Category: Music

The whole idea behind “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer” was to find unexpected connections between songs, and then ride that train of thought into something else. And I thought this would be the perfect, quintessential example: “Hold Up” from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs from Fever to Tell.

As it turns out, it’s not-at-all tangential, and not really much of a story: The guy from Vampire Weekend riffed on a variant of “Maps” and sent it to Beyoncé, who turned it into “Hold Up.” Even if it’s not that complicated a story, it still is interesting to me just how much that article in Billboard is a bizarre time capsule. How many of those words would be recognizable to somebody reading it 100 years from now?

Or even farther? It’s fun to imagine a far-distant civilization that had never heard of Karen O, Vampire Weekend, Diplo, or Twitter, and had only vaguely heard of Beyoncé (in the same way that we know of pharaohs only by mention of their names), somehow discovering this pop culture Rosetta Stone and suddenly being able to piece together entire sub-genres of 21st century popular music.

And they’re both great songs, without feeling like just a cover or a sample. “Hold Up” not only borrows a lyric from “Maps” and a hook from Andy Williams, but even the idea to combine them from Ezra Koenig. But it’s still undeniably a Beyoncé song, something powerful built on top of a base of something clever.

My only context for “Maps” was playing it in Rock Band enough times for it to become a favorite. And then hearing it in countless karaoke nights, with the entire room singing along by the end. All my connotations of the song feel completely separate from the “meaning” of it, and couldn’t possibly have been in mind when it was written and recorded, so it seems like it’s gone on to have a life all its own.

Except that the reason the song is so memorable is because its hook isn’t just musical, but meaningful. I’m not sure I understand the lyrics to the original song, but I feel like I get the hook, and it’s universal. So maybe it’s not getting reinterpreted and reinvented, but actually Karen O was so good at capturing an intense emotion inside a single lyric, that she’s shared that exact feeling with everyone who’s ever sung it.

I’ve been a fan of Kim Deal ever since I first saw the video to “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies — they were all doing the same gag, but she was the one really selling it, said my impressionable late teenage mind. On top of having a voice that sounds like only one other person in the world, she’s maintained a kind of integrity that I think is completely unique. It feels like she doesn’t care in the slightest about being a rock star, but cares a lot about music.

It’s something that seems to baffle a lot of people. I’ve seen multiple videos purporting to document The Breeders from formation through Last Splash and the years afterwards, or talking about the success of “Cannonball,” and the guys¹Always guys, it’s worth pointing out making them just seem incapable of getting Deal’s work on its own merits. It’s always framed as a competition between The Breeders and the Pixies²Without mentioning Frank Black and the Catholics or his solo albums, which seem like a better comparison?, as if she’s incapable of ever escaping the looming shadow of Charles Thompson. And people can’t understand how a song as non-traditional as “Cannonball” became such a big hit, without dismissing it as a one-hit-wonder fluke of the 1990s.

I may be a little guilty of it, too, since when I heard that Kim Deal was releasing a solo album called Nobody Loves You More, I wondered why not just make another Breeders record? After hearing the two singles so far, “Coast,” and “Crystal Breath,” it’s obvious: this isn’t going to be a Breeders record.

Usually with a Breeders record, even when I can’t tell who’s singing what part, I can tell what each instrument is doing. It’s odd to hear Kim Deal songs with a ton of production around them, instead of two guitars, a bass, drums, and sometimes violin. “Coast” emphasizes horns — it initially reminded me a lot of Blondie’s cover of “The Tide is High” — to feel lazily tropical. “Crystal Breath” emphasizes the back beat, and it reminds me a little bit of St Vincent’s self-titled album.

The trick is that all the production is still in service of a Kim Deal song, and she is a master at coming up with hooks. In 2013, she released a bunch of disparate singles not collected into a single album, and “The Root” was my favorite. It’s pared back to nothing but guitars and drums (and a car’s back-up camera in a snowy parking lot, for the video), and it still gets stuck in my head.

“Cannonball” still baffles some music critics because it seems too weird to be popular. I think the truth is that it’s full of hooks, but they’re not in the expected places, and I think that’s a recurring trick of Deal’s. She could be cranking out catchy songs non-stop, but she seems to be more interested in making songs that are catchy enough to stick, but weird enough that they don’t just evaporate from memory the second they’re over. I still can’t say I’m a fan of Pod, but in the rest of The Breeders’ albums and her solo work, I think there’s a lot to be said for making music that challenges you to ignore it.

I get the sense that Nobody Loves You More is something like the opposite of all the “Unplugged” performances that bands were doing in the 1990s. Those were intended to show that the bands being given tons of money by record labels were actually talented musicians underneath all the noise and over-production. Kim Deal’s new album seems like it’ll show us what’s core to her music, whether it’s stripped down, or with guest musicians and a full suite of studio tricks.

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  Always guys, it’s worth pointing out
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  Without mentioning Frank Black and the Catholics or his solo albums, which seem like a better comparison?

Pictured is my attempt to make a belated birthday cake for myself, since my favorite kind is just a yellow cake with chocolate fudge frosting, and it seems foolish to order one from a bakery when they’re (ostensibly) so easy to make. As the keen-eyed viewer might be just able to make out: the process didn’t go well. The cake tore apart in multiple places, and the frosting was too runny and never solidified. The message of that cake is not so much “Happy Birthday” as “Why Do I Exist?”

Honestly, I thought the whole thing was funny. But it also happens to be a good metaphor for my overall mood the past couple months. Varenicline (aka Chantix) is a wonder drug in terms of helping me quit smoking when literally nothing else can, and as of today, I’ve gone five weeks without a cigarette and haven’t missed it a bit. But the side effects of the drug (and withdrawal) are lousy. For me: getting extremely nauseated after I take one, and a lengthy depression.

It takes over gradually enough that I’d forgotten that the same thing happened last time I took varenicline (and quit smoking for three years). It feels like something gunking up the gears in my brain, so that they grind imperceptibly slower each day, until they just sieze up. That means going from not really enjoying anything, to being not motivated to do anything, to just not being able to do anything, no matter how urgent it is.

“On Being Blue” is from Art of Noise’s last album The Seduction of Claude Debussy, from 1999. That means I was either on my way out at LucasArts, or I’d just left, and was likely suffering from career-ambition-oriented depression at the time. The song is actually about mood and color, though, which you can tell was a fixation of Debussy’s just by listening to La Mer, a composition that doesn’t sound like the ocean so much as feel like the ocean.

“Sunless Saturday” is from Fishbone’s The Reality of My Surroundings, released in 1991. That means I was in my second year of college and probably still feeling pretty optimistic. Fishbone was singing about injustice, not depression as a side effect of medication, but the reason I like it so much today is the same reason I liked it so much then: it doesn’t shy away from describing what it feels like to be in the pits, but it also doesn’t wallow in them.

It’s stabilizing to know that whatever you’re feeling is temporary. I’ve only got a few weeks left of this prescription until I’m done with it and the needless hassle of smoking. And of course, the upcoming election is filling me with hope instead of dread, for once. If you’re in the US, remember to verify your registration — or register to vote! — at vote.gov.

Lately you might have been hearing cool and totally normal people sounding the alarms about “DEI hires,” which is a real and normal thing to be concerned about, and not just a lazy repeat of the same old dog whistles that go back seventy years or longer. Much like “urban,” and “hood,” all the way through “CRT” and “woke,” it serves a very important purpose: it lets people express all the ideas behind the n-word, without the unpleasantness of the n-word itself.

So let’s take a closer look at diversity, equity, and inclusion, while listening to some comforting white music!

First up is “One Bad Apple” by The Osmonds. This song was written by George Jackson originally intended for The Jackson 5, but went to The Osmonds after the Jacksons chose to record “ABC” instead. Clearly yet another in the countless examples of perfectly competent white performers being passed over in favor of more ethnic ones.

People like to sling out terms like “racist,” or “misogynistic,” or “inexcusably racist and misogynistic,” whenever someone raises concerns about DEI, but critics insist that it’s actually about fairness. And the logic is clear if you think about it for even a second: if anyone who’s not a straight, white, male gets a job or a promotion, that’s a “DEI hire.” That means that every job should be given to a straight white man by default, instead of some racially-motivated special-interest virtue signaling. Why are you bringing race and gender into a discussion about the things to which straight white men are entitled?!

While you’re appreciating that airtight bit of logic, here’s a song by Jack White: his cover of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” with The Electric Mayhem for a Muppets album. This song was written and made into a classic recording by Stevie Wonder, but it took White to make an impression of the original with a “Seven Nation Army” hook grafted onto it.¹Non-sarcastic note: I genuinely like Jack White and think he’s extraordinarily talented, but doesn’t add anything to this song and the cover is inessential at best.

And Muppets often have me thinking about rainbows, and how something that was once so simple and beautiful has been co-opted to have all these weird connotations of “different people living together with respect and harmony” and “freedom to pursue your own happiness.” And how this whole “DEI fad” doesn’t do much for white men like me.

Well, except for how working for a company with an explicit and extensive DEI policy means that I’m surrounded by co-workers at every level with a wider range of life experiences than I’ve ever been in a 30-year career. And I guess that I don’t have to spend every conversation worried about fallout if I mention that I’m gay, and I don’t have to worry that my job is at risk the next time politicians decide to use sexual orientation as a wedge issue to make up for their complete lack of policy.

Actually you know, now that I think about it, anybody throwing a tantrum about DEI is a nonsense-spouting dimwit who can go get stuffed.

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  Non-sarcastic note: I genuinely like Jack White and think he’s extraordinarily talented, but doesn’t add anything to this song and the cover is inessential at best.

After he left Soul Coughing, Mike Doughty wrote a bunch of simpler, pared-back songs and released them on the album and EP Skittish and Rockity Roll. Many of them are just acoustic guitar and a groove box, and most of them are hell of catchy.

My favorite is “Ossining”, which I’ve been singing along to for years without ever bothering to find out what it means. I’d used context clues and the repeated “why not seek Ossining” to guess that it was a playfully made-up word for some kind of enlightenment movement. As it turns out, it’s a small city in New York state. There could still be some enigmatic double meaning to the song, though, and I’m enjoying the continued mystery.

I do know what “Lithonia” is, though — if you haven’t watched that video yet, I don’t want to spoil it but I will warn that it has a jump-scare gory ending — because I grew up near there. So did Donald Glover, since he grew up near there, too. It’s not an especially remarkable city; when I was growing up, the highlight was that it had a Dairy Queen. Now, it has a mall.

Maybe the song isn’t about the city at all, and it’s a character or something from Bando Stone and the New World, Childish Gambino’s upcoming movie. Again, I’m preferring to live with the mystery for now.

I will say that I spent a long time underestimating Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, and I hope I’ve learned my lesson. For instance: I thought it was absurd that 30 Rock picked “Stone Mountain, Georgia” as the hometown of Kenneth the page, and they set at least one episode there depicting it as the smallest, most stereotypical, backwoods shithole in the darkest part of the Appalachians. It’s actually a relatively large city, built up around a landmark co-opted by racists to celebrate the Confederacy. I assumed that the 30 Rock writers intended it as meta-commentary, since the episodes were all about how New York writers had no idea what the rest of the country was really like. Later, I found out that Glover is from Stone Mountain, and he was a writer on the series.

Also, I’d been way too dismissive of Childish Gambino’s music, as just a celebrity side project. I think it was partly a defense mechanism, because it seemed cosmically unfair that someone could be that handsome and that funny and also be a talented musician. It turns out that not only are there some fantastic songs — “3005” in particular — but more importantly, the songs aren’t “celebrity makes a hip hop record” so much as a hugely talented person having too many ideas to fit into one medium.

One morning last week, my cat was performing his daily ritual of standing in the hallway and wailing until we got up to feed him. Instead of waking up immediately to address his concerns, I instead just incorporated his wails into my dream.

I don’t remember what the specifics of the dream were, but now it had a background track of Bronski Beat’s song “Smalltown Boy,” or at least the vocals at the beginning.

I’m skeptical that either Jimmy Somerville or my cat would appreciate being confused for each other, since they were both singing about something so deeply heartfelt and important to them. One the trials of being a young homosexual living in a town that doesn’t accept you, and the other having not been fed for at least six hours.

I really like this interview with Somerville from a Dutch TV show in 2007, where he’s a lot more lighthearted about the song than I would’ve expected, while still being defiant and assertive about what it means. I also have to admit that as many times as I’ve heard it, I never actually knew what it was about until just recently. I’m terrible at being able to decipher lyrics, so I never knew the lyrics beyond “run away, run away,” which I’d thought was the title.

Unlike the song “Run Runaway” by Slade, where I didn’t know the title and only remembered the lyrics “see chameleon, lying there in the sun.”

They’re kind of the opposite of Somerville’s smalltown boy, running back to Scotland to cavort amidst a castle with kilt-wearing pipers and dancers. I’m positive I saw that video back in the 80s, but I saw lead singer Noddy Holder and conflated it with a Doctor Who episode. I guess they’re also the opposite of Bronski Beat in that I’d always heard Slade associated with glam rock, and they are the straightest glam rockers I could possibly imagine.

The Breeders have released a 14-minute video called “Live in Big Sur,” recorded in the middle of a hiking trail in the most beautiful part of the California coast, capturing stripped-down performances of songs from Last Splash. In addition to some gorgeous drone footage, it’s also got short, clever animations scattered throughout.

The whole package is super charming, and a reminder that the band has a hell of a lot of great songs besides “Cannonball.” Here are two of my favorites:

I like “Wait in the Car” mostly because “Wait in the car, I’ve got business” is something I always thought only my mother said. It really helps sell the middle-aged midwestern punk rock vibe of the whole album. All Nerve is my second favorite Breeders album, and it was such a pleasure to see them get the band back together and still be as weird and funny as they were in the 90s.

Like when they recorded “Safari”. Which just cemented the crush on Kim Deal I already had from the Pixies. She’s just the coolest.

Dear Diary:

One of the things that might not be immediately obvious about coming out in your early 30s is that you’re a grown-ass adult having to go through a lot of the same awkward stuff that most people went through in their teens. In my case, that meant coming out with a huuuuuge crush on a guy that I’d met online, who decidedly did not feel the same way.

I should make it clear that there are no hard feelings at all; he was perfectly fine and supportive, and I don’t know how I would’ve handled the situation if the roles had been reversed. So everything here is making fun of myself, not anybody else.

Because I was infatuated. I’d save our chat logs and read back over them repeatedly, imagining that mundane conversations were the most witty and sparkling banter, and desperately looking for any clue that there might be some kind of spark there. Every story was fascinating, and I ended most conversations feeling like Marcia Brady after meeting Desi Arnaz, Jr.¹I’m really, really old, is what I’m getting at.

And I got excited about “what’s your favorite song?” conversations, immediately going to buy the recommendations from iTunes.²Yes, this is back when you had to pay for music. See above. The first I remember was “Toxic” by Britney Spears, which was ubiquitous at the time, but I had somehow never heard in its entirety.

Purchasing this song felt like I was crossing some sort of threshold. By that point, I knew that I was gay, but I didn’t think I was that gay.

But once I got over myself, I came to the realization that “Toxic” is just objectively a banger, regardless of age, orientation, or snobbiness. The video is hilariously dated, stuck hopelessly in the early 2000s, but the song is still fantastic.

The other song, though, was “The Killing Moon” by Echo and The Bunnymen:

And again, I don’t mean any offense to anybody who likes the song, but man. That couldn’t be any less my thing unless it were death metal, or maybe “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes. Hearing it in the middle of an intense crush made my stomach drop like the first time I saw The Phantom Menace.

Hearing it now, though, just makes me happy. It’s a reminder of how hard it is to find the right person, how some people just don’t click no matter what, and how good things tend to happen when and if they’re supposed to. Twenty-plus-years-ago me was convinced he’d be alone forever, and he spent most of his time riddled with anxiety about everything. Now, I look back and realize… well, at least now I’m anxious about entirely different stuff.

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  I’m really, really old, is what I’m getting at.
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  Yes, this is back when you had to pay for music. See above.

I don’t think O Brother, Where Art Thou? is what made me want to learn to play the banjo, but it definitely solidified any vague notion I might’ve had earlier.

I always hated pop country music, and coming from a fairly small city in Georgia, I wanted to resist anybody’s attempts to brand me as a redneck, so I just avoided anything that seemed even vaguely countrified. But bluegrass played well is sublime. Every time I saw Hee-Haw at my grandparents’ house, all I remembered was the corny jokes, and it was only as an adult that I realized how genuinely talented Roy Clark and Buck Owens were.

I got a banjo not long after O Brother came out, but I still haven’t practiced enough to get any good at it. I can play a slow and tortured version of “Cripple Creek,” which I think is the equivalent of claiming you can play the piano because you know “Heart and Soul.” It’s looking less and less likely that I’ll have a free decade or so to get good at all the stuff that I’ve been meaning to get good at over the years, so maybe I need to invest that time into learning to enjoy doing things even if I’m not good at them.

Fortunately, there are plenty of people who are good at playing the banjo, and they like to show off by playing it extra fast.

One of them is Dave Carroll in Trampled By Turtles, and you can hear him and the rest of the band showing off in “Wait So Long”, which I can’t hear without also hearing my middle school band teacher yelling at us that we were rushing.

But I think my favorite bluegrass performance ever is Alison Krauss & Union Station playing “Choctaw Hayride” live, with Ron Block on banjo and Jerry Douglas on dobro. If you’ve never heard their live double album released in 2003, I encourage you to listen to it as soon as possible. Every song is better than the studio version, the energy of the crowd is fantastic, and their personality and sense of humor come through as much as their obvious talent. Plus they do a performance of “Man of Constant Sorrow” when it was at its most popular.