Turn It Up - 10/9/2023

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

We’re back again to start the week with some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first this week, then David, and we’ve also included some reading recommendations at the bottom.

“Niccolo” – Buddy and Julie Miller (from In The Throes, 2023)

There are few sounds I love more than Buddy and Julie Miller singing in harmony. And this track from their remarkable new album is my favorite Miller mode: swelling mid-tempo pop that layers their voices on top of jangling strings and heartbeat drums. The twangy shimmer is perfect for the Julie-written devotional, where “your love follows me around” is not an unwelcome haunting from the past, but a necessary means of support. Like much of the Millers’ music and its underlying impulses, it’s a source of sustaining spirit. - CH

“Althea” – Jamie Wyatt (from Feel Good, 2023)

It makes sense, but there’s still something pleasantly surprising about the Grateful Dead’s embrace by a new generation of artists who operate in the big-tent version of Americana. Wyatt’s tight cover of one of the Dead’s slinkiest grooves – written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter – allows the singer to pay tribute to her Deadhead musician dad and place her own soul-inflected music in a larger continuum of spaced-out rock and country-fried funk. The groove is less flexible than the Dead’s original, perhaps, but Wyatt makes up for it with a vocal that trades Garcia’s whispered myth-making for an open-throated tribute to the title character. - CH

“Streets of Philadelphia” – Joshua Redman (feat. Gabrielle Cavassa) (from where are we, 2023)

On the stunning new collection from saxophonist/composer Joshua Redman, he teams with singer Gabrielle Cavassa on a meditation about U.S. identities through reworked versions of famous city songs. Sometimes they become mashups – he puts Sufjan Stevens behind Count Basie, or poignantly teases John Coltrane’s “Alabama” before the state’s official anthem – but even when the arrangements stay closer to the source, Redman and his collaborators reveal new worlds of interpretation in the grandest jazz tradition. Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” becomes a restless blues, both anchored and propelled by Cavassa’s soaring, lonely testimony. Especially when she’s complemented by Redman’s saxophone and a piercing guitar line from Kurt Rosenwinkel, Cavassa’s performance emphasizes that “Streets of Philadelphia” is fundamentally a prayer, a reaching out for the kind of connection that the band models on this deeply moving track. (Thanks to Joseph Thompson for telling me about this one.) - CH

“Ten Dead” – Wilco (from Cousin, 2023)

I’m not sure whose loss Jeff Tweedy is reporting here. It could be the victims of another mass shooting, of another climate disaster, of another act of state violence, of the continuing effects of COVID or another pandemic, or of the less newsworthy but still relentless work of the Grim Reaper. But that uncertainty is the point, isn’t it? On this quietly devastating new one from Wilco, Tweedy softly admits that “I’m tired when the day begins, I’m tired when the day ends” as he addresses a world framed by such loss and as the band builds their trademark sweet-noised swirl around him. (With new producer Cate Le Bon, this is one of the best-sounding albums that the band’s ever made.) When Tweedy asks “what’s ten more to me?” at the end, it comes off not like indifference but rather like the sad recognition that the lonesome valley is just over the next horizon for each of us. And a desperate wish that we stop sending each other there as often and as cruelly as we do. - CH

“Fuck The Girls (F.T.G.)” – Doja Cat (from Scarlet, 2023)

Doja Cat’s new album is as hot as Hell, a comparison made more apt by the demon/devil imagery that she interlaces throughout it. The brooding “Fuck The Girls” doesn’t break new ground (either up here or down below) – it offers a standard rebuke of haters and pretenders. But it’s one of my favorite examples of the pure pleasure of her flow, a scattergun of rhymes that struts above the moody bass line and skittering drums. It’s clever, it’s forceful, and it’s gone after two-and-a-half minutes: a short, sharp display on a big, entertaining record. - CH

“After the Revolution” – Carsie Blanton (single, 2023)

Carsie Blanton has made some great records about love, revolution, and what they share. Here she offers a maximalist pop-rock symphony that presents the revolution both as a glorious societal upturning and a chance for personal redemption. Blanton’s hopes that she will become “a better wife” and her chosen “a better husband” afterwards could seem corny in the wrong hands, but the rise of her voice amid the strings and guitars that rain down around it gives her seeming prophecy a loving, pleading sadness. And then, at the end, she repeats “It won’t always be this way” several times, as if to further indicate that – despite the chorus’ Brit-pop bombast – she’s not sure if it’ll happen or if it’ll work. But it’s worth imagining, even if for a minute, and working for, even if for a lifetime. - CH

“We Ran Wild” Martin Zellar (from Head West, 2023)

Where former Gear Daddies frontman and rock-and-roll lifer Martin Zellar runs into an old running buddy, a la Springsteen in “Glory Days,” but rather than easy nostalgia the conversation turns dark. Toward disappointment for the friend, who’s had to sell his instruments while Zellar is still playing, and toward grief for the both of them as they count down the long-ago friends who’re now long gone. “Brother, you sure are lucky to have written that song,” the guy tells him, and I’m going to assume he’s talking about “I Wanna Drive the Zamboni,” a copyright Zellar knows is the difference between the good life and there-but-for-the-grace-of-God. That’s when the sentiment turns, for me, to roots-rock gratitude. Zellar ran wild in the day, lived to tell about it, and is now happily and proudly making music with son Wilson Zellar, who engineered Head West and plays guitar on it to boot. I love a happy ending. My fingers are crossed we can all sing along. - DC

“Barn Burner” Ian Munsick (from White Buffalo, 2023)

Figured from the title that this one came with apologies to William Faulkner. Turns out that it deploys a different freshman curriculum staple, the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. Wyomingite Ian Munsick catches his girlfriend “birthday suitin’ it” with some dude and sings a ridiculously catchy chorus of “She broke my heart, then her barn burned down—like one thing led to the other.” For a while, he’s coy about claiming any cause and effect. But the way he encourages his country-rock band to “Burn it down, boys!” at the blazing, Brad Paisley-ed, double-time coda sure sounds like a confession to me. - DC

“Swingin Party (Ed Stasium Mix)” and “Swingin Party (Alternate Version)” The Replacements (from Tim: Let It Bleed Edition, 2023)

My initial reaction was that the new Stasium mix boosts Tim from one of the best albums of its decade to being one of the best albums I’ve ever heard. Once I got past the immediate delights of dryer, crisper sound and some separation, thank you, what really popped for me was the way the new mix highlighted what a fantastic singer Paul Westerberg, best known as a tune- and wordsmith, can be. That quality really landed for me in the alternative, stripped-way-down version of “Swingin Party” included on disc three of the Let It Bleed Edition box. “If being strong’s your kind,” Westerberg slurs on his third run through the chorus, “then I need help here with this feather.” He exaggerates his vibrato on the final phrase, play-acting vulnerability so you won’t know how weak he really is. It doesn’t work. - DC

“Corn” Cast of Shucked, “Somebody Will” Andrew Durand, and “Friends (Acoustic Worktape - Bonus Track)” Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally (from Shucked: Original Broadway Cast Recording, 2023)

Stage musical Shucked, with songs by longtime Nashville writing partners Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, opens with “Corn,” a high-energy cornucopia of corny jokes (“It’s the same going in coming out”) and hooks that pop, all of which establish the show’s not entirely corny premise, about a small country town that fears outsiders and builds metaphorical walls, complete with a (sell it!) key change and what sure sounds like a (big-finish!) kick line. “Somebody Will” begins as a perfect distillation of good-old-boy humility (“If you ask me, I turned out okay / My dogs are fed and my soul is saved”) then reveals itself as a sly parody of mediocre white boy self-confidence. Finally, “Friends” works fine in the second act, but shines even brighter on the bonus work tape version, where these longtime collaborators and dear pals sure seem to have written a love song to one another. - DC

“Country Club” Reyna Roberts (from Bad Girls Bible, Vol. 1, 2023)

This just sounds better and better every time I hear it. Like Nelly’s 2021 “High Horse” (currently my beau ideal of the type), or “Buckle Bunny” or, of course, this party’s starter “Old Town Road,” “Country Club” is a perfect example of the delightful hip hop and modern country blend that should be in heavy radio rotation but is not. Roberts’ record waves back to peak Shania in her sound and her spunk, and nods lyrically to Garth. More importantly, it shouts what we want—“no old-members-only club”—and when we want it—“all day, all night,” right now. - DC

Reading recommendations

Jenn Pelly on Joni Mitchell’s “Lead Balloon” and Jann Wenner, for Pitchfork

Otis Suggs on Atlanta’s first rapper, Mojo, for Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Jonathan Gould on Stop Making Sense, for The New Yorker

Jody Rosen on “Jewface,” for The New Yorker

Natalie Weiner on the Discogs site, for The Verge

Henry Carrigan on Dave Marsh’s Kick Out the Jams, for No Depression

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