Song Of The Week Archive

Garage rock, with sleighbells. Love Hotel was a favorite short-lived band in Seattle in the early aughts. This is the title track from a whole album of catchy little holiday tunes that are by turns arch, ardent, and lonely.

I know this isn't news and you've all heard it a million times, but in case you haven't been listening to the radio or been spending time in the club... From her EP "Low Kii Savage". I'm fascinated by the chopped up chorus vocal, and can't figure out how you can perform this live without sort of undermining the point of it. A neat trick.

This song has come back to me a few times over the last weeks. I loved it in high school, learned the piano bit and never forgot it. A dystopian rocker about the destruction of New York City, written by a young man in the mid 1970s, but titled with a kind of prophetic year, and well, here we are, aren't we? He never says who the "they" are. Original version can be found on 1976's "Turnstiles" but this is the definitive (live) recording-- from Madison Square Garden in 1980, off "Songs In The Attic"

Indie Nashville. You've heard her voice before on this list fronting the Great Unknowns. This is from her solo "War Surplus", out last month.

From 2003's "EP".

A fun summery tune for the last day of summer. From Xylos' 2011 self titled.

I'll confess to being super late to Lorde's achievements from 2013 but really liking the songs. Here's a surprising, successful cover of "Royals" that I also am late to, but really like. Postmodern Jukebox is a twee outfit that mostly irritates me by deploying virtuoso musicianship in service of wrecking contemporary songs, recasting them as big-band-era novelties. But they hit a sweet spot with this one, largely because of the guest vocalist: a weird super tall dude who dresses as a clown, calls himself Puddles, and has a remarkable voice. His interpretation here has some oompf to it-- doesn't feel like a genre exercise. The piano part through the prechorus complements, too. I don't usually put video links in this mailing, but in this case the video is probably the best way to experience the thing. The song is off PM Jukebox's 2014 album "Twist Is The New Twerk" (ughhhhhh). Hat tip to Amy for the recommendation.

I'd entirely forgotten about this song until it got dislodged from the recesses of my childhood memories last week. Carly Simon was part of the cohort of east-coast-aristocracy folk that came up in the 70s and 80s-- a sort of Martha's Vineyard version of the parallel Laurel Canyon sound-- along with James Taylor, who she was incidentally married to for a bit. She's unrelated to folkster Paul Simon, but is the daughter of the first half of Simon & Schuster (publishing). She was also kind of a babe.

Mitski is getting a bit of positive coverage as she rises to some prominence in the indie rock world on the strength of her latest album. This is the lead single from "Puberty 2". I've been struggling to pin down what else this sounds like to me, but anyway I like it lot-- tuneful and her voice is compelling (and there's no shortage of thematic stuff to wade into in the album if you're interested).

Sophie Hawkins was probably better and more interesting than critics and listeners gave her credit for. Her 1992 debut album "Tongues And Tails" has remained one that I keep coming back to, decades (!) later. She was already in her late 20s when it was released, and it's an eclectic reflection of prior work in jazz, rock, and other domains. The lead track "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" was a quirky kind of hit but Hawkins mostly disappeared after that. Too bad. Half of the rest of that album was at least as strong-- tuneful, rhythmic, sexy, searching-- and the other bits were merely good, including a vulnerable reworking of Bob Dylan's "I Want You". She did a couple more for Columbia yielding one more widely-heard single and then vanished to start-your-own-label twilight. (She's still making music but seems to be playing mostly little clubs these days.)

There's only so much re-listening to Prince's 1980s output that can be done this week. So let's memorialize him by pushing a bit farther back, to when the purple one was just a kid in Minneapolis. As a gifted teenaged guitarist, he was in demand as a session musician and played with lots of people in the small Minneapolis R&B and funk scene. A group he was a regular in was 94 East, formed and fronted by a guy called Pepé Willie. Not a lot of recorded work exists, but this song is from a set of early demos ("The Cookhouse 5") found and issued not long ago from tapes made in 1975. Here's the lead track. Prince is playing guitar and is credited as "Prince Rogers Nelson". He was 16 at the time.

Chicago blues from one of the great pianists, off of 1960's "Otis Spann Is The Blues"

The X-Files is back on the air as of this past weekend, a couple decades after its two leads were crush objects everywhere. Embracing the moment, indie songstrix Bree Sharp has sweetly re-booted her super-catchy 1999 love letter "David Duchovny (Why Won't You Love Me)". If you don't know it, be sure to watch the original music video through, now a fun 90s pop culture time capsule.

Are you over all the David Bowie veneration this week? Cool, here's a classic David Bowie song. But it's an acoustic cover/reinterpretation in Portuguese by Seu Jorge, the Brazilian musician-- he was cast in the 2004 movie The Life Aquatic and his performance involved doing several Bowie tunes like this. They were so delightful that there's a whole companion soundtrack album of them called "The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions", which I heartily recommend if you like this sort of thing.