My Top 100 Singles of 1970

Friday, May 30, 2025

 




Here's the Spotify playlist:

1. Chicago - "25 Or 6 To 4"
2. Stevie Wonder - "Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)"
3. Black Sabbath - "War Pigs"
4. The Jackson 5 - "ABC"
5. Badfinger - "No Matter What"
6. Neil Young - "Cinnamon Girl"
7. James Brown - "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine"
8. Mountain - "Mississippi Queen"
9. The Beatles - "Let It Be"
10. Simon & Garfunkel - "Cecilia"
11. The Temptations - "Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today)"
12. Sugarloaf - "Green-Eyed Lady"
13. The Kinks - "Lola"
14. Sly & The Family Stone - "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"
15. Loretta Lynn – “Coal Miner’s Daughter”
16. The Doors - "Roadhouse Blues" 
17. Norman Greenbaum - "Spirit In The Sky"
18. The Carpenters - "(They Long To Be) Close To You"
19. James Taylor - "Fire And Rain"
20. James Brown - "Funky Drummer"
21. James Gang – “Funk #49”
22. Grand Funk Railroad - "I'm Your Captain (Closer To Home)" 
23. Blues Image - "Ride Captain Ride"
24. John Lennon - "Instant Karma!"
25. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - "The Tears of A Clown"
26. Grateful Dead – “Casey Jones”
27. Dionne Warwick - "This Girl's In Love With You"
28. Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Lookin' Out My Back Door"
29. Joni Mitchell - "Big Yellow Taxi"
30. Black Sabbath - "Paranoid"
31. Led Zeppelin - "Immigrant Song"
32. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - "Ohio"
33. Melanie – “Look What They’ve Done To My Song, Ma”
34. Five Stairsteps - "O-o-h Child"
35. James Brown – “Super Bad”
36. Santana - "Black Magic Woman"
37. Grateful Dead – “Truckin’”
38. Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Travelin' Band"
39. B.J. Thomas - "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head"
40. George Jones - "A Good Year For The Roses"
41. Chicago - "Make Me Smile"
42. The Doors - "Peace Frog"
43. James Taylor – “Sweet Baby James”
44. The Delfonics - "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)"
45. Leon Russell – “A Song For You”
46. The Partridge Family - "I Think I Love You"
47. Kris Kristofferson – “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”
48. The Guess Who - "No Sugar Tonight"
49. James Brown – “Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved”
50. The Ventures - "Hawaii Five-O"
51. Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Run Through The Jungle"
52. Simon & Garfunkel - "Bridge Over Troubled Water"
53. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - "Woodstock"
54. Melanie with the Edwin Hawkins Singers – “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”
55. Sly & The Family Stone - "I Want To Take You Higher"
56. Eric Burdon and War - "Spill The Wine"
57. Edwin Starr - "War"
58. R. Dean Taylor – “Indiana Wants Me”
59. Lynn Anderson – “Rose Garden”
60. The Doors - "Waiting For The Sun"
61. Eric Clapton – “After Midnight”
62. The Guess Who - "No Time"
63. The Who - "The Seeker"
64. The Jackson 5 – “I’ll Be There”
65. Bob Dylan - "Wigwam"
66. James Brown – “Ain’t It Funky Now (Part 1)”
67. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - "Carry On"
68. The Spinners – “It’s A Shame”
69. Free - "All Right Now"
70. Creedence Clearwater Revival – “Up Around The Bend”
71. The Allman Brothers Band – “Revival (Love is Everywhere)”
72. Shocking Blue - "Venus"
73. The Carpenters – “We’ve Only Just Begun”
74. Bread – “Make It With You”
75. Curtis Mayfield – “(Don’t Worry) If There Is A Hell Below, We’re All Going To Go”
76. Todd Rundgren – “We Got To Get You A Woman”
77. Santana - "Evil Ways"
78. The Delfonics – “Trying To Make A Fool of Me”
79. Linda Ronstadt – “Long Long Time”
80. Neil Young – “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
81. Dionne Warwick - "I'll Never Fall In Love Again"
82. Grateful Dead – “Uncle John’s Band”
83. The Jackson 5 – “The Love You Save”
84. Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band - "Express Yourself"
85. The Kinks – “Apeman”
86. Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Who'll Stop The Rain"
87. The Moments – “Love On A Two-Way Street”
88. Diana Ross - "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"
89. Joe Cocker - "The Letter"
90. The Band – “Time To Kill”
91. T. Rex - "Ride A White Swan"
92. Ernie (Jim Henson) – “Rubber Duckie”
93. Cat Stevens – “Wild World”
94. The Who - "Summertime Blues (live)"
95. Elvis Presley – “Patch It Up”
96. Jay and the Americans - "This Magic Moment"
97. Willie Nelson – “Laying My Burdens Down”
98. John Lennon – “Mother”
99. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - "Teach Your Children"
100. The Guess Who - "American Woman"

One fun thing about doing these lists is realizing how many hits some people had in one year. Crazy year for James Brown, for Creedence, for Neil Young and CSNY. I wasn't even alive yet in 1970 but a lot of these songs conjure visceral memories for me, singing "Rubber Duckie" in the tub as a kid, playing "25 Or 6 To 4" in my high school marching band, my wife's car that was named after "Cecilia." 

Previously:
My Top 50 Albums of 1970
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1971
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1972
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1973
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1974
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1975
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1976
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1977
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1978
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1979
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1980
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1981
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1982
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1983
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1984
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1985
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1986
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1987
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1988
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1989
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1990
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1991
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1992
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1993
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1994
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1995
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1996
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1997
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1998
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1999
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2000
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2001
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2002
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2003
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2004
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2005
My Top 25 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2006
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2007
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2008
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2009
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2010
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2011
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2012
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2013
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2014
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2015
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2016
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2017
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2018
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2019
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2020
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2021
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2022
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2023 
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2024

2:45 PM

My Top 50 Albums of 1970

Thursday, May 29, 2025




























Here's the Spotify playlist with a deep cut from each album:

1. Black Sabbath - Paranoid 
2. Grateful Dead – American Beauty
3. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory
4. Neil Young - After The Gold Rush
5. The Velvet Underground - Loaded
6. Curtis Mayfield – Curtis
7. The Allman Brothers Band - Idlewild South
8. George Harrison – All Things Must Pass
9. The Who - Live At Leeds
10. Joni Mitchell – Ladies Of The Canyon
11. Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection
12. The Kinks – Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One
13. Van Morrison – Moondance
14. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
15. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà Vu
16. The Doors - Morrison Hotel
17. Funkadelic - Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow
18. The Beatles - Let It Be
19. Derek and the Dominoes – Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs
20. The Stooges – Fun House
21. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
22. Santana - Abraxas
23. The Jackson 5 - ABC
24. Todd Rundgren – Runt
25. Laura Nyro – Christmas And The Beads of Sweat
26. The Beach Boys – Sunflower
27. Leon Russell – Leon Russell
28. Grateful Dead – Workingman’s Dead
29. Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water
30. Cat Stevens – Tea For The Tillerman
31. John Lennon – John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
32. Yes - Time And A Word
33. Stevie Wonder - Signed, Sealed and Delivered
34. The Band – Stage Fright
35. Joe Cocker – Mad Dogs & Englishmen
36. Tim Buckley – Starsailor
37. Creedence Clearwater Revival – Pendulum
38. Elton John – Elton John
39. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III
40. Brewer & Shipley – Tarkio
41. Attila – Attila
42. James Taylor – Sweet Baby James
43. James Brown – Ain’t It Funky
44. David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World
45. Rodriguez – Cold Fact
46. Bob Dylan - New Morning
47. The Mothers of Invention – Weasels Ripped My Flesh
48. Roberta Flack – Chapter Two
49. Jimi Hendrix - Band Of Gypsys
50. Aretha Franklin - Spirit In The Dark

A lot of informal cultural markers separate the '60s from the '70s (Altamont, the deaths of Jimi and Janis), but the biggest is probably the end of the Beatles. It's been interesting working backwards through the '70s, ambling through their solo careers, to finally arrive at the end of the Beatles era. In a way it's the most Beatles-related product that's ever been released in a year, between Let It Be and five solo albums, one of them a triple LP. In the end, though, I just couldn't fit McCartney or either Ringo album into my top 50. Now I'm going further back into the era where it was the norm for artists to release two albums in one year, and I hate pushing out some artists just to include multiple albums by another. But in a year that Sabbath, the Dead, Elton and CCR each released a pair of classics, the list just feels like it's bursting at the seams. 

2:44 PM

Movie Diary

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

 




a) Black Bag
I wish every great filmmaker was a little more like Steven Soderbergh, directing one or two features almost every year of his career, working with large and small budgets in a variety of styles and genres but plenty of identifiable signatures and pet topics. I would say Black Bag is minor Soderbergh, but again, when a guys is almost 40 movies in, I'm happy with a reasonably unique and finely crafted minor work. I don't particularly like Michael Fassbender as an actor or as a person, but it's still got a pretty strong ensemble cast, with Tom Burke as a standout, and feels like a novel sort of spy movie where a bunch of petty personal resentments and affairs get mixed up in the espionage and dominate the plot. It's pretty short and kind of feels like it comes to a very quick and sudden climax when there could've been a whole extra 20 minutes of, if not action, then some more scene changes and twists or speeches, but I respect that maybe it was probably deliberately contained to something smaller. 

RaMell Ross made a lot of very strong aesthetic decisions in Nickel Boys, including the first-person camera perspectives for the main characters, that really gave it a unique, engaging feel that draws you into what's, essentially, an extremely sad and upsetting story about the late Jim Crow era. I wasn't as into the heavy use of stock footage montages, though, it's like suddenly this very purposefully filmed movie keeps looking like low budget sitcom interstitials for a few seconds here and there.

c) Babygirl
I don't think I liked Halina Reijn's second feature as much as Bodies Bodies Bodies, but I liked it, and I dug that it had a very different tone and sensibility, makes me curious to see what she does next. The two most memorable uses of music in the movie were both from big 1987 albums, which makes me wonder if Reijn was deliberately calling back to the Fatal Attraction heyday of erotic thrillers and positioning Babygirl as a gender-swapped update. Maybe that's a reductive lens to look at it through, but it definitely reminded me of those kinds of movies, in good and sometimes bad ways. Also pretty interesting to see Antonio Banderas cast against type as a boring, ineffectual lover. 

d) Paddington In Peru
It's always annoying when a director gets a strong franchise going and then hands the reins to someone else and the quality immediately goes down. I didn't even know going into Paddington In Peru that it wasn't directed by the same person as the first two movies, but I very quickly started to suspect that was the case while watching it and had to google and confirm my suspicion. Paul King, who directed the first two Paddington movies, was too busy making, ugh, Wonka, to do a third Paddington movie and handed the job off to Dougal Wilson, making his debut feature after directing many music videos for Coldplay, Massive Attack and others. Not a terrible movie but the feel just wasn't the same. 

e) The Zone of Interest
This is a movie I wish I'd watched before all the awards and everything, just because it feels like it blunted the impact of it all to have already seen all the praise and debate about its point and how it communicated it, but I'm a Johnny come lately with a lot of movies, it just happens sometimes. The night vision thermal imaging camera in the night scenes kind of threw me off, just felt like an extreme byproduct of the dedication to using natural light, but I don't know, I'll give the benefit of the doubt that it was a strong creative decision that I just didn't understand, but as I was watching it, it just felt like oh the movie's just gonna look like shit for these scenes. 

f) I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House
As much as I liked Longlegs, it made me want to go back and check out Osgood Perkins' earlier work. It's a short movie and very minimal sort of ghost story/murder mystery, lots of whispering and mostly takes place in one small house, but I liked it, it felt like a very fully realized 

g) Above the Shadows
The other night my wife read something about this movie or saw a clip or something and was intrigued, and immediately put it on. Olivia Thirlby plays a woman who becomes invisible at the age of 12 and lives her entire life just sort of moving through the world alone and unseen, until she meets one guy who can see her, played by a pre-"Reacher" Alan Ritchson. A pretty intriguing and original spin on an old premise, but at some point it feels like writer/director Claudia Meyers got to interested in the thematic and metaphorical resonance of the idea that she didn't bother to make the plot hold together, or even let it go unexplained in an appealingly mysterious way, there's just a lot of stuff left hanging in the air. Still a pretty cool movie, but a frustrating one, with a weirdly random supporting cast (Megan Fox, Jim Gaffigan, and the late David Johansen in his final acting role). 

I think pangolins are really cool, cute animals, but I mostly just knew them from photographs, had never seen them at a zoo or seen much video footage. So I was excited to watch this Netflix documentary, which is really lovely and heartwarming but also a bit upsetting because it gets into how much pangolins are victims of poaching. But at least you get this beautiful story of the pangolin Kulu and the guy who nurses him to health and bonds with him until he's ready to go into the wild and live on his own, and I found it delightful that there's apparently a home for pangolins called the Pangolarium. 

i) Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars
I watched this while working on my recent piece about Clapton, and I was pleasantly surprised that both the filmmakers and Clapton himself look back on his career pretty thoughtfully and it's not just an overly flattering paint-by-numbers biography of a rock legend, even if it's nothing revelatory.

8:01 AM

Saturday, May 24, 2025

 





In 2013, I wrote a list of the 50 best rap remixes since 2000 for Complex. We recently went back and overhauled the whole ranking for a new version of the piece and added a bunch of different remixes from the past 12 years. 

9:01 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 386: Luther Vandross

Friday, May 23, 2025

 





Kendrick Lamar and SZA's duet "Luther," featuring a sample of Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn's 1982 duet "If This World Were Mine," is currently in its 13th week as the #1 song in America. It's a wonderful thing to see for several reasons, including that, as was shown in the great recent documentary Luther: Never Too Much, Vandross wanted to cross over and get a big #1 pop hit and never quite got there with his own records. Of course, he did get to see his voice sampled on a #1 before he died, on Twista's "Slow Jamz," but it's cool to see an even bigger hit sampling him and named after him.

Luther Vandross album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Emotion Eyes
2. A Lover's Change
3. She's A Super Lady
4. You Stopped Loving Me
5. Better Love
6. Once You Know How
7. Busy Body
8. My Sensitivity (Gets In The Way)
9. Because It's Really Love
10. Come Back
11. She Doesn't Mind
12. Love Is On The Way (Real Love)
13. Please Come Home For Christmas
14. It's Hard For Me To Say Goodbye
15. Dream Lover
16. Like I'm Invisible
17. If I Didn't Know Any Better

Track 1 from Luther by Luther (1976)
Track 2 from This Close To You by Luther (1977)
Tracks 3 and 4 from Never Too Much (1981)
Tracks 5 and 6 from Forever, For Always, For Love (1982)
Track 7 from Busy Body (1983)
Track 8 from The Night I Fell In Love (1985)
Track 9 from Give Me The Reason (1986)
Track 10 from Any Love (1988)
Track 11 from Power of Love (1991)
Track 12 from Never Let Me Go (1993)
Track 13 from This Is Christmas (1995)
Track 14 from Your Secret Love (1996)
Track 15 from I Know (1998)
Track 16 from Luther Vandross (2001)
Track 17 from Dance With My Father (2003)

During his '70s run as a backup singer for stars like Roberta Flack and David Bowie, Vandross released two albums with the band Luther. After he became a solo star, Vandross bought the rights to the Luther albums and actively chose to keep them out of print, which I think is kind of a shame because those are solid records that aren't that different from his '80s work. Last year, they were finally reissued and put on streaming services, so it was nice to be able to include a couple tracks. Luther's "Funky Music" was rewritten into the Bowie deep cut "Fascination," and Vandross re-recorded a couple Luther songs on his solo albums, including "Emotion Eyes" on Never Let Me Go.

I included all of Vandross's solo albums except 1994's Songs, which is all covers of big familiar hits. "Better Love" was sampled on the Young Gunz hit "No Better Love." Vandross co-wrote "Better Love" and with keyboardist Nat Adderley Jr. (nephew of jazz legend Cannonball Adderley) and "Busy Body" with bassist Marcus Miller, and those two guys play and/or co-wrote a lot of Vandross's best stuff and Miller co-produced a few albums. By the time I started listening to R&B radio in the '90s, Vandross was in the "Your Secret Love" era and while his voice is amazing in every era, I've really come to prefer his first few albums, when he was just putting that light '80s gloss on his classic soul influences. 

6:00 AM

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

 





Tom Dissonance premiered his 30-minute film NO FRIENDS in Glasgow earlier this week, an entertainingly surreal piece edited together from scenes from the sitcom "Friends" without any of the six main cast members in it. He invited me to contribute to the soundtrack album, so Western Blot covered Olivia Newton-John and ELO's "Xanadu," a song I first heard in The One Where Ross And Rachel...You Know. You can watch the movie on YouTube and buy a USB of the film and soundtrack on Bandcamp. 

11:04 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 385: Jill Sobule

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

 





Jill Sobule passed away a couple weeks ago at the age of 66. She's best known for her two 1995 hits "I Kissed A Girl" and "Supermodel," but she'd grown into a respected cult artist in the decades since then. 

Jill Sobule album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Where Do I Begin
2. Mexican Wrestler
3. Karen By Night
4. Love Is Never Equal (with Steve Earle)
5. Disinformation
6. Heroes
7. Empty Glass
8. Freshman
9. Nothing To Prove
10. Lucy At The Gym
11. Clever
12. Don't Let Us Get Sick
13. Vrbana Bridge
14. Flight (Jet Plane Charm)
15. Statue of Liberty (Statue of Liberty Charm)
16. Loveless Motel
17. Where Is Bobbie Gentry?
18. Tomorrow Is Breaking (with John Doe)
19. Golden Cage
20. Tell Me I've Won
21. Jetpack
22. (Theme From) The Girl In The Affair
23. Rock Me To Sleep
24. A Good Life

Tracks 5 and 19 from Things Here Are Different (1990)
Tracks 3, 13, and 22 from Jill Sobule (1995)
Tracks 4 and 11 from Happy Town (1997)
Tracks 2, 6, 10, 16, and 23 from Pink Pearl (2000)
Tracks 8 and 21 from Underdog Victorious (2004)
Tracks 7 and 20 from Jill Sobule Sings Prozak and the Platypus (2008)
Tracks 9, 17, and 24 from California Yearrs (2009)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Dottie's Charms (2014)
Track 1, 12, and 18 from Nostalgia Kills (2018)

I think of Jill Sobule sort of like Aimee Mann, as a consummate songwriter's songwriter who just happened to have a mainstream hit or two but always seemed to do fine without making songs for the radio. They also both released their solo debuts on Geffen in the early '90s but didn't last long on the label, finding a bigger audience elsewhere, and both worked with cantankerous elder statesmen types. Todd Rundgren produced Things Here Are Different and Sobule toured with Warren Zevon multiple times. I guess they had a bit of kinship as people known for novelty hits, and "I Kissed A Girl" was no more representative of her catalog than "Werewolves of London" was of his. Sobule covered one of my favorite late period Zevon deep cuts, "Don't Let Us Get Sick," for a tribute album, and also put it on one of her albums as a bonus track, and today it's her third most streamed song behind her two big singles.  

I think Pink Pearl is probably Sobule's best album because when I was listening to it and selecting songs to consider for this playlist, I initially picked literally every song on the album that wasn't a single. It's just full of gems and has very interesting, detailed arrangements. Pink Pearl's "Heroes" and "Disinformation" from her debut both feel like pretty prescient songs in terms of how Sobule wrote about topics like political disinformation and problematic celebrities, like if I'd just heard those songs with no context I'd assume they came out in the last five years. Of course, her two big hits address things like bisexuality and eating disorders with both humor and humanity, and it's in general impressive hearing how she wrote about topics like love, self esteen, and depression in these songs. I also really like the frank way she writes about the life of a middle class musician "Freshman" and "Nothing To Prove." 

Sobule co-wrote the songs on Dottie's Charms with an assortment of notable writers, with each song being about a different charm on a charm bracelet. Jonathan Lethem co-wrote "Statue of Liberty (Statue of Liberty Charm)" and Vendela Vida co-wrote "Flight (Jet Plane Charm)." Santana drummer Michael Shrieve plays on Sobule's debut, and he does some amazing in the second half of "Golden Cage."Sobule appeared as herself in a 2003 episode of "The West Wing," performing "Heroes" and "Rock Me To Sleep." I also realized while putting this together that Sobule co-wrote the Eels song "Manchild" and is the voice heard on the answering machine in that track. 

Sobule's final concert was about a week before her death, opening for The Fixx in Illinois, and the last song she performed publicly was an unreleased tune "It's Just As Easy To Be Nice As It Is To Be An Asshole" (also known as "Commie Dyke Jew"). The last song she played before that was "Karen At Night," which is absolutely one of her very best, one of those songs that should've been a hit in a better world where Jill Sobule had lots of hits. 

"A Good Life" felt like a really beautiful song to end the playlist with, a song where she imagine all sorts of life-ending catastrophes and having a very zen, content response to it all. Sobule reportedly died in a housefire, which seems like a horrible and terrifying way to go, and I can only hope she didn't suffer long, and that her final thoughts were something like the lyrics of "A Good Life." 

11:03 AM

TV Diary

Monday, May 19, 2025

 




My wife read and enjoyed The Murderbot Diaries and has loved Alexander Skarsgard since "True Blood," so she was really anticipating this one, and the first two episodes were pretty great. With Skarsgard's voiceover narration driving a lot of the humor, it feels almost like an inverted version of "You," where instead of a killer rationalizing why he's actual a moral and loving person, we get a robot who thinks of himself as a remorseless killer rationalizing why he hasn't hurt anybody yet. 

"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" was a pretty good but flawed show, and one of its weirder flaws was making Luke Kirby's depiction of Lenny Bruce into this kindly dreamboat that just felt totally wrong for the real life figure he was playing, even as it was a great and magnetic performance that justifiably got him nominated for an Emmy. So it feels inevitable and overdue that Amy Sherman-Palladino built her next show around Kirby, and it's really just wonderfully entertaining, whipsmart dialogue in English and in French, I like the whole ensemble but Lou de Laage is the standout, she's just so entertainingly chaotic. 

Most Tina Fey shows are absurdly packed with jokes in the style of "30 Rock," so it almost feels like a waste of her talent to do a more measured adult dramedy about people in trouble marriages. But it's got a great cast with Steve Carrell and Colman Domingo and Will Forte, and I kinda like it more when it's going for small character moments than big laughs. I've never seen the Alan Alda movie this is based on, but it was nice to see Alda get a little cameo appearance in this. 

d) "Bet"
The new Netflix series created by Simon Barry ("Warrior Nun," "Continuum") is a really entertaining little show about a Japanese transfter student at a boarding school who's obsessed with gambling. I feel like this should be a career-making role for Miku Martineau, her manic, mischievous performance really drives the show. 

"Forever" is adapted from a Judy Blume book from the '70s. modernized by "Girlfriends" creator Mara Brock Akil so it's now about two Black teenagers from L.A. in 2018. A period piece about 7 years ago is odd, but I feel like we'll be getting more and more shows about that "just before COVID" period of time in the future. It's a really sweet and involving story about two teens who are both experiencing their first love, but it also has all this complicated social media era stuff running through it as well, and Wood Harris makes a surprisingly great TV dad. 

Jane Austen wrote thousands of letters in her lifetime, and shortly after her death, her sister famously burned most of them. And it's kind of funny that this act to protect the personal life of a beloved author has made people more curious, and now inspired a TV series about Cassandra Austen that speculates upon her motives for burning Jane's letters. As lurid as the impulse behind the show is, though, it at least feels like an empathetic attempt to imagine the inner lives of the Austen sisters, moreso Cassandra than the novelist. 

This Amazon Prime show about college freshmen is very broad and full of cliches, but it's still reasonably charming. Wally Baram has written for shows I love like "Shrinking" and "What We Do In The Shadows" but this is her first major onscreen role and I absolutely adore her. 

This Australian miniseries is based on a novel and takes place, at least in the beginning, during WWII. I'm only one episode in but it seems pretty promising. I realized while watching this that two of the stars are Jacob Elordi, who played Elvis Presley in Priscilla (2022), and Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla Presley in Elvis (2022). 

Paul Hunter is one of the greatest music video directors of all time, but "Government Cheese" is only his second major longform project after the 2003 action flick Bulletproof Monk. And it really feels like he's having a ball making a very colorful, stylized period piece, with lots of creative framing and angles, I kind of wish more great video directors got let loose on features and series. I'm not really sure where this tale of a burglar/convict-turned inventor is going, but David Oyelowo and Simone Missick are great leads, I'm enjoying watching the story unfold. 

This Freeform miniseries about a kidnapped child is very tense but I'm only one episode in. Nice to see Jim Sturgess and Holliday Grainger, hadn't seen either of them in anything in a minute. 

This Netflix series is based on romance novels about Texas ranchers and feels kind of "Yellowstone"-lite in a good way. Mina Kimes and Marianly Tejada are insanely good-looking, which is important for this kind of show, and Josh Duhamel is better at playing a grizzled rancher than I would've expected. 

I didn't really know who Tom Segura is, but I guess he's a comedian who's more famous for a podcast than his standup, which is never a good sign. And Netflix gave him a show that's probably the worst sketch comedy show I've seen since "Mind of Mencia," just so much empty raunch and blood and feces haphazardly inserted into different premises. It's embarrassing that people like Shea Whigham and Dan Stevens have cameos in this. 

Still easily one of the best comedies on TV, but the writers have made it clear that they believe the show is about Deborah and Ava's relationship being in constant flux as they become friends and then enemies and then friends again and so on, which can be a little exhausting to watch. 

I'm never as over the moon about Nathan Fielder as other people, I just find his whole deadpan approach a little too dry. I like the second season of "The Rehearsal" more than the first, though, that Evanescence episode was definitely pretty deranged. And the bit where he'll have an entire conversation with somebody, and then it's revealed that he was rehearsing with an actor to have the real conversation later? That always cracks me up.
 
Season 4 was really good, I feel like they've gotten the number of celebrity cameos down to a sane amount after going overboard for a while, and even as an "It's Always Sunny" agnostic I enjoyed the crossover episode. 

This show has started to get a little stale, but they have a pretty strong bench of guest stars and recurring characters, the episodes with Taylor Ortega or Odessa A'zion are always good. 

I'm glad this is slowly becoming more of an ensemble show with more characters and subplots. The monster apocalypse stuff doesn't draw me in as much as the human drama, I don't know if that means the action scenes aren't done well or if I just think the mushroom zombies look stupid. 

r) "You"
I haven't really heard much of anything about the final season of "You" or any finale spoilers, which really shows you how much this show lost the juice. I'm only a few episodes in and it's still pretty entertaining, a plotline with Anna Camp playing twins was such a good idea. But they definitely dragged this thing on for a season or two too long and stretched credulity too much so people lost interest. I'll still finish this at some point to see what happens to Joe, though. 

s) "Andor" 
The second and final season of "Andor" seems to have just intensified the general feeling that it's one of the best things to come out of the entire Star Wars franchise. I'm still a bunch of episodes behind but it's good stuff, it's oddly refreshing to see something with a more realistic adult edge in this world and the cast is great. 

It's odd that animated Star Wars shows so often look like absolute dogshit. The characters in this show remind me of the humans in the first Ice Age movie. 

"Ramy" was one of my favorite shows on television, and while I'm happy Ramy Youssef seems to have  a lot of other projects going on, I'm a little bummed that he seems to have ended "Ramy" in part to focus on another autobiographical show, "#1 Happy Family USA," that's animated and a lot more broad and snarky. It's funny, but often in that provocative 'ain't I a stinker' "South Park" was that I find annoying. 

Pretty good Argentine sci-fi show, one of the rare foreign language shows on Netflix that seems to have gotten a big following in America. 

This Apple TV+ series about one of the first celebrity chefs in 19th century France is one of the horniest shows I've ever seen, it's great. 

Armie Hammer's ex-wife is the host of this HBO Max true crime series about toxic relationships, and man, that first episode is just terrifying, I don't know if I could handle watching another one if they're all this intense. 

A fun Netflix doc about the Triple Crown, unsurprisingly there are a lot of big personalities and interesting stories in this world. 

Phoebe Waller-Bridge narrated this nature doc miniseries about octopuses, and I'd say it's not quite as good as the one Paul Rudd nominated last year. But they're both entertaining and this one takes something of a different angle, focusing in part on humankind's cultural fascination with octopuses, with lots of appearances from octopus enthusiast Tracy Morgan. 

10:53 AM

Wednesday, May 14, 2025


 












I ranked every INXS album for Spin, and also wrote a piece looking back at the best-selling live album of all time, Eric Clapton's Unplugged. 

12:40 PM

Monthly Report: May 2025 Singles

Tuesday, May 13, 2025





















1. Balu Brigada - "So Cold"
I'm always fascinated by New Zealand and interested to hear the bands from there, going back to Split Enz and the Chills up to contemporary acts like the Beths. Balu Brigada is two brothers from Auckland who haven't released a full-length yet, but "So Cold" hit #1 on alternative radio and crossed over to pop radio, and they opened Twenty One Pilots' world tour. And given the way the alternative charts have been clogged up with these boring established bands like Mumford & Sons and Cage the Elephant, it's exciting to get some new blood that write good songs. Here's the 2025 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

2. Rob49 - "WTHELLY"
New Orleans rapper Rob49 has had a few moderately popular national hits at this point but didn't seem to quite make the jump to being a star, even after getting a Cardi B feature, but this brazenly stupid and fun viral record with a great beat seems like what he needed. Rob49 has already previewed a remix featuring Justin Bieber, something that has a high rate of making a song bigger but a near-zero rate of making a song better, I'm not really looking forward to that. 

3. Ella Langley - "Weren't For The Wind"
A few days after I named Ella Langley and Riley Green's "You Look Like You Love Me" my favorite country single of 2024, it became the year's first and only country radio #1 by a woman (and even then, obviously, a collaboration with a more established male singer). And Langley's follow-up single is really great too, shows she can do something a little more melodic and sultry.  

4. Dasha - "Not At This Party" 
Another second hit that I really like from someone who broke through on country radio last year, although I still feel like as a pop artist who broke through with a country song, there's still a strong chance that Dasha's best long term prospects are as a pop artist. In any case, I like her voice. 

5. Benson Boone - "Sorry I'm Here For Someone Else"
Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons signed Benson Boone to his label, and Benson is, like Reynolds, an ex-Mormon and BYU dropout, which seems like a very specific cultural thing they've tapped into (Benson's upcoming tour has three Salt Lake City dates, so I get the sense Mormons don't mind that he doesn't currently identify as a Mormon). And Boone, like Imagine Dragons, has become extremely successful in an extremely uncool way, although I feel like a lot of people didn't really have any clue who Boone was until that Grammys performance. "Sorry I'm Here For Someone Else" is a bit more uptempo and new wave-y than his most popular stuff, and just him choosing to launch his sophomore album with a song that sounds like this has endeared him to me a little bit. 

6. Justin Moore - "Time's Ticking" 
When Justin Moore released his album This Is My Dirt last year, Dierks Bentley guested on "Time's Ticking," but Moore released a solo version of the song that's now a charting single, which is something that seems to happen sometimes in country, like Bentley's label didn't clear his version for a single release because he has his own song out, who knows. In any case, I kind of like the song better with just Moore, there's nothing about the lyric that really lends itself to being a duet. 

7. Billie Eilish - "Wildflower"
"Birds of a Feather" is a constant presence on Top 40 radio, it actually increased in spins last week, but the song that follows is on Hit Me Hard And Soft has also made a good follow-up single. It's not quite as good as "What Was I Made For?" but her slow songs have really grown on me, she really knows how to get a big, compelling sound out of her voice without singing loudly, kind of an interesting talent. 

8. 803Fresh - "Boots On The Ground"
It feels like we only get one or two big R&B wedding dance/line dance-type hits per decade, and things like DJ Casper's "Cha Cha Slide" or V.I.C.'s "Wobble" took years to become staples, so it's kind of fun to see something like "Boots On The Ground" become a phenomenon in real time -- releasing this just before Beyonce started the Cowboy Carter tour was a really smart move on his part, whether or not he had any idea she'd incorporate it into her show. 

9. Kendrick Lamar f/ AzChike - "Peekaboo" 
This was never one of my favorite songs on GNX, and it still isn't, really, but I was curious to see if anything from the album would pop off after those first three hits were inescapable the last few months. And "Peekaboo" is growing on me, it definitely feels like the right contrast to those songs. 

10. BigXThaPlug - "2AM"
I really liked just about every BigXThaPlug I'd heard until he recently released his first top 10 hit, "All The Way" with country singer Bailey Zimmerman, which feels like he's really just speedrunning to have a crossover hit when he was doing a great job building a regional fanbase. So I'm glad that he's still also working one of the better songs from Take Care to rap radio. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Jack Harlow f/ Doja Cat - "Just Us"
I don't mind Jack Harlow being a pop rapper who understands what his lane is and works the heartthrob angle, but god he always says such embarrassing shit on these songs, what the fuck. 

12:39 PM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 384: The Alarm

Monday, May 12, 2025


 





















Mike Peters, lead singer of the Welsh band The Alarm, died a couple weeks ago. I was only a little familiar with the band's music, so it felt like a good time to check out their catalog. 

The Alarm album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Only the Thunder
2. Eye of the Hurricane
3. Third Light
4. We Are The Light
5. No Frontiers
6. Deeside
7. Lie Of The Land
8. The Wind Blows Away My Words
9. Permanence In Change
10. Dawn Chorus
11. The Rock
12. Howling Wind
13. One Step Closer To Home
14. Where A Town Once Stood
15. Closer To Home
16. Hell Or High Water
17. Only Love Can Set Me Free
18. Shout To The Devil
19. Hardland

Track 7 from The Alarm EP (1983)
Tracks 3, 4, 12, and 18 from Declaration (1984)
Tracks 1, 6, 10, and 15from Strength (1985)
Tracks 2, 9, 13, and 17 from Eye of the Hurricane (1987)
Tracks 5, 11, 14, and 19 from Change (1989)
Tracks 8 and 16 from Raw (1991)

The Alarm were always one of those bands I read or heard more about than I knew their songs. "Sold Me Down The River" is definitely the one I remember hearing on the radio when it was new or recent, that's a really catchy song. "The Stand" also sounds pretty familiar, I feel like I heard that at some point. The Alarm toured with U2 and it's definitely easy to hear the kinship there, Peters sometimes sounds a bit like Bono and they're kind of like a more rootsy U2 with more harmonica and acoustic guitars on some of their '80s records. 

I decided to just focus on The Alarm's first decade together and the five albums and one EP they made in their initial run before they split in 1991, although they later reunited and made a lot more music in the 21st century. I was a little dismayed to find that their catalog on Spotify is really confusing, there are re-recordings of their albums that look like reissues, and the reissues feature completely reshuffled running orders with non-album tracks inserted in between tracks from the original album. So I really had to look around and make an effort to listen to those albums as they were released in the '80s. 

The first couple albums probably have the largest number of their best songs, but the Tony Visconti-produced Change may be their best-sounding album. I really gravitated to "Hardland," it sounded to me like a big climactic concert closer that should end the playlist. It doesn't seem like they ever played that one much, though, "One Step Closer To Home" and "Howling Wind" were among the band's most performed deep cuts. 

12:38 PM

My Top 50 Movies of 2024

Thursday, May 08, 2025
 









1. Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)
2. Longlegs (Osgood Perkins)
3. Conclave (Edward Berger)
4. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
5. Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve)
6. Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
7. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
8. Blitz (Steve McQueen)
9. Drive-Away Dolls (Ethan Coen)
10. Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
11. Abigail (Matt Bettinelli-Opin and Tyler Gillett)
12. The First Omen (Arkasha Stevenson)
13. Babygirl (Halina Reijn)
14. Challengers (Luca Guadagigno)
15. Saturday Night (Jason Reigman)
16. Wolfs (Jon Watts)
17. The Instigators (Doug Liman)
18. Woman of the Hour (Anna Kendrick)
19. Anora (Sean Baker)
20. The Fall Guy (David Leitch)
21. A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)
22. Better Man (Michael Gracey)
23. Monkey Man (Dev Patel)
24. Civil War (Alex Garland)
25. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier)
26. Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos)
27. Maria (Pablo Larrain)
28. Beatles ‘64 (David Tedeschi)
29. The Silent Hour (Brad Anderson)
30. Lisa Frankenstein (Zelda Williams)
31. Good Grief (Dan Levy)
32. Orion And The Dark (Sean Charmatz)
33. The Supremes At Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat (Tina Mabry)
34. Mean Girls (Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr.)
35. Gladiator II (Ridley Scott)
36. A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski)
37. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
38. Fly Me To The Moon (Greg Berlanti)
39. Piece By Piece (Morgan Neville)
40. Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3 FM (Jay Schlossberg)
41. The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders)
42. Don’t Move (Adam Schindler and Brian Netto)
43. Luther: Never Too Much (Dawn Porter)
44. Night Swim (Bryce McGuire)
45. The Idea of You (Michael Showalter)
46. Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy)
47. The Beekeeper (David Ayer)
48. Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann)
49. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (Kevin Costner)
50. The Killer (John Woo)

This is really the first time I've compiled a list of my favorite films of any year. In all the years I did year-end lists for Baltimore City Paper, there was one year they sent me to review enough movies that I was invited to vote on the year's top ten films of 2008, and my ballot was kind of knowingly flimsy and full of popcorn movies. I'm just not much of a cinephile, and it never feels like the right time to do a year-end list because I don't go to the theater a lot, and it can take months or years for stuff to hit streaming services. Awards season also kind of blurs the lines between years, but I ultimately decided to just go with a movie being whatever year is on its IMDb page. Once I realized I have seen about 100 movies that came out in 2024 now, it felt like I could at least try and make a list and be happy with it, no matter how flawed or incomplete it may feel, and then go backwards by year from there. 

12:53 PM