I don’t watch Kelly Clarkson’s show, so I can’t say this with any authority, but I assume she doesn’t wade into geopolitics very often.
But on February 25, 2022, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, she chose as her Kellyoke song the English-language version of Nena’s ’99 Luftballons,’ an anti-war song written during an escalation of Cold War tension.
When watching clips of Miranda Lambert promoting her new album, I wound up catching a great appearance on Kelly Clarkson's show. She and Clarkson shared vocals on a number of songs, the fellow Texans knocking each one out of the park.
Then Twitter's algorithm kicked in, and I started seeing a ton of clips from Clarkson's "Kellyoke" series, the part of the show where she performs a cover — the common wisdom being that it's invariably better than the original.
English rock band Manfred Mann held the #1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 the week of October 20, 1964, with ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy,’ a song I think I first heard when Bill Murray marches to it in Stripes.
‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ started its life as ‘Do-Wah-Diddy,’ a 1963 release by the vocal group The Exciters. That version peaked at #78 before the white boys claimed it and took it to the top of the charts.
After writing about one too many lazy R&B jams, I’ve made the executive decision to narrow Throwback Weekends to the 50s through the 80s. I’m always excited to discover which songs were popular in those four decades, and seldom excited to relive the hits of the 90s and 00s, so why not make it official?
Part of the appeal of the earlier decades is that they all predate my adulthood. I was either a teenager, a kid, or not yet born when those songs came out. That makes for a more entertaining throwback than revisiting the hits of my 20s and 30s. Plus, popular music in the 90s and 00s frequently sucked.
Concluding my ranking of the songs on Miranda Lambert’s new album, Postcards from Texas…
#1. ‘Run’
This song was definitely written about Lambert’s split from Blake Shelton — in fact, it was written in the months following their split but remained unrecorded for nine years.
I chose ‘Run’ as the album’s best track because I’m blown away by its honesty. Lambert owns up to her restless nature, admitting that she deep down knew she would leave the relationship.
Meet Me In Montauk 