Turn It Up - 9/24/2024

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. As always, we’ve listed a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Dan Reeder – “52 Years Ago” (from Smithereens, 2024)

Nobody’s quite like Dan Reeder. His specialty is small songs with conversational lyrics and knockout hooks that manage to be funny, sad, and insightful at the same time. What makes this even more remarkable is how simple many of his compositions are, like this singalong from his upcoming album Smithereens. As with earlier examples of this favored mode, the simple structure and inviting melody of “52 Years Ago” almost mask the humor and poignance of the lyric. Reeder relates the story of an old heartbreak with a detail and informality that make it clear how fresh it remains in his mind and heart. “She had a long dress on when she dumped me,” Reeder harmonizes with himself over rolling piano, a repeated image that is somewhere between laughin’ to keep from cryin’ and the other way ‘round. Reeder’s song is as unforgettable as this breakup, and I’ll be damned if I don’t find myself singing it to myself every so often. – CH

Bon Iver – “S P E Y S I D E” (single, 2024)

I’ve loved Justin Vernon’s out-there electronics on recent Bon Iver projects, especially since those experiments helped destabilize images of the scruffy Wisconsin auteur as a kind of indie-folk abominable snowman who emerges from his cabin with an acoustic guitar and a notebook full of songs. Of course, though, I love a lot of those acoustic-notebook songs, too, and his new single “S P E Y S I D E” is a very effective example of the sound that brought him his initial prominence. All the core elements are here: spare guitar, double-tracked vocals that lift into falsetto, a lonely lyric, intimate production. What distinguishes “S P E Y S I D E” is the soaring viola from Rob Moose and the precision with which Vernon apologizes to someone he did wrong. It’s lovely, perfect for the swirling snowscape that’s headed back this winter and – clunky essentialism aside – has always been evoked for me by all Bon Iver phases. (The name means “good winter,” after all.) If he’s returning to this mode for a while, I’m glad to have him back. If he’s headed off in more exploratory directions again, I’m excited to follow him down those paths too. – CH

Muni Long – “Type Questions” (from Revenge, 2024)

The “No Scrubs” riff at the top gives it away. This brooding track from singer-songwriter Muni Long is squarely in the sonic and thematic tradition of TLC and other great R&B women whose recordings often concerned honest accountings of men’s foolishness. Of course, such lessons are familiar in the country tradition too, which makes sense given that Muni Long is the stage name of Priscilla Renae Hamilton, a songwriter who penned hits for artists from Rihanna to Carrie Underwood, and whose 2018 album Coloured explored the country roots of her larger creative continuum. The plucked acoustic guitar that buttresses “Type Questions” isn’t far from an identifiably “country” sound, either, and the muted flexibility of Long’s vocal and melody works across genre divides as she lists off the necessary information. “Type Questions” is a call back, a call out, and a call forward: It’s also a highlight of Muni Long’s great new album. – CH

RVSHVD – “Drowning Man” (from It’s Rashad, 2024)

RVSHVD’s been releasing some great singles for the past few years, and his first full-length is a very capable collection of mainstream country. I kinda wish it had more of the energetic genre-smashing of his early tracks, but there are moments where he shines in a straight-country (Strait-country?) mode that I wish was likely to gain more radio play. “Drowning Man” is best of all. It’s yet another of those great country songs about drinking, with lyrics that balance clever wordplay and open-hearted emotion, and a restless melody that RVSHVD relishes with his twangy tenor. This one works so well for me, I think, because of how the song neither celebrates drinking nor denies how it can become a place of refuge. Instead, RVSHVD acknowledges the “workin man’s blues” that leads to this drinkin’ man’s blues, and he flips the pour-some-whiskey declaration of so many party anthems into something sadder and more weighty. It’s as bittersweet as liquor, and just as intoxicating. – CH

Sarah Jarosz – “Just Like Paradise” (from Polaroid Lovers: Deluxe Edition, 2024)

Part of a new deluxe version of her wonderful recent album, “Just Like Paradise” is another example of Sarah Jarosz’ expertise with rich, shimmering songs rooted in both folk and pop-rock traditions. The descriptor “shimmering” even shows up in “Just Like Paradise,” in fact: The beachfront setting is perfect for the hazy sunset and cool breeze of the arrangement as Jarosz’ resonant alto rolls across waves of keyboards, steel guitar, mandolin, and drums. It’s entrancing, and the fact that it’s just a bonus track signals how deeply in the zone Sarah Jarosz is working right now. – CH

Breland – “Icing” (single, 2024)

Breland loves his woman’s faith, her folks and the way she doesn’t need his money. And he “hates to fixate on the surface parts.” But he cannot lie. Breland likes big butts, and his country girl got back. So he lists her many virtues and his wedding plans but also recycles the butt-rocking hook from “High Horse,” his Nelly collab from 2021, to make sure she shakes it with him on the floor. At long last, a true-love antidote to the leaden and lecherous “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” – DC

Leon Bridges – “Peaceful Place” (single, 2024)

Like an Afrobeat Bill Withers, Leon Bridges communes with ancestors, revisits old haunts, exhales. – DC  

Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs (featuring Lucinda Williams) - “Hell or High Water” (from Vagabonds, Merchants & Misfits, 2024)

The standout cut off Campbell’s third full-length with the Dirty Knobs is this duet with Lucinda Williams. Campbell’s voice still sounds like someone who harmonized with Tom Petty for decades, but the slow talk-sing pacing and spare acoustic guitar strum spotlight his distinctive limitations, which is to say his unique charms, like never before. Williams sounds great too. Maybe because she’s reading her lines straight off the sheet, hasn’t lived this one live for decades, she foregoes her late period slurring and tells the story. Together they’re just a couple of wastrels vowing to make it home safe (Mike: “I wasn't lookin’ for trouble, oh, no, not me”) or at least through the night (Lucinda: “Deep in the darkness, we shared our last kiss”), come hell or water. But I wouldn’t bet on it. – DC

Chris Smither – “She Said She Said” (from Call Me Lucky, 2018)

The Smithers covers collection, Call Me Lucky, somehow missed me back in 2018 but found me last week (Thank you, algorithm!) and let me feel this Beatles number like I’d never heard it before. Most of the talk around “She Said She Said” focuses on John Lennon, Peter Fonda and an acid trip, a merely biographical reading that’s encouraged by the psychedelic arrangement. Smither’s intensely bossy interpretation forces you to hear Lennon’s song as he wrote it, as an argument between lovers. Note to men everywhere: If she says, “You don’t understand what I said,” do not shout “No, no, no, you’re wrong.” Instead, maybe just ask her what she means. – DC

The Spinners – “Living a Little, Laughing a Little” (from The Thom Bell Studio Recordings: 1972 - 1979, 2024)

A couple years after their belated Rock Hall induction, the Spinners are honored on a six-disc set that collects everything (?) they did with producer and primary songwriter Thom Bell: album cuts, radio edits, two-sided singles, and amazing Tom Moulton mixes and more. You probably know the group’s big signature hits and still can’t get enough of them, but as this set shows, there’s so much more. A more or less random example: “Living a Little, Laughing a Little” was an R&B Top Ten (off 1974’s New and Improved) that only barely cracked the pop Top 40, written by Bell and his longtime song partner Linda Creed and featuring both of the band’s primary lead singers, husky tenor Bobby Smith and siren tenor Phillipe Wynne, trading lines. Bell opens it alone on stately piano and takes his time building the arrangement: simple drum, a funky teletype guitar, strings, bass, a clarion French horn. Smith and Wynne observe the way we like to laugh at a clown’s tears, at the fool with his heart in his hand, but then Wynne demands we also “watch how he tries hard to hide that he’s dying inside.” It’s hard to laugh then. – DC

Recommended readings:

—Elizabeth Nelson shares her liner notes to Bob Dylan’s new The 1974 Live Recordings box set, for GQ

—Bill Friskics-Warren on the late “Jackson” and “Coward of the Country” songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler, for The New York Times

-Jeff Gage talks to Midland, for Esquire

-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Body Count’s cover of “Comfortably Numb,” for Vulture

-Chris Herrington on the legacy of backup singers Rhodes, Chalmers, and Rhodes, for Daily Memphian

-Mark Anthony Neal on Earth, Wind & Fire, for Medium

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