Friday, April 11, 2025
6:01 AM No comment
Deep Album Cuts Vol. 381: The Kinks
Thursday, April 10, 2025 
Last fall I ranked every Kinks album for Spin, and as I was doing my deep dive on the band's catalog, I started picking out songs for this playlist.
2. Stop Your Stobbing
3. Nothin' In The World Can Stop Me Worryin' About That Girl
4. Where Have All The Good Times Gone
5. Baby Won't You Please Come Home
6. David Watts
7. Funny Face
8. Do You Remember Walter?
9. Brainwashed
10. Strangers
11. Moments
12. Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues
13. You Don't Know My Name
14. Daylight
15. Introduction to Solution
16. Have Another Drink
17. The Hard Way
18. Stormy Sky
19. Misfits
20. Attitude
21. Add It Up
22. Heart of Gold
23. Missing Persons
24. Think Visual
25. Now and Then
26. Close to the Wire
Tracks 1 and 2 from Kinks (1964)
Track 3 from Kinda Kinks (1965)
Track 4 from The Kink Kontroversy (1965)
Track 5 from Face To Face (1966)
Tracks 6 and 7 from Something Else By The Kinks (1967)
Track 8 from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
Track 9 from Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire) (1969)
Track 10 from Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One (1970)
Track 11 from Percy (1971)
Track 12 from Muswell Hillbillies (1971)
Track 13 from Everybody's In Show-Biz (1972)
Track 14 from Preservation Act 1 (1973)
Track 15 from Preservation Act 2 (1974)
Track 16 from The Kinks Present A Soap Opera (1975)
Track 17 from The Kinks Present Schoolboys In Disgrace (1975)
Track 18 from Sleepwalker (1977)
Track 19 from Misfits (1978)
Track 20 from Low Budget (1979)
Track 21 from Give The People What They Want (1981)
Track 22 from State Of Confusion (1983)
Track 23 from Word Of Mouth (1984)
Track 24 from Think Visual (1986)
Track 25 from UK Jive (1989)
Track 26 from Phobia (1993)
The Kinks were never as big in America as they were in the UK, so even though I totally grew up on the Stones and The Who, my experience with the Kinks for a long time was limited to a handful of ubiquitous songs from the '60s and early '70s. I didn't even hear their biggest '80s song, "Come Dancing," until I saw the video on MTV2 one day in the late '90s and was kind of baffled that it didn't sound much at all like the other stuff I knew by the band.
One thing I find myself doing in this column is lamenting when I got into a band via a compilation, because back in the CD era, if you had all the hits in one place, it kind of slowed you down from buying the proper albums. In college I got the 2002 compilation The Ultimate Collection, I can't even remember if it was a used bin acquisition or something a friend gave me. Still, that's a pretty comprehensive 2-disc best-of with all the hits plus a few famous album tracks, so it was at least a good crash course, but I wish I had picked up a couple of proper albums instead. In any case, now that I know the albums, it was fun to try to condense that history into this, I love when I can cram a little of something from every album from a 30-year career into an 80-minute mix and you can kind of hear their sound evolve from song to song.
The Pretenders covered "Stop Your Sobbing," Van Halen covered "Where Have All The Good Times Gone," The Jam covered "David Watts," and ELO very clearly nicked the intro from "Do You Remember Walter?" on "Mr. Blue Sky." Wes Anderson used "Nothin' In The World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" memorably in Rushmore, and "Strangers" in The Darjeeling Limited. "Strangers" and "Funny Face" and "You Don't Know My Name" and "Close to the Wire." were written and sung by Dave Davies, who had a nice little run of songs on Kinks records alongside his brother Ray writing most of their material. "Close to the Wire" felt like a good closing song as a rare example of Ray and Dave trading off on lead vocals.
6:00 AM No comment
Monthly Report: March 2025 Albums
Tuesday, April 08, 2025
1. Saba and No ID - From The Private Collection of Saba and No ID
Saba really made me a fan with 2022's Few Good Things, so when I interviewed No ID in 2023, I was really excited to hear that they were working on a full-length project together -- in fact No ID revealed that he knew Saba's father, the Chicago R&B artist Chandler, way back in the '90s. And after a year and change of waiting, this tape totally lives up to my expectations, No ID's way of chopping familiar samples in refreshing new ways works is used to great effect on the first two tracks, and Saba's writing is just so frank and clear-eyed and he keeps switching up the flow, going more melodic on "Woes of the World" and more intricate and triplet-heavy on "Westside Bound Pt. 4." Here's the 2025 albums Spotify playlist I'm constantly updating with new releases.
2. Nels Cline - Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline has been one of my favorite guitarists in the world for three decades now, and in most of that time he's been so prolific that there's been at least one new album from him as a bandleader or solo artist just about every year. But things have been relatively quiet on that front since 2020's Share the Wealth, although he's remained pretty active with Wilco and other sideman/session-type things. Judging from recent interviews, I guess the pandemic just slowed down his process of developing setting a set of new material with a band, but the first album from his new combo Consentrik Quartet is an excellent collection to return with. Cline and German saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock will sort of weave together these different parallel lines and then suddenly lock into harmonizing on a busy run of notes, it's really a delight to hear them play together. I think my favorite part is on "Slipping Into Something," when that cool 15/16 bassline comes in and everybody just starts going off.
3. Lady Gaga - Mayhem
I've never really been blown away by any of Lady Gaga's post-Born This Way albums, but Mayhem is pretty fun even if I can't tell whether her heart's really in this return to her earlier style -- really I can never tell how much she means anything, for better or worse. I didn't consider "Disease" or "Abracadabra" to be particularly good Gaga singles, but they're perfectly good Gaga songs that kick off the album well (while "Die With A Smile" is a great single but barely a Gaga song at all). Most pop albums that slow down in the second half start to lose my interest there but that run of midtempo songs that starts with "LoveDrug" is really my favorite part of the record.
4. Brian D'Addario - Till The Morning
When I interviewed Brian D'Addario of the Lemon Twigs a few years ago, one of the things I was most curious to ask him about was the creative dynamic with his brother Michael and how their writing and production styles differ -- he had some interesting answers, but I still mostly distinguish them by Brian kind of have a mellow folk pop singing style and Michael doing some more affected punk and glam-type voices, which works well as a yin/yang. They seem to be such a tight creative unit that I was surprised to see that either of them released a solo album, but Till The Morning came out on the brothers' new label Headstack Records and Michael co-produced the album and did a little writing and singing. So it's really pretty much a Lemon Twigs album, albeit a mellower one in the style of Everything Harmony. I particularly like the twangy pedal steel guitar on "This Summer" and "One Day I'm Coming Home."
5. mssv - On And On
mssv (short for Main Steam Stop Valve) is kind of a similar deal to fIREHOSE -- Mike Watt plus a drummer he's played with for a long time (in this case Stephen Hodges) plus a younger singer/guitarist (in this case Mike Baggetta). A little noisier than fIREHOSE, though, which I like. They've had a couple previous albums but I think I like this one best, really captures the energy and immediacy of three guys playing together in a room well, and Watt really gets to let loose on the thunder broom on "Super Dumb" and anchor a dreamier soundscape on "On Its Face" and spiel a bit on "Boat Song" and "Careful What You Wish For."
6. Bob Mould - Here We Go Crazy
I recently ranked Husker Du's albums for Spin, but I haven't really kept up with Mould's post-SST adventures as much as I have with Mike Watt. I like this record, though, which has one of my favorite drummers in the world, Jon Wurster, doing great work. The songs Superchunk have released since Wurster stepped away from the band have been excellent, Laura King hit the ground running, but I'm still gonna make more of an effort to seek out whatever Wurster is playing on now. I think "Neanderthal" is my favorite track on Here We Go Crazy.
7. Spiritbox - Tsunami Sea
I hadn't actually heard Spiritbox until they did a couple tracks with Megan Thee Stallion, which were fun, but I wasn't sure if I'd like their music based on that. But I really like their new album, one of the few bands I really enjoy out of this whole metalcore or post-metalcore or whatever it is scene. They really throw a lot of different sounds in there but they make sense together, and Courtney LaPlante mixes singing in with the screaming really well.
8. Playboi Carti - Music
It seemed like Playboi Carti was going to jump into the A-list when the anticipation for Whole Lotta Red was mounting, but it didn't quite happen, I think maybe the Christmas day release was a bad call. But Music (which was for years called I Am Music right up until its release, much like Drake's Views From The Six/Views switcheroo) really did big numbers and got the world's attention. I think Die Lit is still my favorite Carti album, he's getting a little carried away with wacky voices now. The standout tracks for me so far are "Charge Dem Hoes A Fee" featuring Future, and "Toxic," where Carti does a Future impression. I get why "Evil Jordan" is the most popular song because the beat is great, but he really ruins it yelling "I AM THE MUSIC" at the end. Also I disagree with Kanye...on a lot of things actually, but specifically that I think Carti and Kendrick are a good combination.
9. The 1975 - Still... At Their Very Best (Live From The AO Arena, Manchester, 17.02.24)
The 1975 are a little more tongue-in-cheek about their quest to be the best band in the world than, say, Oasis, but I think they very much belong in that lineage of pompously ambitious UK bands, and the name of their last tour, The 1975 At Their Very Best (and the continued leg of the tour, Still... At Their Very Best) was pretty sincere about the greatness they're aiming for. And the thing is, I'm totally on board, I really think they're more or less the best mainstream band of the last decade or so and they're still operating at the top of their game. The Amazon concert special from earlier in the tour was paced a little better than this one, I know that a lot of their most popular songs are slow and the audience seems really pumped about the long stretch of slow songs in the middle of the show, but their studio albums do a better job of mixing tempos. That said, a pretty damn good live record.
10. Will Smith - Based On A True Story
Will Smith released his new album almost exactly 20 years to the day after his last album, Lost and Found, which is kind of a sentimental milestone for me as well, because the first time I ever got paid to write was my Lost and Found review for Baltimore City Paper. Both of these albums get far on my lingering youthful love of He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper, Based On A True Story isn't an amazing return to form like the last LL Cool J album, but it's pretty solid when Will isn't trying too hard to sound current (I don't like the songs with Big Sean and Russ).
The Worst Album of the Month: NAV - OMW2 Rexdale
I guess respect for NAV for not trying to reinvent himself as a mob boss like Drake, but it's crazy how he's been a bona fide rap star with consistent top 10 albums for like 7 years now and hasn't developed any swagger at all. He still raps in that blank monotone sounding like a middle schooler, and he still has that Mark Zuckerberg haircut that even Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have anymore.
12:49 PM No comment
TV Diary
Monday, April 07, 2025 
a) "The Studio"
Seth Rogen has been producing some great TV series for a while now ("The Boys," "Preacher," "Invincible"), but 2023's "Platonic" was the first time he'd actually starred in a live action series since "Freaks & Geeks" and "Undeclared," and apparently that's coming back for a second season on Apple TV+ along with his new series, "The Studio." A cameo-filled satire of modern Hollywood could so easily be smug and unfunny or, I don't know, an "Entourage" retread, but "The Studio" really succeeds on the execution, it has a genuinely funny perspective and a strong creative vision, including lots of scenes consisting of one long shot that would probably be more impressive if the show hadn't debuted 2 weeks after "Adolescence," which is full of even more staggering oners. The percussion-heavy score is composed by Antonio Sanchez, who also scored Birdman, which I think tips off Rogen and Evan Goldberg's biggest influence for their directorial style on "The Studio" (one character also straight up mentions Birdman in an episode). All three episodes so far have climaxed with Rogen's character upsetting a well known director, so there's certain a formula emerging, but it's really good and the stories involving Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard had particularly good payoffs. And the great ensemble includes Kathryn Hahn kind of being ridiculous in the same way she was on "Parks & Recreation," and Chase Sui Wonders, who is really fulfilling the potential I saw in her as a comedic actress on the great short-lived series "Generation" a few years ago.
This Hulu series starts Michelle Williams as a woman with terminal cancer and Jenny Slate as her best friends, and it's based on a podcast the two women started in real life (sad spoiler: the woman Williams's character is based on passed away several years ago). The main story is about Williams leaving her husband and trying to have an enjoyable sex life before she dies, but I really enjoy the dynamic of her and Slate as friends, it's really a pretty sweet show about friendship aside from all the kinky stuff.
I've never had strong feelings about Shonda Rhimes shows, I always seem to watch a season or two of "Scandal" or "How To Ge Away With Murder" or "Bridgerton" and enjoy it a little but then eventually forget to keep up with it. But I love "The Residence," she really brought a great cast together (including Uzo Adubo, Ken Marino, Randall Park, Eliza Coupe, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) to fire some hilarious dialogue at each other in a White House murder mystery. It's really sad that Andre Braugher died during filming and they had to reshoot his scenes with Giancarlo Esposito, it would've been nice for this to be his final role. And it's a little embarrassing that they cast Al Franken as a senator, I don't know why some people are obsessed with relitigating him making the right decision to resign.
d) "Pulse"
There's always room for lots of medical dramas to thrive, but I feel like it's either really good timing or really bad timing for a show about an emergency room like Netflix's "Pulse" to debut right at the moment that people are obsessed with "The Pitt." "Pulse" is a much more conventional procedural and the CGI-heavy disaster sequences that open some of the episodes unfortunately remind me a lot of "9-1-1." But I think it's a decent show with a strong cast, and I absolutely adore Jessy Yates, who plays the sister of the lead, and want to see more of her.
I'm fascinated with how at some point Kevin Bacon made this pivot from being the Footloose guy and a pretty conventional likeable leading man to all sorts of villain and antihero roles in horror flicks and dark comedies. In this new Blumhouse-produced series, he plays a bounty hunter who is killed, and then comes back from the dead under orders from the devil to hunt down demons, a good fun pulpy premise.
"Mid-Century Modern" was created by the guys who made "Will & Grace" and it feels very transparently like a vehicle for Nathan Lane and Matt Bomer to do "Will & Grace"-type patter. I was never a huge fan of that show but I respect that it was very good at what it did, and Lane is a comedic genius who's clearly really enjoying himself here.
g) "Side Quest"
"Side Quest" is a "Mythic Quest" spinoff, four standalone episodes about tertiary characters who work for or are otherwise connected to the video game studio the show is about. On paper that seemed like a perfectly good idea because "Mythic Quest" is a really good show with a big ensemble. But "Side Quest" is a bit more earnest than the main show and, I don't know, it feels like those pointless 'webisodes' that a lot of shows had to make in the early days of the internet, but longer. Like, a 30-minute episode about the career of a cellist playing in an orchestra that performs music from a video game? I don't know, man.
I was a fan of Netflix's "Daredevil" series and was happy to hear that Disney+ was going to revive the show and continue telling the story with Charlie Cox. But I really thought the entire ensemble made the show work, and it was kind of bittersweet that they only brought Elden Henson and Deborah Ann Woll briefly for the first episode and then kind of pivoted to a different supporting ensemble. And the action scenes in this new series haven't really blown me away like they did in the Netflix show, I want more of that crazy fight choreography. Making Kingpin the mayor of New York City is a great (and unfortunately timely) storyline, though, Vincent D'Onofrio is always great in that role.
The first season of "Survival of the Thickest" was fun, I'm glad it's back for a second season, Netflix really doesn't have a lot of solid sitcoms, especially post-"Grace & Frankie."
I'm not generally someone who turns on a show just because they kill off one character I like, but the character death at the end of season 2 of "Yellowjackets" really felt like one more disappointment in an underwhelming sophomore season. Season 3 has been pretty good so far, and adding Hilary Swank is fun, I guess, but I miss the actress that they wrote out of the show, and I'm still kind of trying to feel the buzz of excitement of that first season again.
k) "Wolf King"
Computer animation that emulates the look of stop motion animation can be really beautiful, but this new Netflix fantasy cartoon really looks like dogshit.
I've never played the video game Devil May Cry, but the anime adaptation on Netflix is pretty fun, and I unironically love that the song's theme song is the Limp Bizkit classic "Rollin'."
HBO is starting to get more into international shows that aren't in English, and this is the first Spanish-language Max series. It's about the investigation of of a suspicious suicide and has very artful direction, builds up a somber atomosphere very well.
This Korean series on Netflix imagines a near future with space tourists going up to spend time on a space station, which is a pretty interesting premise that hasn't really been done much on American TV, and the visual effects are pretty good for something without a huge budget.
I just thought it would be funny to put all these shows with "When..." titles in a row because they look funny together. Another Korean show, a sweet romantic show that kind of spans generations, starting the story in the '50s.
p) "Newtopia"
Another Korean show, this one on Amazon Prime, a zombie outbreak story that really feels kind of distinctive and fast-paced compared to the deluge of American zombie shows.
So many good stories are driven by the deaths of wealthy people and questions about inheritance and possible foul play so this is a great premise for a series, you get to explore that old trope from a different angle in every episode.
r) "La Palma"
This Norwegian show about people on a volcanic island that's on the verge of eruption really feels like a very mediocre derivative disaster movie-type thing with bad acting, bad visual effects.
s) "1992"
"1992" from Spain probably is just ahead of "La Palma" as the worst foreign language show I've seen on Netflix lately, just a very cheesy murder mystery with some gross scenes of burned bodies and a murderer who leaves a colorful little doll with their victims as a signature.
This Polish show is pretty good, it's about a novelist who's being blackmailed and returns to his hometown where he has a lot of complicated history. Good cast, good acting.
A cool Swedish crime drama based on a true story that shows how forensic investigators solved a 16-year-old cold case using genetic information from ancestry research websites.
I enjoyed this Netflix reality show about the history of Korean cuisine, that's an area I only have a little of firsthand experience in and it made me want to try a lot more.
Between Alan Cumming on "Traitors," Joe Manganiello on "Deal Or No Deal Island," and now Peter Serafinowicz on "Million Dollar Secret," I'm getting kind of tired of seeing actors I like host game shows, you guys should be off somewhere actually acting. I like the premise of this show and the way they sort of play the contestants off each other, though, it's not terribly original but the execution is good.
This 2-part Apple TV+ documentary has one feature-length episode about Black actors who've headlined major films and one about Black actresses. And I like that each doc has its own director and its own tone and approaches the subject matter from different angles, partly because the latter doc has to deal with Halle Berry being the only Black actress to ever win an Oscar for a leading role and how almost everyone they talk to deserves more opportunity than they're getting. But they're both great watches and they interviewed just about everyone you could hope to see.
A decent little History Channel show looking at various disasters like the Hindenberg as well as more obscure stories. The production values aren't great but it's alright as a background noise kind of show to put on.
Hudson Yang was the lead on "Fresh Off the Boat," and after basically watching him grow up on the 6 seasons of that show, it's fun to see him as a young adult hosting this reality show about cooking, especially the first episode that reunites him with his TV dad, Randall Park.
12:48 PM No comment
My Top 50 Mainstream Rock Singles of the 1980s
Friday, April 04, 2025
I've already done lists of my favorite hip-hop, R&B, alternative, and hard rock/metal singles of the 1980s. And this is the first time I've really split hairs this much and divided the rock music of a given decade into three different buckets. I'm almost tempted to break the genre into four pieces and make a soft rock list, but I figure a lot of the adult contemporary yacht rock stuff that did better on pop radio than rock radio in the '80s will just slide into my eventual pop list here and there.
Here's the Spotify playlist.
1. Queen and David Bowie - "Under Pressure" (1981)
Hearing a song via sample, particularly a sample in a far inferior song, can often ruin it for you, or at least fill your head with associations that are hard to shake. But I definitely knew "Ice Ice Baby" before "Under Pressure," and it hasn't done anything to stop "Under Pressure" from becoming one of my favorite pieces of music. It's probably the single most played song on my Amazon Music account, not so much because of my love for the song specifically but because Queen and Bowie are two of the artists I most frequently ask my Echo to shuffle songs by while my family has dinner.
2. Tom Petty - "I Won't Back Down" (1989)
I love that Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne made Full Moon Fever in Mike Campbell's garage and really were just having fun getting out the usual Heartbreakers way of making records and wound up with the biggest album of his career. I mean, they had to have known that "I Won't Back Down" and "Free Fallin'" and "Runnin' Down A Dream" were probably hits, but the album's genesis was a lot more casual than what it sounds like when you hear those massive hits on the radio just about every day.
3. Stevie Nicks - "Edge Of Seventeen" (1982)
Stevie Nicks actively campaigned to become a member of the Heartbreakers, which never happened, but she did make a few hits with Tom Petty. And even one of her biggest songs without Petty was directly inspired by his wife, who Nicks heard say "age of seventeen" in a thick Florida drawl (Benmont Tench also plays on the song). Waddy Wachtel, who Nicks has made music with her whole career, dating back to the Buckingham Nicks days, contributed that staccato guitar riff that makes "Edge Of Seventeen" sound so badass.
4. Phil Collins - "In The Air Tonight" (1981)
There are a couple of classic rock stations I listen to that both, naturally, play "In The Air Tonight." But one of them, WBIG-FM, always plays a version that has loud live drums layered over the quiet drum machine pattern in the first half of the song, which sounds really stupid and totally fucks up the whole point of the big dramatic ending (you can hear a little of this version here). It turns out this is the single mix that was originally released in 1981 at the suggestion of Ahmet Ertegun, before people defaulted to the mix on the Face Value album. Ertegun has a pretty glowing reputation in the music industry, but man he made the wrong call there.
5. Journey - "Any Way You Want It" (1980)
1997 was hip hop's jiggy era, the period in which the term 'jiggy' was popularized, and I submit to you that if other genres had jiggy eras, this song epitomizes mainstream rock's early '80s jiggy era. This is that Rodney Dangerfield dancing on a golf course music. Apparently this song's writing style was influenced by Phil Lynott when Journey toured with Thin Lizzy in the late '70s, which makes it even cooler.
6. Pat Benatar - "Heartbreaker" (1980)
Pat Benatar is such an incredible rock vocalist, she probably belongs up there with Freddie Mercury as someone who could've been a straight up pop singer or any number of other styles but chose to be a rocker. That little phaser effect on her voice on the a cappella breakdown on "Heartbreaker" is so fucking cool, what a dynamite record. A rep for Benatar was helping me set up an interview with her a few years ago and then they ghosted me, and I'm still bitter about that. Let's talk, Pat!
7. Neil Young - "Rockin' In The Free World" (1989)
A whole lot of the artists on this list are legacy rock acts from the '60s and '70s that very shrewdly adapted to the '80s with slicker records and music videos and were rewarded with enormous album sales. There are relatively few guys who really spent most of the '80s in the wilderness. I think Jimmy Buffett had the worst commercial dip in the '80s, while Bob Dylan had the most divisive '80s run. Neil Young was so far off in his own world for most of the decade that Geffen unsuccessfully attempted to sue him for not sounding like himself, but he was also the guy who ended the '80s with a career-defining smash that completely reset his trajectory for the '90s.
8. Bruce Springsteen - "I'm On Fire" (1985)
Of the aforementioned '60s and '70s rockers who adapted well to the MTV era, nobody did it bigger than Bruce Springsteen, turning Born in the U.S.A. into a juggernaut with a run of seven Top 10 singles to rival Thriller. "I'm On Fire" didn't feel like one of the most ubiquitous hits from that album at the time, but in the streaming era it's pulled ahead of every track but "Dancing in the Dark" on Spotify, and I think it's totally justified, I love how it's gentle but fast, sad but sexy, rootsy but synth-heavy.
9. ZZ Top - "Gimme All Your Lovin'" (1983)
The members of ZZ Top were all born in 1949, the same year Bruce Springsteen was born. meaning they were pretty much the same age when they were ubiquitous on MTV in the mid-'80s. The once-scraggly Springsteen took on a youthful clean-shaven look to become a music video star, while Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill had grown out their beards and seemed like mystical Texas boogie elders in their videos.
10. John Mellencamp - "Cherry Bomb" (1987)
This song just makes me so happy, every time I hear it. When I interviewed John Mellencamp a few years ago, I just had to tell him it was one of my favorites and ask how he decided to have multiple singers alternate lead vocals on the second verse, and he expounded on his love of Sly and the Family Stone and how it was a direct homage to them.
11. The Who - "Eminence Front" (1982)
Sometimes I wonder if The Who's legacy would be any different if they never did another tour or album after Keith Moon died the way Zep did after Bonham died. We got some good stuff out of the Who's continued existence, though, and "Eminence Front" is way at the top of that list. Pete Townshend was still messing with some of the burbling atmospheric keyboards that were a big part of Who's Next and Who Are You, but Faces drummer Kenney Jones keeps a much more straightforward groove than anything Moon would've played, and the result is something special and hypnotic that just works every time I hear it, whether on the radio or on a recent episode of "Severance."
12. Rick Springfield - "Jessie's Girl" (1981)
Rick Springfield was a singer dabbling in acting when the stars aligned and he briefly became the king of all media in the early '80s when he had one of the biggest hit songs in the world and a popular 2-year stint on the soap opera "General Hospital." Springfield's existence has been boiled down to that moment, but his career is a lot longer and more interesting than he gets credit for, with a decade of hits with the band Zoot and as a solo artist in his native Australia before "Jessie's Girl," and four Platinum albums that each had at least one Top Ten hit in America. Still, if you're gonna be remembered for one song, you could do a lot worse.
13. Steve Winwood - "Roll With It" (1988)
There are a lot of White guys who sing "soulfully" in this list, especially British guys, and sometimes that stuff ages surprisingly well and sometimes it ages like milk. I don't think Steve Winwood gets enough credit these days as one of the very best vocalists in that particular niche, though, just a fantastic voice and a great catalog across his solo career, Traffic, the Spencer Davis Group, and Blind Faith. Holland-Dozier-Holland's lawyers were busy in those days, they got their names added to the songwriting credits of both "Roll With It" and Aerosmith's "The Other Side" for similarities to their old Motown hits.
14. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - "Refugee" (1980)
When I crunched the numbers for all my lists of albums of each year of the decade to make lists of my favorite artists of the 1980s, Tom Petty was in the top 10 for albums as well as singles, with his frequent collaborators Jimmy Iovine and Mike Campbell also in the top 10 for singles. "Refugee" is, like Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker," a 1979 single from a 1979 album that peaked in 1980, and I hate when songs straddle decades in a way that makes it hard to say which one it belongs to, but I'll just bite the bullet and make my choice here.
15. Genesis - "No Reply At All" (1981)
Genesis in the early '80s was really fucking cool if you ask me, those really taut grooves on "Paperlate" and "Turn It On Again" and "Abacab," to say nothing of the Phil Collins solo stuff, it's really right in a sweet spot of a style that I love. Collins putting the Phenix Horns from Earth, Wind & Fire on some of those Genesis songs and some of his solo stuff always sounded so good.
16. Bruce Hornsby and the Range - "The Way It Is" (1986)
I kind of wish Bruce Hornsby had come out in the era of Elton John, because I love the sound of his piano playing, but the production on his stuff is so slick, a lot of it reminds me of the "Wings" theme song. This song is perfect, though, one of those pop hits that feels so deceptively simple and pretty while he's slipping in all this history about civil rights legislation and just a general outlook about empathy and equality.
17. Toto - "Rosanna" (1982)
As a drummer there are times when I like the drummer more than the band, but that usually means it makes the band grow on me, and Jeff Porcaro was just incredible, man, I love the spin he put on the Purdie Shuffle on this song.
18. Queen - "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" (1980)
Queen's only two #1 songs in America were both from The Game and were both instances of the band wearing a musical costume rather than sticking to their core sound. And I think "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" is an example of how what Queen did went beyond pastiche, like Freddie clearly took the Elvis Presley template, but created a song that Elvis would've been lucky to have been offered, it would've been one of his best songs ever.
19. The Romantics - "What I Like About You" (1980)
I always loved this song since I was a kid, and the "What I Like About You" video was probably the first time I ever saw someone play drums and sing at the same time, some thing I do in my bands now. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be before I tried it!
20. Eddie Money - "Shakin'" (1982)
Eddie Money was a real goofball (check out the way he mouths along with the stuttering guitar lead in the "Shakin'" video) but he made some songs that really kicked ass. It's so funny that he slips in the line "her tits were shakin'" in the second verse and it never got censored on the radio or MTV. The 1997 compilation Shakin' With The Money Man is one of the best titles ever given to a greatest hits record.
21. Bruce Springsteen - "Hungry Heart" (1980)
Many people don't know, this song is written from the perspective of a man whose entire family was eaten by Baltimore Jack, the legendary Maryland cryptid.
22. Journey – “Stone In Love” (1982)
I love how the last two minutes of "Stone in Love" just go off on this tangent with a completely different melody than the first half of the song, I guess it's a bridge but they just keep going and never properly return to the chorus other than some harmonies repeating the title line.
23. The Greg Kihn Band - "The Breakup Song (They Don't Write 'Em)" (1981)
I didn't realize it until after both of them had passed away, but Greg Kihn went to the same high school at the same time as my father. This may be a quintessential power pop song not just for the hooky chorus but for the way it openly yearns for the songwriting of another time.
24. Pete Townshend - "Let My Love Open The Door" (1980)
The Who never cranked out albums as steadily as their contemporaries -- by the end of the '70s, they'd released 8 studio albums, while the Stones had 14 and the Kinks had 18. So I'm not sure what got into Pete Townshend in the early '80s that he decided to sign a solo deal and pushed out 4 albums (2 solo and 2 by The Who) in the space of two and a half years. He probably spread himself too thin and could've had a classic or two if he'd consolidated those songs into fewer releases, but I'm glad we got both "Let My Love Open The Door" and "Eminence Front" out of that burst of activity.
25. Don Henley - "The Boys Of Summer" (1984)
Since Tom Petty heard and passed on Mike Campbell's demo that became "The Boys of Summer," people like to imagine that it could've been a Petty song or that it's his "the one that got away," but I don't know, I really like it as a Henley song. I worked with Henley on a Leonard Cohen tribute concert last year, he was surprisingly friendly, although I think he was trying to riff on some weird joke that I had just come from Vegas and I totally failed to pick up what he was putting down.
26. Fleetwood Mac - "Gypsy" (1982)
I know the title of this song is a word people frown upon using and I respect the reasons why, but god I love this song, I know people are big on the Tango in the Night singles but this is by far my favorite post-Tusk song by Fleetwood Mac.
27. Traveling Wilburys - "Handle With Care" (1988)
I'm gonna go ahead and stamp this as the last classic hit song involving any of the Beatles, better this than "Free As A Bird" or "FourFiveSeconds." Joseph Quinn doesn't know how Timothee Chalamet got his number, or why his texts always begin with "Nelson, it's Lucky."
28. Fabulous Thunderbirds - "Tuff Enuff" (1986)
Stevie Ray Vaughan may be the most revered guitarist of the 1980s, but I kind of prefer the music of his older brother Jimmie's band the Fabulous Thunderbirds, who had sort of a more bubblegum take on blues rock on their four great Hot 100 hits "Tuff Enuff," "Wrap It Up," "Stand Back," and "Powerful Stuff."
29. .38 Special - "Hold On Loosely" (1981)
.38 Special is another band that features the brother of a more famous rock icon. Donnie Van Zant had a nice run of hits with .38 Special, which I think is a better career to have than Johnny Van Zant, who tried in vain to fill the shoes of their older brother Ronnie as the frontman of later lineups of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
30. John Mellencamp - "Jack & Diane" (1982)
Given that John Mellencamp is the archetypal "heartland rocker," I found it fascinating to realize that he started out as kind of a glam rock disciple of Bowie who was discovered by Tony Defries, manager of Bowie, Mott the Hoople, and Iggy Pop. And Spiders From Mars guitarist Mick Ronson was a big part of Mellencamp's biggest hit, playing guitar and suggesting some of the percussion choices and the vocal harmonies on the bridge.
31. Genesis - "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" (1987)
"Land of Confusion" has historically been my favorite Invisible Touch track (I loved the weird video as a kid) but this one has slowly crept up, it just feels so huge and cinematic. I forgot sometimes how weird the bridge is in the full 8-minute album mix -- not really proggy because they just ride the same 4/4 groove for the whole song, but they have fun with a variety of synth noises in there.
32. Rod Stewart - "Young Turks" (1981)
Rod Stewart felt so much more ubiquitous in the '80s and early '90s than he does now, I used to find him pretty annoying, but now I realize he made some pretty great music in the early '70s. And even after he started to get a bit obnoxious in the disco era, he made a pretty great song with some modern new wave-y influences on "Young Turks," the first video shown on MTV to feature breakdancing.
33. Styx - "Too Much Time On My Hands" (1981)
"Too Much Time On My Hands" is another example of how classic rockers adapting to new wave seems like a pretty terrible idea on paper but wound up giving us some great music. I also really enjoyed when Paul Rudd and Jimmy Fallon remade the song's video. It's Styx's only top 10 hit written and sung by Tommy Shaw, who leads the band now, while founder Dennis DeYoung, who wrote and sang their other 7 top 10 hits, sits on the sidelines. Apparently he played the singer in a Styx tribute band in a Hilary Duff movie once.
34. The Outfield - "Your Love" (1986)
I was kind of surprised to learn The Outfield was British. Maybe because I associate the word "outfield" with baseball? I don't know. I also think I assumed this song was more of an early '80s thing, maybe because there were so many bands with that raspy The Police/Men At Work vocal sound at the time.
35. Donnie Iris - "Ah! Leah!" (1980)
The first girl I was completely infatuated with in middle school was named Leah. Weirdly I don't think I ever heard this song, or at least didn't realize what it was called until many years later as an adult. And I'm kinda glad I didn't know it at the time, it doesn't feel like it lines up with the emotions I have attached to that name. Still a pretty good song, though.
36. Bryan Adams - "Somebody" (1985)
There are some Bryan Adams songs that have been so overplayed that I kinda never wanna hear them again, including "Summer of '69" and some of his '90s soundtrack ballads. But "Somebody," "Cuts Like A Knife," "It's Only Love," I never get sick of those jams. I feel like Counting Crows kind of ripped off the lead guitar from "Somebody" on "Hanginaround," but in a good way, I like both of those songs.
37. Queen - "Another One Bites The Dust" (1980)
Considering that John Deacon was inspired by Chic's "Good Times" for the "Another One Bites the Dust" riff and Michael Jackson was the person who told Freddie Mercury it should be a single, it feels a little funny to put this on a 'rock' list. But disco's influence on rock music was a greater force for good than it usually gets credit for, and this is probably right beneath "Miss You" by the Stones as the top classic of the form.
38. Stevie Nicks with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" (1981)
Given how many simultaneous hits guys like Drake or Kendrick can have these days, it feels silly to think that the success of "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," the highest charting song of Tom Petty's career, would stifle the Heartbreakers single that was out at the time, "A Woman In Love," but it was a different time.
39. Bonnie Raitt - "Thing Called Love" (1989)
Bonnie Raitt had been making records with occasional minor success for two decades when her tenth album, Nick of Time, won the Grammy for Album of the Year and hit #1 on the Billboard 200. And that album's yearlong climb to the top started with a pretty great lead single, which I didn't realize was written by John Hiatt until I bought a Hiatt best-of CD for a dollar last year and his version was on it.
40. Little Feat - "Let It Roll" (1988)
Little Feat were arguably the greatest cult band of the '70s, and one of my personal favorite bands of all time. Almost a decade after original frontman Lowell George died, the remaining members of Little Feat decided to make a go at reuniting. They considered some old collaborators, including Bonnie Raitt and Robert Palmer, before bringing on Craig Fuller of Pure Prairie League. Little Feat didn't quite become household names, but for a couple of albums they had a bit of the mainstream visibility that had eluded them for so many years, including a "Saturday Night Live" appearance and four top 10 rock radio hits. Paul Barrere's "Let It Roll" is my favorite of those hits and it sounded great when I saw the band last year and they threw it into a set of their '70s songs and blues covers.
41. Journey - "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" (1983)
Considering the way "Don't Stop Believin'" has become by far Journey's most ubiquitous song over the last couple decades, it might seem ridiculous that I have three Journey songs on this list but not that one. But listen, I like that one too, I just enjoy some other Journey songs more, and "Separate Ways" kicks ass, probably one of the hardest rocking synth-driven songs in the AOR canon.
42. Foreigner - "Juke Box Hero" (1981)
I still sort of think of Journey and Foreigner as two peas in a pod in that wave of really slick radio rock. Far more of Foreigner's best hits were in the '70s, but they had some good ones in the '80s too, and "Juke Box Hero" is just so deliriously hammy and over-the-top.
43. George Thorogood & The Destroyers - "I Drink Alone" (1985)
I lived in Delaware for about a decade growing up, and as a young rock fan in Delaware, there weren't many local success stories to get excited about -- Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell met in a private school in New Castle County and got out of there and headed to New York as fast as they could, I guess that's kinda cool. I remember Delaware rock stations playing a ton of Thorogood, though, and always referring to his band by their original name, The Delaware Destroyers. That's a pretty funny name, though, it sounds like they wanted to destroy Delaware, which I suppose could've been a popular position to take in Delaware.
44. Robert Plant - "In The Mood" (1983)
While dozens of bands tried to fill the void left by Led Zeppelin in the '80s, the band's frontman has always seemed wonderfully unconcerned with trying to recapture the band's sound or stature in his solo career. And I just adore the dreamy groove of "In The Mood," driven in part by Phil Collins on drums, I heard this song so much on the radio growing up that I was surprised to learn that another song from the same album, "Big Log," is technically far more popular.
45. Loverboy - "Working For the Weekend" (1982)
Loverboy is, like Rick Springfield, one of those acts where I'm surprised how successful they were -- four multi-platinum albums, and ten Top 40 hits, including two that were bigger than "Working For The Weekend," the only song I hear by them all the time today.
46. Pink Floyd - "Learning To Fly" (1987)
A lot of people kind of side with Roger Waters over David Gilmour in the Pink Floyd split, but you could do worse than having the band be led by the great guitarist with the best voice in the band. Certainly the post-Waters albums aren't as weighty and conceptual, but there are some pretty good songs, and "Learning To Fly" is a great one.
47. Jackson Browne - "In The Shape Of A Heart" (1986)
I heard a lot of Jackson Browne growing up (my parents met at a festival he was playing at), and my dad always loved this song. It's an incredibly sad song, about Browne's first wife who committed suicide, but I don't know, it's beautiful and I have a lot of memories attached to it. Also some really nice guitar leads from Rick Vito, about a year before he joined Fleetwood Mac
48. Bruce Springsteen - "Dancing In The Dark" (1984)
I love that Bruce Springsteen basically turned a writer's block fit in search of a lead single into one of his biggest hit, he always came up with great stuff when his back was against the wall and he needed to deliver.
49. The Rolling Stones - "Start Me Up" (1981)
The Stones' peak period was incredibly long, writing a song that rivals "Satisfaction" as their definitive hit a whole 16 years after "Satisfaction" is almost unheard of. And it's pretty hilarious that Mick Jagger sings "you make a dead man come" over the fade out in such a ubiquitous song.
50. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - "Don't Come Around Here No More" (1985)
Tom Petty famously couldn't quite crack Southern Accents as a concept album and wound up doing some songs with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics that didn't really fit the idea of the record but were still good, including its biggest hit. I love the way the Heartbreakers take over from the drum machine groove and rev up the song at the end.
9:26 AM No comment
Deep Album Cuts Vol. 380: Joe Cocker
Friday, March 28, 2025
Joe Cocker is one of 2025's nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Bad Company, the Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Chubby Checker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Mana, Oasis, Outkast, Phish, Soundgarden, and the White Stripes.
2. Change In Louise
3. Do I Still Figure In Your Life?
4. That's Your Business
5. Dear Landlord
6. Hello, Little Friend
7. Give Peace A Chance (live)
8. Space Captain (live)
9. She Don't Mind
10. I Get Mad
11. Performance
12. Lucinda
13. Born Thru Indifference
14. Worrier
15. I Can't Say No
16. Marie
17. Come On In
18. Don't Drink The Water
19. Satisfied
20. You Know It's Gonna Hurt
21. Hitchcock Railway (live)
Tracks 1, 2, and 3 from With A Little Help From My Friends (1969)
Tracks 4, 5, and 6 from Joe Cocker! (1969)
Tracks 7 and 8 from Mad Dogs & Englishmen (1970)
Track 9 from Joe Cocker a.k.a. Something To Say (1972)
Tracks 10 and 11 from I Can Stand A Little Rain (1974)
Track 12 from Jamaica Say You Will (1975)
Tracks 13 and 14 from Stingray (1976)
Track 15 from Luxury You Can Afford (1978)
Track 16 from Sheffield Steel (1982)
Track 17 from Civilized Man (1984)
Track 18 from Cocker (1986)
Track 19 from Unchain My Heart (1987)
Track 20 from One Night Of Sin (1989)
Track 21 from Joe Cocker Live (1990)
I was a little surprised by Joe Cocker's nomination. He died about a decade ago, and it feels like his hits and his overall style are even further out of fashion now than they were then. He's considered more of an 'interpreter' than an artist, because while he did write songs, virtually every song he's known for is a cover. He could really sing the hell out of some songs and make them his own, though. There are plenty of good Beatles covers, and a few I like as much as original, but "With a Little Help From My Friends" may be the only Beatles cover that I think blows the original out of the water. Of course, I probably watched a hundred episodes of "The Wonder Years" before I ever listened to Sgt Pepper's, so I would say that.
So I made an effort to highlight Cocker the songwriter here, and the songs he wrote (often with his pianist Chris Stainton) on this playlist are "Sandpaper Cadillac," "Change in Louise," "That's Your Business," "She Don't Mind," "Something To Say," "I Get Mad," and "Born Thru Indifference." In addition to his famous Beatles covers, Cocker also frequently covered Bob Dylan ("Dear Landlord") and Randy Newman ("Lucinda" and "Marie"). Cocker was the first person to release Allen Toussaint's "Performance," later recorded by Aaron Neville, Dobie Gray, and others.
Cocker is one of those '70s acts whose highest charting album in the U.S. was a live record, and Mad Dogs & Englishmen is pretty killer. Leon Russell, who wrote "Hello, Little Friend" and the hit "Delta Lady" for Cocker's second studio album, was the musical director of that tour, and it included a song he wrote with Bramlett that has never been released elsewhere called "Give Peace a Chance" (not to be confused with the Lennon song of the same name). Russell discovered Matthew Moore, who sang backing vocals on the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour and wrote the fantastic song "Space Captain," and would continue to write songs for Cocker for many years after, including "Worrier," which has an Eric Clapton guitar solo and great backing vocals by Bramlett. His brother Daniel Moore also wrote songs for Cocker, including "I Can't Say No."
I think it's kind of funny that he released an album called Joe Cocker! and followed it with an album called Joe Cocker -- fittingly, the one with no exclamation point was less successful. My mom had the Joe Cocker Live album in the early '90s, and that was my first exposure to his music outside of "The Wonder Years." It may not be as good as Mad Dogs & Englishmen but I like that record and figured I'd end the playlist with something from that, although he continued to record many more records for a couple decades after that.
11:41 AM No comment