Turn It Up - 9/9/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s another 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.

Lauren Auder, Wendy & Lisa – “I Would Die 4 U” (from TRA​И​Ƨ​A, 2024)

The next collection from the remarkable “Red Hot” series – now in its fourth decade – looks to be one of its most exciting yet. TRA​И​Ƨ​A features an astonishing roster of artists, including a returning Sade Adu, meditating on ideas of trans-ness and (non)binaries in both gender and beyond. The first release, a haunting version of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U,” finds the great Wendy & Lisa (who played on the original recording) teaming with singer-songwriter Lauren Auder. Over propulsive keyboards from Lisa Coleman, with Wendy Melvoin’s guitar crashing through like waves, Auder – whose own transition journey adds poignance to the song’s famous couplets that imagine a world beyond gender normativity – sings in a hushed prayer that explodes into something like desperate assurance on the chorus as Coleman and Wendy Melvoin join hands and hearts with her. It sounds both old and new, and it bodes very well for an album that may be my most anticipated of the fall. – CH

Lara Downes – “America” (from This Land, 2024)

Classical pianist, composer, and arranger Lara Downes has made a string of remarkable records in the last few years that uncover and remix American musical legacies from enslaved people to Scott Joplin and beyond. (I had a great conversation with her for the Music Reconstructed podcast a while back – check it out here.) Her new album, This Land, continues that work, revisiting the canon from Guthrie to Gershwin to Paul Simon’s meditation on 1960s frustration and opportunity. Her graceful solo version of “America” amplifies the melancholy, with echoing glissandos and dissonant counterpoints filling in the air around the recognizable rise and fall of Simon’s gorgeous melody without overwhelming it. (The performance reminds me of many things, but I particularly hear Allen Toussaint’s version of Simon’s “American Tune” as a particularly resonant counterpart.) Downes is always listening to the moment as much as she listens to the past, and her “America” is surely a sound for our times. – CH

Shemekia Copeland – “Broken High Heels” (from Blame It on Eve, 2024)

Speaking of the sound of our times, Shemekia Copeland’s blazing rocker “Broken High Heels” is the kind of anthem that we always need. Over a stomping, Stones-y arrangement, Copeland bemoans our oblivious reaction to climate change and global pandemics with a mix of weary resignation and blistering refusal to give up or give in. It’s Ralph Ellison’s “blues impulse” at its best – assuring survival (and even defiant pleasure) in the face of ongoing catastrophe. Copeland neither ignores nor wallows in it. Instead, armed with the clarion voice that’s made her such a crucial figure in twenty-first-century blues/Americana/roots/et cetera, she insists that we keep on keeping on even as the world literally burns around us. So let’s rip it up, before they rip it down. – CH

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – “North Country” (from Woodland, 2024)

When I say that “North Country” hits me where I live, I’m not speaking figuratively. A song about being in Tennessee (where I live now) and thinking about going back up north (where I used to live), which features lyrics about how the winters are too hard now even as they recall warm memories of the past, is nearly guaranteed to strike somewhere near the core of my being. Welch and Rawlings’ tender ballad, a highlight of their very fine new album, pulls these heartstrings with care and precision. Images of snow around the pines and fireflies after dinner add welcome specificity to the song’s lovelorn longing, which finds even greater illustration through the duo’s close harmonies and dreamily interlocking guitars. It knocks me out in the dead of summer, so I can only figure that it’ll work even better once the air turns colder and the night comes earlier. I look forward to finding out. – CH

Oasis – “The Hindu Times” (from Heathen Chemistry, 2002)

(Note from CH: Oasis are back, apparently, so here’s something I wrote about them in February as part of our Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominee round-up. If they really do tour, and if I get to see them, I sure hope that “The Hindu Times” makes the setlist.)

Back in 2002, for reasons too boring to describe here, I was in Ireland and hadn’t heard any rock ‘n’ roll for over a week. For me, this was a Footloose level of deprivation. I found my way into a record store in Dublin, where the about-to-be-released Oasis album was on the listening station. I was a fan, even in less starved circumstances. I put the headphones on, “The Hindu Times” started, and I legitimately had one of the purest moments of rock catharsis that I’ve ever experienced. The big drums, the cascading guitars, Liam Gallagher’s snotty declarations, the lyrics that are so cliched that they almost sound new again – it was, in all its corny maximalist glory, a fitting microcosm for the broader Oasis experience. The grandiosity has always been the point with Liam and Noel and company, of course. But at their best, which is more often than you might think, the unabashed self-importance is matched by massive hooks and arrangements that make even the most obvious homages in their playbook feel fresh somehow. I’d never argue for “The Hindu Times” as one of the best Oasis songs, but it’s my favorite. Because there’s no other Oasis song that I heard that day in the Irish record store, with those massive drums and cascading guitars and the rest turned up as loud as they’d go. Sometimes the old tricks are all you need. - CH (originally posted 2/23/2024)

PC Band ft. Tito Jackson – “Wuda Cuda Shuda” (single, 2024)

Over the last half decade or so, this slinky R&B Memphis five-piece has put out an EP and an album’s worth of singles, all worth your time, but this new one is my favorite. The sound leans old school—the melody’s a light and bright sing-along, but the funk’s deep and front man Nick Markeith is singing the blues. The “boo-thang [he’s] been hittin’ on the side” called his bluff and called his wife. Now he’s “lookin’ like a whole damn fool” and calling elder Tito Jackson for advice. Tito agrees with “the whole damn fool” part—but can’t tell him a damn thing he didn’t already know about what he “Wuda Cuda Shuda” done in the first damn place. I’m rooting for him and all, but that nagging bass thump sure suggests he’ll be feelin’ like a fool again soon enough. – DC  

Daniella Cotton – “So Afraid of Losing You Again” (from Charley’s Pride: A Tribute to Black Country Music, 2024)

New Jersey’s Daniella Cotton is a New Jersey rocker who’s spent this century filling out her albums with cover songs that, if not exactly unexpected, are definitely ballsy. She’s tricked out “Strange Fruit” with clunky club beats and dared to essay iconic numbers like “Purple Rain” and “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Both more surprising and more successful is her latest project, an EP tribute to Charley Pride. The arrangement on “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” for example, borrows heavily from the Stones and is set up as sisterly advice: “Hello ladies!” Cotton’s electric-blues reinvention of Dallas Frazier’s “So Afraid…” drags the melody so slowly, so lugubriously, that Pride’s 1969 original fades entirely into an alternative universe: What if Pride had wound up in Chicago instead of Nashville, or switched out all the Hank Williams albums in his collection for Koko Taylors?  (Cotton has a much more straight-country version of the song available on YouTube; but it’s the EP version I recommend.) — DC

The Oak Ridge Boys featuring Willie Nelson – “I Thought About You, Lord” (single, 2024)

Written by Willie and cut at least twice by him too. But this piano-and-voices-only version, with Oak Ridge Boy Duane Allen trading verses with Nelson, is the one going on my Willie Keepers playlist. I do wish producer Dave Cobb had punched up the Boys’ too-quiet chorus harmonies (with Ben James replacing late tenor Joe Bonsall), but Allen’s lead especially is a fragile yet wise, beautiful thing. I also like that Willie’s song, coming ahead of the group’s next album Mama’s Boys—dedicated, the press release informs, “to mothers everywhere”—now allows for the possibility that its “Lord” is a woman. – DC

Dwight Yoakam and Post Malone – “I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom)” (single, 2024)

My favorite post-rap Post Malone so far, mainly because he keeps sounding for a second at a time like a young Steve Earle, then basically doesn’t register at all. Post-bluegrass Dwight Yoakam (did you hear Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars…?) is what really makes this work. His unmistakable tenor is an enormous gift, his ear for records rather than mere songs a bigger one. That title onomatopoeia makes for one hell of a catchy chorus. – DC

The Starkweathers – “Town I Hate” (from Hit the Hay, Vol. 13, 2024)

Kansas City’s The Starkweathers were one of the best of the early alternative country acts out here in the heartland. They cut a few singles for Faye and Sub Pop Records, contributed to a couple of Bloodshot Records samplers, and released 5-Song EP in 1994. “Town That I Hate” was its opening track—a jangly, plainspoken ridiculously catchy roots rocker about big economic and romantic plans that definitely do not go as planned. Written and sung by Rich Smith, complicated by the close, desperate harmonies of bassist Mike Ireland, “Town I Hate” is post-punk country-rock perfection. I bring it up because Sound Asleep Records has just included the track on Hit the Hay, Vol. 13, the latest installment in the reissue series that, like this Starkweathers’ cut, is celebrating a thirtieth anniversary this year. Alongside “Town I Hate,” the new Hit the Hay features a 1987 solo side from Bill (Foster &) Loyd, a 2017 cut from Dead Head dead ringers Pacific Range, and a rarity from Ozark legends the Morells (IYKYK), plus 20 more roots rockers. (Speaking of the Morells… Sleepless Records has also just released You’re Gonna Hurt Yourself, a 22 track-collection of post-Shake and Push Morells sides. Inquiries for either collection should be directed to label head Jerker Emanuelson at jerkersoundasleep@outlook.com.) — DC

Recommended reading:

-Sasha Weiss on a Prince documentary we’ll likely never see, for New York Times

-Will Hermes on The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, for Pitchfork

-Alphonse Pierre on Rich Homie Quan, for Pitchfork

-Rodney Carmichael on Rich Homie Quan, for NPR

-Eddie Glaude talks to Ed Pavlić about James Baldwin, for Glaude’s A Native Son

-Natalie Weiner on country parody Memphis Kansas Breeze, for Don’t Rock the Inbox

-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Neil Young’s Atchives, Vol. III, for his So It Goes

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