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

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Weekend Songs Archive

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

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Weekend Songs Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lyrics are like a blogger’s lament. I’ll talk more about that on Monday, and in the meantime hope you’re having a good one and enjoy the tune.

Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft,
my voice so tender, my need of love absolutely clear.

Listen – Absolutely Clear

The year is 1994. The place: The Old Trout in Windsor. It was a great venue, and there weren’t many places for bands to play other than London, and you couldn’t expect your friends to go an see bands up there. Signed groups and local acts used to play there, bands even did secret warm-up gigs before Reading. REM, Chili Peppers, PWEI all played there.

This blogger played there, too.  What? Check it out. April13, 1994. Headliners, baby. Ugly In Spring. Great days. Yep. Great days.

Anyway, vanity dispatched, you’ll see on April 8, Sebadoh played there and I went to the gig. There was the thrill of taking to the same stage in the same week as the mighty ‘doh.

Looking at the bill now, I can see Oasis played there two weeks later, but I hadn’t heard of them and Live Forever wasn’t released until late summer. We headlined a few weeks later, as did Blur. That day someone came to sign us, but the deal was awful so I didn’t go for it. Honestly. Haven’t I told you this? I’m sure I’ve written about this before.

Actually, I haven’t. I know it’s been nearly five years of blogging, but I’ve held a lot back. Stick around, I may learn something. But imagine if I had been signed though. Oh man, that would be cool. I could be a rock star right now, and instead of seeking approval and acceptance and sharing my soul while expressing myself in ways I can’t with people close to me, I’d be – oh, hang on…

Well, the thrill of playing that week was dampened somewhat because when we got home from the gig we heard that Kurt Cobain had died. He’d been dead three days, but was discovered that night.

But I digress. Or do I? There’s a backstory to this one, so you get two for one. It’s like dinner and a movie.

It’s funny. I take off the pressure of pledging to update the weekend song, and suddenly it doesn’t seem like a burden.

And it’s sad to feel this resistance
what once before had felt so free

 Listen – Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)

Here’s a song from the Mills Brothers back in the early 1930’s.

It’s a capella, save for a guitar that you only hear at the beginning and it’s a dark thrill and joy.

I’ll be standing on the corner high
when they bring your body by.
Oh you dog,
you rascal you.

Listen – You Rascal You

These things take time and I won’t do it if no one wants it. I have the songs already, this is all about you.
I can’t track how many people actually listen, so it you think it’s a good idea, leave a comment. Anonymously if you want, but have an opinion.

Let’s remember the original 1977 version and forget that it was covered awfully in the 1990’s (cough: “ASWAD”).

There’s schmaltz and there’s schmaltz, OK.

TiTWeSo fans might care to know that Stephen Bishop also wrote Separate Lives, which was covered by Phil Collins. I’m with you Stevie. Take the money - I’ll do what I can on my end.

This song has some harmonies in the chorus which shouldn’t work. I mean really shouldn’t and if you try and sing them, you think, “Holy crap, that’s not right – no, not right at all” but they work in his voice. I think they go with the minor key feel and keep hitting those notes. I might be wrong.

It’s bittersweet, it’s got pedal steel – and that’s how it’s done.

I’ll just dream and stay tanned. Toss up my heart to see where it lands.

Listen – On And On

Listen

Reader’s voice: Enough with the country songs, already.

Hey. My blog, my rules, m’kay? Right.

If I’ve got this right, I’m somewhere warm and sunny where the only umbrellas you get are the ones sticking out of drinks stood in glasses you or I would never own, feeling a little bit like this song. I’m enjoying some time offline, and when that’s your job, that can be a guilty pleasure.

Speaking of which, here’s Randy Travis, who’s got one of those voices that you know that in million years, no one could sound like him as well as he does.

I like the simple poetry of country music. “Tennis shoes up on the handle bars”, rhyme that with “cars”, move off to a chorus singing about what makes you feel good, sound a little vulnerable. It sounds like a formula, which it is, but there’s a chemistry.

No chains,
no strings,
no fences,
no walls,
no ‘Net,
just you,
to catch me when I fall.

Listen – Look Heart, No Hands

I love the melody to this one, as well as the theme. Yes it’s new country, but it makes we want to get in a car and just keep driving. Or get the outbound plane. This week I’m doing both, so there will be a break in the regular updates here. But instead of leaving you in the dust that’s been flying up with every increasing instance of me kicking at my heels, I’ll leave you in the honest and pleasant company of the lovely Suzy Bogguss who imparts on us a happy tune with sad lyrics.

I might have a thing for Suzy, or at least the idea of her. I imagine she’d mop my brow after a hard day out and call me cowboy which we’d both know would be sweet and funny because I’m about as English as you’re allowed to be. Then she’d pour me an iced tea on the porch and we’d talk about the unlikelihood of frost.

And you may walk away from love but you’ll fall head and heel again.
And I don’t want to be standing here and I don’t want to be talking here and I don’t really care who’s to blame.

Listen – Outbound Plane

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New – Weekend Song archive

It’s a crazy old world and I’m just a fool in it, so here’s something stupid and great. It’s not progressive, it’s not strange, but it comes from one terrific rock album, straight up and down the line with southern riffs. When Shake Your Moneymaker came out in 1989, I loved it and soaked though I was in grunge and indie, The Black Crowes were happy doing their thing.

This was the standout track. I’m aware of Hard To Handle, which is a great cover, but for me, this is a bundle of fun. It’s nothing original, it borrows and tips the hat at the giants whose shoulders they stood on while dancing on their graves and knowing they won’t mind. It’s Stones meets the Allmans in riff-laden, lifting and raiding shameless balls-out rock.

Who’s with me?

Cheat the odds that made you, brave to try to gamble at times.

Listen – Jealous Again

Ireesh Lal is a multi-instrumentalist, bringing oud and tabla to laid back loops and beats. Nancy Kaye is a laidback pop and jazz singer and songwriter, and Carmen Rizzo is a producer who has worked for Seal, Coldplay and Paul Oakenfold. It’s so riduclous a combination that is has to work.

And by lordy it does. Last week’s Weekend Song has become the Itunes download of the week. I’m trying to say I called it, but I’m getting cocky with the trends because even the band’s own site says that since the release of this album three weeks ago their songs have had 3,615 plays, which is an injustice. They have one gig planned for next month. One.

Here’s their website, where you can download this song for free direct from them. Then listen to Sweet Love as well, because you must. I have bought both songs but can’t get it to upload. That’s a huge pain but in my neck of the world, there’s only an hour and a quarter of weekend left in which to song, so you’ll just have to go there and listen.

All she wants is love but it never comes.

Listen – Dreams Of 18