Category — Songs

Here’s one from an internet aquaintance of mine who had produced beautifully recorded, simple songs.

You can hear more of his stuff here from the brilliant Fifty Shades Of Gray to this one.

I really like it because it’s familiar but unusual at the same time, and I love the harmonica and the gutstrung acoustic at the end is delicious.

Listen – Front Porch

—-
Weekend Songs Archive

It’s not the weekend yet, but I haven’t been posting on here lately because of many reasons. Also, this song has become a bit of an obsession since I first heard it on Monday and it won’t wait. It’s deep within my head and I’ve listened to it about three or four times a day. And it’s a gem.

Meaghan Smith is a Canadian singer songwriter of retro-vintage stylings. She’s been described as if Bjork worked with k.d. lang and Doris Day.

She’s more of a Pixar Nina Simone. This song has great lyrics and the meter is perfect. Just beautifully flawless. Every single syllable is perfect. Not that perfection is something I look for in music, and there’s plenty else here, but this is great. If we looked for perfect, there would be no genius, no creative flash or wonderful accidents. No Charlie Parker or Alistair Fleming – or pelicans.

Meaghan Smith says she suffers from stagefright and she took four years of open mics before she plucked up the courage to tour. Her record label is slowly getting her out there without pushing her and I’d like to do my bit.

Also, she sings so beautifully that it should hammer home the reminder that shyness sucks. It really does. Shyness is like there’s a party in your head an no one’s invited. The things I might have done had I not held myself back by being such a shytard. It’s just rubbish and I decided when I hit thirty to stop doing it. And it’s not condusive to the creative process. How many other Meaghan Smiths are there? Actually, I know that, and it’s not many.

And who else could turn Here Comes Your Man into such a thing?

Her album The Cricket’s Orchestra comes out this week, and while I downloaded this song, I didn’t want to embed a high quality version because you should buy it. I can’t even embed the video here because her label has disaballed that functionality.

I’ll never forget your kind brown eyes
Or the fingerprints you left all over my life

Watch: Drifted Apart

—-
Weekend Songs Archive

Which limp geological feature was also an Olympic Games host city which in 1980 was marked by the “Miracle On Ice” hockey game where underdogs USA beat the USSR and went on to win the gold?

Lake Flaccid.

BOOM. Ain’t never lost it. So here’s a song for the hockey fan in all of us. Canada face the USA in the final on Sunday and it’s a big deal. Here to play us out are sardonic beat hosers The Tragically Hip.

The story behind the song is a good one and shows that sport goes further than teams or anything I can explain.

Go, eh?

Listen – Fifty Mission Cap

Archive of Weekend Songs

We’re going to stay with the 80’s with a bland song, a little fun. Great singer, but not a strong song. So why do I have it here? Why do I sit here are 11:17 on a Saturday night forsaking all others for one small priviledge? I’ll tell you why.

The incredible guitar solo. Because this could be the most perfect pop guitar solo of all time.

A good solo has a beginning, middle and end. Like a kiss, it’s a dance and a balance of structure and abandon. It gets you thinking that the context has possibilities you never realised. It’s an act in the physical and dramatic sense, with the play and the player. You’re a part of it as much as it is a part of you.

And that’s the relationship between a good guitar solo and the song. And you too, now that I think about it, and through that – although to a lesser extent, but still worth mentioning – me. It’s the way a perfect wine can make a meal better, or how the weather improves the company you’re with.

Think of the live version of No Woman No Cry. It’s all just enough. It’s perfect. There’s phrasing and talent and improvisation and vocabulary and you know what else? I’m just going to shut up, because to keep talking would be to delay the justice this does.

Listen – It’s A Mistake

Weekend Song archive

Here’s a great song from the 80s with trademark romanticism. I think teenagers in the 80s had it great because music had a mushy defiance that teenagers don’t have now. Vampires? Please.

I love the chord sequence in this. I play this on acoustic guitar because like any good song it works across a lot of style and (ahem) performers’ ability.

It’s got your key change and nice bit at the end and the riff at beginning and middle. It’s just nice, and nice gets is an overlooked value it art, underrated in merit and devalued by a lack of talent when nice is not only all these is, but most of what you need.

It’s a piece of pop slowcooked to perfection. It’s about unrequited love, and that distance is brought out because it’s even further removed by lines like “And you want her and she wants you.” He’s not singing about himself. Like The Beatles did in “She Love You” or Leonard Cohen with “Suzanne”, previously a weekend song of its own right here.

It’s like he’s consoling a friend. He’s saying “It’ll all work out”. Maybe he’s saying “Look, man, it might never happen.”

I had the same feelings when I was a teenager. We all did, and we all thought we were unique. There may be teenagers now reading this now thinking: “How does he know?” Why would you think I don’t?

Good song. I hope it works out for the guy.

She probably ends up with Chad Hoffritz. Don’t get me started on that guy.

Listen – No One Is To Blame

Weekend Song archive

Of all the songs by The Rolling Stones played in a zydeco style, Beast Of Burden is probably my favourite. Right, right?

This is a sassy number – and I’ve never said sassy in this blog before, but these are sassy times.

It’s a swaying smouldering jukejoint of a rendition, all fireflies, live oaks and hot wings wrapped up and fried in a Spanish moss-bound family bible where if the South were any deeper we’d have to dig it out.

Let’s go home and draw the curtain.
Music on the radio, come on baby, make love to me.

Listen – Beast Of Burden

Weekend Song archive

I heard this one for the first time today and it literally stopped me in my tracks. To my knowledge, three songs have done than in my life until today, and two of them have Bela  Fleck on them.

Bela Fleck for those who don’t know is the New York-born man who was destined for greatness when he was named after Bartok and Dvorak. Naturally he became a banjo player and is the torch-bearer elect for the legend Earl Scruggs.

The other song I referred to was this one, called Big Country, which was bluegrass double bass and guitar, but today? – I don’t know what this is, but it’s everything I love.

It’s got smooth jazz sax, a pop horn section like backing vocals from Walk On The Wild Side, bluegrass banjo and the rhythm section is the cello, played by twenty four year old Ben Sollee.

It’s folk, it’s soul, it’s pop, it’s jazz. It’s funny, it’s tragic, it’s lovesick, it’s heartbroken, it’s honest, it’s cheeky, it’s simple, it’s deep and it is one of the greatest songs I ever heard in a very long time.

Please buy it. I was wracked about putting this song up here for free, but saw there was loads of it on ebay and this song is on his own website at http://www.bensollee.com/ but please check him out. I’m off to find his album Learning To Bend.

This man deserves our money to keep playing music and writing songs because if he can write a song like this every five years or so, whole lives would be better.

And it’s a shame, you know, but it’s ingrained, you know. Boys don’t cry.

Listen – It’s Not Impossible

Because sometimes all you need is a girl with a guitar.

Or just a girl.

Or even a girl.

I mean guitar. Did I say guitar? I said “girl”. Oh. What, both times? I meant guitar.

So this weekend you’re getting both, because here’s a great song by Kathleen Wilhoite. Gilmore Girls fans will know her as Liz Danes, whom she played for three years, and she was in ER (she played the drug-fuelled sister Chloe of resident Dr Lewis) from ‘94-2002, during which time she released an overlooked album called Pitch Like A Girl.

Be that as it may, this is a great song about unrequited love, or maybe love that wasn’t even quited in the first place.

Disappointment stops by from time to time to see how I’m doing.

Listen – Wish We Never Met

Viewers of the live podcast might recognise this one which has opened the last two shows.

I include this because it rocks. And Betty Harris has a great voice, and she is the true forgotten soul queen of New Orleans. And the horns are awesome, and it’s produced by the mighty Allen Toussaint.

This is from 1968 and it should have been a huge hit, but here we are. Now’s all we have and today’s what we’re working with.

He acts as if he doesn’t know that I’m alive. He hurts me so.

Listen -  Mean Man

I’ve spoken a lot about Erroll Garner on here before, here, and while I’m peppering my posts with links, if you haven’t read the one about my Fats Waller connection, you can.

But yes, here’s a song I nearly died to, which is a story yet to be told, but it involves plungeing towards a 150ft drop with no brakes. This is from Erroll Garner Plays Gershwin and Kern at and the risk of sounding all Humphrey Littleton, this was discontinued and never made it to CD.

Strike Up The Band was the opening track to that album and it’s a hell of a piece. It pounds in lumbering with the thunk of Garner’s own style – how his most famous song, Misty, is the sweetly flowing and oddly out-of-character is one of those wonderful musical mysteries – and then it gets going.

Count Basie once shared a festival bill with Erroll Garner, and Basie did his set with two bass players because Garner had such a strong left hand that people who heard his set would think his own big band had no bottom end, despite the fact that Garner had appeared with his trio.

But have a listen, now that I’ve (*ahem*) garnered your interest <snork> and damn if we ain’t back with the weekend song. And a lot of posts in my head – of which I’ll share with you. Along the way (”…waaaaaay“).

Listen – Strike Up The Band