Alby's Latest Posts
Song of the Day 8/19: Bo Burnham, “Welcome to the Internet”
Bo Burnham is usually classified as a comedian, but he’s just as easily categorized as a musician, one in the tradition of Tom Lehrer with a tad of Kurt Weill thrown in. (Song of the Day featured his songs about Jeff Bezos last month.) Listen to how accurately he skewers what we’ve done to ourselves […]
DL Open Thread Thursday, August 19, 2021
Why would a guy, a Florida governor let’s say, dissuade people from getting vaccines or wearing masks, but go all-out on a treatment for people once they come down with Covid? Why do you think? Um…could it be that his second-biggest political donor owns a big chunk of the treatment company? Didn’t have to turn […]
Song of the Day 8/18: Elvis Costello, “Blame It on Cain”
From Elvis’ first album, with Clover backing him. John McFee’s jazzy guitar and Costello’s delivery of his cryptic lyrics dominate the track. Nobody’s ever come up with a satisfying explanation of the song’s meaning, and I can’t find any record of Costello ever having said, but it’s pretty clear somebody is passing the buck. The […]
Song of the Day 8/17: The Felice Brothers, “Jazz on the Autobahn”
WXPN has had this tune in heavy rotation since it dropped two months ago, but I didn’t hear it until this weekend. The Felice Brothers, who began with a trio of upstate brothers who moved to Brooklyn to busk in the subways, made their national mark with their first album in 2008. Their sound got […]
Song of the Day 8/16: Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”
Who lost the war in Afghanistan? Certainly not the defense industry, which got the lion’s share of the trillion dollars the country wasted waging it. Big win for them. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which seemed to awaken Americans to the fact that they could be incinerated at a moment’s notice, was still fresh when Dylan […]
DL Open Thread Sunday, August 15, 2021
One of them finally spilled the beans. A congressional aide told journalist Julia Ioffe the reason Republican politicians are getting their own constituents killed: About a month ago, I was talking to a pretty senior Hill aide on the Republican side. Vaccinated, everybody in his shop was vaccinated. I said, ‘What is the deal, why […]
Song of the Day 8/14: Nanci Griffith, “Tecumseh Valley”
Nanci Griffith was an accomplished singer and songwriter who broke through after moving from her native Austin to Nashville in 1985, but her greatest acclaim came with her Grammy-winning 1993 album “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” covering other singer-songwriters who, like her, worked musical territory between folk and country that produced a literate hybrid we now […]
Song of the Day 8/13: Bruce Springsteen, “I’m Goin’ Down”
Enough with the ersatz Bruce — let’s play some of the real thing. Springsteen recorded this track with the E Street Band in 1982, at the same Power Station sessions at which the full-band versions of the songs on “Nebraska” were recorded (they were later scrapped in favor of the four-track demos they worked from, […]
Song of the Day 8/12: Marah, “Point Breeze”
Yesterday’s post about Jack Antonoff’s solo project Bleachers included the tune he recorded with Bruce Springsteen, and I mentioned how much it sounded like one of Springsteen’s late-period moody ballads. It reminded me that bands used to emulate a much different Springsteen — the R&B-influenced sound of the band he used to record his first […]
DL Open Thread Thursday, August 12, 2021
Legal experts are saying the evidence piling up against the Previous Guy makes an indictment of the pretend president inevitable. This means it has less than a 50-50 chance of coming to pass. You know how they say alcoholics are never “cured,” they’re just in recovery? I have to assume the same applies to crackheads […]
Song of the Day 8/11: Bleachers, “Stop Making It Hurt”
I heard this song on the radio the other day and, being a sucker for major-key pop song with a good hook, I looked up who did it, because I had never heard of Bleachers. Turns out the guy, real name Jack Antonoff, was the guitarist for Fun, which had a big hit in 2012 […]
DL Open Thread Wednesday, August 11, 2021
One certainty about the Trump coup is that this lumbering mound of seething resentment and ignorance — Trump, that is — isn’t smart enough to have done all this himself. Though the news-consuming public doesn’t seem to care, there are people at work determining who provided that help, and the most interesting facet is where […]
How ‘Good Republicans’ Let Fascism Capture Their Party
I have to disagree with my esteemed colleague on the subject of so-called “good” or “moderate” Republicans. They do exist — not in Congress, which is why Chris Coons is pissing up a rope, but they are out there. I know more than a few myself. They’re the sort of people who have a decent […]
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