The Saturday Shuffle

At last -- a free hour in my day!  Let's turn on the old shuffle machine and see what it yields...

1. Do You Want It All? / Two Door Cinema Club
From Tourist History (2010)
Tasty little morsel of British indie pop, sort like Death Cab for Cutie meets the Kooks. (And no, that's not a reference to the sadly kaput marriage of Ben Gibbard and Zoe Deschanel). The production values are quirky, almost lapidary, with fragments of phrases repeated urgently, like mantras, over a peppy rhythm track spiced with space-age sound effects. But absolutely radio friendly!

2. When in Rome / Nickel Creek
From When Will the Fire Die? (2005)
Sitting sweetly at the intersection of bluegrass and indie pop, this wonderful trio (also, sadly kaput) composed of fiddler Sara Watkins, her guitarist brother Sean, and mandolinist Chris Thiele (now of Punch Brothers) was a real find for me. Snarky lyrics and modernist rhythms, textured with Americana  instrumentation -- trust me, it's a winning combination.

3. The Rat's Prayer / The Soft Boys
From A Can of Bees (1980)
And now for something completely different -- at least on the surface -- Sir Robyn Hitchcock's first band, psych-folk-punk renegades the Soft Boys. Garage-y guitars and drums, herky-jerky tempos, folky harmonies, and best of all, wickedly absurdist lyrics.: My. Cup. Of. Tea.

4. Better Days / Roseanne Cash
From This One's For Him (2012)
No, not the Kinks' "Better Things," but a wise and rueful Guy Clark song, covered here by real Nashville royalty, Twitter queen Roseanne Cash. This new tribute album is one of the finest country albums of many a year -- with Clark's warm and witty songs as the foundation, it should be brilliant, and it is.

5. Martha My Dear / The Beatles
From The White Album (1968)
Paul McCartney in full music-hall mode -- scrumpdillyumptious.  I say music-hall, but alongside the oom-pah/ragtime beat Sir Paul can't help tossing in a bossa nova groove here and there.  And yes, we all know he really wrote this about his Old English sheepdog ("hold your head up, you silly girl / Look what you've done" -- poop on the carpet!), but it's still a crazy mad wonderful song.

6. (I Wanna) Call It Love / Sondre Lerche
From Duper Sessions (2006)
Remember the Steve Carell movie Dan in Real Life? Probably not; it was highly missable.  But I loved the soundtrack tunes by this sweet Norwegian singer-songwriter, and immediately plucked several other tunes out of his slim catalog. There's a little soft-shoe jazziness here too, a smooth strain of Cole Porter romanticism, but with a touch of Scandi angst, too.  Well, why not?

7. Groovy Movies / The Kinks
From The Great Lost Kinks Album (1973)
Sorry, no link -- it's a bootleg. (Got to solve this mp3 posting conundrum...) This album only hit the market for a nanosecond before the horrified Kinks demanded it be withdrawn; most of it was discarded demos, scraps of songs that Ray Davies had written for other projects, padded out with some Dave Davies solo work.  This is one of the Dave tracks, sloppy rather than whimsical, but kinda endearing all the same.

8.  Cry Like a Baby / The Box Tops
From The Best of the Box Tops (1968)
Hard to believe this came out the same year as "Martha My Dear"; it's soul-saturated Memphis pop, with horns instead of oom-pah, Farfisa organ instead of plinky piano, and a raft of gospel back-up singers.  And the divine vocals of Alex Chilton...

9. I'm a Soldier in the Army of the Lord / Lyle Lovett
From Smile: Songs from the Movies (2003)
Full-on gospel -- whoever said Lyle Lovett could only do country?  This track appeared in the 1997 Robert Duvall film The Apostle (searing performance, Bobby D!) and it sure enough gives me that old-time religion. Do I love this cat's voice or what?  That supple vibrato with just enough creak and twang -- there's no one else sounds even remotely like him.

10. We Should Be Making Love / Huey Lewis & The News
From Hard At Play (1999)
Lazy, loungy, soulful pop, as easy on the ears as Huey himself is easy on the eyes (Huey and Daryl Hall: my two big 80s music crushes.)  And one of my favorite song premises:  Our singer hero is always listening to his woman friend's romantic issues, until now he's finally 'fessing up that he longs to BE her romantic issue.  You could slide into this like a pair of warm moccasins, girl.  Why not?

"Good As Ever" / 
Works Progress Administration

What's in a name?   Well, here's a case study.  Of course I knew there was a band out there in the 90s called Toad the Wet Sprocket, but something about that name made me assume it was a punk metal thrash band.  They were young, they were from California, they were totally outside my frames of reference, back in those days between MTV and Sirius when I didn't have any decent channel for finding new music.  Even though I'm sure I heard some of their big songs -- like All I Want or Fall Down -- I never connected song to band, and remained blissfully ignorant that this was actually a band I would have liked, and liked a lot.

Same thing with Nickel Creek.  Nickel Creek, Nickleback -- who knew which was which?  And because every Nickleback song I ever heard was obnoxiously loud and boring, I would never have paid attention to Nickel Creek, until a friend's daughter started dating mandolinist Chris Thile.  I finally hauled myself to one of their shows and fell in love with their indie bluegrass sound.  Unfortunately, that was on their "farewell for now" tour, so goodbye Nickel Creek. (Okay, okay, they're just on a break. Or so they say.)

I'd have missed Works Progress Administration, too, if they hadn't included a cover of the Kinks' "I Go To Sleep". Thankfully the Kinks network does not allow any covers to go unnoticed, and so I hunted down this track.  I discovered to my delight that Works Progress Administration is a bizarre sort of supergroup, combining (get this line-up) fiddler Sara Watkins and her brother, guitarist Sean Watkins, from Nickel Creek; Lyle Lovett's fiddler Luke Bulla; Tom Petty's keyboardist Benmont Tench; Elvis Costello's drummer Pete Thomas; Elvis's AND Hohn Hiatt's bassist Davey Faragher; and the incredible Greg Leisz, who's played various stringed instruments for everybody from Smashing Pumpkins to Sheryl Crow. And the presiding spirit of all this seems to be Toad the Wet Sprocket's leader, Glen Phillips. Who knew?

It's just an insanely good album, by the way, with track after track featuring each of these amazing artists. It really does feel like a community effort, a collaboration among music-loving musicians who dig each other's work and are happy to share the spotlight.  (How refreshing!)  Nevertheless, my big question after listening to this album was:  Who is this Glen Phillips?



This particular WPA track has been teasing my brain for weeks now.  I've got it on a couple of workout mixes on my iPod, and this stupid tiny iPod Shuffle that I've got doesn't display artist info -- so when that wheeze of fiddles starts up, I'm momentarily thrown.  Is this a country artist?  Alt.country?   Everybody in this project is clearly getting their twang on, though you could hardly help it, with all those fiddles around.

But then as soon as Glen Phillips starts singing those unrhymed, meandering verses, I'm thrown back into indie mode. (Maybe it's the juxtaposition of words like "fontanelle" and "bassinet" and "razor blades" that does it.)  "I feel too much and I'm sick of feeling" -- yup, that's perfect 21st-century sentiment. Yet that gently ticking tempo, the good-humored fiddles, and Phillips' ironic phrasing keeps the whole thing from going all dark and emo-punk.  By the time he gets to that last verse -- "Maybe it's a kind of genius / Finding fault in everything / If I had a palace in utopia / I'd obsess on the cracks beneath the sink" -- we're clued into his comic persona, the hapless mopey loser.

For something this laidback and unassuming, it actually turns out to be a major earworm.  I still can't figure out where the hooks are, though -- those ever so slightly discordant fiddle riffs? The moody key change at the end of the chorus? Maybe it's just the way Phillips pronounces "fontanelle." He knows the audience is going to giggle there.

I guess it's no surprise that a song by the Kinks would show up on this album -- the smart cool kids gets the Kinks, even the ones in sunny California. (Especially the ones in sunny California, maybe -- there's a reason why The 88 are Ray Davies' new pet band.)  These guys get character, they get irony, and they've got the musical chops to back it up, enough chops to attract veterans like Benmont Tench and Greg Leisz. They deserve a better name than Works Progress Administration, for all its sincere Depression-era resonance.  But hey, knowing how fluid the indie scene is these days, they'll probably change it next month anyway.  I just hope I'll find it in time!

"Somebody More Like You" / Nickel Creek

A few weeks ago I had the unexpected pleasure of seeing this alt-bluegrass trio perform in Central Park (see here for my review). I love it when you take a chance on a band whose music you've never heard, and they turn out to be GREAT.

Nickel Creek (not to be confused in any way shape or form with Nickelback) consists of fiddler Sara Watkins, her brother Sean on acoustic guitar, and their friend Chris Thile on mandolin. They've been playing professionally since they were about 10, but they're 20-somethings now and they've evolved from traditional bluegrass into this wonderful hybrid that's indie rock one minute, folk the next, quirky downtown pop the next. This track is one of Sean's (you'll find it on their 2005 album Why Should The Fire Die?) and it really sold to the crowd that night in the park.

It starts out so earnest, with a folky guitar line and Sean's wistful tenor, backed up by Sara's harmonies and mournful fiddle solo. "I didn't hear you / Say you're / Sorry," he begins, adding "the fault must be mine." At first I take that remark at face value, but the song soon enough slides into snarkiness, as each repeated melodic phrase edges down the scale. "I wish you all the best of luck / In finding somebody more like you." As the song develops, it becomes plenty clear that being like her is NOT something he admires.

"You said you'd love me / Always / Truly," he reminds her, adding ironically "I must have changed." Yeah, right -- I can just imagine him rolling his eyes. And in the bridge, he really lets her have it -- "I hope you meet someone your height / So you can see eye to eye /With someone as small as you." Ouch.

It's a rueful minor-key melody, delicately syncopated and sparely arranged. Their bluegrass roots are still there, in Sean's nimble guitar picking and Sara's singing fiddle, but that bongo-like percussion (which I seem to recall was Chris tapping on the body of his mandolin) plants a foot in alt-rock. It's hypnotic, smart, subtle --- just the sort of thing I like.

Song after song from these folks that night kept wowing me. I walked out afterward simply buzzing with happiness, my faith in modern music restored.

Somebody More Like You sample