Turn It Up - 11/18/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s a new week, so we’re back to share some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first, then David, and we’ve got a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – “Stories We Could Tell (French TV)” (from Long After Dark: Deluxe Edition, 2024)

The new reissue of Petty’s sharp 1982 album Long After Dark comes accompanied by a bunch of rare and unreleased stuff, a welcome addition that’s highlighted by several takes from a session for a television show in France. These “French TV” cuts not only include the propulsive pop of “Keeping Me Alive” (one of my favorite Heartbreakers deep cuts), but this chiming version of “Stories We Could Tell,” written by John Sebastian and recorded by the Everly Brothers, among others. Petty and the crew also included this lovely ode to musical partnership on the live Pack Up The Plantation, but I think I prefer the slightly more polished version here, with Mike Campbell’s ringing electric guitar washing around Petty and drummer Stan Lynch as they sing in warm close harmony. A small pleasure, but a very rich one. – CH

Marcella Simien – “Lelia” (from To Bend to the Will of a Dream That’s Being Fulfilled, 2024)

The Louisiana-born Simien is one of Memphis’ most important contemporary musicians and a fitting symbol for the city’s continuing syntheses. After numerous acclaimed releases with her band Marcella and her Lovers, Simien goes fully solo for To Bend to the Will of a Dream That’s Being Fulfilled, a stunning meditation on sustenance and restoration. She draws particular inspiration from her ancestors, never more directly than on “Lelia,” which she dedicates to her great-grandmother in a spoken invocation. With her accordion providing constant circular-breath background, Simien converses with her ancestor – her “direct line to the divine” – to find both comfort and mission. The lyrics are spare and almost mantra-like, a fitting demonstration of To Bend to the Will’s atmosphere of meditative exploration. Simien draws each note like a prayer and then releases it into the world like a blessing. Which is exactly what this music is. – CH

HitKidd (feat. Talibah Safiya) – “Land of the Free (Outro)” (from HitKidd for President, 2024)

A young Memphis hip-hop producer most famous for his work with GloRilla, HitKidd has assembled an all-star crew of local talent (including Glo and the late legend Gangsta Boo) for his latest album-length party. The most astonishing moment of HitKidd for President comes at the very end, when the great Talibah Safiya – who I’ve celebrated here before – appears to send “Land of the Free” into the stratosphere. Brooding keyboards are Safiya’s sole accompaniment as she moves across a vocal that is alternatively soaring and raw, finding operatic scope and deep-blues grain in a lyric that contends with the title’s promise against the reality of who gets left out. The words matter, of course, but are only secondary to the depth and breadth of Safiya’s vocal, which further affirms her as a singer of unique power. Portentous but never pretentious, this is an “outro” that seems more an intro for a new world waiting to be born. – CH

Haley Heynderickx – “Mouth of a Flower” (from Seed of a Seed, 2024)

The new album from singer-songwriter-guitarist Haley Heynderickx has knocked me sideways. I’m not surprised, given how much I liked her debut. But Seed of a Seed is a straight-up stunner, anchored by Heynderickx’ expert finger-picking and driven by songs about the growth, decay, and various stages of (re)birth that appear throughout the natural world. While she celebrates the possibilities of listening to an earth we too often ignore (like on the prayerful “Redwoods (Anxious God),”), this is far from back-to-the-land romanticism. Indeed, on the restless “Mouth of a Flower,” Heynderickx observes the way that so many beings – from flowers to humans – exist in a process of “take and take and take” as long as they can, over a countrified guitar line that grows more ominous as the lyric unfolds. (Seriously – this is one of the best guitar albums of the year, on top of everything else.) This isn’t an apology for human avarice, by any stretch, but instead a reminder of our shared vulnerability. And, in the aftermath of an election driven seemingly by our worst impulses, it’s hard not to hear “Mouth of a Flower” as a blues-impulse reckoning with the cold, hard facts of life. Heynderickx doesn’t land on hopelessness or disconnection, but rather on a call to learn new ways of being and knowing. If we’re going to survive, individually and collectively, we better pay attention. – CH

Dwight Yoakam – “If Only” (from Brighter Days, 2024)

Yoakam’s back with a big, bright album that works best when it revels in the twangy bash-and-pop that’s always been one of his specialties. “If Only,” for example, is a straightforward ‘60s romp around which Yoakam arranges a shifting set of era musical touches, from Fab Four harmonies to R&B organ and beyond. (It might be too easy to say that “If Only” sounds like Buck Owens backed by the Wrecking Crew, but it would be neither inaccurate nor a bad thing.) At the center, as always, is Yoakam’s aching tenor, which rides up and down the melody with his trademark ease and precision. Now in his fifth decade of recording, he sounds as invigorated as ever. – CH

Julian Taylor – “Sixth Line Road” (from Pathways, 2024)

Julian Dean Taylor is a Canadian singer-songwriter who’s coming up on ten albums over the last decade but who I somehow have only just this year discovered. His latest, Pathways, has a smart, mellow rootsy vibe (RIYL: William Prince), and I will definitely spend more time with it. The keeper for me so far, though, is “Sixth Line Road,” which Google suggests might be literally in Ottawa (?), which musically splits the diff’ between Bill Withers and Don Williams, and which thematically mourns those “cut down at the knees” by cops:  I’m afraid “Each inch of pavement tells a story of grief / Where the black streets divide the land of the free” is destined to remain relevant. – DC

Doechii – “Boiled Peanuts” (from Alligator Bites Never Heal, 2024)

L.A.-via-Tampa rapper Doechii downplays expectations by labeling her Alligator Bites Never Heal a mere mixtape, maybe because she tries on multiple styles without ever settling on one, but I’m just calling it my favorite rap album of the year. 16 of 19 cuts fail to make it even to three minutes, which means you’ll stream more of them but will also leave each perfect hook-and-groove wanting more. Doechii spits her rhymes high speed (“Nissan Altima”) or slams them like poetry (“Bullfrog”), sings like Rihanna (“Slide”) and mimics Missy (“Catfish”).  Her “Boiled Peanuts” creeps in like early Snoop-and-Dre but maintains a jazzy Digable “no chip on my shoulder” vibe, with a bass-heavy Los Sospechos sample. “I'm a dying sunflower leaving a trail of seeds,” she concludes, finding blooms in doom. – DC

Lou Donaldson – “Midnight Creeper” (from Midnight Creeper, 1968)

Lou Donaldson died earlier this month, just a week after turning 98. Like so many other mid-century jazz saxophonists, he started out in be-bop thrall to Charlie Parker, most famously joining young lions Art Blakey, Horace Silver and Clifford Brown for A Night at Birdland. By the late ‘50s, Donaldson’s bop was leaning hard into the blues, and by the end of the ‘60s had gone full on soul jazz. His “Midnight Creeper” is a prime example. Donaldson’s opening solo has a warm and rich tone that plays well with pop and rock tastes, and the cut’s succeeding turns on cornet, guitar (George Benson!), and organ, glide groovily along to a press-rolling funky drummer and makes me imagine the Jazz Crusaders jamming with the MG’s. Be warned: You’re liable to spend the rest of the day humming Donaldson’s bright hook. R.I.P., Lou Donaldson. – DC

George Jones – “Window Up Above” (from The Lost Nashville Sessions, 2024)

These late 1970s re-recordings of George Jones’ hits were “initially made exclusively for artist promotion,” per the press release, “often completed in just one or two takes with an announcer’s voice between songs.” So it’s no surprise none of the 16 cuts here can touch its original. Then again, it’s George Jones, people! Each arrangement has either been tweaked or, once or twice, completely reimagined, and even slight differences in Jones’ phrasing and wording can create entirely new worlds from what you may expect. Case in point is “The Window Up Above,” the best song Jones ever wrote and one he tinkered with throughout his career. In the 1960 original, George spies his wife in her lover’s arms out the window and concludes, “How I wish I could be dreaming and wake up to a love that’s true.” By the time he recut the song with Billy Sherrill in the ‘70s, though, he was so bummed that he’d downgraded his standards considerably, wishing merely that he could wake up “to an honest love,” true love now apparently even out of the question. Similarly, earlier versions have him concluding the song by hoping “he makes you happy and you will never lose his love,” but on this Lost Sessions version, George has been so crushed by his woman’s infidelity, he’s actually feeling more empathy for her cheating lover: “I hope… he will never lose your love.” George doesn’t sound optimistic. –DC  

Recommended reading:

-Mark Anthony Neal on Quincy Jones and three albums that defined Black pop music, for Medium

-Mark Anthony Neal on Luther Vandross and Black grief, for Medium

-Evelyn McDowell on new Mia Zapata and the Gits re-releases, for New York Times

-Elizabeth Nelson on Robert Hilburn’s biography of Randy Newman, for The Washington Post

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