Posts about individual songs
It’s that time of the year when people trot out their best of lists, and we’re no exception to the rule. In contrast to 2020 when everyone was sadly recording alone in their bedrooms, 2021 was a bit more upbeat. The first 6 months of the year saw a lot of new releases, including some backlog from 2020. The result — a bumper crop of great new tunes.
I woke up this morning humming “Woodstock,” the old Joni Mitchell song from back in the late ’60s. I wasn’t actually humming her version — I was humming the CSNY version which is harder and more conventionally rhythmic. Joni’s Woodstock is sadder and more desperate — “I have come here to lose the SMOG,” she […]
This year was the first in three years that I’ve bothered to put together a year end best of compilation annual CD, as we had for so many years before. For whatever the reason, I got bored with current, nowaday music. I started listening to classical! It was bad. This year, maybe because of the […]
On Bubble Wrap radio this week, we tried to stay away from Christmas without being totally unseasonal in our selections. The end result was a wintry mix of new stuff just in and songs from past years with the words “winter” or “snow” in their titles. I know, it’s a cheap algorithm but it works, and gives […]
There were more police killings of black men this week, including Keith Scott and Terence Crutcher, bringing a sense of frustration and grief that can’t go away because they don’t stop happening… This week’s Bubble Wrap show featured lots of funk, r&b, hip hop, and even some disco (imagine that), mostly addressing the black experience, […]
It’s August here in the small Vermont town where I live, and even here, in the so-called north country, we’re experiencing a bona fide heat wave. To celebrate, we watched Seven Year Itch while eating take-out sushi and drinking basil vodka. Yeah, it’s that kind of summer night. This week’s Bubble Wrap show was not […]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was pop music in 2011. In the larger world, there were eruptions of populist sentiment accompanied by chants and machine gun fire, depending on what part of the world you experienced “spring” in that year. Arab Spring rolled through the Middle East […]
One of the better songs of 2008 seems to have vanished without a trace — Baserock Babies by Oakland’s Beeda Weeda. Like The Roots and How I Got Over, they don’t bother to sugarcoat the reality of urban life for people of color. Sure, the song is funny in a grim kind of way but […]
The Future Collective keep bringing us great music. Their latest show featured The Suitcase Junket, a one-man band led by Matt Lorenz, a Vermonter now living in Amherst who’s already getting airplay on The River. In addition to having an amazing voice and top notch songs, in a quirky folk vein, he also knows how […]
The other night, I happened to be listening to Pan Voyevoda by Rimsky-Korsakov when, to my surprise, out popped the Simpsons theme song. Not literally, but the theme R-K used to open his suite is the same, almost note for note, as the theme to the Simpsons. It’s slower, to be sure, and unsyncopated, but […]
Not that many records have impressed me this year, but there’s something about Sweet Life by Frank Ocean that stuck with me even though lyrically, it’s completely alien to my life. Somewhere between rap and R&B, Sweet Life takes you to a land of milk and honey somewhere in Beverly Hills where happy young people enjoy […]
I’ve been intrigued by Wye Oak for a few years, partly because they’re called Wye Oak (the ancient oak tree in Maryland that died a few years back) and partly because they’re from my old home town of Baltimore. “Civilian” was one of my favorite tracks of 2011 and now they’re back with “Spiral,” a […]