TV Diary

Friday, April 30, 2021




a) "Mare Of Easttown" 
The "investigation of a teen or child's murder in a small town full of secrets" genre of miniseries has really exploded in the past decade, it feels like one or two of these shows pop up every year. Only a couple of those shows have veered into any kind fantasy or heightened reality direction like the genre's obvious forerunner "Twin Peaks," though, and "Mare Of Easttown" heads in the opposite direction of extreme realism. Despite the familiar territory, however, I'm all in after a couple of episodes. The first episode made my heart break for Cailee Spaeny's character even before she turned up dead, Kate Winslet's performance is kind of casually brilliant (I love when she went to the fancy author's event and shoved an hors d'oeurve behind a couch cushion), her dynamic with Evan Peters is entertaining. And Craig Zobel, director of my favorite feel-bad movie of the 2010s, Compliance, is so good with all the scene-setting small town Pennsylvania details. I liked Phyllis Somerville's little bit in the first episode, it reminded me how much I like her and then I saw the "in loving memory" note in the credits and found out that she passed away last year. 

b) "Shadow & Bone" 
My wife has read a couple of the books in this series so as usual she's been able to explain to me a little of what's going on in Netflix's new fantasy YA franchise, I'm not really hooked on the story yet but the cast and the special effects are pretty good so I'm enjoying it. 

c) "Rutherford Falls" 
"Parks And Recreation" is, for me, one of Michael Schur's lesser creations, so I was iffy about his new show that to some extent seemed to be another one about civics class nerds working in local government. But the first episode sets an interesting plot in motion and it seems to be maybe tonally a little more like "The Good Place" in terms of how the humor and the personality clashes work. Plus it's pretty cool to see a show with an Indigenous showrunner and actors and writers that has kind of a frank sense of humor about an aspect of American culture and history that most shows wouldn't know the first thing about getting a laugh out of. 

d) "Chad" 
Adults playing children is something that works fine in sketch comedy but I tend to find it more irritating than funny if not downright uncomfortable in a series or movie. A lot of people love the show "PEN15" but I just couldn't stomach more than an episode or two. But Nasim Pedrad was consistently great in her 5-year "SNL" tenure and I've always wanted to see more of her since then, so I was willing to give "Chad" a chance. And it doesn't help that Chad, the 14-year-old boy Pedrad plays, looks almost exactly like the kid Martin Short played in the movie Clifford, but this show is pretty hilarious at times ("obviously I'm a huge feminist but if you could redirect your evil female energy") so maybe I can get past my hangup. 

e) "Why Are You Like This" 
It's interesting to see the American comedy zeitgeist refracted in other countries in shows like "Why Are You Like This," which feels a bit like an Australian answer to "Broad City." Not derivative per se but certainly the stars/writers are poking fun at themselves in a similar way. 

Another comedy from a different part of the world that kind of feels like it would be a little too hip and of-the-moment for all but a handful of American networks, starring Brandon and Domnhall Gleeson as best friends who are not related, which is kind of weird considering how much they look like each other. Domnhall's been in a lot of stuff but I haven't seen Brandon in anything before and he's got great comedy chops, very fearless. 

g) "The Nevers"
Another show with Irish accents that are very enjoyable to listen to. Joss Whedon created this show and worked on the first half of the first season before stepping away from the show amidst his professional taking a dive last year, and it's been pretty awkward watching HBO try to market the show without mentioning him and critics trying to set up the forthcoming post-Whedon episodes as inevitably far better than the ones airing right now. But who knows, maybe the show will get great without him, I've never really had too much attachment to his work give or take "Firefly," so I'm trying to just enjoy it as another silly HBO show, and the premise is kind of cool and the mostly unfamiliar cast is excellent, Amy Manson seems to really make the most of her scenery-chewing villain role. 

h) "Home Economics" 
An excellent ABC sitcom about the complicated relationship between 3 adult siblings who are in very different financial situations, with the brilliant casting decision of having the wealthiest sibling played by  Jimmy Tatro, best known for his pitch perfect portrayal of an absurdly obnoxious teenager in "American Vandal" a few years ago. As someone who doesn't really have warm feelings towards "That '70s Show" but regards Topher Grace pretty highly as a comic actor, I'm happy to see him in a really promising new show, although the weakest part of every "Home Economics" episode is when they force him into some contrived slapstick physical comedy scenario. 

i) "Them" 
People are pretty unhappy about this show, and I get it just from the little I watched and what I read about later episodes. "Lovecraft Country" tread similar territory and occasionally went arguably too far, but "Them" seems to exist a lot more artlessly for shock value. 

j) "Cruel Summer" 
This miniseries has kind of a novel structure, in that it's constantly jumping between three timelines: the same day in three consecutive years, before during and after some kind of kidnapping plot gone awry. I don't really find it too engaging beyond the cleverness of that format, though. 

k) "Rebel" 
Episodes of "Rebel" open with a slightly silly chyron that the show is "based on Erin Brockovich's life today," I guess to differentiate it from the events earlier in her life that the movie Erin Brockovich were based on. But instead of having Sagal play Brockovich, she's playing a similarly feisty character who goes by the ridiculous name Rebel, and the whole thing is a little too cartoony for its own good. 

l) "Kung Fu" 
The CW made a shrewd decision to reboot the old white guy martial arts show "Kung Fu" with an actual Asian American lead, kind of like what people wanted the "Iron Fist" series to be. And it's a decent little action series, not as campy as the source material but still pretty broad. 

m) "Big Shot" 
It's kind of funny that in between enormous Star Wars and Marvel event series, Disney+'s programming is stuff like "John Stamos is a coach in Coach Stamos." "Big Shot" manages to be about as well written and aware of sports show conventions as it can be, but it's not exactly a materpiece. 

n) "Dad Stop Embarrassing Me!" 
Jamie Foxx is rightly praised as a generational talent who can do a staggering number of things well, but apparently he's not too stuck up about it to do an extremely silly family sitcom on Netflix about his life as a single father. I kind of respect that, but the show's not really any good, despite the way he throws himself into it with typical commitment. I liked how when the characters smoke, the smoke is really poorly CGI's into the scene. 

o) "Zero" 
Netflix's "Zero" is about a Black teenager in Italy who feels invisible and then gains the actual superpower to turn invisible, which is a great premise, but I haven't watched too much of the show yet, it hasn't totally hooked me. 

p) "The Way of the Househusband"
This is an anime about a yakuza boss who retires to become a househusband for his career girl wife, and it's just such a great over-the-top satire of anime action tropes, I'm finding it even funnier than I normally would because my 11-year-old son watches practically nothing but anime these days. 
 
q) "Everything's Gonna Be Okay" 
The first season of "Everything's Gonna Be Okay" was a really charming and memorable portrait of two teen sisters whose parents are both dead being raised by their older brother. And the second season, more than any show I've watched in the past year that takes place during the COVID-19 pandemic, really seems to capture what life at home during the pandemic has been like, what everyone being home all the time has done to families. The episode with Richard Kind and Maria Bamford was fantastic. 

r) "Breeders"
Another sort of insightful comedy about family in its second season, "Breeders" can be a little tough to watch sometimes - some episodes have very few laughs at all - but I'm finding it really engrossing any way. 

s) "Manifest"
My attention wandered a lot during the first season of this show, and coming back to it for the second season, I feel like I have less and less of an idea what's going on, I think I'm getting off the bus now. 
 
t) "Saturday Night Live"
I thought things were going pretty well with "SNL" kind of shaking off its post-Trump hangover, at least until they announced that Elon Musk is hosting an episode soon and kind of brought some unpleasant feelings back. But Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman have really been doing great out of the featured player set, and Melissa Villasenor has really hit her stride, I think she might be the one who gets her due whenever Kate McKinnon decides to stop carrying the show on her back. 

u) "Exterminate All The Brutes"
Raoul Peck makes some very strong points in this HBO miniseries about colonialism and genocide, but I think a lot of the show's personality comes straight from Peck's decision to do the voiceover narration himself, his voice has a really commanding presence, almost a Werner Herzog sort of thing. 

v) "The People V. The Klan" 
A CNN miniseries about a woman who successfully sued the KKK after son was lynched in 1981, pretty crazy story, can't believe I had never heard it before. 

w) "Sasquatch" 
The people in this Hulu series are about as intense as you'd expect people in a documentary about Bigfoot to be, I don't know if I believe any of this stuff but there's a reason people are obsessed with the possibility that it's true. 

x) "Wahl Street" 
It's kind of weird that Mark Wahlberg, the only billion dollar box office movie star with hate crimes on his rap sheet, is so devoted to vanity projects, like "Entourage" and "Wahlburgers" and this HBO docuseries, about how cool and relatable his exploits with his family and friends are. But this one even more than the others just makes him feel like the most vacuous careerist bro, there's really just nothing under the surface, it's all surface. But it's kind of nice to see that Marky Mark is still friends with at least one member of the Funky Bunch, Ashey Ace (although I'd really appreciate an update on Hector The Booty Inspector). 

y) "Infinity Train" 
One of my favorite animated shows of the last few years just wrapped its 4th and final season, I don't think it was their best (or at least my 5-year-old hasn't watched it over and over like the other seasons) but it was a solid one, I enjoyed the whole story of Ryan and Min-Gi's band and related to it. 

z) "The Barbarian And The Troll" 
I grew up on stuff like "Sesame Street" and "Fraggle Rock" and kind of wish there was more puppetry on contemporary kid's TV. But watching this, which looks less like Jim Henson stuff and more like "Crank Yankers," I dunno, the style of puppetry definitely matters. I do like this show's sense of humor and satirical take on fantasy tropes, though. 

7:36 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 232: Kate Bush

Tuesday, April 27, 2021



Kate Bush is one of the 2021 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Devo, Carole King, Iron Maiden, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Todd Rundgren, The Go-Go's, Rage Against The Machine, and New York Dolls, among others. 

Kate Bush deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. James And The Cold Gun
2. The Saxophone Song
3. Kite
4. Full House
5. Coffee Homeground
6. Violin
7. Blow Away
8. Delius (Song Of Summer)
9. Get Out Of My House
10. Leave It Open
11. The Morning Fog
12. Jig Of Life
13. Mother Stands For Comfort
14. Reaching Out
15. Deeper Understanding
16. Never Be Mine
17. Why Should I Love You?
18. Lily
19. Mrs. Bartolozzi
20. Among Angels

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from The Kick Inside (1978)
Tracks 3 and 5 from Lionheart (1978)
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Never For Ever (1980)
Tracks 9 and 10 from The Dreaming (1982)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from Hounds Of Love (1985)
Tracks 14, 15 and 16 from The Sensual World (1989)
Tracks 17 and 18 from The Red Shoes (1993)
Track 19 from Aerial (2005)
Track 20 from 50 Words For Snow (2011)

Kate Bush has been a massive star in the UK for her entire career, but she's ever quite been that big in America, so I really knew of her much when I was younger. I knew her work with Peter Gabriel and her biggest U.S. hit "Running Up That Hill," but even that wasn't quite at the inescapable level of '80s synth pop songs. But I also came of age at a time when two of the coolest and most popular female solo artists were Tori Amos and Bjork, both of whom were heavily influenced by Kate Bush, so I kind of grew up hearing echoes of her without realizing it until later -- to say nothing of how Big Boi from Outkast and a couple generations of indie artists worship Kate Bush. So it's been fun to delve into her catalog and see what all the fuss is about. 

When Kate Bush was 16, demos of over 50 songs she'd written were shopped to record labels, but nobody was interested until a mutual friend passed her demos to Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. Gilmour produced some professional quality demos with famed Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick that helped her get a record deal with EMI, and a couple of them, including "The Saxophone Song," appeared on her first album. 

Bush's debut single "Wuthering Heights" topped the UK charts and she was a big deal from there on out, which is kind of hard to imagine just based on how eccentric and proggy her first few records can be. I feel like the only kind of comparable thing that's happened in my country in my lifetime with a teenage girl becoming a chart-topping star with such an idiosyncratic, uncompromising sound is Billie Eilish, but even that's in a very different context. Bush didn't tour from 1979 to 2014, putting her in an elite club of major acts who didn't tour in support of some of their biggest albums (including The Beatles, Steely Dan, R.E.M., and Talking Heads).  

The early stuff is growing on me but Hounds Of Love and The Sensual World are definitely more immediately palatable albums to me, bigger drums and and less ornately complex arrangements but still a lot more personality and originality than most synth pop records of that era. Hounds Of Love is a cool album because it's very cleanly divided into a side 1 of Bush's biggest and most accessible pop songs and a side 2 that's an epic mini-suite titled The Ninth Wave, 7 interconnected songs inspired by Tennyson's Arthurian poems. She sort of repeated the same format on Aerials, a double album where the 1st disc features distinct songs and the 2nd disc, subtitled A Sky Of Honey, is one long piece that's meant to represent the 24-hour cycle of a single day. 

"Deeper Understanding" is a startlingly prescient song from 1989 about the nascent Internet ("As the people here grow colder, I turn to my computer/ And spend my evenings with it like a friend"). Appropriately, Bush chose this song as a single when she later released an album of re-recordings of old songs, 2011's Director's Cut. The original "Deeper Understanding" predates by quite a few yeras what I think of as the quaint early songs about the Internet like Britney Spears' 1999 track "E-Mail My Heart" or Prince's 1996 song "My Computer," which Kate Bush actually sang backing vocals on. Prince also played and sang backup on "Why Should I Love You?" from Bush's The Red Shoes and it's a great song, kind of an uncannily perfect melding of the sounds of two artists who always sort of lived in their own sonic worlds but admired each other's work.  

7:47 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 231: Carole King

Friday, April 23, 2021





Carole King is one of the 2021 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Devo, Iron Maiden, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Todd Rundgren, The Go-Go's, Rage Against The Machine, and New York Dolls, among others. As I noted in Spin a couple years ago, this is long overdue, because King was nominated once in 1989, and then a year later was inducted in the non-performer category alongside her ex-husband and collaborator Gary Goffin for their '60s songwriting work, but then King wasn't nominated for the Hall proper again for 30 years. Hopefully she'll get in this time. 

Carole King deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. I Didn't Have Any Summer Romance
2. Now That Everything's Been Said
3. No Easy Way Down
4. Spaceship Races
5. Tapestry
6. Way Over Yonder
7. Home Again
8. Where You Lead
9. Back To California
10. Music
11. Brighter
12. Feeling Sad Tonight
13. Bitter With The Sweet
14. Haywood
15. A Quiet Place To Live
16. Welfare Symphony
17. A Night This Side Of Dying
18. Wrap Around Joy
19. One Was Johnny
20. So Many Ways
21. Time Alone
22. Disco Tech
23. Passing Of The Days
24. Snow Queen

Track 1 from The Dimension Dolls (1962)
Track 2 from The City's Now That Everything's Been Said (1968)
Tracks 3 and 4 from Writer (1970)
Tracks 5, 6, 7 and 8 from Tapestry (1971)
Tracks 9, 10 and 11 from Music (1971)
Tracks 12 and 13 from Rhymes & Reasons (1972)
Tracks 14, 15 and 16 from Fantasy (1973)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Wrap Around Joy (1974)
Track 19 from Really Rosie (1975)
Track 20 from Thoroughbred (1976)
Track 21 from Simple Things (1977)
Track 22 from Welcome Home (1978)
Track 23 from Touch The Sky (1979)
Track 24 from Pearls: Songs of Goffin and King (1980)

Obviously, Carole King is the ultimate example of a songwriter who transitioned from doing behind-the-scenes work for other artists to becoming a star in her own right. And though she was reticent to perform or tour until after the success of Tapestry, she actually recorded quite a bit as an artist in the decade before that when she and Gary Goffin were enormously successful Brill Building songwriters. She released several solo singles in the '50s and '60s, some on Don Kirshner's Dimension Records label. When Dimension landed a huge hit with "The Loco-Motion," a song King and Goffin wrote for their babysitter Little Eva, the label released The Dimension Dolls, a compilation album featuring several songs apiece by King, Little Eva, and The Cookies (a later lineup of the '50s girl group whose original members had become Ray Charles' Raelettes). The five Carole King songs on that album included her first Top 40 hit as an artist, "It Might As Well Rain Until September," but it would be 9 years before she had another. 

After King divorced Goffin and moved to California, she formed a band with future husband Charles Larkey and Danny Kortchmar, a brilliant guitarist and songwriter perhaps best known for his work with Jackson Browne who'd play a major role in many of King's solo albums. That band, The City, released one album in 1968, and it's a pretty underrated little gem. Two songs from that album later appeared on King's 1980 solo album Pearls. To me it's kind of a mystery why Carole King's first solo album Writer basically did nothing commercially, even though it was released 7 months before Tapestry on the same label, with largely the same sound, and a single featuring James Taylor, whose career had just exploded that year. Writer isn't as good an album as Tapestry, sure, but not by a huge margin, in my opinion. 

Of course, Tapestry is the shining achievement of Carole King's recording career, and justifiably so. Nearly every song on it was a hit, whether for King or for someone else. And even one of the songs that wasn't, "Where You Lead," was re-recorded by King and her daughter Louise Goffin as the theme song of "Gilmore Girls." One of my favorite chapters of David Hepworth's book Never A Dull Moment details how Carole King and Joni Mitchell recorded Tapestry and Blue at the same time in the same building with some of the same personnel and equipment -- two unimpeachable classics, possibly the two most important female singer-songwriter albums of all time, both unique and fairly different from each other.  

Carole King would be an important figure even if she had done nothing of note after Tapestry, and if you didn't know better you might assume she didn't, since that album's place in the canon has grown and grown to the point of eclipsing all her other work. But she was a prolific major star for long after that, and nearly every album she made in the '70s peaked in the top 5 and/or went gold, with a string of over a dozen Top 40 hits. Music, released at Christmastime a few months before Tapestry won big at the Grammys, is estimated to have sold over a million copies in its opening week, a mind-boggling number in the pre-SoundScan era. 

9 out of King's top 10 songs on Spotify are from Tapestry, and the only exception is a surprising one -- "Bitter From The Sweet," an album track from 1972's Rhymes & Reasons. It was the b-side to the album's only hit, "Been To Canaan," but it has over 10 times as many streams as that song, or any other song on the album. I've scoured YouTube comments and other corners of the internet trying to figure out why, and haven't found any notable covers, samples, or film or television placements. It doesn't seem to be nearly as high on King's top songs on Apple Music, so I'm guessing it's a Spotify algorithm aberration, much like the Pavement one detailed in this Stereogum piece. But it's a good song with a funky bassline and a pretty brass arrangement, can't complain if some digital quirk elevated the song. 

1973's Fantasy stands out in Carole King's discography for the way it plays as a 'song cycle' with segues that run from one song into the next -- I included 3 consecutive tracks that work together especially well. Her next album, 1974's Wrap Around Joy, featured two of her biggest post-Tapestry hits, "Jazzman" and "Nightingale." It's also notable in that King co-wrote every song on the album with David Palmer, otherwise best known for his brief tenure in an early lineup of Steely Dan, singing lead on "Dirty Work" and "Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)" on their debut album. 

I haven't seen the animated musical based on Maurice Sendak's books that the Really Rosie soundtrack was made for, but the songs on there are pretty charming. I always kind of want singer-songwriters who play piano to make more music with stripped down voice-and-piano arrangements, and 1976's Thoroughbred kind of fits that bill the best in King's catalog, the opener "So Many Ways" is gorgeous. People like to poke fun at the way almost every artist had at least one disco song in the late '70s. But it's kind of fun to hear the author of "The Loco-Motion" and other '60s dance craze hits try her hand at the disco on "Disco Tech" on 1978's Welcome Home, particularly since it was never released as a single. And it felt kind of perversely appropriate to swing straight from that song to possibly King's most country song, "Passing of the Days."  

9:54 AM

Thursday, April 22, 2021

 




Here's another track by George Bonanza that I played drums on, in addition to a couple of tracks of his I posted about in March that I'd helped with. 

9:41 AM

Movie Diary

Wednesday, April 21, 2021






a) Dark City Beneath The Beat
I was pretty thrilled to hear that T.T. The Artist's documentary about Baltimore club music was being exec produced by Issa Rae and released by Netflix. Of course, I announced many years ago that I'm writing a book about the same subject, and this mostly just reminds me that I still haven't finished it, which sucks, but I promise I will, and seeing this movie and all the positive attention it's gotten was definitely motivating. Dark City Beneath The Beat is a quick 65-minute movie full of dazzling performances from various local musicians and dancers, as much an extended music video as a documentary, full of places and people I know and love, so maybe it's hard for me to be objective about it, but I really enjoyed it. And there were some great documentary moments too -- I especially liked Blaqstarr talking about his first local hit, "Tote It," I've interviewed him multiple times and never got that story out of him. I was a little disappointed that only maybe half of the music in the movie was Baltimore club in the classic 130 beats per minute sense, but that at least served to show the musical variety of the scene as it is now.  

b) Spontaneous
Spontaneous, the directorial debut from screenwriter Brian Duffield, is a movie about how teenagers start spontaneously combusting at random, specifically members of the senior class of one high school. Someone is perfectly fine at one moment, and then they suddenly cease to exist, their blood spraying all over whatever friends or classmates are in their immediate vicinity. But it's mostly a pretty charming rom com about two of the teens who fall in love while they helplessly wait to see if they'll be the next ones to explode. And that odd combination of gore and comedy, of existential dread and romance, manages to work. This could be one of those movies that builds a cult over the years like Heathers or Jennifer's Body. 

c) Godzilla vs. Kong
I like a good fx spectacle as much as anyone, but modern Godzilla or King Kong movies tend to bore me -- it seems like the harder they try to stack the deck with skilled actors on the ground looking up at the monsters, the more futile the effort seems to be. Kong: Skull Island came the closest to actually using its overqualified cast well, but this falls far short of that, and it just made me sad to watch Bryan Tyree Henry pad out the movie with poorly written banter. Eiza Gonzalez in Godzilla vs. Kong is about the best anyone has looked in a movie since Eiza Gonzalez in I Care A Lot, though. 

d) Raya And The Last Dragon
As much as cable and various streaming services cost now, I'm loathe to pay extra for any individual movie. But my kids were both pretty excited to see Raya And The Last Dragon, and I figured buying it on Disney+ would be worth it, as much as kids tend to rewatch movies. But it was really just an okay movie and my youngest only ended up watching it twice, so it felt like kind of a wasted purchase to me. 

e) Jojo Rabbit
As someone who grew up on Mel Brooks lampooning the Nazis, so I can appreciate the kind of wild-eyed mischief that Jojo Rabbit is going for, although the movie only really took it a step further enough to make me laugh a handful of times. The songs used at the beginning and end of the movie were brilliant -- recognizing the songs and then suddenly realizing which versions they used was just hilarious. One of the better Best Picture noms of its year I suppose, but not a better movie than What We Do In The Shadows or Thor: Ragnarok. 

9:40 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 230: Devo

Tuesday, April 20, 2021




Devo are one of the 2021 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Iron Maiden, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Todd Rundgren, The Go-Go's, Rage Against The Machine, and New York Dolls, among others. And I love Devo and have long meant to include them in this series, so here's hoping they get in this year. I think just from an artistic standpoint, they're one of the most deserving, one of the most original bands to ever go platinum. 

Devo deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Space Girl Blues
2. Baby Talkin' Bitches
3. Uncontrollable Urge
4. Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')
5. Shrivel-Up
6. Praying Hands
7. Gut Feeling / (Slap Your Mammy)
8. Devo Corporate Anthem
9. Clockout
10. Wiggly World
11. Blockhead
12. Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA
13. It's Not Right
14. Snowball
15. That's Pep! 
16. Planet Earth
17. Don't You Know
18. Turn Around
19. Going Under
20. Love Without Anger
21. Enough Said
22. Pity You
23. Big Mess
24. Speed Racer
25. Out Of Sync
26. Don't Rescue Me
27. Puppet Boy

Tracks 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 from Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978)
Tracks 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 from Duty Now For The Future (1979)
Tracks 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 from Freedom Of Choice (1980)
Track 18 from the "Whip It" single (1980)
Tracks 19, 20, 21 and 22 from New Traditionalists (1981)
Tracks 23, 24 and 25 from Oh No! It's Devo (1982)
Tracks 26 and 27 from Shout (1984)
Track 1 from Hardcore Devo: Volume One (1990)
Track 2 from Hardcore Devo: Volume Two (1991)

When I made my Replacements playlist last year, I wrote about how I'd swap mixtapes with people in high school and college, and how my gateway for several bands, including Devo, was through somebody's homemade best-of tapes, which I'd listen to in my car for years and kind of supplanted my need to check out those artists' proper albums until much later. So about 2/3rds of the songs on this playlist are songs that were on a Devo mixtape somebody made me 20-something years ago, partly because someone else's favorite Devo songs informed what became my favorite Devo songs.  

The two albums Devo released on Enigma after being dropped from Warner Bros., 1988's Total Devo and 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps, are not currently on streaming services. And while it would've been nice to include some good later songs like "Happy Guy," I was okay with only really covering the group's work up to 1984, because they were kind of on a commercial and creative decline for the entirety of the '80s. 

I made the Deep Album Cuts series as an attempt to kind of provide a counterpoint to various acts' 'greatest hits' albums, but of course, some bands have actually made official collections with that concept. In 1990, a couple years before Public Enemy packaged an album of rarities as Greatest Misses, Warner Bros. released a Devo Greatest Hits collection alongside a Greatest Misses album. Inevitably, my playlist has 5 of the same songs as Greatest Misses (as well as a 3 non-singles that were on Greatest Hits). 

Around the same time in the early '90s, Rykodisc issued two Hardcore Devo compilations of the group's mid-'70s 4-track demos, including early versions of Q: Are We Not Men?  and Duty Now For The Future songs and tons of stuff that never wound up on a proper album. In 2014, shortly after Bob Casale's death, Devo celebrated the band's 40th anniversary with a tour of Hardcore-era material, which spawned the Hardcore Devo Live! concert album. So I thought it'd be cool to kick off the playlist with some of that stuff before their official debut. 

Of course, when Devo finally did debut in 1978, they arrived as this remarkable, fully formed phenomenon. The first track on their first album, "Uncontrollable Urge," was never released as a single, but it's always been heralded as one of the greatest Devo songs, if not the greatest. And over the years it's slowly seeped into pop culture, appearing in several movies including Wolf Of Wall Street. A cover of "Uncontrollable Urge" is the opening and closing theme music of "Ridiculousness," a show that airs on MTV literally dozens of times every week, so it's mind-boggling to contemplate how many times that song has been heard by millions of people in the past decade. 

One of the interesting things I learned recently was that Toni Basil was dating Gerard Casale in the early '80s when "Mickey" was a hit, and that song's parent album Word Of Mouth featured members of Devo backing her on three of their songs, including "Pity You" (retitled "You Gotta Problem") and the early Hardcore-era track "Space Girl Blues" (retitled "Space Girl"). 

Lately I've been reading Evie Nagy's excellent 33 1/3 book about Freedom Of Choice, and it's fascinating to hear about that album's genesis in granular detail, "Snowball" might be my #1 favorite Devo song. It's a bummer to hear the band talk about Duty Now For The Future as a misfire, though, some days I think it's actually my favorite Devo album, it's got loads of fantastic songs and sounds. I also included the non-album "Whip It" b-side "Turn Around," which was famously covered by Nirvana (as "Turnaround") on Incesticide. Speaking of covers by Seattle bands, The Posies have a fun cover of "Wiggly World." 

As someone who makes music with synthesizers and live drums, Devo is a big inspiration to me, especially those first 3 or 4 albums before they started using drum machines heavily. The late Alan Myers was just an incredible drummer, he helped Devo really become a rock band (there's a big contrast between the Hardcore Devo stuff before he joined the band and what they made after) but he was really coming up with interesting patterns that no other rock drummer of the era was, even the way Devo plays non-4/4 time signatures is different from other bands. It's kind of remarkable, for something that kind of started as a multi-media art project that was not meant to be primarily a touring and recording band, Devo's music is so good just by itself, whether or not you're taking in all the videos and conceptual stuff or the philosophy informing the songs. 

9:39 AM

Monthly Report: April 2021 Singles

Monday, April 19, 2021





1. Ava Max - "My Head & My Heart"
I couldn't stand Ava Max's first two hits "Sweet But Psycho" and "Kings & Queens," but I thought her album was alright outside of those tracks. And now she's finally got a single on the radio that I really like, "My Head & My Heart" is just a classic four-on-the-floor Europop banger with a great vocal melody. Here's the 2021 singles Spotify playlist that I add 10 songs to every month throughout the year. 

2. Pooh Shiesty f/ Lil Durk - "Back In Blood" 
It feels like it's been a while since a dark menacing gangsta rap song was on the radio and performed on "The Tonight Show" and stuff like that, it's kind of refreshing even if the DMX era is never coming back. 

3. Rosé - "On The Ground"
I really liked Blackpink's "Ice Cream" last year, which was very much the familiar K-Pop mold of kind of sounding like turn of the century hi-tech R&B. But Blackpink member Rose's debut solo single is something else entirely, although it sort of evokes the same era, a jangly pop/rock song that sounds like it could've been recorded by Natalie Imbruglia, written by U.S. hitmakers Amy Allen (Harry Styles, Halsey) and Jon Bellion (Justin Bieber, Maroon 5).

4. Olivia Rodrigo - "Deja Vu" 
Following up a song as big as "Drivers License" is a mixed blessing, and Olivia Rodrigo took the route of something that feels a little like a sequel, with some of the same woozy synths and a lyric that feels like it's about the same breakup from a slightly more angry perspective. That said, the way the drums and synths hit after the first chorus sounds fucking amazing and I hope this song becomes ubiquitous and doesn't kind of get lost in the shuffle like follow-ups to megahits sometimes do. I love the way the video ends looping back to the intro, I kind of wish the song did that too. 

5. Jimmie Allen f/ Brad Paisley - "Freedom Was A Highway" 
When I wrote about the Bettie James EP last year I singled "Freedom Was A Highway" out as my favorite track, so I'm glad they released it as a single, their voices sound great together and Paisley knocks out a great guitar solo. 

6. Daya - "Bad Girl" 
It's been almost 5 years since Daya's first album, and she's released a lot of singles in that time without much chart action. "Bad Girl" finally got her back on pop radio a little bit, though, I really enjoy Charlie Puth's songs sometimes when someone else sings them. 

7. Juicy J f/ Lil Baby and 2 Chainz - "Spend It" 
I liked this song when it was on The Hustle Continues but man it's been sounding great on the radio lately, I'm glad that Juicy J's recent resurgence as a producer has helped get one of his own songs out there a little too. 

8. Lil Nas X - "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)"
As with "Old Town Road," I think the "Montero" is a lot more entertaining because of the chart-topping spectacle and controversy and social media trolling that Lil Nas X has surrounded it with than it would be if it was just this simple catchy little 2-minute song. But it's fun to see him rile people up, and I'm curious what the album will sound like. 

9. DaBaby - "Masterpiece" 
The backlash to DaBaby seemed to peak around last summer when he was topping the charts with "Rockstar," so I don't know if that means he's too big too fail or if the commercial downturn is coming. "Masterpiece" has kind of performed below what most of his solo singles have done, but I think it's a good idea for him to put out something with more aggressive production like this after all the memes about his songs sounding like Scooby-Doo chase scene music or whatever, it's a great beat. 

10. Ashley McBryde - "Martha Divine" 
It's irritating sometimes how slowly country radio moves, "One Night Standards" took almost a year to peak on the charts so her label wouldn't even release a 2nd single from the album until that had happened. And it surprised me which one they chose, "Martha Divine" is almost the last song from Never Will that I expected to be a single, but it's a good one. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Masked Wolf - "Astronaut In The Ocean" 
For some reason, two of the biggest ascendant stars in U.S. popular music right now are rappers from Sydney, Australia. I don't like The Kid Laroi's music at all, but Masked Wolf's hit has a higher frequency of abjectly terrible lyrics ("I believe in G-O-D, don't believe in T-H-O-T"). 

9:38 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 229: Iron Maiden

Thursday, April 15, 2021





After being eligible for 17 years, Iron Maiden are finally one of 2021 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Todd Rundgren, The Go-Go's, Rage Against The Machine, and New York Dolls, among others. So I thought I'd dig in and build on my love of "Run To The Hills" and listen to a bunch of albums with Eddie on the cover.  

Iron Maiden deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Iron Maiden
2. Phantom Of The Opera
3. Wrathchild
4. Drifter
5. Hallowed Be Thy Name
6. 22 Acacia Avenue
7. Children Of The Damned
8. Where Eagles Dare
9. Die With Your Boots On
10. Back In The Village
11. Flash Of The Blade
12. Heaven Can Wait
13. Only The Good Die Young
14. Tailgunner
15. Childhood's End

Tracks 1 and 2 from Iron Maiden (1980)
Tracks 3 and 4 from Killers (1981)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from The Number Of The Beast (1982)
Tracks 8 and 9 from Piece Of Mind (1983)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Powerslave (1984)
Track 12 from Somewhere In Time (1986)
Track 13 from Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son (1988)
Track 14 from No Prayer For The Dying (1990)
Track 15 from Fear Of The Dark (1992)

I've always had a complicated relationship with metal. I love loud rock music, and I love aggression of the heaviest punk rock and the complexity of prog, and '70s hard rock and proto metal is very much my bread and butter. But that point where heavy metal really started to get codified into its own thing in the '80s, I've always found a lot of that music hard to love or listen to in anything but small doses and short sittings. But I've started to appreciate metal more, particularly NWOBHM stuff, in recent years, kind of seeing where these bands picked up where Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy left off and took things further. I also really dig that super dramatic Bruce Dickinson/Ronnie James Dio school of metal singers.  My brother-in-law and bandmate John loves Iron Maiden so he's played me stuff and gotten me more curious about the band, and I've been really digging the band's first decade lately. 

Iron Maiden was already on its 3rd lead singer by the time they recorded their first two albums with Paul Di'Anno. But the band had to cancel gigs because of Di'Anno's drinking and drug problems, and eventually replaced him with Samson singer Bruce Dickinson, who quickly became the definitive Iron Maiden frontman. But those first 2 albums are pretty good, and feature several songs that remained concert staples for decade, including "Iron Maiden," "Phantom of the Opera" and "Wratchchild." But the original versions of those songs still get more streams than the live renditions with Dickinson vocals on the platinum live album Live After Death. Bassist Steve Harris was always the primary songwriter, so they probably would've released "Run To The Hills" and "The Trooper" and become a huge band even if Di'Anno was still singing, so he really blew it on a monumental, near Pete Best level. The band actually bought him out with a lump payment when he left so he doesn't even receive royalties for those first 2 albums. 

A lot of Iron Maiden's perennial live favorites were the epics that were too long to be radio singles, like the 7-minute "Hollowed Be Thy Name" and "Heaven Can Wait." But I left off some longer ones like the 13-minute "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" just because I like to make these relatively digestible 80-minute playlists, and I could only fit in 15 songs as it is. I think my favorite song on here is "Where Eagles Dare," the instrumental section kicks so much ass and it really exemplifies how Iron Maiden's rhythm section could still really swing where later generations of metal bands rarely did. "Flash Of The Blade" is one of my favorites from a guitar standpoint, and "Only The Good Die Young" has an awesome full minute arena rock finale .I also kind of think Guns N' Roses probably copped the ending of "Mr. Brownstone" from "Back In The Village." 

9:30 AM

Tuesday, April 13, 2021





Spin made a list of the 50 best albums of 1981, and I wrote blurbs about Prince, Elvis Costello, Squeeze, and ELO.  

11:04 AM

Monthly Report: March 2021 Albums

Monday, April 12, 2021





1. Joyce Wrice - Overgrown
I don't think I had heard of Joyce Wrice before the day this album dropped, but I'm glad I caught wind of the positive buzz and checked it out, this is a really excellent independent album that could definitely pave the way for mainstream R&B stardom. Most of the album is produced by D'Mile, and I didn't even realize how much stuff I love that he's had a hand in (Diddy-Dirty Money, H.E.R., Victoria Monet, Ty Dolla Sign, and Lucky Daye, who guests on the standout "Falling In Love"). The Westside Gunn verse is one of the biggest mood killers in the history of R&B albums but otherwise the whole thing is great. Here's the 2021 albums Spotify playlist that I put all the new albums I listen to into 

2. Better Days - Better Days
I used to share a practice space with Jason Butcher's old band Among Wolves and I've been a big fan of his voice and his songs for a long time. So I was really excited to see that he's re-emerged from a couple of tough years with a new project, and the 7-song debut by Better Days recorded at Wright Way Studios in Baltimore is great. It's got a similar roots rock sound to most Among Wolves stuff but the single and standout "Ladyfingers" is kind of funky and minimalist with finger snaps and electric piano and lots of empty space between notes. 

3. Starrah - The Longest Interlude
Brittany "Starrah" Hazzard has written huge hits for Rihanna, Maroon, 5, Kevin Gates, and tons of other artists, and I've been following her career with interest ever since her early work with Jeremih, especially after I realized she went to the same high school that I did, years after I did (Cape Henlopen HS in Rehoboth, Delaware). I tried to interview a few years ago but apparently she's pretty private and her team was trying to figure out some weird thing where I'd submit questions and the interview would be animated, I don't know, it didn't work out. The Longest Interlude is her first solo project, aside from a 5-song thing with Diplo a few years ago, and it's pretty good, very chill midtempo autotune R&B sort of thing, reminds me a little of early solo Dawn Richard. 

4. Nick Jonas - Spaceman
It kind of feels like Nick Jonas has spent the last decade a bit like Michael Jackson spent most of the '70s, kind of bouncing between making solo records and making music with his brothers, sometimes having more success with one or the other and seemingly always fumbling around for the right musical direction. Spaceman is one of the best albums, maybe the best, that he's ever made, though, because he just locked in with one really versatile producer, Greg Kurstin, and made something with a sustained sound and mood that doesn't feel like it's trying to be everything to everybody, I think "Delicious" and "If I Fall" are my favorite tracks. Unfortunately, the album came out with little advance notice, got no radio airplay, debuted outside the top 10, and is maybe a week from dropping off the Billboard 200 entirely. 

5. Zara Larsson - Poster Girl
Poster Girl is another solid pop album that kind of came and went without making much of an impact, despite the fact that Zara Larsson has been releasing excellent singles for it, including "Ruin My Life" and "Love Me Land," since 2018. There was also a cute promo run where she played up being Swedish and did a livestream concert from a literal Ikea store in Sweden. "Need Someone" and "Poster Girl" are my favorite songs on here that I hadn't heard before the album, great bassline, definitely recommend this to fans of the last Dua Lipa album. 

6. Benny The Butcher & Harry Fraud - The Plugs I Met 2 EP
After hitting a new commercial high watermark with Burden Of Proof, it kind of feels like The Plugs I Met 2 is back to Griselda business as usual, another brisk half hour with a single producer and lots of Scarface imagery. But Benny is at the top of his game and Harry Fraud is a good foil for him, no misses on here aside from the Fat Joe and French Montana verses. And "Plug Talk" with 2 Chainz is a great one. 

7. Andrew Farriss - Andrew Farriss
When I was growing up, INXS was on MTV constantly, even well into the '90s, and I loved all their hits, and appreciate them as a band and their whole catalog even more now. The INXS videos always understandably had Michael Hutchence front and center with his 5 bandmates all toiling relatively anonymously in the background and occasionally mugging at the camera. But keyboardist/guitarist Andrew Farriss, possibly the least animated guy in those videos, was the musical mastermind of INXS, writing most of their songs with Hutchence, and has just now released his first solo album. He's a passable singer and is mining a more rootsy singer-songwriter aesthetic than anything INXS did, but I'm enjoying it and it's cool to see kind of an unsung genius finally step out on his own for the first time, I think "Drifting" is my favorite track. 

8. Rod Wave - SoulFly
Rod Wave has quietly built a really strong following in the last couple years -- "Heart On Ice" from his debut album was massive, but his next two albums have sold better, with the latest becoming only the 2nd rap album to top the U.S. charts so far in 2021. I don't know why he named his album after a Sepultura side project, but SoulFly is a pretty solid record -- if you've heard one Rod Wave song you've heard them all, but I appreciate his confidence in his sound, there's no big name producers on here and only one guest verse, from Polo G. I think my favorite track is "Blame On Me," I also like how he turns the time his stage collapsed into a little punchline on "OMDB." His first name is Rodarius, and I think Rodarius Wave has a nice ring to it, sounds like a scientific term. 

9. 24kGoldn - El Dorado
I interviewed 24kGoldn last year, early in "Mood"'s run as the #1 song in the country, and it was cool to talk to this guileless kid at the moment that a catchy little song he wrote with his friends was conquering the world. "Mood" is still inescapable -- it just notched its 30th week in the top 10 -- but both of his follow-up singles missed the Hot 100 entirely, and this album made a relatively small splash, so this might be his one big moment in the sun. I wouldn't count him out, he strikes me as a shrewd and clever guy, and he made El Dorado largely with the same friends that produced "Mood" and mines the same territory, bringing guests like Future and Swae Lee into that sound instead of trying to cop their style. 

10. Ghost Of Vroom - Ghost Of Vroom 1
It's not unusual for there to be some hard feelings and some messiness after a band breaks up, but I've often been saddened or confused my Mike Doughty's actions since Soul Coughing split 20 years ago: writing a whole memoir trashing his bandmates, sometimes refusing to play the band's songs at solo shows but also making a solo album of Soul Coughing re-recordings and doing a solo 25th anniversary tour of their debut album Ruby Vroom. So when I interviewed Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg last year I was happy to hear that he and Doughty had patched things up and were getting along better. Still, some weirdness persists: Doughty said in interviews that he'd attempted to reunite the band but not everybody was down for it, so instead he'd be making an album with Steinberg called 'The Ghost of Ruby Vroom' (this is doubly weird because the album's namesake Ruby Froom is a real person who is still alive and has made some good music of her own). For whatever reason, this didn't pan out, so Ghost of Vroom became a duo with Doughty and a different bassist, Andrew Livingston. And while I find this whole saga exhausting, the record is pretty good, it's fun to hear Doughty in a more playful mode than his singer-songwriter solo stuff and doing odd free associative rhymes over noisy, sample-filled bass grooves. 

The Worst Album of the Month: YBN Nahmir - Visionland
YBN Nahmir's biggest singles, 2018's "Rubbin Off The Paint" and the recent 65-second "Opp Stoppa," aren't exactly masterpieces, but Visionland still managed to be such a notably shitty album that on the release date people were openly ridiculing the song "Soul Train" on Twitter. YBN Cordae famously dropped the YBN from his name and left his crew on his journey to become the token young rapper that old rap fans think is wholesome and talented. And YBN Nahmir makes some clumsy gestures towards trying to be that kind of rapper too on the opening track "Still (Family)" with Ty Dolla Sign, and then the rest of the album is just straight down the middle boredom. At least the bay area track with E-40 and Too $hort is good. 

9:37 AM

TV Diary

Friday, April 09, 2021





a) "Made For Love" 
"Made For Love" is a dark comedy where the wife of a tech billionaire decides to leave him and finds that he's implanted a chip in her brain and can see and hear everything she's doing. That this story manages to be funny, while also having dramatic stakes, is a testament to Cristin Milioti, on a hot streak after Palm Springs. But there's also great turns by Ray Romano, as her father who treats his sex doll like a real person, and Patti Harrison from "Shrill" and the classic Nilla Wafers Twitter joke. There's also just a lot of surreal little touches, like the fact that there are characters named Jeff, Biff, Fiff, and Judiff. I'm actually kind of bummed there's only 2 episodes left, I hope it comes back for a second season. 

There are almost as many dark satirical twists on comic book superhero movies and shows now as there are MCU movies, and the premise of "Invincible" has enough in common with Amazon's biggest current hit "The Boys" that it's for the best that it's animated instead of live action. Love the voice cast (J.K. Simmons, Sandra Oh, Walton Goggins, Jason Mantzoukas, and Gillian Jacobs especially) and I've been hooked since the crazy ending of the first episode. 

I don't feel superhero fatigue that often but I definitely get it with this show. I never much cared for either of these characters in the Marvel movies, and Bucky & The Bird don't really work for me as a duo with their stale buddy cop banter -- they could've at least called Shane Black to punch up the dialogue. But I don't know if I think of this show as a failure per se unless I think about how it cost an astonishing $25 million per episode (for perspective, the trades shit a brick when "The Get Down" averaged $16 million an episode). 

d) "Calls" 
This Apple TV series is pretty novel -- a scripted drama with brief 15-20 minute episodes that are basically just the audio of telephone calls, with funky colorful screensaver visuals. I thought that each episode was a self-contained story, sometimes with similar unsettling sci-fi premises, until it became apparent that every episode tied together into one big narrative, which kind of gets explained and resolved at the end. Sometimes the voice acting is a little over-the-top and I wonder if it would've been better as a full-blown TV show and not a glorified podcast/radio drama, but I still really enjoyed it. 

This kind of feels like how there's now all these shows and movies about Gotham City that don't feature Batman, except it's the Sherlock Holmes universe without Sherlock (apparently he does pop up in some episodes but I haven't seen him yet). Pretty good show, though, solid cast of people I haven't seen before, aside from Clarke Peters from "The Wire." 

Serial killers are as American as apple pie, so it's interesting for once to see a true crime series about a killer from another part of the world like Charles Sobhraj, who killed a dozen hippies who vacationed in Asia in the '70s. I haven't gotten too far in to the series yet but I feel like they're nailing all the period details much more convincingly than most TV that takes place in the '70s. 

When I saw that there was an upcoming series with my first name in the title, naturally I hoped it would be good, but no such luck. This show has already attracted a ton of negative attention for the general politics of the show, and the fact that the Afghani title character is played by an actor of Indian descent. But to me it's just kind of frustrating in that usual Chuck Lorre CBS sitcom way where I can see a little spark of personality in the show but it mostly settles for mediocrity, and invariably features actors I really like and want to see in other things -- in this case Elizabeth Alderfer, who hopefully has not given up her role on "A.P. Bio" for this, but also Parker Young from "Enlisted" deserves better. 
 
After Aretha Franklin's death, two competing biographical projects went into production: Respect, a feature film due out this summer with Franklin's own choice of Jennifer Hudson playing her, and the third season of NatGeo's "Genius" series, starring Cynthia Erivo. It's always been clear which project had more prestige and money and probably will be of higher quality, but I still wanted to give this one a chance. The first 2 seasons of "Genius" did a pretty good job telling the stories of Einstein and Picasso and I liked that they were choosing a musical performer as one of their geniuses, and an 8-episode series had potential to cover more of her life and her art than a 2-hour film. And we're kind of fortunate to have 2 Oscar-level actresses who can really sing and are up to the task of portraying Aretha. Unfortunately, this whole thing drops the ball on a lot of levels, the dialogue is terribly clumsy and I never really buy Erivo's Aretha. Worst of all is David Cross, who's spent way more time satirizing bad drama in sketches than he has being a dramatic actor, and makes this thing feel like Walk Hard every time he's onscreen. He plays Jerry Wexler, and I thought "huh, Marc Maron usually gets these roles now" and sure enough, Maron is playing Wexler in the J-Hud movie. It's also weird when they get to the last episode and decide to suddenly start using photos and footage of the real Aretha, which just kind of highlights where Erivo's performance misses the mark. 

As someone who still has a crush on Katharine McPhee from the "American Idol" and "Smash" era, I'm glad she's still getting TV work, even if it's in an incredibly mediocre Netflix sitcom where she's a down-on-her-luck country singer that becomes a family's live-in nanny. 

This is a cute show, Nick and Koob are really entertaining characters. I actually didn't know that Emilio Estevez was in this show until he popped up halfway through the first episode, older and much more cantankerous, which was kind of enjoyable. In retrospect, it's kind of weird that an iconic kids' movie opened with the protagonist getting a DUI. 
 
Between this, "Beartown," and the "Mighty Ducks" show, three series about adolescent hockey players debuted in the space of about a month, which is kind of weird, although they're all fairly different shows. "Zero Chill" is pretty good for a teen dramedy, although TV shows are always so brazen with casting adults as high schoolers, Grace Beedie is 22 and really shouldn't be playing a 15-year-old. 

A legal drama on OWN, decent premise and cast but the production values feel kind of low, definitely not up to the same standard as other shows on the network like "Queen Sugar" and "Greenleaf." 

Cartoon Network really doesn't get enough credit, their daytime programming is as varied and original as Adult Swim and I'm totally glad that my kids have things to watch that are as great as "The Amazing World of Gumball" and "Craig of the Creek." "Elliott From Earth" might not prove to be quite as great from those shows, but it's off to a promising start with an entertaining story about a kid, his mom, and a dinosaur having adventures on a spaceship. 

The second season has gotten kind of intense as they've really started to play out the parallel universe implications of the U.S. and Soviet space programs becoming part of the '80s escalation of the cold war, complete with guns and missiles being sent to the moon. But I think the show has succeeded at being compelling at a character level, I've started to really feel attached to some of these folks, the Baldwin family drama is poignant and I've enjoyed the Tracy Stevens story arc, I think I just have a huge crush on Sarah Jones now. The dialogue really doesn't ring true to the period sometimes, though, I just doubt that people were saying "stay in your lane" or "alternative lifestyle" in 1982. 

I guess Zoey/Max/Simon will always be to some extent the engine driving this show and as much as I roll my eyes at TV love triangles I think they handle it well. My wife is not happy when Skylar Astin's not the boyfriend, though, she's very partisan in that regard. But I like that they've given Max and Mo their own love interests in recent episodes, Katie Findlay is really cute. 

The final episode of "Wynonna Earp" is airing this week but I just devoured every episode of the series in the past year so it doesn't feel like a long run for me. It feels like the show has gotten a little more cartoony and broad over time, perhaps Wynonna herself more than other characters, but I don't mind it, Melanie Scrofano has great comedic instincts and I kind of hope she does a full-on comedy after this. I'm also glad they brought back Dani Kind from "Workin' Moms" for this last run of episodes, Mercedes is a great character. 

This show continues to feel like lesser "Rick And Morty" in its second season, whether it's not good because Dan Harmon isn't working on it or it just has less developed character, I don't know. But it's growing on me, there's usually some insanely clever line every few minutes that makes me laugh pretty hard. I hope Thomas Middleditch gets fired from this and his other show, though, apparently he's a huge creep. 

The biggest storytelling strength of "Snowfall" is that they started the series at the beginning of the crack epidemic in L.A. so things weren't exactly dull in the beginning but everything is just escalating constantly and making the early seasons feel like the calm before the storm. It's 4th season takes place only maybe 2 years after they started, but the show is so much more violent, and they do a great job of really making it feel as horrifying as it should be, there's not too much of an action movie gloss on things. And it's just interesting to watch Franklin Saint's character evolve to where he is now, although now that I've heard Damson Idris speak in his real voice the American voice he came up with for the character sounds a little ridiculous, it's like the difference between Hugh Laurie and House. 

"Good Girls" is another show on its 4th season but, like "Snowfall," it's kind of covering so many crazy criminal operations from day to day that it's only been like a year or two in the show's timeline since the first episode. They were one of the shows that shut down production mid-season last year and didn't get to finish the storyline they were working on for season 3. So it's been nice to finally see them pick up those threads in season 4, I've been enjoying Andrew McCarthy's hitman and Lauren Lapkus's FBI agent. I feel like this show's music supervisor deserves praise, too, there's always great

This Spanish show is one of Netflix's best imports in recent memory, a really pulpy and stylized sort of action comedy about three prostitutes who get fed up with their abusive pimp, beat him nearly to death and go on the run. It's a pretty dark and fucked up show but its tone is kind of playful and light, in some ways it reminds me a lot of "Good Girls." There's a second season coming in July so I'm looking forward to more and them picking up at the last cliffhanger. 

This Mexican show on Netflix is about a girl who dies while parasailing and her brother who's determined to figure out who caused her death. It's really over-the-top and pulpy, not really my thing but I see the entertainment value. 

Apparently the novel Snabba Cash and the movie trilogy based on it are a big deal in Sweden, and this Netflix series is kind of just the first version really reaching America. I like it, though, good cast, strong first episode. 

Now that there's one or two docuseries about every major news story and most of them are mediocre, my expectations were pretty low for this 6-part HBO series about QAnon, I thought it would mostly just be rehashing stuff I already read. But the extent of the interviews with 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan and subsequent 8chan/8kun owners Jim and Ron Watkins wound up making it all compelling, just getting acquainted with these odd nerds at the center of this whole insane conspiracy theory movement, especially when the final episode made a strong case that Q was Ron Watkins all along. 

I'd never heard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist of 1990, this story is pretty crazy, I like the way they're unspooling the details in this Netflix docuseries. 

I thought comedian Jamie Lee was pretty charming on HBO's "Crashing," and on her new Netflix show she kind of helps guide couples through the process of getting married from the perspective that weddings are stressful and you should do whatever you can to stay sane and still enjoy the company of the person you're doing it with. It's a pretty cute little show. 

This Netflix docuseries just tells stories about people and their clothes, mostly regular people but also the saxophonist from The Lost Boys and his codpiece. It's kind of funny that they put the episode about nudists first, though, that kind of threw me off because it's obviously different from all the other episodes. 

9:46 AM

Friday, April 02, 2021

 



It's Bandcamp day once again, and I decided to release a couple of new Western Blot songs that I wrote last month. I've been recording every day of 2021 so there's a lot more to come this year. "Avoiding Everyone" and "Keep It Down" were mastered by Mat Leffler-Schulman and DeadmanJay did the cover art. 

8:23 AM

My Top 50 Country Singles of 2000-2009

Thursday, April 01, 2021





10 years ago, I listed my favorite singles of the 2000s, and did posts writing about my favorite rock, pop, R&B and rap songs of the decade. Last year, when I did the same for the 2010s, I covered the same genres and added country to the lineup. I'd like to go back and do lists for the '90s and other decades, and I feel like it'd be weird if I did country lists for every decade except the 2000s, so I'm just filling in that gap here. I really do love a lot of these songs and had fun revisiting them, though, they take me back to a time when watching CMT or putting on a country station was kind of a fun novelty for me as I got better at exposing myself to a genre that I like but didn't really grow up on. Here's the Spotify playlist of 49 of these songs (Garth's stuff is only streaming on Amazon). 

1. Sara Evans - "Suds In The Bucket" (2004)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #33 Hot 100
Sara Evans recorded plenty of nice, slick pop country, including a cover of Edwin McCain's power ballad "I Could Not Ask For More," but her biggest hit was also her most country, the surprise smash third single from her fourth album. It's a simple little love story told as small town gossip, cute and full of characters like the outraged preacher and the biddies in the beauty shop, but the song is ultimately swept up in the emotion of teenage love, not the judging eyes of the townsfolk. 

2. Keith Urban - "Somebody Like You" (2002)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #23 Hot 100
Keith Urban's stuff rarely scans as country to me, a lot of it just sounds like the king of big shiny guitar-driven pop/rock that started leaving the rock charts in the '90s and took safe haven on country radio. But he's great at it, so it's hard to argue with songs as catchy as "Somebody Like You," which does have a pretty great little prominent banjo part, and is even better with the extended jammy outro on the album version. It was produced by Dann Huff, a guy who's been kicking around the music industry so long that he played guitar on Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again" and Madonna's Like A Prayer, before becoming one of Nashville's most reliable hitmakers of the 21st century. 

3. Taylor Swift - "You Belong With Me" (2009)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #2 Hot 100
Taylor Swift's best early country hits kind of sounded like power pop with a little banjo deep in the mix too, so I'm not too surprised that she abandoned country entirely on her way to become one of the biggest artists of the 21st century. But "You Belong To Me" is still her high watermark for me, I don't know if she's really touched it in all those dozens of subsequent hits. I like the lyrics about being a cheerleader and she's in the bleachers. 

4. Brad Paisley - "Little Moments" (2003)
#2 Hot Country Songs, #35 Hot 100
Brad Paisley's two most reliable kinds of singles are shamelessly loving odes to his wife and playfully clever uptempo tracks that border on novelty songs. "Little Moments" is the one song that successfully splits the difference and balance Paisley's wit and sentimentality in equal doses. 

5. Toby Keith - "I Love This Bar" (2003)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #26 Hot 100
It's a shame that Toby Keith decided to write songs like "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" and "American Soldier" and become Nashville's right wing asshole poster boy of the George W. Bush era, because 95% of Toby Keith's singles are fucking bangers. It's funny how he sang "we like to drink our beer from a mason jar" about 5 minutes before that was considered more of a coastal hipster thing than a redneck thing. 

6. Big & Rich - "Save A Horse (Ride A Cowboy)" (2004)
#11 Hot Country Songs, #56 Hot 100
Seeing this video on CMT one day was a really memorable moment, on par with seeing My Chemical Romance on MTV for the first time the same year. Big & Rich's campy irreverent hick hop turned out to be kind of a fleeting moment in the mainstream country zeitgeist, but "Save A Horse" is a lot better than most of the stuff it foreshadowed, from "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" to 2010s bro country. And there are dozens of nerds who are still mad at Chuck Eddy for convincing them to buy an actual country album.  

7. Rascal Flatts - "These Days" (2002)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #23 Hot 100
I was a little salty last year when a rapper went viral singing this song in a ski mask and inserting references to "the trap" into the lyrics, because I really do unironically love this song and always have. 

8. Little Big Town - "Boondocks" (2005)
#9 Hot Country Songs, #46 Hot 100
Little Big Town didn't become reliable hitmakers until the 2010s, but "Boondocks" was a pretty big signature song that kept them afloat through their early years, and it remains maybe the best harmony showcase for all four members of the group. 

9. The Chicks - "Goodbye Earl" (2000)
#13 Hot Country Songs, #19 Hot 100
I can appreciate the symbolic power of the Dixie Chicks dropping the first half of their name last year, but it does make me kind of sad because it obscures the Little Feat-inspired origin of the name. Veteran songwriter Dennis Linde had been marking references to a character named Earl in hits by Sammy Kershaw and others for years, and "Goodbye Earl" as a playful meta way for him to kill off the Earl character and no longer feature him in songs. Instead, Earl gained a whole new degree of immortality when a group on the cusp of superstardom covered the song. 

10. Miranda Lambert - "Gunpowder & Lead" (2008)
#7 Hot Country Songs, #52 Hot 100
There's a long tradition of country songs where an abusive husband gets lethal comeuppance, and Miranda Lambert's early career highlight "Gunpowder & Lead" is in the more righteous and somber tradition than the more playful approach of "Goodbye Earl," but both are great songs. 

























11. Carrie Underwood - "Before He Cheats" (2006)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #8 Hot 100
Carrie Underwood's just defacing a car in "Before He Cheats," not murdering anyone, but still: the 2000s were a good decade for country songs about women getting revenge. 

12. Montgomery Gentry - "My Town" (2002)
#5 Hot Country Songs, #40 Hot 100
Duo acts were commonplace in pop music a few decades ago, but they've remained a uniquely resilient staple of country music, from Brooks & Dunn to Florida Georgia. And many of those duos seemed to come together when two singers had trouble finding success as solo artists, including Troy Gentry and Eddie Montgomery, whose younger brother John Michael Montgomery was a multi-platinum star in the '90s. Neither of them were powerhouse singers but they had a good dynamic together, and had a great run of singles including "Hell Yeah" and "If You Ever Stop Loving Me" before Troy Gentry's death in a helicopter crash in 2017. 

13. Shania Twain - "Up!" (2003)
#12 Hot Country Songs, #63 Hot 100
Between 1995 and 2002, Shania Twain released three of the biggest-selling country albums of all time, each of them moving over 10 million units, and then that remarkable run quietly ended: she took time off to deal with health issues, she divorced her songwriting partner and producer Mutt Lange, and she didn't release an album for nearly 15 years. Up! was the last and smallest behemoth of the Twain/Lange trilogy, but it might actually be my favorite, it takes their bright and bouncy aesthetic to an absurd new extreme, it actually sounds like an album where 9 of the song titles have exclamation points. 

14. Terri Clark - "I Just Wanna Be Mad" 
#2 Hot Country Songs, #27 Hot 100
Canada is full of country singers with its own scene and its own radio charts, as well as trailblazers like Hank Snow and Anne Murray, but outside of Shania Twain, relatively few modern acts have really had major success in America. Alberta's Terri Clark, however, had a pretty good run of platinum albums and radio hits in the '90s and early 2000s. Clark wrote most of her own hits with a great observational eye in the lyrics, but her biggest Hot 100 hit fell into her lap after Sara Evans made the mistake of passing on it. 

15. Brad Paisley - "Alcohol" (2005)
#4 Hot Country Songs, #28 Hot 100
On one level, "Alcohol" is just a goofy, fun country song to hoist a beer or throw back a shot to. But Paisley is one of modern Nashville's more conceptual writers, and he sings the entire song from the perspective of the concept of alcohol itself, getting a little philosophical with lyrics like "I am medicine and I am poison" before hitting the punchlines ("You had some of the best times you'll never remember with me"). 

16. Dierks Bentley - "Lot Of Leavin' Left To Do" (2005)
#3 Hot Country Songs, #47 Hot 100
I grew up reading about Dierks Bentley's holistic detective agency, and it surprised me when he embarked on a successful career as a country singer. He has a certain plainspoken charm that helps put his songs over even when I wonder if they'd be better served by a more capable singer, and "Lot Of Leavin' To Do" is the most traditional of his hits, in a good way. 

17. Toby Keith - "God Love Her" (2009)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #36 Hot 100
I don't know if this is one of Toby Keith's very best songs or if he just manages to elevate the cliche-ridden tale with the sheer force of his big resonant growl, but I love that last chorus with the breakdown when he hits the word "motorcycle." 

18. Lee Ann Womack featuring Sons of the Desert - "I Hope You Dance" (2000)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #14 Hot 100
"I Hope You Dance" is one of those incredibly sappy crossover hits that was just everywhere, but I think its success was deserved, that lyric and that melody really work. The backing vocals were by Sons Of The Desert, a group that had just lost the race to make their version of "Goodbye Earl" a hit before the Dixie Chicks. Oddly, two members of Sons Of The Desert are brothers named Womack but they have no relation to Lee Ann. 

19. Eric Church - "Hell On The Heart" (2009)
#10 Hot Country Songs, #67 Hot 100
Eric Church was my favorite country artist of the 2010s, and he didn't really hit the big time until 2011's Chief. But his excellent first two albums put him on the map with a series of minor hits, the best of which, "Hell On The Heart," did a good job of displaying the sound Church's producer Jay Joyce would soon be supplying to a number of other major artists. 

20. Gretchen Wilson - "Redneck Woman" (2004)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #22 Hot 100
When it briefly felt like Big & Rich's MuzikMafia had taken over country music, all of that had to do with Gretchen Wilson's quintuple platinum debut album and its lead single co-written by John Rich. And her win at the American Music Awards made her the first of many artists to receive the ire of Kanye West when an awards show didn't go the way he wanted it to. 
























21. Taylor Swift - "Our Song" (2007)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #16 Hot 100
"Our Song" is the definitive Taylor Swift country hit, her first #1 on any chart and her biggest song on country radio that didn't really cross over to pop. It's also all of her early songs in a nutshell, all the infatuation and overthinking and looking at her relationships through the lens of music. 

22. Gary Allan - "Watching Airplanes" (2007)
#2 Hot Country Songs, #43 Hot 100
In a pretty manicured era of country music, Gary Allan stood out with his raspy voice and soulful songs that seemed to carry the weight of a hard life that included his wife's suicide. "Watching Airplanes" is one of those songs where it's hard to imagine any of Allan's contemporaries pulling it off with the same gravitas, and that string arrangement is just killer. 

23. Faith Hill - "Mississippi Girl" (2005)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #29 Hot 100
Faith Hill had been a multi-platinum star since 1993, but after Shania Twain redefined the possibilities of how many records a female country singer could sell in the ensuing years, it kinda felt like Hill spent a while playing catch up and making her music as crossover-friendly as possible. The John Rich-penned "Mississippi Girl" was a pretty calculated song to kick off her return to country music, but I have to admit, I just like it more than her pop material. 

24. Luke Bryan - "All My Friends Say" (2007)
#5 Hot Country Songs, #59 Hot 100
Luke Bryan was, not counting Taylor's crossover-heavy work, the biggest country artist of the 2010s, absolutely huge and inescapable, and I usually changed the station when I heard his Jim Nabors honk of a voice on the radio. But one day I heard his debut single and realized that I really like it, even if it was all downhill from there. 

25. Kenny Chesney - "There Goes My Life" (2003)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #29 Hot 100
Kenny Chesney is another ubiquitous superstar that I have pretty mixed feelings about, particularly when he's singing his "no shoes nation" beach bum anthems. But he can really pull on the heartstrings with a sentimental ballad when he wants to. 

26. The Chicks - "Cowboy Take Me Away" (2000) 
#1 Hot Country Songs, #27 Hot 100
"Goodbye Earl" was a B-side when DJs started to play the song and campaign for a single release of its own, but the A-side, "Cowboy Take Me Away," was a major hit in its own right and another one of the fka Dixie Chicks' best. 

27. Toby Keith - "My List" (2002)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #26 Hot 100
"My List' is one of Toby Keith's few major hits that he didn't write, and it's a lot gentler than his usual fare. But it's a well written lyric and he sounds comfortable summoning a familial warmth that he otherwise doesn't often have much use for. 

28. Brad Paisley f/ Alison Krauss - "Whiskey Lullaby" (2004)
#3 Hot Country Songs, #41 Hot 100
"Whiskey Lullaby" is one of Brad Paisley's few major hits that he didn't write, and it has a darkness and drama to it that's rarely found in his own compositions. But he summoned everything he had as a vocalist and an arranger as well as the perfect duet partner to bring to life songwriter Jon Randall's chilling autobiographical song about alcoholic self-destruction.

29. Josh Turner - "Long Black Train" (2003)
#13 Hot Country Songs, #72 Hot 100
Country's gospel roots still occasionally shine through in uplifting, inspirational ballads with Christian themes, but "Long Black Train" was the rare hit with a little old testament fear of the temptations of the Devil. And I don't think anyone else could've made that song go mainstream but someone like Josh Turner, movie star handsome with one of the deepest, most somber voices Nashville had heard since Johnny Cash. 

30. Dolly Parton - "Better Get To Livin'" (2007)
#48 Hot Country Songs
Dolly Parton's legacy, in country music and in pop culture in general, seems to loom even larger now than it did at the height of her commercial success, and she's recorded 10 albums in the 20th century. But the only time in the last two decades that she really tried to play the game and cater to Nashville, with 2007's Backwoods Barbie, country radio more or less passed on a pretty excellent attempt at a comeback single. Still, she did get one more #1 with her Brad Paisley duet "When I Get Where I'm Goin'" in 2005. 

























31. Jo Dee Messina - "That's The Way" (2000)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #25 Hot 100
Artists on this list have come from all over the place, but Massachusetts native Jo Dee Messina is I'm pretty sure the only country singer from New England on here. The Tim McGraw-produced "That's The Way" was her highest charting Hot 100 song and got her first Grammy nomination, and it has the same slick sheen as a lot of pop country from the turn of the century but a nice dynamic rhythm section really livens it up. 

32. Joe Diffie - "It's Always Somethin'" (2000)
#5 Hot Country Songs, #57 Hot 100
I didn't really check out Joe Diffie's music and realize how much I like it until last year when he sadly became one of the first notable musicians to die of COVID-19. "It's Always Somethin'" was one of the last radio hits he had while his '90s career peak was winding down, although Jo Dee Messina took a cover of Diffie's album track "My Give A Damn's Busted" to #1 a few years later. 

33. Garth Brooks - "Wrapped Up In You" (2001)
#5 Hot Country Songs, #46 Hot 100
Scarecrow was the last album Garth Brooks released before his temporary retirement to focus on raising his kids, and kind of a rootsy back-to-basics record after the infamous Chris Gaines experiment. It feels like a forgotten chapter of his enormously successful career now, but "Wrapped Up In You" holds up as a pretty lovely little song. 

34. Carrie Underwood - "Jesus, Take The Wheel" (2005)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #20 Hot 100
Like other early "American Idol" champions, Carrie Underwood went straight to #1 with her debut single, but since it was pre-written for whoever won the season, it didn't have a trace of the first country "Idol" winner's actual musical identity in it. But she quickly remedied that situation with her next single, and in the end it was clear which song Carrie Underwood built her career on: "Inside Your Heaven," which I wouldn't be able to hum at this point, stalled at gold certification, while "Jesus, Take The Wheel" eventually went triple platinum. 

35. George Strait - "She'll Leave You With A Smile" (2002) 
#1 Hot Country Songs, #23 Hot 100
"She'll Leave You With A Smile" was George Strait's 50th #1 country single, as well as his biggest Hot 100 hit. And it's a reminder of how many hundreds of songs he had to record to get to that milestone that it was not even his first "She'll Leave You With A Smile," he released a completely different song with that title by different writers in 1997. They're both good but I think the right one was a hit. 

36. Tim McGraw - "Unbroken" (2002)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #26 Hot 100
I used to vaguely regard Tim McGraw as one of the best modern Nashville stars, but at some point I started to find his delivery really cloying, and now I reach for the dial pretty fast if I hear "My Next Thirty Years" or "Real Good Man" or even "Live Like You Were Dying." But out of his two dozen #1s, "Unbroken" is a relatively forgotten one that I really like, feels a little more lively and less saccharine than his biggest songs. 

37. Taylor Swift - "Tim McGraw" (2006)
#6 Hot Country Songs, #40 Hot 100
It's been a long time since she needed to trade on anyone else's name, but Taylor Swift got a little help from the name recognition of at the time probably the biggest star in country to get her debut single on the radio. Co-written by Liz Rose (who herself had written a Tim McGraw song, 2002's "All We Ever Find"), "Tim McGraw" is kind of like a lesser "Our Song" where Taylor and the boy actually do have a song (apparently her favorite McGraw song that she had in mind was 2004's "Can't Tell Me Nothin'," which is kind of amusing since Kanye West had a hit by that same title). 

38. Martina McBride - "Anyway" (2006)
#5 Hot Country Songs, #32 Hot 100
It kind of cracks me up how much this is the same song as "Do It Anyway" by Ben Folds Five, but slower and more serious, but I like both songs a lot. 

39. Toby Keith - "How Do You Like Me Now?!" (2000)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #31 Hot 100
Toby Keith became a crossover star with bumper sticker-ready songs like "I Wanna Talk About Me" and "Who's Your Daddy?" that transformed him from a relatively normal machocountry singer to some kind of strutting Johnny Bravo-style caricature of raging id. And "How Do You Like Me Now?!" is by far the best of those, the one that gives the Toby Keith character an origin story and some tender verses to launch the big triumphant chorus out of. 

40. Reba McEntire - "Somebody" (2004)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #35 Hot 100
Credit goes to Reba McEntire for continuing to release music and rack up radio hits the entire time she was starring in her eponymous sitcom for 6 seasons, she had a real multimedia empire going there. And "Somebody" is one of those songs that really deploys the power of her voice perfectly, that big ascending melody on the chorus has some beautiful harmonies. 

























41. The Chicks - "Not Ready To Make Nice" (2006)
#36 Hot Country Songs, #4 Hot 100
The no-longer-Dixie Chicks came back swinging with the perfect musical statement after the enormous backlash to their comments about that sack of shit George W. Bush. "Not Ready To Make Nice" was a triumphant in every sense, critically and on the pop charts and at the Grammys, except at country radio, where it was received tepidly. Still, #36 ain't bad considering that many stations outright boycotted the group. 

42. Shooter Jennings featuring George Jones - "4th of July" (2005)
#29 Hot Country Songs
County tends to foster 2nd generation stars a little more readily than other genres, from Hank Jr. to Lukas Nelson, and a couple years after Waylon Jennings passed, his youngest son launched a career that's included some great solo albums and some Grammy-winning production work. Lots of country singers like to reference George Jones, but it probably helps to be the son of another legend to get Jones himself popping up singing a few bars of "He Stopped Loving Her Today" on your debut single. 

43. Blake Shelton - "Some Beach" (2004)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #28 Hot 100
Before he was on "The Voice" and the cover of People and in relationships with two famous blondes, Blake Shelton was a C-list country singer with the worst mullet in Nashville. But I have a soft spot for the first song I heard by him, which felt like kind of a dry satire of the beach bum anthems that were taking over country radio at the time, with Shelton (in both the song and the video) dreaming of a tropical vacation while landlocked in an unpleasant workaday world. 

44. Billy Currington - "Good Directions" (2006)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #42 Hot 100
A few months before Luke Bryan started making hits of his own, he wrote his first #1 for Billy Currington, a charming little story song about romance and turnips. 

45. Cyndi Thomson - "What I Really Meant To Say" (2001)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #26 Hot 100
It doesn't feel like there are a lot of one hit wonders in modern country music -- the radio industry is so regimented and engineered to get established stars to #1 with almost every single that new artists rarely get there unless they're being prepped to return there and become a new A-lister. But Cyndi Thomson really just had the one big hit, the lovely Celtic-tinged ballad "What I Really Meant To Say," and then her next two singles missed the top 20 and she left the music industry for a few years and never released a second album. She did, however, co-write a Gary Allan hit a few years later. 

46. Jessica Andrews - "Who I Am" (2000)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #28 Hot 100
Jessica Andrews is a little less strictly speaking a one hit wonder -- she released three albums and put almost a dozen singles on the charts, but "Who I Am" was far and away the biggest of them. She sang "if I never win a Grammy, I'm gonna be just fine," so I guess she's alright because she never did. 

47. Brad Paisley - "Me Neither" (2000)
#18 Hot Country Songs, #85 Hot 100
Brad Paisley had already started to score hits when he released "Me Neither" but it was his last miss for a long time -- his next 27 singles peaked at #7 or higher, most of them #1s. It's one of my favorite Paisley singles, though, a fast and sharp-witted little dynamo of a song. 

48. Little Big Town - "Good As Gone" (2006) 
#18 Hot Country Songs
Little Big Town had a dry spell for a few years where they struggled to repeat the success of "Boondocks." But one of those singles that missed foreshadowed how they'd find their groove later, by letting Karen Fairchild's smokey and dramatic voice take center stage. 

49. Sugarland - "Something More" (2005)
#2 Hot Country Songs, #35 Hot 100
I'm surprised Jennifer Nettles didn't have a big solo career because she really had a star quality that powered Sugarland's string of hits, a lot of people could've made this song big but I don't know if a lot of her contemporaries would've belted out that hook with the same force. 

50. Toby Keith - "As Good As I Once Was" (2005)
#1 Hot Country Songs, #28 Hot 100
Toby Keith was a late bloomer who started releasing albums in his 30s and reached his commercial peak in his 40s. So while this playful song about his body starting to give out on him was probably pretty true to life, he was right in his prime artistically, consistently cranking out these entertaining but well crafted songs that almost always shot to #1.  

8:00 AM