Flack Jacket Required
I was thinking
of building the ultimate playlist with one simple rule. One artist. One song.
Each day will feature a song by an artist whose birthday is that day and then
nine other songs by nine different artists just because people like things to
be in tens.
The playlist
is here - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4exU9MUJMWaouOgnu7zmSl?si=I5fqk7VpQX6aDGec7xvqsQ&pi=e-IfIWXc5GT56R
So, the idea was
that you might want to follow and share and either have the playlist yourself
or do your own or chat about it with me, you could use the hashtag #EHGOGS.
I’m on Twitter X
thing as @fourfoot
Today’s selections
is dedicated to birthday girl Roberta Flack
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – Roberta Flack One
of those songs that seemed to be everywhere when I was a kid – films, adverts, radio
etc. You don’t really appreciate it because the cultural wallpaper doesn’t give
you any context for it to appreciate it alone. And then ten thousand years
later, you hear it playing in a bar near Paddington station, like I did. A quiet
Sunday evening, close to closing time. And it hits you what an extraordinary
love song it really is. And you catch a train home alone and it fucking hurts
all the more.
I Love A Rainy Night – Eddie Rabbitt. I think I heard
this in an episode of The Leftovers and it went straight onto my iPod and stayed
there. I imagine Johnny Cash covering it and it being a completely different
song, mind.
Reach Out I’ll Be There – Lee Moses Largely
instrumental cover of the Four Tops classic, funky as hell. I do love it –
totally ignore the verses, occasionally cry out the title. More covers should
be this laissez-faire.
My Heart is Closed for the Season – Bettye Swann A
sweet, sweet piece of Southern soul which I only heard cos of a compilation
given to me at a Readers Recommend meet in 2007. RR was this column curated by
Dorian Lynskey which arrived in time for the Playlist era, each week had a
different theme and Dorian would invite contributions to a blog which would be
whittled down to a final 10. I really liked the column but the blog got a bit
cliquey for me and I stepped away, not least because I was having a mental
health/midlife crisis at the time and the idea of staying up till 2am to be the
first to suggest a particular song for the blog kudos was increasingly insane.
This Would Make Me Happy – Fontella Bass. Rescue Me
you know. This one deserves the same level of public adoration.
The Fool – Brigid Dawson and the Mothers Network Soulful
and slightly psychedelic-rock, reminds me of Mug Museum era Cat Le Bon
Boys and Girls – Pixie Lott Because it’s a fucking
great pop song.
Royals – Lorde Because it’s a fucking great pop song
despite pretending it isn’t
Yo La Tengo – (Thin) Blue Line Swinger The album version
is nine minutes plus of adventurous noise-pop, YLT always make me feel something
when I listen to them, and sometimes it’s giddy excitement and sometimes it’s the
kind of bittersweet and somewhat joyful melancholy that characterises this
song. They always want to be Mogwai and the Monkees. But I’ve gone for the catchy
shorter version because it’s as good a pop song as has been written this last
40 years.
Object – Ween Another song discovered through Readers
Recommend. I always dismissed Ween as the worst kind of stoner band, the kind
of band that people who venerate Zappa a bit too much (i.e. at all) seem to go
for. Then I heard this and let them off the hook. Serial killers were always a
bore in Mark E Smith’s book but this is proper original version of Texas
Chainsaw Massacre levels of unsettling….
Thanks for putting up with this shit – tomorrow we celebrate
Sheryl Crow
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