You Are What You Listen To: Tuning Up
For years I've been trying to figure out a way to put together a series where I dive deeper into the stories around the albums in my collection. Think something like the songbook, but oriented around my album collection.
As an experiment, I logged all of the albums I listened to so far in 2021, and I'm writing them up as little capsules. We'll see if it works. Most of these, and indeed most of my music listening at home, were popped on while I was cooking dinner.
January 2 #1 - Way back in 2019, I scooped up a copy of the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Waitress. Somehow, I didn't manage to make time to listen to it until 2021. That's super awkward. It's not like I lacked familiarity with it. From Fall 2006 to its demise with the summer semester of 2020 I was right after Sunday Matinee, which as the name implies is all about musicals. I'd heard Waitress on there many times, and I saw the film back in 2007 when it came out.
In any event, I popped the cast album on when I was making my first cheesecake. I'll grant you that it would have been more authentic to do it while making a pie, but you work with what you have. Unfortunately, the resulting cheesecake was a lot better than the cast album, which lacks any song that really sticks in the head. I'll probably listen to it a few more times to be sure, but it wasn't sticky, which is the number one thing I want in a cast album. Maybe if I saw it on stage I'd have had a better experience, but I've got enough experience with the theater to say probably not.
January 2 #2 - After listening to Waitress, I wanted a proven winner so I put on Give the People What They Want by the one and only Miss Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Alas, I never got to see Sharon perform the material on this disc (the last time I saw her was 2011), which is a shame because I think it is the strongest of the six albums (not counting the Xmas or soundtrack albums). It certainly has the best video in Retreat:
I'm not sure there's any band I miss as much as Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings.
January 2 #3 - Way back in 2005, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's self-titled debut album was white hot. They went from nobody to everywhere (or at least everywhere I was paying attention to) in no time at all. The story goes that they played some club in NYC and both David Byrne and David Bowie turned up at the same gig to check them out.
I had acquired this album somewhere along the way after listening to it at the radio station, and really liked it. I still really like it, actually. It's weird and delightful and makes me happy. I also had tickets to see them at their first Cleveland appearance at the House of Blues in 2006, but I somehow got so sick that I couldn't go. I gave them to Rob, if I recall correctly. As such, I didn't get to see them, or their opener, Architecture in Helsinki, who I remember as being interesting.
None of their subsequent albums ever made as much of an impact on me, and you can be sure that I listened to at least the next few. I finally saw the band in 2013. Three of the five original members had left the year before, and at this point they were opening for Stars at the Beachland. I enjoyed their set, but I sure wish I could have seen them at the peak.
January 3 - I'm going to guess that most hard core Genesis fans do not count Invisible Touch as their favorite album, or really any of the years with Phil Collins providing lead vocals. I am not a hard core Genesis fan. To be honest, I barely qualify as a fan at all and really only know a few of the albums from the 80s, but my mother owned this on cassette, and I loved it. I found a used copy on CD somewhere a few years back and snapped it up. Frankly, it's a great pop album.
January 4 - Earlier that day I read an article about how there was a ska-punk revival going on. As I've been waiting for the fourth wave of ska for 20 years, this piece of hopeful news let me to slap on Let's Face It by the The Mighty Mighty Bosstones on. I saw them way back in 2003 when they opened for Flogging Molly at the Agora.
This was when Flogging Molly was the hot punk band of the moment, and I and pretty much everyone else was there to see them. In fact, the headlining part of that gig stands out in my memory as the only show ever where I've crowd surfed, twice. My memories of the Bosstones set are virtually nonexistent, but for all that it's now the overplayed commercial hit moment of the Bosstones, and possibly of the ska-punk era as a whole, I still really enjoy it. My old cohost Ron used to give me crap when I would occasionally play it, but whatever. The album holds together well, The Rascal King is a great song, and I always feel like doing the running man in my kitchen when I play it. Give me this over anything Flogging Molly or The Dropkick Murphys did.
January 5- Archie and the Bunkers are a local Cleveland band made up of two brothers. The older brother plays drums, the younger brother plays the organ, both sing. I saw them for the first time when the oldest brother was barely 15 when they played Studio-A-Rama in 2014, then again a year later opening for King Khan & the BBQ Show in what ended up being my show of the year for 2015. I saw them again in 2018 (when the band was still wasn't old enough to drink) at the release party for their second album.
The album I played this day was their self-titled first official release, not counting a CD-R they did earlier. It's a punky bluesy thing with both a sense of history and something new going on. I'm pretty sure I bought it directly from the band at the King Khan show. I like it a lot more than the the follow up.
January 6 - Given everything that went down at the Capitol that day, I was in the mood for some music to lift me up. Who better than Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band? Well, if you're my age probably a lot of people, I've always been one of the younger people in the show the three times I saw Bruce, or even when I saw the film Blinded by the Light. Oh well, their loss. When I was much younger and dumber I used to claim that every American male should own a Springsteen album, and while there's obviously a lot wrong with that statement when I look back on it 20 years later, that doesn't change that some of his stuff is amazing. In particular, The Rising, which is pretty easily the best album I've heard that comes out of 9/11, which is one of three "where were you moment?" of my life, the third being Challenger.
In any event, I think you have to go back to 1984 and Born in the USA to find the a better Bruce album, and it's even higher in my memory because my first Bruce show was this tour back in 2002 with my little sister. What a good night that was.
January 7 - I got into the New Pornographers mostly because of my love for Neko Case. She wasn't with them the third time I saw them in 2017 on tour supporting the Whiteout Conditions. At this point New Pornographers have 8 albums, and this is maybe the fourth best, but it's also the only one that I bought and played obsessively before I saw the tour date, and it's got a warm place in my heart because of that.
January 8 - I saw a Los Angeles band called Orgone twice back in 2011 and bought a disc at both of those shows. Musically, they are somewhere between funk and afro-beat and soul, with a female lead singer and a large competent band. I'm not sure if they ever came back to Cleveland, but I suspect not because I had a good time both times I saw them and would have happily gone again. At the time of those shows their newest album was Cali Fever, which is a fun listen.
January 9 - On New Year's Eve local music emporium Music Saves had a fifty percent off sale to clear inventory. I bought a few things from them. One was from Charles Bradley, who I was fortunate enough to see four times in my life, twice opening for Daptone acts in 2011 and then headlining in 2012 and 2014. After he died of cancer, a posthumous album titled Black Velvet came out, which I was happy to snag, having played it frequently on my radio show.
Between Sharon Jones dying of cancer in 2016 and Charles Bradley in 2017, Daptone and music fans everywhere took a beating. The two had similar career arcs of "working in obscurity for a long time and becoming famous at a comparatively old age", and while Sharon was inarguably better, Charles was no slouch. When I landed in Geneva in 2015, his face was plastered all over the wall of the airport to advertise the Montreux Jazz Festival.
January 10 - One of the other discs I got from Music Saves was the most recent effort from David Byrne, the 2018 release American Utopia. Something that M and I planned to do in 2020 was a trip to New York City, and one of the things we wanted to do there was try to snag tickets to see the stage version of American Utopia. I expect we'll have to settle for the film, as I can't imagine Byrne will bring it back after this long pandemic layoff.
I'd listened to the album a few times when it came out, but look forward to doing a much deeper dive. His stuff is very hit or miss (kind of like a three true outcomes hitter in baseball) but this one is a hit. Perhaps not as much of a hit as Love This Giant (which I saw on tour with Byrne and St. Vincent in 2013) or Here Lies Love (featuring Sharon Jones!) but something I'm going to listen to an awful lot.
As an experiment, I logged all of the albums I listened to so far in 2021, and I'm writing them up as little capsules. We'll see if it works. Most of these, and indeed most of my music listening at home, were popped on while I was cooking dinner.
January 2 #1 - Way back in 2019, I scooped up a copy of the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Waitress. Somehow, I didn't manage to make time to listen to it until 2021. That's super awkward. It's not like I lacked familiarity with it. From Fall 2006 to its demise with the summer semester of 2020 I was right after Sunday Matinee, which as the name implies is all about musicals. I'd heard Waitress on there many times, and I saw the film back in 2007 when it came out.
In any event, I popped the cast album on when I was making my first cheesecake. I'll grant you that it would have been more authentic to do it while making a pie, but you work with what you have. Unfortunately, the resulting cheesecake was a lot better than the cast album, which lacks any song that really sticks in the head. I'll probably listen to it a few more times to be sure, but it wasn't sticky, which is the number one thing I want in a cast album. Maybe if I saw it on stage I'd have had a better experience, but I've got enough experience with the theater to say probably not.
January 2 #2 - After listening to Waitress, I wanted a proven winner so I put on Give the People What They Want by the one and only Miss Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Alas, I never got to see Sharon perform the material on this disc (the last time I saw her was 2011), which is a shame because I think it is the strongest of the six albums (not counting the Xmas or soundtrack albums). It certainly has the best video in Retreat:
Click to viewI'm not sure there's any band I miss as much as Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings.
January 2 #3 - Way back in 2005, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's self-titled debut album was white hot. They went from nobody to everywhere (or at least everywhere I was paying attention to) in no time at all. The story goes that they played some club in NYC and both David Byrne and David Bowie turned up at the same gig to check them out.
I had acquired this album somewhere along the way after listening to it at the radio station, and really liked it. I still really like it, actually. It's weird and delightful and makes me happy. I also had tickets to see them at their first Cleveland appearance at the House of Blues in 2006, but I somehow got so sick that I couldn't go. I gave them to Rob, if I recall correctly. As such, I didn't get to see them, or their opener, Architecture in Helsinki, who I remember as being interesting.
None of their subsequent albums ever made as much of an impact on me, and you can be sure that I listened to at least the next few. I finally saw the band in 2013. Three of the five original members had left the year before, and at this point they were opening for Stars at the Beachland. I enjoyed their set, but I sure wish I could have seen them at the peak.
January 3 - I'm going to guess that most hard core Genesis fans do not count Invisible Touch as their favorite album, or really any of the years with Phil Collins providing lead vocals. I am not a hard core Genesis fan. To be honest, I barely qualify as a fan at all and really only know a few of the albums from the 80s, but my mother owned this on cassette, and I loved it. I found a used copy on CD somewhere a few years back and snapped it up. Frankly, it's a great pop album.
January 4 - Earlier that day I read an article about how there was a ska-punk revival going on. As I've been waiting for the fourth wave of ska for 20 years, this piece of hopeful news let me to slap on Let's Face It by the The Mighty Mighty Bosstones on. I saw them way back in 2003 when they opened for Flogging Molly at the Agora.
This was when Flogging Molly was the hot punk band of the moment, and I and pretty much everyone else was there to see them. In fact, the headlining part of that gig stands out in my memory as the only show ever where I've crowd surfed, twice. My memories of the Bosstones set are virtually nonexistent, but for all that it's now the overplayed commercial hit moment of the Bosstones, and possibly of the ska-punk era as a whole, I still really enjoy it. My old cohost Ron used to give me crap when I would occasionally play it, but whatever. The album holds together well, The Rascal King is a great song, and I always feel like doing the running man in my kitchen when I play it. Give me this over anything Flogging Molly or The Dropkick Murphys did.
January 5- Archie and the Bunkers are a local Cleveland band made up of two brothers. The older brother plays drums, the younger brother plays the organ, both sing. I saw them for the first time when the oldest brother was barely 15 when they played Studio-A-Rama in 2014, then again a year later opening for King Khan & the BBQ Show in what ended up being my show of the year for 2015. I saw them again in 2018 (when the band was still wasn't old enough to drink) at the release party for their second album.
The album I played this day was their self-titled first official release, not counting a CD-R they did earlier. It's a punky bluesy thing with both a sense of history and something new going on. I'm pretty sure I bought it directly from the band at the King Khan show. I like it a lot more than the the follow up.
January 6 - Given everything that went down at the Capitol that day, I was in the mood for some music to lift me up. Who better than Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band? Well, if you're my age probably a lot of people, I've always been one of the younger people in the show the three times I saw Bruce, or even when I saw the film Blinded by the Light. Oh well, their loss. When I was much younger and dumber I used to claim that every American male should own a Springsteen album, and while there's obviously a lot wrong with that statement when I look back on it 20 years later, that doesn't change that some of his stuff is amazing. In particular, The Rising, which is pretty easily the best album I've heard that comes out of 9/11, which is one of three "where were you moment?" of my life, the third being Challenger.
In any event, I think you have to go back to 1984 and Born in the USA to find the a better Bruce album, and it's even higher in my memory because my first Bruce show was this tour back in 2002 with my little sister. What a good night that was.
January 7 - I got into the New Pornographers mostly because of my love for Neko Case. She wasn't with them the third time I saw them in 2017 on tour supporting the Whiteout Conditions. At this point New Pornographers have 8 albums, and this is maybe the fourth best, but it's also the only one that I bought and played obsessively before I saw the tour date, and it's got a warm place in my heart because of that.
January 8 - I saw a Los Angeles band called Orgone twice back in 2011 and bought a disc at both of those shows. Musically, they are somewhere between funk and afro-beat and soul, with a female lead singer and a large competent band. I'm not sure if they ever came back to Cleveland, but I suspect not because I had a good time both times I saw them and would have happily gone again. At the time of those shows their newest album was Cali Fever, which is a fun listen.
January 9 - On New Year's Eve local music emporium Music Saves had a fifty percent off sale to clear inventory. I bought a few things from them. One was from Charles Bradley, who I was fortunate enough to see four times in my life, twice opening for Daptone acts in 2011 and then headlining in 2012 and 2014. After he died of cancer, a posthumous album titled Black Velvet came out, which I was happy to snag, having played it frequently on my radio show.
Between Sharon Jones dying of cancer in 2016 and Charles Bradley in 2017, Daptone and music fans everywhere took a beating. The two had similar career arcs of "working in obscurity for a long time and becoming famous at a comparatively old age", and while Sharon was inarguably better, Charles was no slouch. When I landed in Geneva in 2015, his face was plastered all over the wall of the airport to advertise the Montreux Jazz Festival.
January 10 - One of the other discs I got from Music Saves was the most recent effort from David Byrne, the 2018 release American Utopia. Something that M and I planned to do in 2020 was a trip to New York City, and one of the things we wanted to do there was try to snag tickets to see the stage version of American Utopia. I expect we'll have to settle for the film, as I can't imagine Byrne will bring it back after this long pandemic layoff.
I'd listened to the album a few times when it came out, but look forward to doing a much deeper dive. His stuff is very hit or miss (kind of like a three true outcomes hitter in baseball) but this one is a hit. Perhaps not as much of a hit as Love This Giant (which I saw on tour with Byrne and St. Vincent in 2013) or Here Lies Love (featuring Sharon Jones!) but something I'm going to listen to an awful lot.