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Song of the Day #3,433: ‘American Teen’ – Khalid

I haven’t done a week of ‘What the Kids are Listening To’ songs in awhile, largely because I’m so unimpressed with what passes for hit music these days. ‘Bodak Yellow,’ seriously?

But I thought this would be a good time to dedicate a week to songs that my actual kids are listening to, specifically my 15-year-old daughter Sophia.

Sophia likes her share of music I find horrible (again, ‘Bodak Yellow,’ anyone?) but she has introduced me to a number of songs I quite enjoy. This week I’ll highlight five of them.

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Song of the Day #3,432: ‘Complicated Shadows’ – Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello’s 1996 album All This Useless Beauty featured mostly songs he had initially written for other artists. ‘The Other End of the Telescope,’ for example, was written with Aimee Mann and first appeared on ‘Til Tuesday’s fine album Everything’s Different Now.

Today’s track, ‘Complicated Shadows,’ was written for Johnny Cash, though the Man in Black opted not to record it. He did, however, record two other Costello tunes, ‘The Big Light’ and ‘Hidden Shame,’ during his career.

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Song of the Day #3,431: ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ – Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams has released a dozen albums during her 38-year career, four in the first 18 years and eight in the last 20. She stepped up the pace after 1998’s Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (still her best album), releasing a record about once every other year.

My guess is that if 2014’s Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone had come after a lengthy hiatus, rather than during the relatively productive streak Williams was on at the time, it would have been received with more critical fanfare.

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Song of the Day #3,430: ‘Evergreen’ – Ron Sexsmith

Yesterday’s featured artist, Beck, has never made two albums that sound alike. Today’s has never made two that sound different.

If you played songs from all of Ron Sexsmith’s 14 albums on random (and I’ve done this), you would have a hard time differentiating the tunes on his 1991 debut from those on this year’s The Last Rider, let alone the dozen in between.

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Song of the Day #3,429: ‘Dear Life’ – Beck

It’s crazy how artists quietly put together careers that start to feel like legacies. Take Beck, who still has the impish charm of the nerd-punk who crashed MTV with “I’m a Loser,” yet somehow is entering his 25th year as a recording artist.

This year’s Colors is Beck’s 13th studio album, released three years after the unlikely Album of the Year Grammy winner Morning Phase. Somehow, this is the first traditional pop album he’s recorded. Or at least as traditional as an oddball like Beck can get.

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