Song of the Day #4,124: ‘Summer Kitchen Ballad’ – Josh Rouse

Josh Rouse’s third album, 2002’s Under Cold Blue Stars, is a loose concept album about a suburban couple in the 50s, modeled after Rouse’s own parents. The record traces the highs and lows of a lifetime spent together.

This track, ‘Summer Kitchen Ballad,’ comes late in the album and offers an impressionistic look at what I imagine are a handful of days spent in the kitchen watching the summer turn into fall.

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