Deep Album Cuts Vol. 198: The Go-Go's

Monday, July 27, 2020







The Go-Go's, a new documentary about the first multi-platinum instrument-playing all-female rock band, is premiering on Showtime this week on August 1st, so I thought I'd look back at their catalog here. 

The Go-Go's deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Can't Stop The World
2. Tonite
3. Skidmarks On My Heart
4. This Town
5. How Much More
6. Automatic
7. Lust To Love
8. We Don't Get Along
9. I Think It's Me
10. Girl Of 100 Lists
11. The Way You Dance
12. It's Everything But Partytime
13. You Thought
14. I'm The Only One
15. Beneath The Blue Sky
16. Forget That Day
17. Mercenary
18. Screaming (live)
19. Blades (live)
20. Fun With Ropes (live)
21. Beautiful
22. Talking Myself Down
23. Daisy Chain
24. Here You Are

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 from Beauty And The Beat (1981)
Tracks 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 from Vacation (1982)
Tracks 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 from Talk Show (1984)
Tracks 18, 19, 20 and 21 from Return To The Valley Of The Go-Go's (1994)
Tracks 22, 23 and 24 from God Bless The Go-Go's (2001)

In addition to the documentary, I feel like I've seen a lot of Go-Go's songs popping up in different places this summer. Superchunk released a cover of "Can't Stop The World," Tanya Donelly released a cover of "Automatic," and the original version of "Vacation" by Kathy Valentine's earlier band The Textones was the theme song to the new Starz series "Hightown." 

The Go-Go's had kind of a brief fun, only three albums as a big pop act, breaking up when I was too young to experience their fame firsthand. So I mainly remember them making the rounds as a nostalgia act in the '90s, when they reformed to tour and release the compilation Return To The Valley Of The Go-Go's. I remember the band talking about their punk roots when promoting Return in 1994 -- specifically I remember John Lydon's syndicated radio program Rotten Day, where he reacted to that claim with derision, mockingly singing "We Got The Beat" in a Johnny Rotten wail. But then I watched the band's episode of "Behind The Music" and really warmed up to them. I also got a crush on Jane Wiedlin and picked up her 1988 solo album Fur from a used bin, pretty good record. And then my old band Zuul that had a really strange repertoire learned a cover of "We Got The Beat" that we played at shows. I think we might have also practiced "Head Over Heels," which is probably my favorite Go-Go's song.  

The most popular Go-Go's deep cut on streaming services, "This Town," has a cool tricky 7/8 time signature on the verses, but there's a lot of gems here. I particularly think Talk Show is a strong album, deserved better than being the underperforming follow-up that preceded their breakup, "I'm The Only One" and "Beneath The Blue Sky" are some of their best tunes. And "Forget That Day" has the funky electric piano sound from "Head Over Heels" that I always loved. 

The Return compilation has a bit of everything, hits and b-sides and live tracks and some newly recorded 1994 songs, including "Beautiful." But the really interesting part of that record is the punkier early Go-Go's songs captured in rehearsals and club shows in 1979 and 1980. "Screaming" and "Blades" and "Fun With Ropes" never made it onto a proper album but definitely show you what the band might have been if they hadn't polished up their sound and become America's sweethearts. 

When The Go-Go's finally released a 4th album in 2001, obviously music had changed a lot in 20 years and they adopted a more modern rock sound, and they worked with some outside writers including Billie Joe Armstrong, who co-wrote the lead single. I thought it was cool that "Talking Myself Down" was co-written with Susanna Hoffs from The Bangles, a little solidarity among the big girl groups of the '80s (Vicki Peterson from The Bangles also toured with The Go-Go's in the '90s when Charlotte Caffey was pregnant, and both bands were briefly labelmates on I.R.S. Records in the early '80s). 

9:58 AM

Movie Diary

Monday, July 20, 2020





Given that I love Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, and "Russian Doll," I think it's fair to say that I am up for any time loop story, and I'm fine with it becoming a sort of subgenre unto itself. Like those other films/shows, Palm Springs offers its own twist on the trope with its own internal logic and weird mythology, while also deconstructing a lot of wedding hookup romcom cliches. I'm overintellectualizing it, though, it's really just a very, charming movie where Andy Samberg has to really act a little more than usual and pulls it off well, great supporting parts from J.K. Simmons, Meredith Hagner, and June Squibb. 

Netflix's big recent action movie based on a graphic novel series, with Charlize Theron as the leader of a band of immortal mercenaries. I was really impressed by Gina Prince-Blythewood's last movie Beyond The Lights and I'm glad she's finally gotten to direct another feature 6 years later, particularly a rare action movie directed by a woman. There's some really thrilling fight choreography and some cool, not too flashy CGI when the immortals get shot or cut and heal themselves. It was kind of refreshingly no-frills despite the context, though, tonally more like a Jason Bourne movie than a comic book movie. 

Will Ferrell vehicles have suffered from diminishing returns over the past decade, so perhaps I merely lowered my expectations enough to be pleasantly surprised, but I liked this. Obviously Eurovision is kind of an obviously absurd setting for Ferrell to clown around in, much like NASCAR or whatever, but I enjoyed the way it was also an affectionate celebration of the contest with a lot of references and cameos from people who've participated in it, and I'm always happy to see Rachel McAdams in a comedy, she never misses. 

Any sequel to a decades-old classic has an uphill climb ahead of it, but Stephen King revisiting the world of The Shining and stuffing it with a bunch of new characters and different weirdness is a lot more interesting than if anyone else had tried to do a more straightforward follow-up. And Make Flanagan, who directed Oculus, one of my favorite horror flicks of the past decade, did a great job of managing the delicate balance of making a film that's both a sequel to the Kubrick film and an adaptation of King's sequel book. I enjoyed the way it didn't initially seem to have too much to do with the original story and worked its way backwards to it, sort of like The Force Awakens but without feeling as much like fan service. I also really enjoyed the villains, particularly Rebecca Ferguson, who was kind of creepy and terrifying but also really hot but also wearing a ridiculous hat that reminded me of 4 Non Blondes. 

I feel like this movie got a little lost in the shuffle of Knives Out and The Hunt and the sudden glut of upscale action films about decadent white people murdering each other in an old timey manor. But man, don't overlook Ready Or Not, this shit rules. Samara Weaving particularly stepped up for her highest profile lead role to date, managed to be neither a scream queen nor a generic badass action movie heroine but just a compelling actor who kept you inside the head of a character who spent the whole movie terrified, angry, confused and/or in horrible pain. And after all the satisfying action, they managed to wrap up the story with a great batshit ending. 

This was fun, J.Lo killed it, and it's interesting to watch a period piece about the late 2000's recession, and kind of wonder (hope?) what stories from this recession we'll be sitting around watching in a decade. The framing device of the protagonist telling the whole story to a journalist, since the movie was based on an article, felt a little forced and lazy to me, but otherwise it was really entertaining and well cast. Obviously it brings to mind Magic Mike in a lot of ways but the story had a little more meat to it.

Andrew Patterson self-financed his debut feature by directing commercials in Oklahoma, and submitted it to over a dozen festivals before getting accepted to Slamdance, winning an award, and selling his movie to Amazon. That's such a great underdog success story that I really wanted to love this movie, and I can't say I did. But it brought some cool original ideas to the camera work and the storytelling of a '50s alien invasion movie, makes me think he'll do something really great on his 2nd or 3rd movie. 

I decided to finally check this out while working on my Pulp deep cuts playlist, and it was pretty enjoyable. The entire thing was filmed in the band's hometown, Sheffield, when they returned to play the last show in England of their reunion tour in 2012. So there's a few complete song performances but it's not quite a concert film, and it kind of avoids the usual rockumentary beats of comprehensively telling the band's story in favor of a movie that captures the band's unique character and sense of humor and a lot of the local color of Sheffield. Some great little anecdotes, like someone who lived with Jarvis Cocker calling "Dishes" a great song while noting that he never once saw Jarvis with a dish rag in his hand. 

My kids love Seuss books and particularly The Lorax, both of them always found it kind of frustrating that you never see The Onceler's face in the book, and were kind of relieved that they show it in the movie. I much prefer the old TV specials that Seuss himself worked on like The Grinch to the new school adaptations, but this is definitely one of the better ones, "How Bad Can I Be" is a pretty fun song. 

8:12 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 197: DMX

Friday, July 17, 2020








DMX is going up against Snoop Dogg with the next Verzuz song battle on Instagram on July 22nd, and I've been meaning to post an X playlist for a while now, so here goes. 

DMX deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Prayer
2. Fuckin' Wit' D
3. Look Thru My Eyes
4. N****z Done Started Something (featuring The LOX and Ma$e)
5. ATF
6. Bring Your Whole Crew (featuring P. Killer Trackz)
7. Keep Your Shit The Hardest
8. The Omen (featuring Marilyn Manson)
9. It's All Good
10. Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Blood
11. Blackout (featuring Jay-Z and The LOX)
12. Comin' For Ya
13. Here We Go Again
14. The Professional
15. Good Girls, Bad Guys (featuring Dyme)
16. When I'm Nothing (featuring Stephanie Mills)
17. I'ma Bang
18. We Go Hard (featuring Cam'ron)
19. It's Personal (featuring Jadakiss and Styles P)
20. Cold World (featuring Adrenna Mills)

Tracks 1, 2, 3 4, and 5 from It's Dark And Hell Is Hot (1998)
Tracks 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 from Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Blood (1998)
Tracks 12, 13, 14 and 15 from ...And Then There Was X (1999)
Tracks 16 and 17 from The Great Depression (2001)
Track 18 from Grand Champ (2003)
Track 19 from Year Of The Dog...Again (2006)
Track 20 from Undisputed (2012)

DMX didn't have the longest reign on top, but few if any rappers have made a bigger impact in a shorter amount of time -- 3 enormous multiplatinum albums in under 2 years, plus a couple more platinum albums that kept him ubiquitous for a few years after that. 1997 hip hop wasn't entirely the simple shiny suit picture people make it out to be now -- it was the summer of Wu-Tang Forever after all -- but the way DMX's first two albums completely dominated 1998 and set the tone for what was to come was huge. I think he deserves a lot of credit for bringing street rap to new commercial heights at a time when an equally popular counterbalance to Bad Boy might otherwise have been hard to find. I mean, the fact that over half of this playlist is from one year doesn't even feel wrong, the same way half my CCR playlist was from 1969.

For my part, I associate It's Dark And Hell Is Hot with my first job. I washed dishes in a restaurant, and the other dishwasher played that album in the kitchen a hundred times. I mainly remember Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Blood for X's turn toward shock rap -- the cover art, the Marilyn Manson feature, and that amazing couplet that opens the first full song, "Bring Your Crew" ("I got blood on my hands and there's no remorse/ and got blood on my dick 'cause I fucked a corpse"). But listening back to these records now, I was surprised to realize that Flesh Of My Flesh might actually be my favorite DMX album, partly because the best songs aren't the singles like on some of his other records -- it's kind of crazy to think that "Keep Your Shit The Hardest" and "It's All Good" weren't all over the charts. And the violin solo at the end of "Flesh Of My Flesh" is so cool and unexpected. 

DMX projected a particular image and sound so well on his biggest hits -- the barking, the anger, the anthems -- that I think his versatility has been forgotten a little bit. His albums had storytelling songs, songs where he'd pitch his voice up or down to have back-and-forth conversations with God and Satan, all sorts of flows, all sorts of nerdy ambitious MC stuff that came from the years and years he spent honing his craft before his career suddenly exploded. And although Swizz Beatz obviously launched the biggest career out of X's producers, Dame Grease and P. Killer Trackz really did the bulk of the best songs on those albums and had much more varied and sophisticated styles. Plus you get stuff like "I'ma Bang," a Just Blaze production from fall 2001 that sounds nothing like The Blueprint, much like the Just song I put on the Fabolous deep cuts playlist. And "We Go Hard" is one of my favorite No I.D. beats, it always surprised me how well DMX and Cam'ron could sound on a song together. 

It's kind of entertaining to put on the albums and hear much brighter and more upbeat songs than anything he ever released as a single, like "Good Girls, Bad Guys," which is really entertaining but sounds like something he didn't want to make and only would've released as a single if the album didn't sell huge right out of the gate like it did. "When I'm Nothing" in particular is just incredible, DMX sounds oddly great shouting over this big beautiful disco groove. Maybe if these songs had been singles, X would've been all over radio a little longer but we'd look at him a bit more like we look at Ja Rule. But I think these songs are pretty enjoyable since they never got overexposed. 

Obviously, DMX has had a lot of rough patches in more recent years, and you can hear his music decline over the course of his career. Even the version of 2012's Undisputed on streaming services that has explicit lyrics tags is actually a clean version, so I apologize for the terrible lyric edits on the last track on the playlist. And I skipped over the 2015 album that the label that released Undisputed put out without X's permission. There's also crap like a 2011 album of re-recordings of his greatest hits, the bad 2011 version of "Ruff Ryders Anthem" actually has more plays on Spotify than the 1998 original. But DMX has always been an underdog (no pun intended) that I want to root for, even in the Verzuz battle where Snoop easily has the upper hand, I hope he holds his own. 

11:54 AM

Monthly Report: July 2020 Singles

Thursday, July 16, 2020







1. The 1975 - "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)" 
"If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)" is The 1975's highest charting single in the UK, and was recognized pretty immediately by a lot of fans of the band, including myself, as one of the best songs they've ever made. But their particular brand of synth rock nostalgia is oddly out of step with the synth rock nostalgia that's in vogue on American radio, so it remains to be seen if it'll get very high on the alt-rock charts, much less become their 3rd Hot 100 hit. But I love it, particularly how it's one of the rare times the pretty ambient interludes peppered throughout their albums share space in the same track with one of their big brash pop songs, in this case with FKA Twigs singing some high notes over the intro. I've played the song on YouTube more than anywhere else, though, because the performance in the official video has just a little more oomph than the album track. Here's the 2020 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

2. Lil Baby - "The Bigger Picture" 
As we live through a historic year that is irrevocably changing our country, a lot of major artists have released music that refers directly to current events, whether the pandemic or the police brutality protests or both. And I'm glad that artists are engaging with the headlines and that people can still feel passionate about music at this moment, but inevitably a lot of that music feels kind of thirsty and disposable, I'm in no rush to declare anything important. But it's been interesting to see who actually releases a song that feels weighty and memorable, and who's released weird trivial social media-oriented songs (hi, J. Cole). When My Turn was released in February, I wrote a piece asking whether Lil Baby or a couple different rappers would really level up and graduate to the A-list in 2020, and I think that question has been answered pretty decisively, even before "The Bigger Picture" came out, that it's really his year. It's also kind of a cool flex that he has the biggest album of the year but his highest charting single isn't on it. That "what happened to COVID? nobody remember" line hasn't aged well, though. 

3. Chaz Cardigan - "Not OK!"  
Really enjoying the first alt-rock radio hit from this kid from Kentucky, it's not as massively catchy as the time when Gerard Way was not ok, but it's pretty damn good. The rest of the Vulnerabilia EP is excellent too, as is this little ditty from his TikTok. 

4. Zara Larsson - "Love Me Land"
Now that Dua Lipa is legitimately huge in the U.S. I'm focusing my hopes on Zara Larsson, she's released so many good singles in the 3 years since her last album and I'd like one to hit, particularly this one. 

5. Tenille Arts - "Somebody Like That" 
It seems astronomically unlikely that two Canadian country singers named Tenille, both born in 1994, would break through around the same time, but it's not exactly the weirdest thing that's happened this year. So far Tenille Townes from Alberta has been the more successful of the two on American radio, but I'm really rooting for Tenille Arts from Saskatchewan, her current single is just massively catchy. I particularly like the way the chorus sounds like it's going to hit the big obvious resolution halfway through and then just keeps going and sustaining that tension. 

6. Grouplove - "Deleter" 
Not to sound a million years old, but it is a little surprising to turn on the local alt-rock station and hear a current hit that's, like, an energetic and fast-paced rock song. And based on Grouplove's biggest previous song, "Tongue Tied," I didn't necessarily expect it to come from them. 

7. Lucky Daye f/ Babyface - "Shoulda" 
I'm a little annoyed that this song went onto the deluxe reissue of Lucky Daye's excellent 2019 album, I wish it was getting a big push to kick off his next project, really love it. 

8. Katy Perry - "Smile" 
I've been content with Katy Perry being relegated to the dustbin of formerly ubiquitous pop singers, but I've always had a weakness for her ruthlessly obvious approach to pop music. And even in her decline I've really enjoyed singles from her upcoming album Smile like "Never Really Over" and now the title track, which borrows its bubbly groove from Naughty By Nature's minor classic "Jamboree." The video, which features a pregnant Katy Perry mugging in clown makeup, makes me cringe as much as anything she's ever done, but I'll stick to just listening to the song. 

9. Surfaces f/ Elton John - "Learn To Fly" 
Even as he creeps slowly towards finally retiring from touring, I appreciate that Elton John has maintained a kind of restless omnivorous attitude towards collaborating. In the last 2 years he's appeared on records by Lady Gaga, Ozzy Osbourne, and Young Thug, and now Texas pop duo Surfaces, who were completely unknown until like 6 months ago. I'm not really into the big smash hit that put Surfaces on the map, "Sunday Best," but the follow-up with Elton is really charming. 

10. DaBaby f/ Roddy Ricch - "Rockstar" 
The Hot 100 has had a revolving door on the #1 spot for most of the year, with a lot of songs posting huge streaming numbers the first week and then dropping off -- "The Scotts" and "Stuck With U" and "Trollz" will be trivia questions someday, some of the most instantly forgotten #1s since Eminem's "Crack A Bottle." I thought "Rockstar" would follow suit, since it's kind of an unremarkable song that just happens to be by 2 of the biggest rappers in the world right now, but it's managed to log 5 weeks at the top now, the longest running #1 since Roddy Ricch's own 11-week behemoth "The Box." And it's grown on me, it diverges from DaBaby's signature sound in that way people keep pretending he never does, and while it seemed odd to have Roddy Ricch on a song and not have him do the hook, he manages to inject a countermelody into his verse that makes it feel more like a bridge in a really cool way. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Saweetie - "Tap In" 
I can't believe that both of her hits sample mid-2000s Lil Jon productions. I feel like she either needs to mine some other sounds for nostalgia, or cut Lil Jon a huge check to make a whole album of inferior retreads of his old hits. 

11:53 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 196: Pulp

Wednesday, July 15, 2020








Beyond The Pale, the debut album by Jarvis Cocker's new band Jarv Is, is coming out on Friday, so I wanted to look back at Cocker's work with Pulp, the horniest white band of their generation. 

Pulp deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.
2. Pink Glove
3. I'm A Man
4. The Night That Minnie Timperley Died
5. Pencil Skirt
6. Boats And Trains
7. Acrylic Afternoons
8. There's No Emotion
9. I Spy
10. Dishes
11. Joyriders
12. I Love Life
13. Death II
14. Underwear
15. Weeds
16. Seductive Barry
17. The Fear

Track 6 from It (1983)
Track 8 from Freaks (1987)
Track 13 from Separations (1992)
Tracks 2, 7 and 11 from His 'n' Hers (1994)
Tracks 1, 5, 9 and 14 from Different Class (1995)
Tracks 3, 10, 16 and 17 from This Is Hardcore (1998)
Tracks 4, 12 and 15 from We Love Life (2001)

Pulp were famously, well, not famous at all for the first decade of their career, really for longer than they were ever successful as an active group. The first Pulp album was released in 1983, the same year as debut albums by R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Violent Femmes, and Tears For Fears, but it seems like a whole generation or two of alternative music passed before they became heroes of the mid-'90s Britpop moment. But it kind of feels like they arrived right on time, figuring out their sound and image right in time to be peers of similarly named one word bands like Blur and Suede. 

The three albums and various singles that Pulp released before His 'n' Hers are largely disregarded both by the band and fans, rarely championed or performed live outside. That era is best known as collected in the Countdown 1992-1983 compilation, so I picked some of the better earlier tracks that didn't appear on there to sprinkle into this playlist. It's fun to hear Pulp's aesthetic and Jarvis Cocker's persona slowly sharpen and come into focus, but the band's last 4 albums are really the meat of their catalog. 

I read about Pulp more than I heard them when Different Class was out, since their U.K. success was kind of a rumor that reached across the Atlantic while Oasis and Blur kind of became America's representatives for the entire Britpop scene. So I saw the videos for "This Is Hardcore" and "Like A Friend" on 120 Minutes and got on board with This Is Hardcore, fully aware that my point of entry for the band was their dark post-stardom follow-up album rather than the one that made them a big deal, but I loved the album and got Different Class soon after. Incidentally, I just learned like 5 minutes ago that Neneh Cherry does the female vocals on "Seductive Barry," and I've loved that song for 20 years. 

The only time I saw Pulp live was at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in D.C. in 1998 -- they played very early in the day on the second day, after lightning had ended the first day early and some of the acts had to cram their sets into the second day. So they only played 3 songs, an awkward little abbreviated set of "The Fear," "Sorted For E's & Wizz," and "This Is Hardcore," but it was great. 

I think Jarvis Cocker's solo work has largely been up to Pulp's high standard, especially Further Complications, and over the years I've really come to regard him as one of my favorite songwriters. So it bums me out a bit that Pulp ever ended, and that their brief early 2010s reunion included too few dates on the east coast of the U.S. for me to get a decent chance at seeing them play a real show. But We Love Life was a nice way to end it, sort of a sweet farewell after the darkness of This Is Hardcore. It was hard to choose songs for this playlist, I couldn't bring myself to cut the long epics like "Seductive Barry" and "F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E." and "I Spy" but that left less room for other songs, and almost every song on Different Class is good enough to be included. 

9:18 AM

The 2020 Remix Report Card, Vol. 2

Friday, July 10, 2020























Last year, I brought the Remix Report Card back here where it started on Narrowcast, after a few years on Noisey. Gonna try to keep it going quarterly here, and there's a good volume of stuff to talk about this time around. Here's Vol. 1 and here's the Spotify playlist with almost every remix I've written about this year. 

"Afeni (Remix)" by Rapsody featuring D Smoke and PJ Morton
Since "Afeni" was Rapsody's first song that got some national radio play and she's collaborated with some big names, I would've loved to hear a couple major artists on this remix. But D Smoke, the winner from the Netflix reality show "Rhythm + Flow," is talented and released a good album this year, so it's cool that she gave him a look on this. Her verse is just from the original song, though, would've been cool to have new Rapsody verse or a 2nd guest MC or something. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

"Bitch From Da Souf (Remix)" by Mulatto featuring Trina and Saweetie
I was thought it was totally fucked up that there was a rapper named Miss Mulatto, and when she finally changed her name, she just took out the 'Miss' part (similar to how Asian Doll, who's not Asian, changed her name to the even more puzzling Asian Da Brat). But I do think this song is pretty good, and the remix is even better -- Saweetie puts in more effort than she usually does on her own singles, and Trina's verse, despite sounding a little lo-fi like it was probably recorded at home under quarantine, is classic Trina shit talk
Best Verse: Trina
Overall Grade: B+

"Butterflies Pt. 2 (Remix)" by Queen Naija featuring Wale
Queen Naija released "Bufferflies" nearly 2 years ago on the same EP that featured her breakthrough hits "Medicine" and "Karma." Then she released "Butterflies Pt. 2," more or less the same song with slightly different production and a different tempo, and added Wale to the radio version. I will give Wale credit for putting in an actual effort on some of his R&B features, his flow was nice on here. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

"Do It (Remix)" by Toni Braxton featuring Missy Elliott
The original "Do It" was a sultry Babyface-penned midtempo Toni Braxton jam in the classic mold. And "Do It" just picks up the tempo and does the same bittersweet piano-driven song with a slightly clubbier beat and airhorns and that big energy Missy always brings to a track, it's a great combination. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: A-

"Flaws And All (Remix)" by Ebenezer featuring Lil Durk
It's crazy to think that we've been getting these exact kind of melodic AutoTune love rap songs for like 11-12 years now, and they still sound pretty much the same as they always have. I was kind of surprised that Ebenezer is from London because American kids all make songs like this too. Lil Durk is really one of my least favorite AutoTune rappers, so he doesn't really do much for me here, but Ebenezer's new verse is alright. 
Best Verse: Ebenezer
Overall Grade: C

"In Your Eyes (Remix)" by The Weeknd featuring Doja Cat
I tend to like both The Weeknd and Doja Cat the most when they're doing cheesy '80s synth pop pastiches, so this song, while not as good as "Blinding Lights," works for me pretty well. Doja's feature is really nothing, though, totally forgettable. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: C-

"My Oh My (Remix)" by Camila Cabello featuring Gunna and DaBaby
I didn't particularly like this song before, but DaBaby's verse was decent and the beat kind of pushed him into an interesting flow. But Gunna has no idea what to do here, his verse sounds more like a half-assed attempt at a bridge. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: D

"My Truck (Remix)" by Breland featuring Sam Hunt
One of the new rap/country novelty hits in the wake of Lil Nas X, this one probably aimed more at country radio with this remix featuring Sam Hunt. I've always kind of turned my nose up at most of Sam Hunt, especially the Drake-influenced stuff, but he totally knows what he's doing on a track like this and improves on it. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

"No Harm (Remix)" by Babyy Chris 2K featuring Kevin Gates
The first time I heard this song on the radio it was the remix, and when I used Shazam to ID it, the original version came up, so I was totally confused and thought maybe Babyy Chris 2K just sounded exactly like Kevin Gates. This song is total dogshit besides the Gates verse, though. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

"Party Girl (Remix)" by StaySolidRocky featuring Lil Uzi Vert
I totally fucking hate this song, possibly the worst of the dreck that TikTok has vomited onto the Hot 100 lately. So I'm no thrilled about a big star extending the song's commercial shelf life, but it is enough in Uzi's wheelhouse that he sounds good on it. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B-

"Rascal (Remix)" by RMR featuring Young Thug
Another one of the new rap/country novelty hits, with RMR aimed at rap radio with Young Thug on the remix of his viral Rascal Flatts interpolation, and Future and Lil Baby on the remix of his other single. I wrote about RMR's project here the other day and I really just dislike this schtick. And I still think it's goofy that Young Thug doing one "yeehaw" ad lib on a song years ago became a meme and is pretty much the whole basis for putting him on this and one of the "Old Town Road" remixes, he tries to make his verse on this work but it just doesn't sound good.
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: C

"Rockstar (Black Lives Matter Remix)" by DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch
Maybe DaBaby just saw what was going on in America when he had the #1 song in the country and felt like he should use the song as the platform to say something, but I dunno if it entirely works. I like the new verse and it's not entirely off topic from the subject matter of the original song, but it's not the grand gesture it feels like it was intended to be. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B-

"Roses (Remix)" by SAINt JHN featuring Future
Brooklyn rapper SAINt JHN was already in the industry, writing for Usher and touring with Post Malone, when he released the original "Roses" in 2016. But "Roses" only became a huge worldwide hit this year in the form of a remix by a producer from Kazakhstan, Imanbek, which gives the song a whole different sound and pitches SAINt JHN's voice up so it's unrecognizable. So he was in kind of a strange position as far as capitalizing on "Roses," and doing another remix, back with another more traditional trap beat and a big mainstream rap star, is a smart move. I don't really understand the appeal of any version of this song, though,, it's all kind of a big bland waste of time to me, but I guess Future is alright on this. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: C+

"Savage (Remix)" by Megan Thee Stallion featuring Beyonce
I already wrote about this remix in my singles roundup, still pretty great, has pretty much replaced the original in my head. 
Best Verse: Beyonce's 1st verse
Overall Grade: A

"Say So (Remix)" by Doja Cat featuring Nicki Minaj
This kind of felt twinned with the "Savage" remix: both released the same week, both went to #1, both featured veteran artists jumping on songs by rising stars. But I like the "Say So" remix a lot less, I just roll my eyes at 'timely' Nicki lyrics like "I put the cookie on quarantine," and Doja hit a better flow with her rap verse from the original song. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: C

"That's A Fact (Remix)" by French Montana featuring Fivio Foreign and Mr. Swipey
"That's A Fact" is the only French Montana single without a feature out of the last dozen or so he's released, so it unsurprisingly made few waves and French added some guests for a remix. There was some weird thing in April where Fivio Foreign criticized French for signing Mr. Swipey but not promoting him enough, but it seems to have resolved nicely with all of 3 of them doing this remix together. 
Best Verse: Mr. Swipey
Overall Grade: C+

"Whats Poppin (Remix)" by Jack Harlow featuring DaBaby, Tory Lanez and Lil Wayne
After a couple years of building buzz, '90s teen movie protagonist Jack Harlow got his big mainstream hit with JetsonMade, the producer behind a lot of DaBaby's hits, and here's the inevitable all-star remix with DaBaby and others. 
Best Verse: DaBaby
Overall Grade: B+

"Will (Remix)" by Joyner Lucas featuring Will Smith
At this point it's a predictable cycle: a young rapper does a song named after or referencing an established legend, and the old guy makes a cameo in the video or appears on the remix, or both in this case. In fact, this remix is just Will rapping for 32 bars with Lucas's hook at the beginning and end, and as someone who has a lot of love for He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper, I enjoy hearing Will rap on some more modern production, and kind of reflect on his life in an interesting way. That said, it also has that vibe of J. Cole's "Let Nas Down" and Nas's remix, this thirsty thing where the young guy desperately wants the legend's approval and the legend dutifully gives it to them. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: B

"Zoo York (Remix)" by Lil Tjay featuring French Montana, Fivio Foreign, and Pop Smoke
I kind of feel bad for young New York rappers, it feels like when they get a buzzing single, the city has so many legends that could hop on the song and instead they get lame ass French on all their remixes. French starts the remix saying "lemme tell 'em what I did for the city" and does a whole verse referencing his own songs like he really has some incredible catalog, it's pathetic. 
Best Verse: n/a
Overall Grade: F

1:06 PM

TV Diary

Thursday, July 09, 2020







a) "Perry Mason" 
As someone who aged out of the coveted 18-to-34 demographic a few years ago, I just barely have firsthand memories of "Perry Mason" as a popular TV property, when Raymond Burr made TV movies as the character 3 or 4 times a year until his death when I was 11. So I'm pretty curious why a gritty prequel miniseries about Perry Mason is something HBO would get behind in 2020 -- it was originally developed as a Robert Downey Jr. vehicle, and what's-his-name from "The Americans" doesn't exactly bring the same kind of starpower to it. And this is more of an edgy prequel reboot than anything that nostalgic older fans of the Burr series would go for anyway -- there's a disturbing image of a dead baby about 30 seconds into the first episode, some full frontal male nudity soon after. But hey, it's fun to watch John Lithgow and Stephen Root in old timey thin mustaches, and Tatiana Maslany is playing a big over-the-top preacher character, so you could do worse for gritty cable drama these days. 

b) "Warrior Nun"
Really enjoying this Netflix show that's made in Spain but with mostly English dialogue and has this weird convoluted premise about an orphan who dies and then comes back to life with mystical powers and joins an ancient order of nuns. There's a lot of engaging character-driven stuff where she makes friends and gets mixed up in their problems so it doesn't get too bogged down in weird mythology, and Alba Baptista is just incredibly cute. 

Michaela Cole was obviously really talented and creative based on "Chewing Gum" and I thought she showed real dramatic chops in "Black Earth Rising," but "I May Destroy You" feels like it's really beyond anything she's done up to this point, really impressive and unique show.  The 5th episode this week kind of took the story to where I think other people might end it, with a victim standing onstage and calling their rapist out in public, but there are 7 more episodes to go so I'm interested to see where the story is going from here, it feels like Coel has made this really textured, realistic world and is trying to explore some gray areas in really charged subject matter. 

The Montreal-based French language Netflix series "Can You Hear Me?" has a bit of the same feel as "I May Destroy You" -- it's a funny, character-driven show about young women going about their daily lives, but then these moments of remembered trauma sneak up on them and cast a pall over everything else. "Can You Hear Me?" is a little broader in the comedy, but it works, Florence Longpre gives a really fearless performance, just throws caution to the wind and makes Ada this kind of unpredictable character that can do or say anything. 

e) "Big Dogs"
The Amazon crime drama "Big Dogs" reminds me of the recent final season of "Brockmire," in that they try to be really bleak and dystopian, but what they filmed back in 2019 doesn't seem quite so far off now. In a way the bleak and crime-ridden New York City of "Big Dogs" seems like '70s NYC in the modern day, with a bit of 1920s mixed in (with criminals running underground speakeasies that play jazz music). Some of the dialogue is a bit clumsy and on-the-nose, but I liked Brett Cullen's big over-the-top monologue at the top of the first episode more than almost anything else in it, so I wouldn't mind if there was more of that. 

f) "Stateless"
It's kind of a dated notion to consider any film actor 'too big' or 'too good' to do television, but it felt notable when Cate Blanchett did "Mrs. America," and now she's in another miniseries for Netflix in the same year. And it occurs to me that I've seldom seen her actually play an Australian as she does in this show, where she's sort of a cult leader with Dominic West, a Brit who I've often seen struggle with an American accent but sounds pretty convincingly Australian here. 

g) "Beecham House"
You don't really think of "Masterpiece Theatre" as being an especially horny program but so much of the stuff I've seen on there has been these glamorous romance novel sort of stories, including "Beecham House," which is about this handsome Englishman in India in 1795, being very noble and dashing. Not bad but kinda boring. 
 
h) "Crossing Swords" 
After enjoying things like "Disenchanted" and "Miracle Workers: Dark Ages" recently, I was ready for another wacky medieval satire. But Hulu's "Crossing Swords" is from the same people who did "Robot Chicken," a show I've never particularly enjoyed, and it does a lot of the same edgy gross out humor, not into it. 

i) "The Baby-Sitters Club"
It amused me that one of the modern touches in this latest reboot is the babysitters throwing shade at Care.com. 

j) "I'll Be Gone In The Dark" 
I remember reading about Michelle McNamara's work as a true crime blogger when she died in 2016, and it's cool to see that her husband Patton Oswalt and others helped posthumously publish her book on the Golden State Killer and this HBO docuseries. It's pretty engrossing, the way they dive into the history of this guy who murdered at least a dozen people and raped many more, through the lens of McNamara's research on the case, you get these bittersweet remembrances from Oswalt about his wife and also these awful firsthand accounts from the killer's survivors. And literally the day after the first episode aired, Joseph DeAngelo Jr., who was arrested in 2018, pled guilty to the murders, so this whole thing is really still just now unfolding. 

k) "Taste The Nation with Padma Lakshmi" 
I am, for some reason, one of the people Padma Lakshmi follows on Twitter, so on the off chance she sees this, I just wanna say hi to Padma, I like the show. Honestly, though, "Top Chef" was always one of the few reality shows I really enjoyed and kept up with for multiple seasons, and this show is a very refreshing look at local American cuisine and the way American immigrants put their own twist on traditional dishes from other countries, it's really thoughtful and well made and it makes me hungry every time I watch it. I particularly like the way they don't shy away from politics and will kind of let them bleed through naturally in the show, like the San Antonio episode where they have to stop filming so often because of border patrol helicopters overhead that they finally just talk over the helicopters and acknowledge how much that's an omnipresent part of life down there. 

A British cooking competition show on Netflix, feels like they're trying to make it stand out with a really light fanciful colorful aesthetic, but for the most part the show is the same old same old. 

Apparently this show was first done in Japan and then Mexico, but I really enjoyed the Australian version that was released in the U.S. on Amazon. Basically, the concept is that 10 comedians are locked in an apartment for 6 hours and try to make each other laugh, and whoever doesn't laugh the whole time wins a big cash prize. Other than the hose, Rebel Wilson, I wasn't familiar with any of the comics in the show, but you pretty quickly recognize everyone's style of humor, who's a prop comic and who does characters and who does snarky sarcasm and who does absurd unexpected things. Some of the contestants are really funny people I'd love to see in more stuff, some of them were a little obnoxious, and some people actually got eliminated for being too passive, but overall it's a lot of fun to watch. I hope they do it in America, it's so easy to imagine famous U.S. comics having a ball with the format, but I'd also happily watch another season of the Australian version.  

Kind of a "Mythbusters"-y show where people who make products for doomsday survivalists test them out, lots of silliness and blowing stuff up, always entertainment value in that. 

A really brilliant Netflix family game show where they just do the classic game everyone plays at home and blow it up to a larger scale -- obviously it's not real lava, but the obstacle course is flooded with red liquid and you have to jump from one piece of furniture to another. Just delightfully silly, I'd love to be on this show with my kids.  

A Netflix reality show where they find couples whose wedding day didn't go according to plan and a team puts together a better wedding for them in the course of a few days, very sweet and touchy feely show. 

Feels kind of nostalgic to watch a show shot in 2019 about restaurants in a tourist town, at a time when we can't go to restaurants. But I used to live in a beach town and work in kitchens in the summer, so maybe it's all too familiar to me, because I just didn't find it interesting, or maybe I just didn't like the people the show was about. 

A Netflix miniseries based on the true story of a 4-year-old Mexican girl who went missing for several days and then her body was found in her bedroom. A pretty well done, engrossing show, but a horribly sad story, don't think I'll finish the series. 

A new Brazilian adaptation of "Dead Set," a show Charlie Brooker created before "Black Mirror." I haven't seen the original show, which might have been novel in 2008, but a zombie horror comedy taking place on the set of a reality show, I dunno, it feels a little stale to do now. 

Considering how many chaos has been wreaked by earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan and surrounding nations in recent years, it seemed like a bold idea to make an anime series with the premise of a huge earthquake sinking Japan into the ocean, and it specifically happening this year. It's pretty good, but man, what a bleak concept. 

A South Korean show about a film special effects artist who begins a relationship with a humanoid robot who is programmed to be the perfect boyfriend. Very strange, kind of droll and funny show, one of those foreign programs that it's hard to imagine being made in America, at least not without being done in a much less earnest, more satirical way. 

Another South Korean show, a much more down-to-earth adult drama kind of thing. 

I was never very into The Grudge, the American adaptation of the Japanese horror movie Ju-On, but this spinoff series is good, really creepy.

As with most Ryan Murphy shows, I had very mixed feelings about the first season of "The Politician," but I liked the concept that each season would focus on a different election in a guy's political career, and the last episode of season 1 kind of jumped forward to offer a promising taste of what season 2 would be. So I'm enjoying this season more than the first, and there are some really entertaining moments, like the Nancy Meyers jokes in the second episode, but there's still a lot I roll my eyes at. 

A lot of networks have shuffled around their schedules during the pandemic, pushing back seasons of shows so they don't run out of things to air while production is shut down. Showtime had the weirdest decision, however, to just pause "Black Monday" in the middle of the second season, airing 6 episodes, pausing for over two months, and then coming back with the last 4 episodes. In any event, I'm glad it's back, the show's mix of period piece drama and really silly dialogue still confuses me sometimes, but it's enjoyable. And the ensemble is even better with people like Xosha Roquemore and Dule Hill and June Diane Raphael in the mix in the recent episodes. 

My 5-year-old has been obsessed with rhyming words, I think partly from all the Dr. Seuss books we read together, but also just the general affinity kids have for rhyming. So I like this Netflix show, it's really cute and feeds his rhyming obsession. 

1:05 PM

Monthly Report: June 2020 Albums

Wednesday, July 08, 2020








1. Hellbound Glory - Pure Scum
Reno, Nevada singer-songwriter Leroy Virgil has been plumbing a particular vein of debauched and depraved country and roots rock since Hellbound Glory's 2008 debut Scumbag Country, and he's still finding enough inspiration that he just got around to writing the inevitable song titled "Renowhere." Pure Scum is produced by second generation outlaw country star Shooter Jennings and it's Hellbound Glory's third album for Shooter's Black Country Rock label, and strikes hits a nice balance between wild-eyed songs like "DUIORDIE" and wounded ballads like "Someone To Use." The best song, "Dial 911" ends with a stabbing victim pleading, "darling if you love me, dial 911," followed by the sound of a heartbeat slowing down and flatlining. Here's the 2020 albums Spotify playlist I put every new album I've been listening to in. 

2. Coriky - Coriky
I kind of rolled my eyes a couple years ago when people excitedly talked about the new group featuring 'half of Fugazi' after Ian MacKaye, Joe Lally, and Amy Farina started playing out a trio. After all, anyone who's heard MacKaye and Farina's 3 albums as The Evens can attest, they make good music together, but you're better off checking your expectations at the door as far as comparing it to Fugazi (same goes for Lally's solo work). Just last year, the owner of several Washington sports teams offered a large sum of money for a Fugazi reunion, which I think makes it even less likely than before that one will ever happen. That said, the Coriky album has quite a few moments that are louder than anything on the Evens records and give me a little bit of a Fugazi feeling, and the presence of Lally filling out the rhythm section gives MacKaye a little more room to cut loose and play noisy solos on "Say Yes" and "Shedileebop," which are probably my favorite moments on the album. And Farina's more bombastic drumming reminds me of her performances on Ted Leo's Treble In Trouble EP that I've long been a big fan of. And I dig the way the three of them trade off on lead vocals and sing harmonies. 

3. Bob Dylan - Rough And Rowdy Ways
The first three songs on Rough And Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan's first collection of new songs in 8 years, contain dozens and dozens of first person statements starting with the word "I," many of them florid and humorous boasts, particularly on the first two songs. It struck me as an interesting turn from somebody who has resisted embracing his own mythology or autobiographical readings of his lyrics for many decades. There's also an ambitious 17-minute song about American history since the JFK assassination, and a 9-minute song that appears to be about little more than Key West being a lovely place. I spent a lot the last couple months working on two pieces about Bob Dylan and listening to the first 15 years of his career. But I'm not really someone who hangs on Dylan's every word, particularly after the '70s, and I was a little surprised by how entertained I was by the lyrics on Rough And Rowdy Ways. 

4. Chloe x Halle - Ungodly Hour
Chloe and Halle Bailey (will they drop the trendy "x" someday? I can only hope) came into the public eye as one of the first acts signed to Parkwood Entertainment, talented teenagers with an auspicious stamp of approval from Beyonce herself. And up to this point it feels like their music career has proceeded at an unhurried pace, with arty and often self-produced music with stated influences like Billie Holiday and Bjork that doesn't seem aimed at the charts, while they've booked TV and film gigs that have kept their public profile steadily rising. And Ungodly Hour feels like the point where they officially declare themselves ready to play the game and be on the radio with the lead single "Do It," but it feels like they found their own path to it, it's not too forced or removed from their earlier stuff. Right now "Busy Boy" and "Don't Make It Harder On Me" are my favorites but the whole thing hangs together pretty well. 

5. Pale Spring - Dusk
I was happy to see L.A. via Baltimore transplant Emily Harper Scott follow up her full-length debut barely a year after 2019's Cygnus, it feels like she's really building up some well deserved career momentum with these records. My early impression of Dusk is that it's more synth-based and less guitar-based than her first album, and has this placid soothing exterior with these dark unsettling feelings and melodies kind of pushing up from under the surface. Right now "Bruise" is my favorite track, it has this very subtle Baltimore club-ish pulse to it

6. Norah Jones - Pick Me Up Off The Floor
About 15-20 years ago, Norah Jones sold tens of millions of albums of pretty and soothing jazz ballads, mostly covers and standards. And to her credit, she seems to have taken that enormous and unusual success as license to make a really wide variety of music with a wide variety of collaborators and find a more idiosyncratic voice as a songwriter. Last year's 7-song quickie To Begin Again really impressed me and Pick Me Up The Floor feels like an expansion on that vibe, still built around her piano and smoky voice but pushed into some more unusual shapes. "Hearts To Be Alone" as a tricky 9/8 meter that I adore listening to, and "Heartbroken, Day After" has a nice little nod to one of my favorite Willie Nelson deep cuts, "Hands On The Wheel." 

7. City Girls - City On Lock
It was pretty impressive that City Girls' career flourished pretty well during the 18 months that the more talented half of the duo was in prison. And I think they stepped up from their previous releases, but I almost just want a JT solo project at this point, I get stressed out hearing Yung Miami's flow careen completely off the beat 

8. Mt. Joy - Rearrange Us
For the last few months, it seemed like almost every time I asked my wife what music she was listening to, the reply would be "Mt. Joy." So I was curious to check out their new record, and I'm really enjoying it. There's some very pretty folky acoustic stuff but I like the more fleshed out songs with electric piano like "Rearrange Us" and "Death" the most. 

9. various artists - Saving For A Custom Van
Father/Daughter Records released this Adam Schlesinger tribute album just 2 months after COVID-19 took Schlesinger's life. And I imagine it wasn't hard to find 31 artists, including Ted Leo and Nada Surf and Tanya Donelly, to cover his songs, he wrote so many good ones. But I especially like that they didn't limit the selections to Fountains Of Wayne, there's stuff from Ivy and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and Josie And The Pussycats and of course That Thing You Do! and other projects. I really binged on FOW when I made my deep cuts playlist and it's great to hear some of those songs covered, Suzy Shinn and Charlie Brand do a great job with my favorite, "All Kinds of Time." Sales of this album go to MusiCares' COVID-19 Relief Fund, so buy it. 

10. Bad Moves - Untenable
The Washington, D.C. band Bad Moves released a single ahead of their 2nd album that caught my eye because of the title -- "Cape Henlopen" is named after a part of Delaware where I grew up (I graduated from Cape Henlopen High School). And now that the album's here, I think that's still my favorite song on the record, but the whole thing is a nice punky indie pop record, I'm partial to the more rocking stuff like "Fog Is A Funny Thing." 

The Worst Album of the Month: RMR - Drug Dealing Is A Lost Art EP
In February, an unknown guy in a ski mask went viral with a video where he sang a Rascal Flatts ballad with gangsta rap lyrics, and four months later he's got a major label project out with features from Future, Lil Baby, Young Thug, and Westside Gunn. I think everyone involved in this must be pretty thirsty to be in on the ground floor of the next Lil Nas X-style country rap novelty. I can't stand the guy's voice, he sounds like Pleasure P from Pretty Ricky singing about trapping. The worst song is "I'm Not Over You" produced by Timbaland, which is really uninspired compared to Tim's country rap stuff for Bubba Sparxxx. 

10:28 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 195: Rufus Wainwright

Monday, July 06, 2020







Rufus Wainwright is releasing a new album, Unfollow The Rules, on Friday, so I wanted to look back at his very interesting and varied catalog and pick out some favorites. 

Rufus Wainwright deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Danny Boy
2. Millbrook
3. Foolish Love
4. Sally Ann
5. Grey Gardens
6. Poses
7. One Man Guy
8. Vibrate
9. Beautiful Child
10. The Art Teacher
11. Gay Messiah
12. Tulsa
13. Between My Legs
14. You Go To My Head
15. True Loves
16. Give Me What I Want And Give It To Me Now!
17. Barbara
18. Respectable Dive
19. Montauk
20. Take All My Loves (Sonnet 40)

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Rufus Wainwright (1998)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from Poses (2001)
Tracks 8 and 9 from Want One (2003)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Want Two (2004)
Tracks 12 and 13 from Release The Stars (2007)
Track 14 from Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall (2007)
Tracks 15 and 16 from All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu (2010)
Tracks 17, 18 and 19 from Out Of The Game (2012)
Track 20 from Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets (2016)

In 1998, I went to see Sean Lennon at the 9:30 Club with Rufus Wainwright, two sons of famous musicians touring together in support of their respective debut albums. And I left the show more impressed with Wainwright's opening set, and have remained a fan ever since. When I was a lovelorn 16-year-old, that self-titled Rufus Wainwright album was one of my go-to emotional albums. At the 9:30 Club, he introduced "Sally Ann" by explaining that that was what they called the Salvation Army in Canada, so that was really my song after I went thrifting at the Salvation Army with a girl I liked. It wasn't lost on me that my unrequited romantic feelings weren't necessarily exactly the same as Wainwright's as a gay man, but the songs still resonated with me. Jon Brion and Van Dyke Parks did fantastic work on that album, I wish they'd continued to work on his later records, but I've read some things about how I guess Wainwright and Brion clashed a bit when collaborating. 

Back in the CD era, when I could only really afford to hear every album by my very favorite artists, I missed some of Wainwright's albums when they were released. Of the ones I heard for the first time when working on this playlist, All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu was a standout, I didn't know it was an entire voice-and-piano album, which was something I'd always wanted to hear Wainwright to do. I mean, the lush orchestrations that dominate his albums are great, but almost every singer-songwriter-pianist, I wish they did more music just sitting at a piano and singing.

I remember Rufus Wainwright speaking about his ambitions for really big time stardom early in his career. And I had a hard time really imagining what that would look like then as I do now, although I suppose the sky's the limit for a good piano ballad, of which he has many. But in retrospect he really has managed an impressive career, carving out a bigger niche than his father Loudon Wainwright III's also great catalog has, with his greater commercial success in Europe and Canada probably helping him remain a major label artist and decent concert draw in America. And of course a lot of these songs include appearances from the rest of the Wainwright/McGarrigle family, and "One Man Guy" is a great cover of a Loudon song from 1985's I'm Alright. 

Out Of The Game is my favorite album of his since Poses, I'm not a big fan of Mark Ronson but he was a good choice to give Wainwright a somewhat more contemporary sound. And there's a lot of great supporting performances on there, including Nels Cline trying on kind of uncharacteristic guitar tone on "Barbara." I wanted to include some of the stuff Wainwright has done outside of his singer-songwriter pop/rock albums, since he's really done some ambitious stuff. It didn't make sense to include the cast recording from his opera Prima Donna, which he doesn't perform on, but I did want some stuff from his album of musical adaptations of Shakespeare sonnets and his tribute to Judy Garland's 1961 classic Judy At Carnegie Hall. In the past I've regretted picking on musicians for forgetting lyrics in live reviews, because I've sung in public enough to know that we all drop the ball sometimes, but the part on "You Go To My Head" where Rufus sings "and I forgot the god-darn words" perfectly in the tune and meter of the song is so entertaining. 

11:56 AM

Sunday, July 05, 2020







I wrote about The Outsider, Homecoming, Vida, and Dead To Me for Complex's list of the best TV of 2020 so far. 

11:55 AM

Saturday, July 04, 2020





Today is the Foo Fighters' 25th anniversary, and I wrote a list of their 25 best live and studio collaborations for Spin. 

Spin also recently did a list of the 101 best albums of the 2010s, and I wrote about DaBaby, Superchunk, Dawn Richard, The 1975, and Taylor Swift. 

11:54 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 194: Willie Nelson

Thursday, July 02, 2020
















Yesterday, I wrote about my favorite country songs of the 2010s. But Willie Nelson's 70th solo studio album, First Rose Of Spring, is out on Friday, so today I'm gonna talk about perhaps the greatest country artist of all time. I've spent a lot of my time in quarantine poring over his massive discography, narrowing down this playlist, just marveling at how rich and endless his catalog is. 

Willie Nelson deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Where My House Lives
2. Darkness On The Face Of The Earth
3. Make Way For A Better Man
4. To Make A Long Story Short (She's Gone)
5. There's A Little Bit Of Everything In Texas
6. Buddy
7. Local Memory
8. Pins And Needles (In My Heart)
9. It's Not For Me To Understand
10. Wonderful Future
11. Sad Songs And Waltzes
12. Pretend I Never Happened
13. Hands On The Wheel
14. Moonlight In Vermont
15. Permanently Lonely
16. I'm A Memory
17. The Highway
18. Country Willie
19. Heartland with Bob Dylan
20. We Don't Run
21. I've Just Destroyed The World (I'm Living In)
22. Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way
23. Picture In A Frame
24. I Miss You So
25. Bring It On
26. One More Song To Write

Track 1 from ...And Then I Wrote (1962)
Track 2 from Country Willie - His Own Songs (1965)
Track 3 from Make Way For Willie Nelson (1967)
Track 4 from The Party's Over (1967)
Track 5 from Texas In My Soul (1968)
Track 6 from Good Times (1968)
Track 7 from My Own Peculiar Way (1969)
Track 8 from Both Sides Now (1970)
Track 9 from Yesterday's Wine (1971)
Track 10 from The Willie Way (1972)
Track 11 from Shotgun Willie (1973)
Track 12 from Phases And Stages (1974)
Track 13 from Red Headed Stranger (1975)
Track 14 from Stardust (1978)
Track 15 from Always On My Mind (1982)
Track 16 from Me And Paul (1985)
Track 17 from A Horse Called Music (1989)
Track 18 from The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories? (1991)
Track 19 from Across The Borderline (1993)
Track 20 from Spirit (1996)
Track 21 from Teatro (1998)
Track 22 from Rainbow Connection (2001)
Track 23 from It Always Will Be (2004)
Track 24 from American Classic (2009)
Track 25 from Band Of Brothers (2014)
Track 26 from Ride Me Back Home (2019)

On Willie's 87th birthday in April, Texas Monthly published a giant comprehensive ranking of all 143 albums he's ever released. And I've enjoyed kind of using that as a guide as I went through some of the dozens of albums I hadn't heard before -- it's kind of wonderful to be able to put on a different album by the same artist almost every day and never come anywhere close to running out of new stuff to check out. I focused on just the half of those that were solo studio albums, but in 80 minutes I couldn't even cover half of those. But with songs from 26 albums over the course 57 years, this is by far the most far-reaching playlist I've ever made in these series (the previous records were the John Prine playlist, which spanned 47 years, and the Aretha Franklin playlist, which covered 22 albums). And I wanted to really spread out the selections, so you get music from every era, there's no gap of more than 5 years between tracks here. 

Willie Nelson released his first album a few months after Bob Dylan released his, so they're right there neck and neck as arguably the two longest-running active recording artists in American music -- and prolific as Dylan is, Willie Nelson has had a much more relentless recording schedule, particularly in recent decades. 1992 was just about the only year since 1964 that he didn't release an album, and a lot of those years he released two or three or even four albums. He went through patches of writing less and focusing on recording covers and/or revisiting his earlier compositions, but still stacked up an incredible songbook. Willie wrote or co-wrote 18 of these songs, so the other 8 still give a decent span of his work as an interpreter of other people's songs.

One thing that's interesting about Willie Nelson's catalog is seeing how he slowly picked up different aspects of his sound and his identity over the years. His inimitable singing style and the soulful melancholy of his songs was there from day one, but he didn't get his iconic guitar Trigger until album #9, 1969's My Own Peculiar Way. And he didn't make an album with his live band The Family (drummer Paul English, bassist Bee Spears, harmonica player Mickey Raphael, and sister Bobbie Nelson on piano) until album #16, 1973's Shotgun Willie. I definitely hear Raphael's distinctive harp two albums earlier on The Words Don't Fit The Picture, but haven't been able to verify the personnel on that album. English, who was Willie's drummer for 50 years and the namesake of the album Me And Paul, died in February at the age of 87. 

Willie Nelson made his first concept album comprised of other people's songs on album #7, the tribute to his home state Texas In My Soul, in 1968. It featured three songs by his Texas honky tonk hero Ernest Tubbs, including "There's A Little Bit Of Everything In Texas." Album #13 was the more spiritual and ambitious concept album Yesterday's Wine in 1971, and then albums #17 and #18 were ,Willie's most famous concept albums and arguably his creative pinnacle: the heartbreaking divorce album Phases And Stages, and the character-driven song cycle Red Headed Stranger. One of the remarkable things about Red Headed Stranger is that Nelson wrote relatively little of it -- the recurring "Time of the Preacher" theme, a couple instrumentals, and the brief "Blue Rock Montana" -- while stringing together covers and traditionals into a resonant storyline. 

Some songs, like "Darkness On The Face Of The Earth," Willie Nelson recorded over and over, a couple times in the '60s and then again in the '90s. And sometimes he'd record an incredible song once on a low-selling album and then never again, like "Pins And Needles (In My Heart)," which I've been absolutely obsessed with ever since I heard it. "Buddy" is Ron Swanson's favorite song on Parks & Recreation, and "Wonderful Future" is one of a handful of Nelson songs featured in the movie Our Idiot Brother, where Paul Rudd plays a character who names his dog Willie Nelson. Both of those songs are non-singles from fairly obscure albums from before Nelson's commercial breakthrough, and both excellent songs, so I have to conclude that the comedy professionals that chose those songs are true blue Willie Nelson fans. 

There were only a handful of new Willie Nelson compositions on the dozen albums he released from 1977 to 1982, his commercial peak thanks to huge records like Stardust and Always On My Mind. But even when he's singing standards, Willie Nelson went against the grain and did things his way -- almost all his most successful albums from the first half of his career have a backstory about how hard he had to fight just to get it made the way he wanted. In 1984, Nelson recorded 25 of the songs he wrote in the '60s and '70s as beautifully simple voice-and-guitar solo performances, and the master tapes were taken by the IRS when his assets were seized in the early '90s. Nelson negotiated releasing the album as a fundraiser to pay his back taxes, and The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories? was a brilliant publicity stunt that raised millions and got his life back on track. But it's also a really affecting record that showed Willie to be the best curator of his own songs. You expect a song called "Country Willie," first recorded in 1965, to be a celebratory theme song, but it's a poignant and sad little tune, rendered even more beautifully on The IRS Tapes than the original. 

Willie Nelson kicked off his late period revival with 1993's Across The Borderline, a Don Was-produced album with stripped down production and covers of songs by non-country artists like Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel -- in a way it was ahead of the curve, since it was released a year before the first of Johnny Cash's celebrated albums with Rick Rubin. It features "Heartland," which Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan co-wrote and sang together (Dylan has also covered one of my favorite Shotgun Willie tracks, "Sad Songs And Waltzes," in concert). But Nelson also followed his peers at other times -- he made Teatro with Daniel Lanois and Emmylou Harris, on the heels of their success with Harris's Wrecking Ball album. But it never really felt like Willie Nelson was chasing a comeback or an award -- he'd make a great record, and then gather up another producer and another set of songs and do it all again 4-12 months later. I was pretty happy to find that he had covered one of my favorite Tom Waits ballads, "Picture In A Frame." My last album had a song that I'd started out going for a Tom Waits vibe and then by the time I'd finished it I was going for more of a Willie Nelson vibe. 

One of the remarkable things about Willie Nelson's later period is that while he understandably stopped writing often in his 60s and released only a handful of new originals in his 70s, he became a prolific writer once again around his 80th birthday he became prolific again. 4 of the albums he's released since 2014's Band Of Brothers are comprised primarily of new songs co-written by Nelson and his producer Buddy Cannon. There's some really lovely tracks on those records about aging, mortality, looking back on a long life, and looking forward to whatever's left, and "One More Song To Write" felt like a perfect note to end the playlist on. 

12:29 PM

The Top 100 Country Singles of the 2010s

Wednesday, July 01, 2020








One the reasons I started doing year-end single lists by genre on here in 2012 is that I wanted to zoom in on stuff I wasn't always listening to, including country. And it really did get me looking at the country charts every week and keeping a country station or two programmed on my car radio more consistently. I never did the snobby "I listen to everything except country" thing, but I never really heard country growing up so I came around to it, both the classics and the modern hits pretty gradually, but by the end of the decade I felt really ready to make this list. 

I already did an R&B list, and rap, pop and rock lists are still to come. Maybe I will go back and do a 2000s country list after that. Here's the Spotify playlist of every song here. 

1. Kacey Musgraves - "Merry Go ‘Round" (2013)
#10 Country Airplay, #63 Hot 100
I remember driving home from work late one night when a DJ on the local country station said they were gonna try out a new song. And from that first moment I heard “Merry Go 'Round,” and went straight home and listened to the other songs Musgraves had, I kinda knew she was gonna be a big deal on some level, whether or not it was on the country radio level. I'm still sometimes surprised how much Golden Hour grew her audience, though, and how many people love that album but don't necessary know "Merry Go 'Round" or Same Trailer Different Park. 

2. Lady A - “Need You Now” (2010)
#2 Hot 100, #1 Country Songs
It can be tricky to figure out where to list songs that sort of straddle two different years, even moreso when they straddle two different decades (for instance, Maren Morris's "The Bones" made a lot of chart impact in 2019, but it's gotten so much bigger recently that instead of putting it on this list, I'm going to save it for the 2020s list in ten years). "Need You Now" came out and broke through in 2009 but peaked on the charts in early 2010, and it arguably hasn't been topped by a bigger country crossover hit since then -- "Cruise" and "Body Like A Back Road" are the only ones that come close, and I don't think either quite got there. Lady Antebellum finally came to grips with their name being bad and became Lady A last month, I guess we'll see if it sticks. 

3. Eric Church - "Springsteen" (2012)
#1 Country Songs, #19 Hot 100
Eric Church has more songs on this list than any other artist, and his longtime collaborator Jay Joyce has more songs on this list than any other producer, and this was their biggest song and the one that made me an avid fan of Church. Trading on classic rock nostalgia was a big crutch for country music in the last decade, and "Springsteen" hits a couple obvious Bruce references while only vaguely summoning the sound of a wistful midtempo E Street tune, but that softly gleaming piano line and evocative lyric give Church a chance to do what he does best instead of simply creating a pastiche. 

4. Josh Turner - “Why Don’t We Just Dance” (2010) 
#1 Country Airplay, #35 Hot 100
Josh Turner is this tall handsome dude with an almost unbelievably deep voice, and I always figured he'd have become one of the biggest stars in country if he wasn't also devoutly religious and primarily made very stern and serious gospel country songs like "Long Black Train." Even his highest charting and most carefree single is an aw shucks wholesome song about moving the couch against the wall to cut a rug in the living room, but it has such a gentle charm and every piece of the tune clicks together beautifully.

5. Eli Young Band - "Even If It Breaks Your Heart" (2012)
#1 Country Songs, #29 Hot 100
The "write what you know" axiom ensures that there are a whole lot of songs about making music and the life of a musician, and a lot of them tend to strike me as kind of boring and indulgent, whether self-pitying or self-mythologizing. But Texas's Eli Young Band (Eli and Young being the last names of two members, not the first and last name of one member as I assumed for years) really nailed it as far as I'm concerned, all the hope and longing and beaut and anxiety that comes with dedicating any amount of your life to making music. Fittingly, "Even if It Breaks Your Heart" played over the opening scene of the TV series Nashville. 

6. Jon Pardi - "Dirt On My Boots" (2017)
#1 Country Airplay, #37 Hot 100
PardiNextDoor (not his actual nickname to anybody but me) locked down the boot-themed country song niche when he followed his breakthrough single "Head Over Boots" with the even bigger "Dirt On My Boots." But I think the part of Pardi's neotraditionalist vibe that I appreciated the most is how prominently the fiddle is mixed on California Sunrise. 

7. Midland - "Drinkin' Problem" (2017)
#3 Country Airplay, #45 Hot 100
One of the few band bands (as in playing instruments, not a vocal group) that broke through on country radio in the 2010s, Midland spiked their neotraditionalism with a little nudie suit retro glamor, appropriate for a band of showbiz lifers that includes a soap opera actor and a video directing buddy of Bruno Mars. And their debut single "Drinkin' Problem" was country's best ode to alcohol of the decade, tipping a hat to the dangers of addiction with the ambivalence and irreverence of a George Jones drinking song. 

8. Darius Rucker – “Wagon Wheel” (2013)
#1 Country Airplay, #15 Hot 100
Hootie & The Blowfish's biggest hit, "Only Wanna Be With You," was dotted with references to Bob Dylan's 1975 songs "Idiot Wind" and "Tangled Up In Blue." The band sent the song to Dylan's publisher when it was first release to no response, but once it became a massive hit, Dylan got a large out-of-court settlement from the band. Nearly 20 years later, Dylan was also part of the biggest hit of Darius Rucker's solo career, three albums into his reinvention as a country artist. Old Crow Medicine Show's most popular song, "Wagon Wheel," was essentially written around a song fragment that Dylan had sung on a widely bootlegged 1973 studio outtake, and once again Darius Rucker was the one that bottled it up and made it a big winning singalong for the pop charts. 

9. Little Big Town - "Pontoon" (2012)
#1 Country Songs, #22 Hot 100
Little Big Town's greatest asset will always be the quartet's four part harmonies, but every successful group with multiple vocalists will eventually figure out which voice really resonates with people. It took Little Big Town a while: in their first 10 years on the charts, they only had three top 10 country hits, each with a different lead singer or combination of lead singers. Then they kicked off their more successful second decade with their first Jay Joyce-produced single, and the reverb Joyce put on Karen Fairchild's vocal instantly brought out the star quality in her voice that would be on proinent display on most of their hits from that moment forward. 

10. Maren Morris - "My Church" (2016)
#9 Country Airplay, #50 Hot 100
"My Church" is another one of those songs that's burned into my memory for the first time I heard it, and instantly made a note of the artist and knew whatever album they were about to release was gonna be one of my favorites of the year. In a genre were actual Christianity competes with religious fervor for the music's stars and history, "My Church" managed to be a little sacrilegious while being so reverent about country that nobody was offended. Michael Busbee, Morris's co-writer and co-producer on "My Chuch" and most of her two major label albums, died of brain cancer last September at 43, a terrible loss for music. 

11. Luke Combs - "When It Rains It Pours" (2017)
#1 Country Airplay, #33 Hot 100
The old joke country songs are often a litany of personal misfortune (I lost my job, my wife left me, and my dog ran away, etc.) doesn't really apply to what country radio plays anymore. Fittingly, however the one song that did play off of that stereotype flipped it on its head entertainingly: the guy's girl leaves him, and it sets off a streak of good luck instead of bad luck. Luke "Puffy" Combs (not his actual nickname to anybody but me) has been on a historic the last few years, with his first 8 singles all going to #1 on country radio, and I have no idea how long it will continue, but "When It Rains It Pours" will always be my favorite from this run. 
























12. Miranda Lambert - “The House That Built Me” (2010) 
#1 Country Airplay, #28 Hot 100
One of only three country songs nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys in the 2010s, "The House That Built Me" was a tearjerking instant classic, the crown jewel of Miranda Lambert's pretty impressive career. And she only heard the song because her fiance was about to record it, and thank god he let her have it, there's no way it would be as good as a Blake Shelton song. 

13. Brett Eldredge - "Don't Ya" (2013)
#1 Country Airplay, #30 Hot 100
Brett Eldredge released two singles at the beginning of his career that I didn't hear when they bounced around the lower reaches of the country charts. But the first time I heard "Don't Ya" on the radio was another one of those moments when I just knew instantly that this was someone I'd be hearing a lot from. He's got a lot more hits now, but he's never bent his deep resonant voice into as many catchy little riffs and runs as he does on this song. 

14. Maddie & Tae - "Girl In A Country Song" (2014)
#1 Country Airplay, #54 Hot 100
The defining legacy of mainstream country in the 2010s is, unfortunately, how much more male-dominated the charts and radio playlists became than they'dbeen in previous decades. It's still a huge issue -- there are 3 women in this week's country airplay top 10, which would be considered a good week by modern standards -- but it reached a tipping point about 5 years ago. "Bro country" was at its peak, Tomato-gate shook the whole radio industry, and two heretofore unknown teenage girls wrote the song that perfectly satirized teh whole situation with withering wit. 

15. Florida Georgia Line - "Dirt" (2014)
#1 Country Airplay, #11 Hot 100
Florida Georgia Line were the unapologetic poster boys for bro country, as lucrative and as loathed as Limp Bizkit were at their peak. But they've managed to survive the moment that defined them and become a career act with a relatively wide ranging sound. And that all started when the launched their second album with a song like "Dirt" that any number of artists would've been proud to release, instead of trying to remake "Cruise." 

16. Brothers Osborne - "Stay A Little Longer" (2015)
#8 Country Airplay, #65 Hot 100
I always assumed that Deale, Maryland siblings T.J. and John Osborne named their group the way they did out of deference to '60s bluegrass hitmakers The Osborne Brothers. But the musical template for Brothers Osborne really feels like The Allman Brothers Band, with John Osborne as the guitar hero who cuts loose on extended solos on the album version of "Stay A Little Longer," but still gets in some great licks on the radio single that chops off 90 seconds of the good stuff. 

17. Brad Paisley - “Water” (2010) 
#1 Country Airplay, #42 Hot 100
Brad Paisley started out the decade as mainstream country's resident hotshot guitarist, and had five country #1s in the 2010s -- not bad, but a clear step down from his ubiquity of the 2000s, when he topped the singles chart a dozen times. "Water" was the last of a string of 'noun' songs like "Alcohol" and "Ticks" where Paisley seemed to just start with a single word and riff on it entertainingly for a couple verses. It's such a simple, playful summer song that you barely even notice that almost half the track is instrumental, with Paisley ripping two guitar solos and leaving room for a nice fiddle section as well. 

18. Sugarland - “Stuck Like Glue” (2010) 
#2 Country Airplay, #17 Hot 100
The early 2010s were not a big time for country crossover -- other than "Need You Now" and Taylor, not much was scaling high on the Hot 100. But "Stuck Like Glue" broke big in that dry period, thanks to Jennifer Nettles, who gave the song the same manic conviction she later gave to 2019's funniest TV song, "Misbehavin'" from The Righteous Gemstones. 

19. Justin Moore - "You Look Like I Need A Drink" (2015)
#1 Country Airplay, #79 Hot 100
Justin Moore is kind of an underdog I find myself rooting for, a guy who's had a good run of hits -- "You Look LIke I Need A Drink" was the 5th of his 7 songs that have topped the country charts -- but hasn't really become a household name. Just a great vocalist, the kind of rich voice and charming drawl that reminds me of some of the best country singers, and can make a song like "Drink" feel like a short story unfurling with a melody. 

20. Tim McGraw - “Felt Good On My Lips” (2011) 
#1 Country Airplay, #26 Hot 100
One of the things I really changed my opinion on in the past 15 years or so of starting to follow country more actively is that Tim McGraw went from being someone I regarded as probably one of the best major artists to someone I roll my eyes at for having a dopey voice and mostly cheesy material. But "Felt Good On My Lips," the victory lap new song from his 4th greatest hits album, is the kind of big shameless pop song I might be disappointed to hear a lesser country artist sing, it's right at McGraw's level in the best way. 

21. Cam - "Burning House" (2015)
#6 Country Airplay, #48 Hot 100
One of my favorite things about country music that I've never researched to really find the origin of is the surprising appearance of the 7/8 time signature in slow songs and ballads. Cam's "Burning House," along with Blake Shelton's "Mine Would Be You," is one of my favorite hits of the last decade that had verses in 7/8 and choruses in 4/4. Cam hasn't released an album since Untamed, which featured "Burning House," and I really hope she gets a career resurgence, she writes some really interesting songs (and also released a great Christine And The Queens cover last year). 























22. Thomas Rhett - "Make Me Wanna" (2015)
#1 Country Airplay, #43 Hot 100
Thomas Rhett is a second generation country star (his father Rhett Akins, who had a string of successful singles in the ‘90s, has continued writing hits, including some of his son’s and the highest Jon Pardi and Blake Shelton songs on this list). And as one generation of singers gets older, Rhett stands as probably the biggest male country star under 40, at least until someone Luke Combs or Kane Brown catches up to his 15 chart-toppers. "Make Me Wanna" is far from the most famous of his hits, but it's always been my favorite, riding a lithe Bee Gees-inspired groove but still identifiably country. 

23. The Band Perry - "Better Dig Two" (2013)
#1 Country Airplay, #28 Hot 100
The Band Perry's big breakout hit "If I Die Young" was an earnest sentimental song about mortality, but they returned to launch their second album with a song that centered on death in a more morbidly funny way. Still, I was surprised when The Band Perry kind of fell off the country map and never made a third album, finally resurfacing a couple years ago with an experimental Rick Rubin-produced electronic EP. 

24. Taylor Swift - “Back To December” (2010) 
#3 Country Airplay, #6 Hot 100
It's weird to look back on 2010s Taylor Swift, 1 and a half albums of country and 3 and a half albums of pop. I don't think she'll ever totally return to the genre that made her a star, which is a shame, because I think she has more good songs like "Back To December" in her while the pop stuff already feels like it's running out of steam. 

25. Dierks Bentley - "Drunk On A Plane" (2014)
#1 Country Airplay, #27 Hot 100
A song with the title "Drunk On A Plane" could've been a full bore bro country party anthem, but Dierks Bentley opted to spin a little yarn and set the scene with a little heartbreak, so that once the big silly chorus gets going, there's that little bittersweet pathos that really makes the song more charming than it has a right to be.  

26.Jason Aldean f/ Kelly Clarkson - “Don’t You Wanna Stay” (2011) 
#1 Country Airplay, #31 Hot 100
Kelly Clarkson is a great country singer in addition to being a great pop singer, and I'm a little annoyed that the American Idol from Texas hasn't just given in and made a full-on country album. But I'll take these occasional duets and detours if that's all she wants to do. 

27. Thompson Square - “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not” (2011) 
#1 Country Airplay, #32 Hot 100
There are so many country songs like this, where the context leading up to the chorus changes each time, and the last time you get to something like a wedding or a funeral. And it gets me every time, especially this one. It's sappy, but it works. 

28. Eric Church - “Drink In My Hand” (2011) 
#1 Country Airplay, #40 Hot 100
The overwhelming majority of Eric Church's biggest hits are the delicate, thoughtful midtempo tracks, and a lot of his harder edged singles got ignored by country radio (or even crossed over a little to rock radio, like "The Outsider"). The exception is "Drink In My Hand," his first #1 and still his signature rocker. 

29. Toby Keith - "Beers Ago" (2012)
#6 Country Songs, #52 Hot 100
Toby Keith will always get more derision from non-country fans than the average country star, and I suppose it's justified to an extent. But man, he really had a fantastic run of singles, for a good 15 years the hits just poured out of him. As that run started to come to an end in the early 2010s, he released so many alcohol-themed singles in a row ("Red Solo Cup," "Beers Ago," "I Like Girls That Drink Beer," "Hope On The Rocks," and "Drinks After Work") that it started to feel like a weird cry for help. Good songs, though. 

30. Kane Brown - "Good As You" (2019) 
#1 Country Airplay, #36 Hot 100
Kane Brown is the country star I'd put money on being the most likely to thrive throughout the 2020s, and part of that is because he's someone who's not afraid to put a drum machine on a track or collaborate with people like Khalid and Marshmello. But mostly it's because when he steps away from all that stuff and just does a twangy ballad like "Good As You," it sounds fantastic. 

31. Sam Hunt - "House Party" (2015)
#1 Country Airplay, #26 Hot 100
At one point not too long ago, Sam Hunt would have seemed the best bet to become country's commercial future. But then he kinda disappeared for a while, and finally delivered his second album recently, 5 years after the first, losing a lot of momentum in the process. That's fine with me, since I always rolled my eyes at the Drake-ish talk-singing tracks that made him an avatar of hip progressive country, but I at least found "House Party" pretty irresistible. 

32. Blake Shelton - “Honey Bee” (2011) 
#1 Country Airplay, #13 Hot 100
In the weeks after Blake Shelton released "Honey Bee," he married Miranda Lambert and began his run as one of the celebrity coaches on NBC's The Voice -- very quickly, this guy who'd been plugging along for a decade as a minor star would become a household name on primetime TV and half of country's new power couple. So "Honey Bee" probably would've become by far his biggest hit at the time even if it wasn't one of his best songs, but it absolutely is. 

33. Kenny Chesney - "Til It's Gone" (2014)
#5 Country Airplay, #73 Hot 100
Like all the big country superstars of the 2000s, Kenny Chesney isn't as big as he used to be, but he's the one that's stayed closest to the top of the heap. He's had over a dozen #1 songs in the last decade, and just last month he beat Drake out on the Billboard 200 to tie Garth Brooks for the country artist with the most #1 albums. "Til It's Gone" was a relatively minor hit for him, but I thought it was a career high point, great majestic arena rock sound with an interesting structure where the last minute of the song was this leisurely decrescendo. 



























34. Little Big Town - "Girl Crush" (2015)
#3 Country Airplay, #18 Hot 100
The response to "Girl Crush" played out so strangely -- it's not actually a song about same-sex attraction, but the lyric teased that possibility enough that some country listeners and radio programmers objected to the song. And, a little like "Old Town Road" a few years later, the news coverage of the controversy and the subsequent counter-backlash fueled the song's huge success as it became the biggest hit of Little Big Town's career, and the second-biggest country song of 2015. It's a good song, but it was definitely a bit odd when it got performed at award shows as if it was an important progressive moment for LGBTQ causes when it's more like a classy "I Kissed A Girl" than anything else. 

35. Lee Brice - "A Woman Like You" (2012)
#1 Country Songs, #33 Hot 100
An incredibly mawkish, schmaltzy, sentimental song, that I am enough of a sappy old married person to enjoy. 

36. Carly Pearce - "Every Little Thing" (2017)
#1 Country Airplay, #50 Hot 100
Another beautiful production from the late Michael Busbee, so brooding and haunted and textured and vulnerable that I was a little surprised that it carried a new artist to #1

37. Thomas Rhett - "Marry Me" (2018) 
#1 Country Airplay, #30 Hot 100
The first 66 seconds of "Marry Me" are a textbook schmaltzy country ballad. And then, Thomas Rhett nonchalantly deploys the lyric's big twist, and carries on with the rest of the song without breaking the mood. It's absolutely brilliant, particularly when it would've been so easy for him to just do another blissful wife guy song like "Die A Happy Man" 

38. Jimmie Allen - "Best Shot" (2018) 
#1 Country Airplay, #46 Hot 100
A lot of my memories of hearing country music when I was younger are from the 10 years when I lived in Delaware. So I've always really rooted for Jimmie Allen, not just as one of the few Black singers on the country charts but as a guy from Sussex County, Delaware who went to high school not far from where I did, just a few years after me. There was a decent pop remix of "Best Shot" but the original country version is definitely the best. 

39. Chris Stapleton - "Broken Halos" (2018) 
#1 Country Airplay, #45 Hot 100 
Chris Stapleton is a big bearded southern rocker who became a darling of Nashville after writing hits for more clean cut stars like Kenny Chesney and Luke Bryan. And a few months after his 2015 solo debut Traveller was released to great reviews and modest sales, the CMA Awards became a coronation when he swept the major awards and the album rocketed to #1 and he's been headlining arenas ever since. Still, it was almost 3 years before country radio found a Stapleton song to really get behind, and it didn't top the airplay chart until after it'd already won a Grammy. But "Broken Halos" is a gorgeous song, I'm glad it became the big one. 

40. Luke Combs - "Beer Never Broke My Heart" (2019) 
#1 Country Airplay, #21 Hot 100
When Luke Combs showed up a couple years ago, another big bearded guy with a raspy voice, I regarded him as kind of a more accessible Chris Stapleton. And he's kind of justified that impression with his huge run of singles, some of which were a little too mawkish and MOR for me. But he's great at big boisterous anthems, and I never tired of hearing "Beer Ne

41. Eric Church - "Record Year" (2016)
#1 Country Airplay, #44 Hot 100
Another Eric Church song that sees emotions through the prism of music, but with way more references than "Springsteen" so I was able to make a whole playlist of the music he tips a hat to in "Record Year." 

42. Darius Rucker - "For The First Time" (2018) 
#1 Country Airplay, #58 Hot 100
Hootie & The Blowfish always had a country vibe to me even when they first got played primarily on rock radio, so there was a sense of inevitability about Darius Rucker's solo success as a country act. But I like that he'll still work a reference to R.E.M. into one of his bigger singles. 

43. Montgomery Gentry - "Where I Come From" (2012)
#8 Country Songs, #71 Hot 100
Montgomery Gentry, co-led by '90s country star John Michael Montgomery's big brother Eddie, had a pretty good string of rowdy anthemic singles in the 2000s. And "Where I Come From" was the last notable one from that run, with a big rousing chorus that ends with"Nobody's gonna call the cops where I come from!" And then, in 2017, Montgomery Gentry came to a tragic end when Troy Gentry died in a helicopter crash, flying when he could've taken a car much like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Kobe Bryant. Celebrities: stay away from helicopters! It's not worth it. 

44. Taylor Swift - "Red" (2013)
#8 Country Airplay. #6 Hot 100
"Red" was the end of an era, the last Taylor Swift single promoted to country radio, one of her few co-writes with Dann Huff, who had a hand in a ton of songs on this list. She's dipped her toe into country radio on occasion (writing a Little Big Town hit, singing backup on a Sugarland single, and an unsuccessful radio campaign for "New Year's Day"), but nothing major, and "Red" is still one of my favorite songs she's ever made. 

45. Rascal Flatts - "Yours If You Want It" (2017)
#1 Country Airplay, #71 Hot 100
It kinda felt like Rascal Flatts spent the 2010s walking peacefully into the sunset, releasing little of consequence, and announcing a farewell tour this year that they ultimately canceled because of COVID-19. But "Yours If You Want It," their final #1 if they really do disband, was a pretty damn good one to go out on. And a few months ago there was a video of a rapper in a ski mask singing two of the big Rascal Flatts hits from the 2000s, so who knows what weirdness the future holds for them. 

46. Dan + Shay - "Speechless" (2019)  
#1 Country Airplay, #24 Hot 100
Scott Hendricks, Dan Smyers
Dan + Shay, one half of whom is former pop singer Shay Mooney who was once signed to T-Pain's Nappy Boy Entertainment, remind me a lot of Rascal Flatts. And like Rascal Flatts, I find them irritating the majority of the time, and very occasionally find their harmonies and schmaltzy songs irresistible. And I thought "Speechless" was by far the best of their run of huge crossover hits that also included "Tequila" and "10,000 Hours" with Justin Bieber. 

47. Jake Owen - “The One That Got Away” (2012)
#1 Country Airplay, #51 Hot 100
I love the way "The One That Got Away" starts, that acoustic guitar strummed so hard it's almost clipping. And I love the way it ends, with the song's opening couplet sung one more time, a little softer and more wistfully. The song in between those two moments is pretty great too. 

48. Carrie Underwood - "Southbound" (2019)  
#3 Country Airplay, #64 Hot 100
In the decade that women got pushed off country playlists, Carrie Underwood reigned as one of the few women who was still a sure thing, but I didn't think she did much that was as memorable as the early hits after she won American Idol. But "Southbound" was just pitch perfect, one of the few country summer anthems in recent memory that felt musically distinct enough that I didn't mind the familiar lyrical tropes. 

49. Brad Paisley - "Southern Comfort Zone" (2013)
#2 Country Airplay, #54 Hot 100
"Southern Comfort Zone" was the rare Brad Paisley song I hated when I first heard it, I think I just found all the little clips of stuff like "The Andy Griffith Show" kind of cloying. But it grew on me big time, I love the way it just builds and builds and builds over 5 minutes and hits all these perfect little sentimental notes over that insistent backbeat. 

50. Keith Urban f/ Miranda Lambert - "We Were Us" (2013)
#1 Country Airplay, #26 Hot 100
Keith Urban has a lot of good singles, there were a lot of songs I could've put on this list that just weren't quite as memorable as his 2000s hits. But his song with Miranda Lambert really stuck with me, it doesn't feel like a hyped up superstar duet but it's easily one of the best songs of the decade where two country singers found the perfect middle point between their respective sensibilities. 




































51. Maren Morris - "I Could Use A Love Song" (2017)
52. Eric Church - "Give Me Back My Hometown" (2014)
53. Jon Pardi - "Head Over Boots" (2016)
54. Gary Allan - "Every Storm (Runs Out Of Rain)" (2013)
55. The Band Perry - "DONE." (2013)
56. Kelsea Ballerini - "Peter Pan" (2016)
57. Justin Moore - "Point At You" (2013)
58. Little Big Town - "Day Drinking" (2014)
59. Thomas Rhett - "Die A Happy Man" (2016)
60. Zac Brown Band - "Keep Me In Mind" (2012)
61. Luke Bryan - “Rain Is A Good Thing” (2010) 
62. Florida Georgia Line f/ The Backstreet Boys - "God, Your Mama, And Me" (2017)
63. Hunter Hayes - "I Want Crazy" (2013)
64. Ashley McBryde - "A Little Dive Bar In Dahlonega" (2018) 
65. Jana Kramer - "Why Ya Wanna" (2012)
66. Casey James - "Crying On A Suitcase" (2012)
67. Jason Aldean - "You Make It Easy" (2018) 
68. Keith Urban f/ Julia Michaels - "Coming Home" (2018)  
69. Eric Church f/ Rhiannon Giddens - "Kill A Word" (2017)
70. Travis Denning - "David Ashley Parker From Powder Springs" (2018)  
71. Carly Pearce - "Hide The Wine" (2018) 
72. The Band Perry - "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" (2014)
73. Justin Moore - "Til My Last Day" (2012)
74. Carrie Underwood – “Undo It” (2010)
75. Brad Paisley featuring Alabama - “Old Alabama” (2011) 
76. Brothers Osborne - "Shoot Me Straight" (2018)  
77. George Strait - "Give It All We Got Tonight" (2013)
78. Eli Young Band - "Dust" (2014)
79. Miranda Lambert - "Automatic" (2014)
80. Brett Eldredge - "Beat of the Music" (2014)
81. Keith Urban - "Somewhere In My Car" (2014)
82. Jason Aldean - "When She Says Baby" (2014)
83. Eric Church - "Some Of It" (2019)  
84. The Band Perry - “If I Die Young” (2010) 
85. Luke Bryan - "Knockin' Boots" (2019)  
86. Thomas Rhett - "Sixteen" (2019)
87. Maren Morris - "'80s Mercedes" (2016)
88. Blake Shelton f/ Gwen Sebastian - "My Eyes" (2014)
89. Parmalee - "Already Callin' You Mine" (2015)
90. Eric Church - "Talladega" (2015)
91. Dierks Bentley f/ Elle King - "Different For Girls" (2016)
92. Old Dominion - "Snapback" (2016)
93. Brandy Clark - "Girl Next Door" (2016)
94. Midland - "Burn Out" (2018)  
95. Thomas Rhett - "Star Of The Show" (2017)
96. Dan + Shay - "How Not To" (2017)
97. Justin Moore - "Kinda Don't Care" (2017)
98. Jason Aldean - "Any Ol' Barstool” (2017)
99. Morgan Wallen f/ Florida Georgia Line - "Up Down" (2018)   
100. Chris Stapleton - "Nobody To Blame" (2015)

12:23 PM