Turn It Up - 2/12/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

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

Sarah Jarosz – “Runaway Train” (from Polaroid Lovers, 2024)

Not a cover of the Roseanne Cash or Soul Asylum hits, though it would play well with both, and we can go ahead and plug it into a playlist with Tom Petty’s plural “Runaway Trains” while we’re at it. So, sure, Jarosz is riding with a stock image here, but the way she makes it her own is a delight, a runaway-train take that’s familiar and distinctive at once. The guy who is said train is “about to hit her like a heart attack.” “Run away, run away,” she warns herself. But that sing-along melody says she’s hooked. He’s coming in fast and it’s too late to run now. –DC

21 Savage – “redrum” (from american dream, 2024)

It’s early in the year but surely this 21 Savage cut will go down as including one of the year’s most effective samples. It begins with spiraling violins and a few lines of Brazilian singer Elza Laranjeira singing “Serenata Do Adeus,” back in 1962. Her last few notes are then chopped and repeated throughout, a haunting part of an eerie-as-hell rhythm track. 21’s “I’ve got big cajónes and I’m letting them hang” isn’t actually what anyone would call scary, and the kind of corny Jack Nicholson quote at the close breaks the spell. But that sample, and the repetition of the title allusion to The Shining, is as creepy as it is catchy. –DC

Jerry Lee Lewis – “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye” (from The Ed Sullivan Show, 1969)

I’m using this clip as a stand in for the game-changing documentary, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. Director Ethan Coen opens his film (which debuted at Cannes in 2022 but is only now available for streaming) with this very performance, and I loved the choice for a couple reasons. First, it showcases from the jump what I’ve long argued is the greatest and most enduring of Lewis’ many stylized gifts: his absolute emotional presence when singing slow, sad and often self-aggrandizing ones. Second, Coen thankfully just lets the tape run here, an innervating storytelling strategy that most music docs shun but that here is sustained for the duration. As is the case for basically every song in the film, we get to see and/or hear the entire performance. There’s no narrator, no talking-head experts. It’s just all Jerry Lee, all the time. Whether he’s singing on an old episode of Hee Haw or Shindig! or duetting ferociously with the host of The Tom Jones Show, or showing up his cousin Mickey Gilley in a cutting contest, or suffering the questions of someone like Tom Snyder or Jane Pauley in archival interview footage—no matter, the music itself almost never stops. The result is that Trouble in Mind hurtles, jumps, rages, and cries as thrillingly as Jerry Lee in concert. Breathless. –DC

Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper – “I’m a Wreck” (from Root Hog and Die, 1989)

Mojo Nixon was a loudmouth country punk with a heart of gold, a provocateur for loud, fast and no rules. His “I’m a Wreck,” with his early collaborator Skid Roper, is a tight little rockabilly gem that’s long been a favorite Mojo cut of mine because of the way it admitted with such good humor the wildness of his life. “I'm a wreck, my whole life's in pieces,” he moans with gusto, characteristically building to a rhyme as vulgar as it is hilarious: “Everything around me smells like feces.” Mojo died this week, his friend and collaborator Matt Eskey confirmed on Facebook, while working an Outlaw Country cruise “after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners.” I didn’t know the man, but boy that sounds like exactly the way he’d have drawn it up. R.I.P., Mojo Nixon. –DC

Hurray for the Riff Raff – “Snake Plant” (from The Past Is Still Alive, 2024)

Alynda Segarra and their wondrous Hurray for the Riff Raff have returned just when we needed them most. One of the advance tracks from their incoming new album, “Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive)” is a rumbling folk-rock travelogue, with Segarra – who’s cited Dylan’s “I Was Young When I Left Home” as an influence for the song – narrating details of a journey through a Florida defined both by sweet mangoes and Superfund sites. As Segarra told Oxford American, the “memory box of a song” grew from their childhood trips to the Sunshine State with their grandfather. “The rest is what I found out in the world: community, grief, love, passion, death.” Segarra’s resonant alto dances through the song’s vivid images – “Garbage island fucking in the moonlight” – and its insistence on survival as a form of resistance and reinvention – “Don’t become an angel with a broken wing.” The band pulses and builds, only briefly falling away near the end when Segarra says “nothing will stop me now.” Then they rejoin as Segarra repeats that crucial phrase, a circle of support gathering around the singer (and the listener) as the song ends. The past is still alive - and so are we. - CH

Little Simz – “Power” (from Drop 7, 2024)

I’m calling it right now. Little Simz’ Drop 7 will be the best album of the year that’s under 15 minutes long, and “Power” will be the best song that’s less than sixty seconds. Returning after her 2022 tower of power NO THANK YOU, maybe the best album yet in an already storied career, Simz takes us on a ferocious trip that pairs electro beats and house grooves with her top-of-the-form rhymes. The album’s most concentrated blast, “Power” explodes with Simz’ double-tracked vocal spilling out syllables over punching synth-drum percolation. “If I said that I’m the greatest, then I mean it,” she reminds us. And, especially after another brilliant record, I’m not about to argue with her. - CH

R.A.P. Ferreira and Fumitake Tamura (feat. Hprizm) – “begonias” (from the First Fist to Make Contact When We Dap, 2024)

This track is a rolling boil. First comes Tamura’s beat – a mix of low guitar and disconnected vocal samples – and then Ferreira and guest Hprizm arrive with quietly compelling verses that feel both poised and offhanded. (Lines like “I’ve been both baskin’ and robbin’” are so good that I can’t believe I haven’t heard them before. And now I’ll never forget them.) A nice reminder of the simmering side of the beats-rhymes-and-reality rap movements of earlier decades, “begonias” also contains enough unexpected twists to not feel like just a throwback. Instead, especially in the context of the delightfully strange album it comes from, it feels like the work of artists who are wisely keeping one ear on the echoes of the past and one on the portents of the future. In so many ways, it’s a vibe. (Thanks to Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen for hipping me to this track.) - CH

Sheryl Crow – “Do It Again” (from Evolution, 2024)

The key to finding enlightenment, Sheryl Crow tells us on her new single, is to do the work: “Every day, I get up and do it again.” It’s an apt metaphor for Crow’s career, now in its fourth decade (!) of rock-solid records that blend big hooks and guitars with the dusty-groove rhythms and country flourishes that have made her such an enduring and subtly adventurous artist. “Do It Again” is the latest entry in what’s become a defining theme – the relationship between change and acceptance in the pursuit of personal growth – and it’s so deeply in her wheelhouse that it’s a visceral joy for any fan from the moment it kicks in. And okay, “Do It Again” is kind of Crow’s greatest hits – snapping snares, crunchy riffs, muted verses building to a soaring chorus, lyrics that use well-placed specifics to support those choruses’ big mission statements, knowing humor, a hook that stays with you, etc.. But, hey, they’re her greatest hits for a reason, and “Do It Again” never feels like a lazy retread. Instead, it’s a welcome return for an artist who keeps finding new ways to make the old tricks work. As far as I’m concerned, she can keep this stuff coming as long as she wants. Because they make me happy - and that can’t be that bad. - CH

Billy Lee Riley and his Little Green Men – “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll” (single, 1957)

J.M. Van Eaton died this week. One of the very last men standing from the transformative music made at Sun Records in the late 1950s, Eaton’s drums can be heard on classics from Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, Johnny Cash, and others. (He’s there in the aforementioned Jerry Lee Lewis documentary a few times, and - in a strange bit of concordance - he was played in the Jerry Lee biopic Great Balls of Fire by Mojo Nixon.) Like many of Sun’s legends, he joined the crew when he was just a teenager; in John Floyd’s great oral history of the label, Sun stalwart Roland Janes remembered having to drive Van Eaton to the studio because he didn’t have his license yet. In keeping with that youthful spirit, Van Eaton’s drumming powered tracks that embodied the rushing excitement and joyous, sometimes clumsy irreverence of a bunch of hopped-up kids figuring out a new musical language. Van Eaton’s steady hand kept the whole thing both rocking and rolling, employing a subtle swing that erupted into furious fills quicker than you could say “go, cat, go.” My favorite example might be this rowdy sci-fi from Billy Lee Riley & His Little Green Men. Kicking off with Janes’ siren guitar and Van Eaton’s punching cymbal, “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll” mixes the wonderment and anxieties of the space age with the equally exciting and worrisome music being cooked up in little rooms like Sun. Riley clowns and shouts, somebody keeps screaming, Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano lurks in the background, and J.M. Van Eaton finds a freight-train boogie that keeps this weirdo riot from spiraling into orbit. Here’s hoping that he’s traveling some new dimensions now, teaching our friends all over the multiverse how to do the bop. Rock on. - CH

Reading recommendations:

-Carl Wilson on the Grammys, for Slate

-Tressie McMillan Cottom on Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, for New York Times

-Jewly Hight talks to Brittany Howard, for NPR

-Justin A. Davis on the Memphis tenant movement of the 1970s, for MLK50

-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Mojo Nixon, for Los Angeles Times

-Also, check out the recommended articles on Toby Keith listed at the end of David’s Keith piece from last week.

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