Category: music

This editon of SOTW features a double shot from The Tubes. If you’re just about my age, you remember a brief period when the Tubes were early MTV darlings with their hits “She’s a Beauty” and “Talk to Ya Later.” If you’re a little older, you probably remember their mercurial lead singer Fee Waybill and their circus antics that even shocked fans in their native San Francisco. Even now, I still hear old-timers laughing about The Tubes and their PT Barnum-inspired numskullery.

Whatever. “Later” and “Beauty” are two delicious hunks of pop craftsmanship, beautifully constructed yet dizzingly alive. Both are about the wrong kind of woman: One who won’t leave after the relationship is long past broke, the other an untouchable goddess, who in this case predicts the tragic allure of Internet porn.

I rediscovered The Tubes in college and promptly forced my roommates to listen to “Later” everytime we went to the grocery store. They became zealots.

Listen in. I defy you not to grin and sing along.

The 2005 Lineup for Coachella has been announced. I’ve actually heard of a few of these bands.

I’ve been a fan Newfoundland-based Great Big Sea since my friend Ken introduced me to them in college. Since celtic rock fans under 50 are hard to find, imagine my delight when my friend Tara not only confessed a similar love for the Canadian-quintet but gave me their latest album Something Beautiful for Channukah. Although it’s not a huge departure from their normal celtic-infused pop, bittersweat songcraft and killer harmonies, the album is 13 strong dependable tracks. My favorite though is Summer, a gorgeous acoustic ballad as gentle as a sigh and as pure as a ray of sun. Listen once and tell me if you don’t feeling like walking barefoot in the grass then stretching long in salute of the sky.

One of my criteria for a song to reach the dizzying heights of “all time favorite song” is that I can remember exactly when and how I first heard it. If history holds, then XTC’s “Then She Appeared” will, several years and many thousands of playings from now, will be one of my all time favorite songs.

Suzan and I were watching a Gillmore Girls rerun last weekend and, at the end of one episode where main character Rory kisses Jess (brooding guy she has chosen over nice pretty boy from the ‘neighb) for the first time, the gorgeous shimmering guitars undulate under their pre-smootch awkward chatter. At the moment of lip contact, the volume swells and, as Suzan swooned, I yelped That’s XTC!”

I’d only been watching the show for a few weeks so the Rory/Jess tension meant nothing to me. Neither really had XTC, whom I only known through “The Mayor of Simpleton”, which my friend Jeremy hooked my up with in college and Suzan’s old copy of their American breakthrough album Skylarking. I found them quirky, charming, and too weird by half. I’m a musicial lunkhead, perferring songs that poke me in the eye with their attractive qualities, instead of asking me to find them through the opacity of lyrics about Rutherford B. Hayes and reverse amplification of the sitar.

“Then She Appeared” is none of these things (and neither is the rest of the XTC catalog, I discovered after wrongly assuming otherwise). It’s a simple, fulsome pop tune about being struck stupid by a beautiful woman. In the hands of a less skilled band, It’d be an asmatic cliche’, rock grist for the “nothing-was-the-same-after-I-saw-you” mill. XTC instead captures this overworn moment of first love as just that–a moment. The setting sun of the lead guitar and the plaintive sigh of Andy Patridge’s lead vocal hint that the moment will pass but for its 4 minutes, you hold it (and her) between your hands and the beauty takes your breath away.

Download Then she appeared.mp3 (3625.2K)

Where were you when you heard one of your favorite songs?

The Polyphonic Spree recently held a “make our video” contest for their song “Hold me Now.” The winner was a puppet duo named Glove and Boots. Their video could make an animal lover out of Ted Nugent.

My buddy Dave introduced me to “The Opera” by Elephant Ride, a mid-nineties band from Los Angeles. Apparently the whole of their one album “Forget” (produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones) is fantastic but I haven’t listened to it since I copied from Dave last summer because I can’t get past “The Opera”, the album’s centerpiece. A gorgeously sublime 4 minutes of music that builds, dives and comes to rest like a giant bird of prey. I’ve never quite understood the lyrics but if the sound is their emotional stand-in, it’s a song about pain, regret and ultimately, coping with loss. That it handles these dark themes with such grave beauty and shimmering majesty is why I’ve listened to this song eight times this morning alone. When I played it for Scott Andrew when he was in town, he shook his head three separate times during the song and says “this is awesome.”

Hear for yourself.

UPDATE: Seems Elephant Ride is now called Virgil, at least acording to this site and has played a bunch around L.A. Also includes the lyrics to “The Opera” (scroll down).

But I just spent 85 perfectly good minutes at Song Meanings.net looking up the lyrics to my favorite tunes and reading how the geekier-than-thou interpret them.

Grab me before I hurt something.

I first heard (Share a Little) Shelter by Miami-based Nuclear Valdez (so named for their friend Valdez who had a horrible temper) on KFOG’s 10 at 10. They’ve got the naive majesty of happy-alt-means-arena-rock begun in the early 1980s by The Alarm and Big Country and carried us through the early 1990s by The Farm and Collective Soul. They’ve been making an album every several years since the have toured as recently as last year. Based on the infectious little triump of “Shelter”, I may have to see what else they’ve got.

Enjoy!

I wish Nick Hornby wrote about music more often. I think I liked his pieces in the New Yorker as much or more as his novels.

So I was thrilled when my buddy Mark pointed me to an Op-Ed Hornby did in the New York Times about rock music, youth and the imagined divide between high and low culture. I offer it here for your reading pleasure.