Ella Fitzgerald Sings Every Song Ever

I am listening to Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book. I adore Ella Fitzgerald. I think there should have been an Ella Fitzgerald recording project called Ella Fitzgerald Sings Every Song Ever.

I am unabashedly biased in her favor, and can think of only one or two instances in all the recorded music I have of hers that I think could even have been improved, let alone where I think she made a mistake—and those are on imported discs of unknown and dubious provenance.

The impression I get so often listening to Ella Fitzgerald is that she sang on the basis of a kind of Necessity. Her voice had astonishing range and power in almost all registers, great emotional scope and depth, and did not lack delicacy, although she is not well known for it. One of the glorious things about the recordings we call the Song Books is the way they display her ability to take quite varied material and treat it as both the material that it was and also make it her own. She could take even Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers numbers that seem a little corny or square, and make them fresh while remaining paradoxically quaint or out-of-time.

All of it seems to be precisely what had to happen, a kind of singular perfection of each song—an odd thing to say about jazz-ish interpretations of popular songs, I realize. In those rare cases in which I prefer someone else’s version of a song, I still perceive something necessary and complete in what Ella did with it. It’s perplexing to me in a deeply satisfying way, and that’s why I can’t help returning to her. Her singing was a kind of Hegelian absolute of popular song, I think.

I think playing Ella Fitzgerald, and explaining what she’s doing, would be a good way to explain Hegel’s philosophical method.

album of the day: Dire Straits

Dire Straits were, of course, a seminal post-punk, roots-revival band, at least in the first phase of their history. Their first album was released in 1978, when the top-selling album in the US was the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever. That is to say, Dire Straits came on the scene at the height of, and at the beginning of the end of, disco. Good timing, boys!

It's hard to imagine an album more diametrically opposed to everything disco. Apart from a couple of double-dubbed guitars, every cut on the album is just four instrument tracks and vocals, the basic kit of rock. And unlike punk, Dire Straits obviously featured Mark Knopfler's virtuoso guitar work and odd impressionistic snapshot lyrics.

I didn't know any of that when I bought my first Dire Straits album (in fact, the less well-regarded second album, Communiqué), or even when I went back and bought this one. All I knew was Douglas Adams had recommended them in the only sex scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. That's a weird connection, because although the music is gorgeous on this record, it's not what I would call sexy, since a lot of Knopfler's stuff is kinda morose. That probably says more about Douglas Adams than about me.

As for me, I took instant liking to Dire Straits, because I was developing my taste for mopey music back then.

And with the exception of "Southbound Again" and "Setting Me Up" - neither of which is really joyful - this is a pretty damn mopey record. Not everything is a gem, of course. "In the Gallery" is a somewhat heavy-handed criticism of trendy arty types and a lament for the artists and art they ruin. I also have the nerve to think the giant hit "Sultans of Swing" is a tad overwrought - but I read it as moping over how unrewarding and uninspired the pub rock scene can be, especially for true artists yearning to breathe free.

My favorites are, as I've tipped my hand already, the contemplative portrait pieces: "Lions," "Wild West End" and "Down to the Waterline" (despite being uptempo), and, when I can get past the artistic-struggle vibe, "Sultans of Swing." Here's a representative stanza from "Lions":

Church bell clinging on just trying
To get a crowd for Evensong
Nobody cares to depend upon the chime it plays
They're all in the station praying for trains
the Congregation late again
It's getting darker all the time these flagpole days
Drunk old soldier he gave her a fright
He's a crazy lion howling for a fight

(Line breaks, and indeed lyrics, are approximate, as Knopfler was at the time a strict adherent to the mumble-something-approximating-what-you-wrote school of folk-rock singing.) While the song pretty clearly tracks a working woman through her commute home, we get a picture of her somewhat vulnerable, and certainly lonesome, state of mind, by way of atmospheric details - as though the city was the outward expression of her emotional state. And that's just cool.

Something else that really strikes me about this album is Knopfler's range as a musician. I mean, duh, right? He's easily one of the 10 best guitarists in rock music of the era - and for pure musicianship, just out-and-out being able to make his guitar do anything, I'm not sure anyone's better. On Dire Straits he's all over the place - tight grooves, anthemic melody lines, lilting, definitely some weepies - and it's absolutely perfect, not a note out of place, not a note too many or too few.

album of the day: Nine Objects of Desire

The last year I spent in Pittsburgh I was in the habit of listening to Harry Shearer's weird weekly radio program, Le Show, every Sunday night on the local NPR station (which happened to be a unit of Duquesne). In between Shearer's bits of satire and tongue-in-cheek reading of bits from the LA Times "hot property" column and trade publications, there were delightful musical fills. Among other qualities, Shearer has excellent taste in music.

He started playing stuff that I didn't recognize as Suzanne Vega for some time. The songs were sharp, had an interesting sense of language, and often some good jazzy rhythm guitar. It turned out the songs were all from this album, which the All Music Guide has no patience for.

I dig their criticism, even if I don't agree with their overall judgment. There are some spiffy songs here. The best of them are probably "My Favorite Plum," "Head Shots," "Stockings" and the very nice "Caramel" - all of which Shearer introduced me to. Aside from "Head Shots," these all seem to describe states of desire - which has always suggested to me that the title of the album is hardly an accident, even if we can't quite call it a themed album. "Caramel" compares love to food, something I think we should always do. "My Favorite Plum" might do the same thing, and if so, it's subtly lascivious, and I approve, or else it really is just Suzanne Vega obsessing over a tree fruit, and I approve. "Stockings" would seem to be about very nearly falling into a lesbian crush, and once again, I approve (although almost none of my lesbian crushes have achieved very much).

"Head Shots" is just kinda creepy. I don't know what it's about, except seeing pictures of a boy's head all over the place. Vega does creepy so well, it's creepy. I don't think she's creepy, I just think she has a creepy ability to express being creeped out by creepy stuff. Maybe her ability being creepy, and the prevalence of creepy themes in her work, means she is in fact sorta creepy, but I'm not yet prepared to render that judgment.

Of the rest, I like "Lolita," "No Cheap Thrill" (which Shearer also played) and "Thin Man" a lot. Lauren really likes "Tombstone," which is about why tombstones are so great - namely, that they weather well. There's only one song on here I really could do without, "World Before Columbus," and even that has a nice guitar line.

A guitar line that is, unfortunately, obscured by the over-production and (AMG got this right) muddy engineering that mar the record. For my money, Vega's song-writing here is clever and smart and shines through despite the production, and that makes it worthwhile.

album of the day: Backatown

We heard Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews on some late-night program, and the performance was just terrific. So we bought the disc.

I ain't got much to say about it. It's terrific. My only criticism is that I wish at least a few of the numbers were extended jams instead of the tight 3-minute jobs they are. I'm not sure if that would defeat Trombone Shorty's purpose here: he might well have a sort of point to make about musical economy, or jabs, or the state of recorded pop music in the fatal stages of capitalism. I don't know.

If you're into that kind of thing, you might enjoy playing "what genre is this" with the album. I had initially stuck him in jazz, before we played the CD, because of the TV performance we'd seen. He was dressed kind of jazz then, too. He looks sorta jazz on the cover. But I moved him to the general mishmash section of our CD collection, because I've decided that the more central vibe here is funk.

But really, what this is, is music. That whole genre-definition game is overdetermined by capitalism, class, and culturally snobbery. At bottom, the only thing that holds a genre together is usage. Certain traits of musical performance and composition keep getting called "jazz" until the family resemblance fools us into imagining it has an essence. By then, it has a cultural cachet, the main significance of which, especially these days, is its brand-identity.

Anyway, you should listen to Trombone Shorty and have a good time.

album of the day: Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5

It's always precarious to write about music as expressing ideas. Especially in the case of a symphony, which is really just a series of notes, and especially in the case of Shostakovich's Fifth, which is not only just a series of notes, but a series of notes he wrote in an attempt to continue his composing career and not, you know, get executed by Stalin.

I forget exactly how I got hooked on Shostakovich. I suspect my friend Bob is to blame. The Fifth Symphony is the first piece I knew, and it was so compelling, I immediately went after all the Shostakovich I could.

I won't go into the details of the history of his composing it here. There's a good piece on it on Wikipedia.

This afternoon, I listened to the first two movements the symphony on the way home from campus, and could barely contain myself. I've continued it since then. I can't provide a perfectly rational basis for this claim, but I'm happy with it: this symphony is about the horror of power. The first movement, for instance, expresses the terrifying potential of power - political power, most of all - to make things happen, to cause things to occur. If I have to explain to you why this is a horrible power, you may already not be a good audience for the symphony. But if you have an inkling, give Shostakovich a listen, so he can explain to you just how horrible power can be.

After being terrified nearly to tears by the first movement (walking down Andre in Turlock, and passing a few fellow pedestrians who gave me very concerned looks), I hit the tragedy of the second movement. Officially, the second movement was a bit of fun, a comic interlude in an otherwise extraordinarily bleak symphony. Bullshit. The second movement takes a Russian folk theme, played in quiet, meek tones on woodwinds and pizzicato violins, and then refracts that theme as an appropriated melody blasted back at the folk by a militaristic march. Their theme expressing life and its sanctity and fragility is twisted into a monstrous anthem, presented back to them as though the people were expected to accept this as the authentic representation of their culture and lives. There's nothing silly or relieving about the comedy of it: it's the harshest satire. My boy Shostie could write some friggin satire.

There follows the third movement, quoting a suppressed - no, an overtly banned - traditional funeral dirge, and which apparently made the premiere audience weep. Nuff said. The fourth movement, in my opinion, expresses the triumph of power, the final obliteration of the life of the folk, as all the themes ultimately contribute to what I am sure in my soul is a mock-heroic climax. The tension Shostakovich achieves in the last phrases of the fourth movement, the clashing cymbals and blaring horns over the straining strings - that's the sound it might make when hope dies.

I mean, imagine you're a creative artist with a quirky sense of humor and a spirit of adventure, and that the work you are compelled to create is making people want to kill you and your friends. Imagine that after your last premiere, people started publishing reviews that said, basically, "yep, time to kill this motherfucker," and that at the same moment, your friends started disappearing. Then they come to you and say, "when's your next piece coming out? We're really interested!"

The awful genius of Shostakovich, in this symphony, was to give those people something they had to accept, even laud, and at the same time, express himself genuinely, and say something about, to, and for the people under this tyranny. Jesus, no wonder they wept!

In Mstislav Rostropovich's direction, this London Symphony recording does some amazing things, I should say. I am most familiar with an old Allegro classical cassette I bought in 1984, for fuck's sake, and that's my basic frame of reference for any other performance - as these things always go. Rostropovich's first movement is way goddamn scarier, and in fact one of scariest performances of classical music I've heard. (You may need to be in the mood, and may need to be familiar with the Fifth, to get this.) But it was the second movement that nailed me. Rostropovich leads the London gang to such a tender expression of the initial themes, and through such a miserable plundering of the same themes, that the connection between them is devastating.

I bought this on iTunes, and because of that, hadn't really regarded the cover art. Nice summation.

album of the day: Pictures at an Exhibition

People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room

- Ani Difranco, "Fuel"

When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time riding my bike out to a shopping center in Greensboro that had a really good book store and a decent record store where I spent a lot of the money I made on my paper route. Among the great finds was a cassette tape of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. I didn't know anything about classical music then, and still know next to nothing, but I could tell from the start that this 1958 concert recording by Sviatoslav Richter was a monumental piece of work.

I played that tape to death, always only playing the side containing Richter's performance and ignoring the orchestrated version by Maurice Ravel on the other. I bought a CD of somebody else playing the solo piano original by Mussorgsky, but it had none of the appeal of Richter's. When my old tape-deck crapped out several years ago, I tried to find a CD of the Sofia concert, and for years, it just wasn't available. Thanks be to iTunes. And thanks be to whoever decided not to tamper with the original engineering, despite its many faults.

In comparison with present-day recording technique and production values, this is a disaster. Seemingly every cough of every audience member is faithfully preserved on the scratchy, flattish monaural recording. My guess would be that, aware of Richter's attacking style, the recording engineer placed the microphone (I expect just one) several feet away from the piano, to avoid red-lining too much.

But Richter is impossible to describe adequately. In his hands, Mussorgsky's sorta tone-poem, sorta programmatic suite is a weird tragicomic passion play. No other performance I've heard has 1/10 the humor, gravity, energy, or meaning. Maybe Richter was just making it all up, and those staid, smoothed-over renderings (I'm looking at you, Ravel) are more genuine. I don't care.

Richter came into the concert hall, sat at the piano, twinkled around with the introduction of the recurrent theme, thence through the Gnomus, the Tuileries, the Ballet of the Chickens in their Shells - all the silly stuff, played with terrific dynamic variation (the Chickens seem to dance in stop-motion animation, very cartoon-like), and then beat the living hell out of the rest of the piece, stomping out a terrifying Catacombs in particular.

I don't know anything about Sviatoslav Richter, really, but in my opinion he was a pretty scary dude. The Wikipedia article about him quotes him as saying he believed performers should simply express the composer's intentions, but if that's so, I can't understand why his performance of Mussorgsky is so different from others I've heard.

I also can't seem to find any information on the circumstances of the 1958 Sofia recital, other than that it was recorded and well-regarded - which is incredibly feint praise for it.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 12 of ??

1. Long December - Counting Crows. Studio version. The live versions from either the VH1 show or the MTV show (we've got a double CD incorporating both of those) are vastly superior. I've never seen Counting Crows in concert, but I imagine they'd be tremendous.

2. Lord Granville - Al Stewart. Nobody sees Al Stewart in concert, of course, and Lord Granville, among all the songs on The Year of the Cat, is one I imagine lease likely to play well live.

3. Los Angeles - X. My Duquesne pal Dave "Dave" Koukal turned me on to X. The first album of theirs I bought was Los Angeles, which contains the song "Los Angeles," and I've never really been sure what I think of the album or the song. The re-released CD had a demo track of "Adult Books," and that's really what got me into X.

4. Los Angeles, I'm Yours - The Decemberists. Okay, I'm sold. As iPods are notorious for doing, mine repeats this song inordinately frequently when set to "randomly" "shuffle" songs. This morning I gave in. You win, Decemberists.

5. Loser - Beck. Get crazy with the cheez whiz all you want, Beck. You're still a loser.

6. Love - The Sundays.

7. Love Always Remains - MGMT. This is one of their more poppy tracks, which I don't think I mean as a pun.

8. Love The One You're With - Crosby, Stills, and Nash. My pal Bobo the Wandering Pall-bearer once started yelling about Israel and Palestine when this came on the radio in the car. It's not really about religious, cultural, and political conflict.

9. Love, Reign O'er Me - The Who. I'm a total sucker for this song, and it's not just Townshend's descending electric guitar line, but also Roger Daltrey's absolute pummeling of the vocal. Just soak in the genius.

10. Madame George - Van Morrison.

11. Magic Bus - The Who. It's almost hard to believe the same guy wrote this. But also genius.

12. Maginot Waltz - Ralph McTell. A cute little ditty about the singer and his pal Albert hanging around playing music and the singer trying to cozy up to Albert's cousin Marjorie, with a very cool chord progression, until it turns all off-to-war in the surprise finish:

Nine o'clock come round we had to take the charabanc
Albert was too drunk to play the banjo but still we sang
All except Marjorie, I could tell at a glance
Because me and Albert was leaving for France.

I said "We'll both be home in a week or two
Me and Albert and Lord Kitchener will teach the Hun a thing or two.
I'm sure to return, after me do not yearn
And we will waltz together all our lives through."

Did they? Well, certainly not in two weeks.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 11 of ??

1. Lapsing With Drainpipe - Grogshow.

2. Last To Know - Neil Finn.

3. Laughing - Winterpills. Three mopey indie/alternative tunes in a row. I needed this?

4. Lazy Line Painter Jane - Belle and Sebastian. That's more like it. I love the ambiguous gender/sex/sexuality stuff in the chorus as the song progresses: "You will have a boy tonight/ You will have a girl tonight / On the last bus out of town..." This version is from a collection of random bits and pieces, Push Barman To Open Old Wounds.

5. Leave It Like It Is - David Wilcox. My friend Nancy knew him when he was scratching out a living playing fingerstyle guitar in coffee shops in the mountains of North Carolina. And now where is he? I think he's scratching out a living playing fingerstyle guitar in coffee shops. Who says show biz doesn't pay?!

6. Leif Erikson - Interpol.

7. Length of Love - Interpol. The more I listen to Interpol, the more I'm willing to accept them into my musical life. They have a good chunky feel. They may be one of those who deliberately title songs so they play consecutively when people play all the songs on their iPods in alphabetical order (I'm looking at you, R.E.M.). Or I might be paranoid.

8. Life And How To Live It - R.E.M. Aha!

9. Life Being What It Is - Kaki King. I love this song. I love Kaki King. She doesn't love me. Life being what it is...

10. Life Is Hard - Bob Dylan. Or as Dylan would say.

11. Lion - John Fahey. Fahey wrote this song about his cat, Lion, after Lion's death. The separate parts are a romping blues and a slow, sweet ballad, and, on my listening at least, capture two essential cat moods.

12. Lips Of The Goddess - Grogshow.

13. Listening For The Weather - Bic Runga. Apparently one of the biggest names in New Zealand pop music, I only know Bic Runga because of this song about the ineluctable vicissitudes of weather, the inevitability of age, and the will to be accepting of each.

14. Little Blue Joy - Paper Cats. A short solo guitar piece of mine, title drawn from a comment Lauren made about a tiny blue wood-sided house somewhere.

15. Living Room - Tegan and Sara. What I like about this song, and what I like about Tegan and Sara, is the sense of their being almost totally out of control. I'm not sure at all I'd like to be around them when they finally lose it.

16. Lonely Rag - Nick Roche. I found this on Soundclick when I first set up my account to share Paper Cats music on the web. It is indeed lonely sounding. If I recall correctly, Roche is from the UK, has some kind of technical job (engineering?), and at 50-something aspires to learn to play better. I need to remember him when, as lately, I despair of ever playing well.

album of the day: Mr. Demachy - Pièces de Viole

A few weeks ago, my loveliest and I started talking about and listening to more classical music - in particular, cello stuff, and in particular, Bach. About that time, I heard about the music streaming site Pandora, and added Bach to my list of musicians (along with Beth Orton, John Fahey, Bert Jansch, Land Of Talk - a very weird list). Pandora uses something they call musical DNA to identify what similar music you might like, and plays it for you.

It played me two Baroque composers I have since fallen madly in love with: Tobias Hume (of which more anon) and Machy (aka Le Sieur de Machy, or on the cover of this album, Demachy) - both composers and players of the viol, the predecessor of violins, cellos, etc. The Pièces were written sometime in the 17th century, but feel rather pre-Bach, both because of the lack of more modern instruments, and because they're still written in more varied modes.

I realize this is why the musician in me loves this music. It's just not like music that's been made since Bach, since we've standardized and reduced our modes and have perfected tuning and scales of instruments, in particular of stringed instruments. Back then, one viol was much like another, but not identical to another, and the frets on them were adjustable, which would change the way the instrument scaled.

But the real reason I have fallen in love is that the bass viol's range is somewhere between a cello and a viola, and has the sonority and cry that cellos have. The varied musical modes add more to the melancholy of the bass viol's sound, so the whole of it has tremendous emotional punch. You do have to really like melancholy music, though.

The four suites contained in the Pièces are modally and chromatically linked, progressing from D minor, to D major, to G minor, ending in G major. Even the major keyed suites aren't your grandpa Bach's major key, because the intervals are both not quite the usual and the steps aren't quite the same as on Grandpa Bach's blasted violins and cellos.

I want to make my guitar sound like that, and to a limited extent, one can do that by changing the tuning. I keep a crappy Takamine tuned to open-C major, with the low E string tuned down to C, but because the frets are built for higher string tension, the lower tuning distorts the scales. Yippee, I say.

I'd love to get my hands on a bass viol, but my guess is they costs millions of dollars, and I have no experience whatsoever with bowed instruments. Maybe I should look for a lute?

That's the other reason I'm enamored: I love early instruments almost as much as I love early music. They both have an imperfect grace that I'm just a sucker for. The viol, like the guitar, derive from an earlier mainly Spanish-made instrument called the vihuela (there are Mexican vihuelas nowadays, but these are the old jobs, the vihuelasaurus as it were). Viols moved north into France, and eventually England, and somewhere along the way somebody decided to bow them instead of pluck them. Machy has a little pluck left in him, too. It sounds somewhere between a guitar and a harp, hint of banjo in there, rather than like a plucked violin or cello - the sound boxes are smaller and so there's much less of that deep resonance.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 10 of ??

1. I Was Meant For The Stage - The Decemberists. Quick, name three other songs with the word "derision" in them!

2. I Will Follow - U2. Way back in the day, U2 were a proto-alternative band with a unique sound.

3. I'll Be Back Up On My Feet- the Monkees. Kind of genius: the staccato rhythm of the lyric and the punchy rhythm guitar give this recording a tremendous forward momentum.

4. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight - Norah Jones/Bob Dylan. A very lovely take by Norah Jones on one of The Bob's sweetest ballads. She even retains his long pause on "IIIIIIII'll be yooooooour..." and snap on "ba-by tonight," which is good, because it wouldn't be half the song it is without those.

5. I'll Stop The World And Melt With You - Modern English. For some reason, this is mislabeled on my iPod as being by the Cure.

6. I'm Burning For You - Blue Öyster Cult.

7. I'm In The Mood - John Lee Hooker with Bonnie Raitt. From one of those late-career John Lee 'n' Friends projects that has such mixed results. Bonnie Raitt is no slouch on slide guitar, though.

8. I'm On Fire - Bruce Springsteen. It's Boss's day tomorrow! Er, no, sorry, that's Bosses' Day. Screw that.

9. I'm Only Sleeping - the Beatles. A strangely good fit after "I'm On Fire."

10. I'm Special - the Pretenders. Okay, you have my attention. Geez!

11. I'm The Man Who Loves You - Wilco. Kick-ass distorted/feedback guitar solo. Did you know Summerteeth is 17 years old now? That album can drive a car!

12. I've Been Everywhere - Johnny Cash. Rapid-fire delivery catalog song. It's fun to listen to all the place names and compare with my own (rather extensive) list of places I've been.

13. If I Needed Someone - the Beatles.

14. If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It - Al Stewart. I dunno, Al, it's just so put together, I can't be sure it did come naturally.

15. In My Place - Coldplay. One of the best numbers by the band we're supposed to love to hate.

Hey, by the way, this is my landmark 641st post!

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 9 of ??

Now, for the letter I!

1. I Am A Rock - Simon and Garfunkel.

2. I Am Also A Walrus - Biff Nerfurpleburger. Written because I realized my character/alter ego Biff believes he was a member of the Beatles, and needed to write a post-Beatles self-referential song (like all of the actual Beatles did). I'm pretty sure Biff is not deranged, though most of his fans may believe otherwise. The whole Beatles thing is because he is badly misinformed.

3. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart - Wilco.

4. I Don't Wanna Grow Up - Tom Waits. If you've never seen the video of the song, directed by Jim Jarmusch, it's revelatory - I'm just not sure of what. Jim Jarmusch is not allowed in the house.

5. (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea - Elvis Costello. Well, then, don't go, Elvis. Do I have to explain everything to you?

6. I Feel It All - Feist.

7. I Found A Letter - Paper Cats. Not my favorite of ours. I wrote it one evening when I found a letter or something written by my ex. Seeing her handwriting was really weird, and brought back a lot of very bad memories, so I wrote them all in a song. As one might imagine, it's not a very nice song.

8. I Found A Whistle - MGMT. I don't know what was happening when they wrote this. I'm guessing its allegorical. Or apocryphal.

9. I Guess I Planted - Billy Bragg/Woody Guthrie. Union song!

10. I Kicked A Boy - The Sundays. The Harriet Wheeler of the date this song was recorded would probably be welcome to kick me a few times. She's got one o' them voices, I tells ya!

11. I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts - X. Not only does this song express John Doe's bad conscience about being an American, but it also incorrectly foretells the doom of American bands. Hah! Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it, X fans!

12. I Remember California - R.E.M. Yes, California is on the edge of the continent. Very informative, Michael.

13. I See Your Face Before Me - Miles Davis. I only know this Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz song from Miles' mid-50s recording, which is painfully desolate. Someone once wrote that no one else has ever been able to express loneliness and forlornness like Miles playing the trumpet. Exhibit A right here.

14. I Started A Joke - the Bee Gees. Wow, has this thing utterly failed to remain current, or even viable, in any way, shape, or form. Play it once, I dare you. Does. Not. Work. Especially not after Miles.

15. I Want You - Elvis Costello. Look, Elvis, she's with that other guy, and she doesn't care what you think of him. And quit being such a creep! This is, in fact, an amazing song. If you're in a committed relationship, and you've got a desperate longing for someone else in a committed relationship, and the two of you are alone together, and that person plays you this song, I for one believe it might mean something.

16. I Want You - the Beatles. In fact, not too very different from the previous song - for the first and only time today.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 8 of ??

... more skipping...

Today's list is brought to you by the letter H.

1. Hey Stella - Paper Cats. I write songs for cats. It's just something I do. Stella is one of the cats that lives at Lauren's mom's house in Harbor City. It dislikes everybody but me and Lauren's mom. I almost always greet her by doing a bad Stanley Kowalski, hence the title of the tune.

2. Hideous Towns - The Sundays. One of my all-time favorite moody alternative bands. I used to play Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic on my usually very depressed drives from Punxsutawney back home to Pittsburgh when I taught at IUP. Perfect music for those gray February afternoons.

3. High Fidelity - Elvis Costello. Not to kvetch, Elvis, but hasn't everybody tasted the bitterness of their own tears?

4. High Flyin' Bird - Richie Havens. Beautiful, sad song.

5. High Germany - Bert Jansch. Traditional song of the Thirty Years' War in a typical Janschian setting - acoustic guitar and bass, a little flute, female voice.

6. Higher and Higher - Jackie Wilson. Possibly the most joyful song ever.

7. Hoodoo Voodoo - Wilco/Woody Guthrie. Yet another from the Mermaid Avenue disc. Among the silliest songs ever.

8. Hotel Song - Regina Spektor. Yummy.

9. House of Cards - Radiohead.

10. Houses of the Holy - Led Zeppelin.

11. How Do You Feel? - Jefferson Airplane. If there's a Jefferson Airplane album other than Surrealistic Pillow that's worth anything, I sure don't know it. It's dated as hell, but who cares?

12. How My Heart Behaves - Feist. I adore Leslie Feist's voice. I hate the backup singing by the band on this track. They shouldn't have done that.

13. How Soon Is Now? - The Smiths. May I be forgiven if I have doubts that Morrissey is human, or that he needs to be loved just like anybody else does?

14. How To Be Free - Paper Cats. From Do Paper Cats Dream of Origami Birds? When I first started writing the music for our 4th cd, I fully intended to write a rock record. This ended up being really the only rock song on it.

15. I Am A Rock

choral concert, preceded by abject despair, followed by hyperreality

I am a fan of the music program at Cow State Santa Claus. I go to numerous concerts every year, especially choral and jazz performances. But I almost missed last night's concert because I saw no advertisement of the show on campus. None. Zippo. I have received four emails announcing the current theater show, and not one about the choral concert.

Thanks to insider information, we got to the show anyway. And as usual, it was excellently performed.

The Concert Chorale performed Mozart and Mendelssohn, and some people you don't know, but maybe should, like Nunes Garcia, Clements, Van Heusen, and Earnest (though Earnest's name probably isn't important...). Wonderful work by the soloists.

Lousy work by the audience. I have really never heard such a rude and obnoxious audience. First of all, dozens of people arrived late, came into the recital hall and didn't get seats until music had started. The etiquette is that you do that as quickly as you can between songs, not walk in and wander around for a while, waving at your friends. Secondly, don't crinkle yer damn program! Most importantly, if you are going to break the law by recording the performance, don't play back the recording immediately after a song!

The Chamber Singers followed after intermission. Our joke name for the Chamber Singers, which dates back to 2005 I believe, is Daniel Afonso's Elite Republican Guard - which is a weird joke, to be sure. (The Elite Republican Guard were Saddam Hussein's crack military security force, alleged to be the absolutely best Iraqi military personnel. I think I had some idea of their being the troupe/troops Daniel sends out to commit musical murder, mayhem, and mischief, though I can tell you I never put it in such brilliant alliteration before.)

The Chamber Singers are indeed the elite choral singers on campus, who generally work with more challenging material and are basically expected to be professional under all circumstances - handy for enduring such a crap audience. They sang all kinds of stuff you've never heard of before, which is great fun, especially the excerpts from Poulenc's Sept Chansons. (They did numbers 1, 2, 5 and 6. I explained, rather helpfully I thought, that in fact this is the complete version of Poulenc's Sept Chansons - it's just called that because Poulenc was a nutter.) Poulenc was a nutter, and the Sept Chansons include some of his weird intervals and melodrama. The other two highlights of their program for me were another 20th century piece, by Hanson, called "A Prayer of the Middle Ages," which has some of the same stuff I love in Poulenc, and was beautifully sung, and the closing number, "Cosita Linda," which is a bit of fluff, but rhythmically dynamic and featured Daniel playing a shaker and the choir swaying to the beat.

Great, great show. The audience didn't deserve it. Well, okay, some of us did.

Anyway, yeah, this was after a day of feeling utterly miserable, all freaking day. No further comment on that.

Afterward, we stopped in at a party for the choirs, and this morning somebody on Facebook had a profile picture taken at the party. So this morning I'm having this Virilio/Baudrillard moment, staring instantaneous nostalgia in the face(book) over my coffee. For some reason folks' party images posted to Facebook hadn't struck me before, but they really are hyperreal, taken to the extreme - some people spend a great deal of time at parties capturing images of the party, then either posting them immediately or soon after to teh Interwebs, so the party becomes this hyper-real event - you know, like the Gulf War... which ties us back into the Elite Republican Guard joke, and which will close out this rambling for today, not least of all because I have a two-inch stack of student papers to grade.

album of the day: Breakfast in America

I'll refrain from any extended commentary on Supertramp, thank you very much. Just take this one album, forget anything else, and you've still got a single work of towering genius, at least as far as pop music goes.

I have the odd feeling about this album, and one or two others, that I've always known it. I feel like this music was familiar to me from before birth, as some weird kind of congenital cultural inheritance. The truth is that my sister had a copy that she played regularly, and I eventually felt compelled to buy one for myself rather than wait for her to play it.

I don't feel one way or another about the quality of the music. It's perfectly fine, perfectly suited to the project as a whole.

Breakfast in America has a perfect pop sensibility, too - bouncy, great hooks, and an ideal balance of cynicism, discontent, and nonchalance. For instance, in my favorite, "The Logical Song," which is the pop-song version of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, but catchier, Roger Hodgson lumps together education, logic, responsibility, and strict adherence to social and political convention. Once you've been in school, you're trapped in this plastic cage of discipline, with no way out:

Now watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical,
liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're
acceptable, respecable, presentable, a vegtable!

Whence into that tight, gorgeous little sax solo by John Helliwell.

Dissatisfaction is a fundamental theme of the album, or at least of Hodgson's stuff, as in the confusedly hopeful travelogue "Breakfast in America":

Take a look at my girlfriend
She's the only one I got
Not much of a girlfriend
Never seem to get a lot
Take a jumbo across the water
Like to see America
See the girls in California
I'm hoping it's going to come true
But there's not a lot I can do.

Good luck with that, Rog. Write if you get anywhere with the California girls.

It's not just Hodgson, either. Rick Davies has his own problems to talk about, for example, in the less well-known "Just Another Nervous Wreck":

Live on the second floor now
They're trying to bust the door down
Soon I'll have a new address
So much for liberation
They'll have a celebration
Yeah I've been under too much stress
And as the cloud begin to rumble
So the juggler makes his fumble
And the sun upon my wall is getting less
Don't, give a damn
Fight, while you can
Kill, shoot 'em up
They'll run amuck
Shout, Judas
Loud, they'll hear us
Soldier, sailor
They'll run for cover when they discover
Everyone's a nervous wreck now

No wonder they're trying to cross the pond.

Even when I was 15, it was interesting to me how strangely disaffected this album is. If I wanted to be very cynical about it, I'd suggest that Davies and Hodgson were deliberately exploiting popular grievances in order to sell records. And I can't really judge that one way or another, in the end.

But I can tell you a couple things.

If you happen to be living through the doomed end of a rapidly failing relationship, and you're pointedly avoiding both this thought and the other party one weekday after work, and you're driving rather far west for your destination directly north, and "Take the Long Way Home" pops onto the radio, it means something.

And if someone you think is lovely suddenly and randomly quotes "The Logical Song" at you, and you know there's no reason it should be there, except that it had to be, and it perfectly and directly addresses you, it means something.

Whether or not it meant anything to Davies or Hodgson.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 7 of ??

1. Fall On Me - R.E.M.

2. Feeling Gravitys Pull - R.E.M. I'm using their spelling, omitting the apostrophe.

3. Feral Children - Beth Orton. Ain't that a great name for a song?

4. Fighting in a Sack - The Shins. And yes, I once more typoed the band name as The Shings. They might as well change their name, eh?

5. Finest Worksong - R.E.M. I wasn't fully aware how many R.E.M. songs start with F.

6. Fire and Rain - James Taylor. Quick, name three other James Taylor songs that aren't about people either going crazy or dying.

7. Fireplace - R.E.M. This is getting suspicious.

8. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - Robert Flack. I wish this song held up better over time. Partly it's the schmaltzy recording and production of this track, but partly, sadly, it is the song.

9. First We Take Manhattan - R.E.M./Leonard Cohen. The is beyond suspicious. R.E.M. close to, but perhaps just a moment beyond the pinnacle of their power, from the Cohen tribute disc I'm Your Fan - the only tribute album I know of whose title puns on a lyric by the honoree.

10. Flash Delirium - MGMT. I'm not sure what to think of MGMT. Some of their more neo-psychelia stuff I like. This isn't some of that stuff. Too much whispering and shouting.

11. Flavor of the Month - The Posies. It's grape.

12. Float On - Modest Mouse. Another band I'm not sure what to think of. You're supposed to like Modest Mouse if you like bands like Coldplay or Radiohead, but I frankly don't see what's so similar.

13. Flying Sorcery - Al Stewart. In late spring and early summer, we kept hearing "Year of the Cat" on the radio, and I eventually downloaded the whole album. Whatever one thinks of it - overproduced, cleverly disguised vapidity; smart pop-rock; significant genre-stretching singer-songwriter meets rock meets prog meets proto-chamber-pop - you couldn't get away with this these days. You'd have to be waaaaay more techno or emo, and that'd wreck the thing.

14. For Marlene - Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. Possibly the only coherent, and easily the most listenable song on Party Intellectuals. It tells the story of a working stiff's devotion to his kid, and for all of Ribot's brooding and bombast, it's actually rather sweet.

So, I had three comments submitted to recent posts, all spam from a website design joint. Let's see if they prowl again.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 6 of ??

1. The Death Of The Clayton Peacock - John Fahey. Eerie tune played with a slide.

2. Diamonds And Rust - Paper Cats/Joan Baez. This is from our latest CD, which is called Do Paper Cats Dream Of Origami Birds?, in case I hadn't mentioned. It sounds really good - way better than I thought it would turn out, on the nth take, the final, successful one, the one after which I said, "Well, I don't care if I never play that song again the rest of my life."

3. Different Drum - Michael Nesmith. Nesmith wrote a handful of terrific songs, and I think I like his version of it better than Linda Ronstadt's.

4. Digging For Fire - The Pixies.

5. Digital Handshake - Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. Noise. Felt great today.

6. Dirty Back Road - The B52s. Just reaching the corner of Monte Vista and Dels Lane. So if you saw me there at around 9:50 this morning, wondering what I was listening to and thinking about as you passed by, now you know. You'll be more circumspect about asking, next time, too, I bet.

7. Djobi Djoba - The Gipsy Kings. Always brings back strangely fond memories of a time long ago with people I never speak to any more, in a place I hope never to revisit.

8. Do I Do - Stevie Wonder. Friggin' Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solo!

9. Do Re Mi - Woody Guthrie. My favorite Dust Bowl Ballad.

10. The Dolphins - Fred Neil.

11. The Dolphins - Richie Havens.

12. The Dolphins - Tim Buckley.

Now that was a trip. Hearing multiple versions of the same song played by different people is one reason I decided to play all the songs on my iPod in alphabetical order. These are all good, but in this order, Buckley's comes off as the most contrived piece of doggerel ever written.

13. Don't Fear The Reaper - Blue Öyster Cult. Hear that, dolphins?

14. Don't Get Me Wrong - The Pretenders. Oh, Chrissy Hynde, is there any malady you can't salve? Of course there is.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 5 of ??

1. A Common Disaster - Cowboy Junkies. Cowboy Junkies are one of those bands I feel I should like better than I do. They take more patience than I'm sometimes willing to give to a band.

2. The Con - Tegan & Sara. Unlike Tegan & Sara, who demand more patience than I'm usually willing to give to a band.

3. Conceived - Beth Orton. And unlike Beth Orton, whom I adore without qualification.

4. Countenance - Beth Orton. She named these songs on purpose so they'd turn up in alphabetical order on some jerk's iPod, I bet. Wait, what?

5. Creep - Radiohead. 17 years and multiple parodies later, I submit this still stands up.

6. Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix. A bajillion years and, I suspect, zero parodies later, still one of the best buzzbox guitar solos ever recorded.

7. Cruelty Humor: Object Permanence - Paper Cats. Lauren's lyric contemplating mortality, our precarious existence, and our dependence on the universe not suddenly becoming offended by that existence.

8. The Crunge - Led Zeppelin. Erg. Whiplash.

9. Crush With Eyeliner - R.E.M. A note to follow The Crunge.

10. Cypress Avenue - Van Morrison. Thankfully, this was after class, on the way home.

11. D'yer Mak'er - Led Zeppelin. More whiplash.

12. Dance Of The Inhabitants Of The Palace Of King Louis XIV Of Spain - John Fahey. This version, from The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick, interpolates some other themes that, Fahey announces, don't have titles.

13. Dancing Days - Led Zeppelin. So there's your Houses of the Holy segment, Al.

14. Dead On The Dancefloor - Earlimart. Yes, they are named after the town about halfway to LA of the same name. They used to pass through a lot on the way to gigs, they say. Sorta indie-post-punk band. For a while, we used to play their album Treble and Tremble whenever we drove through Earlimart, on the Crankster Freeway. The joke lost momentum. Note the "dance" theme dominating.

15. Dear Old Stockholm - Miles Davis. One of my favorite mid-50s recordings of Miles. His version of this old folk tune with his first band with John Coltrane, on his first Columbia album, 'Round About Midnight. This was Miles' first great band, with Red Garland on piano, Philly Joe Jones on drums, and Paul Chambers on bass. Chambers would return for another round with Miles and Coltrane in the late 50s.

Whiplash, dancing, Led Zeppelin. That's been the day.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 4 of ??

1. Chain of Fools - Aretha Franklin. I've had outstanding luck with opening songs this week. I shall risk offense and say that I believe this is better than Aretha's version of Respect. And to quote Steely Dan - "Hey nineteen, that's 'retha Franklin."

2. Chelsea Hotel No. 2 - Leonard Cohen. My favorite line in this most excellent song is "Clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty." Leonard Cohen is allowed in the house, but only if he brings his own booze.

3. Chocolate Jesus - Tom Waits. This completely twisted my entire outlook for the day and established a goofy mood I didn't escape until the walk home. I told my students I became a philosopher when I was 10 in order to impress an older girl I was in love with who was a family friend. It's a true story, but it's still goofy as hell. But how else could I respond to this?

When the weather gets rough
And it's whiskey in the shade
It's best to wrap your savior
Up in cellophane
He flows like the big muddy
But that's ok
Pour him over ice cream
For a nice parfait

4. Christ for President - Wilco/Woody Guthrie. Or maybe it was this that set my mood.

5. Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk - Rufus Wainwright. Or maybe it was this.

6. Cinnamon Girl - Neil Young. Definitely not this.

7. Clap Hands - Tom Waits.

8. Clocks - Coldplay. I suppose I should be deeply suspicious of Coldplay. Oh well.

9. Clubland - Elvis Costello. This was the first song on the walk home.

10. Coal to Cola - Grogshow. Nasty good line: "... the rest of me thinking of all your charms, / and how few there are and how far I go for them."

11. Cocoon - The Decemberists. Pretty and fairly inscrutable song, and not at all goofy, and a great transition from Grogshow to.

12. Coda In Search Of A Song - Paper Cats. An old tune without lyrics, just a 12-string basic track and lead played on an acoustic-electric classical (my trusty Cordoba) with some distortion and echo.

13. Cold Turkey - John Lennon. John Lennon quitting drugs.

14. Come Together - Beatles. John Lennon still on drugs. Time going backwards.

15. Comfort of Strangers - Beth Orton. No evidence of drugs involved.

16. Comfortably Numb - Dar Williams & Ani Difranco. ... and right back on the drugs. Want some cognitive dissonance? Listen to this cover of Pink Floyd.

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 3 of ??

I'm skipping a chunk of Bs. They played on Monday, and I neglected to post about them. Sue me.

1. Brown-eyed Girl - Van Morrison. There might be better ways to start your morning walk to work, but I have my doubts.

2. Burn Your Life Down - Tegan & Sara.

3. C'Mere - Interpol. I just started looking into Interpol. But I've always claimed to be a big fan of the Interpol warnings on videos. I cheer them when they come on the screen.

4. California - Semisonic. Found trolling for songs mentioning California. Dan Wilson sings it as "Cal-i-for-ni-a," which is always fun to hear.

4. California Stars - Wilco/Woody Guthrie. This was interrupted by a student walking to school. She asked how long I've lived here (12 years), and I mentioned that, although I've lived here longer than almost anywhere else, I somehow still don't feel like it's home. I think the precarious nature of my employment may have something to do with that. Anyway, home, for me, is where I live with Lauren - and which somehow manages not to be in California.

5. A Call To Apathy (Tentative Title) - The Shins. I typoed the band as "The Shings" twice.

6. Can't Get There From Here - R.E.M. From Fables of the Reconstruction, my album of choice for stomping around the campus at UNC-Charlotte. It still calls up that particular mood of my youth.

7. Candy Everybody Wants - 10,000 Maniacs. Back when this came out, Natalie Merchant had some kind of weird solvent power over me. I melted on contact with her voice. Somewhat less so these days.

8. Caramel - Suzanne Vega. From Nine Objects Of Desire, which was featured very prominently in the late 90s on Harry Shearer's public radio satire program, Harry Shearer's Le Show. For a while, Vega was one of my favorite songwriters. Now she strikes me as a little too neat and tidy.

9. Caribou - The Pixies. Now, talk about untidy songwriting. Like most Pixies songs, this is basically stupid. I love it.

10. Caring Is Creepy - The Shins. Or the Shings.

11. Carolina In My Mind - James Taylor. Confession time: James Taylor creeps me the heck out.

12. Carry On/Questions - CSN. One of the songs that made me want to play the guitar. That gigantic crashing hard strumming opening - woof! The perfect solo that forms the bridge between the Carry On section and the Questions part - I assume by Stills - cazart!

album of the day: all the songs on my iPod, in alphabetical orderPart 2 of ??

Today on my way to and from campus, I entered the Bs.

"At the Zoo" - Simon and Garfunkel. You knew about the hamsters, didn't you? At least suspected?

"Auctioneer" - R.E.M. From Fables of the Reconstruction, and consequently almost entirely inscrutable. Good riff, though.

"Australia" - The Shins. Time to put ze earphones on!

"Ba-De-Ba" - Fred Neil. Fred Neil is one of 3 or 4 singers I hear in my lumbar vertebrae.

"Back In Your Head" - Tegan and Sara. Another Bridge School Benefit concert performer I've been listening to ever since (2008 edition of the show, I believe), but I still haven't decided whether I like them.

"Back to Ohio" - The Pretenders. I bought Learning to Crawl when I was 16, I think. I had read a story in Time about Chrissy Hynde, about the tumult in the band when she fired Pete Farndon (whom she had a kid with) and James Honeyman-Scott died from a weird reaction to cocaine.

"Balloon Man" - Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians. Robyn Hitchcock is not allowed in the house.

"Bambaleo" - Gipsy Kings.

"Bateau" - Marc Ribot. I decided this afternoon that, since he's from Jersey, I shall assume that he poses as French and affects an accent in conversation, so I will pronounce his last name henceforth like the sound a frog makes.

"Because the Night" - Patti Smith. You may not like Patti Smith. You'd be a fool not to like this song.

"Begin the Begin" - R.E.M. First tune on Life's Rich Pageant. I can't itemize or think clearly either, Michael.

"Better than Ice Cream" - Sarah McLachlan. Lovely lovely song, by a lovely lovely chick. Geez, I'd like to bang her.

"Beyond Belief" - Elvis Costello. Well, that certainly ruined that mood. I really like Elvis Costello in his more cynical mood, which is good because he's almost always in it.

"Big Yellow Taxi" - Joni Mitchell. Is it just me, or does the cutesy ending of this song just about wreck it?

"Bike" - Pink Floyd. This came on after "Big Yellow Taxi," and my brain nearly seized. I exclaimed aloud, walking near Donnelly Park, "Fblaugh!" I can't think of a song on my iPod more unlike "Big Yellow Taxi" than Syd Barrett's crazed rumination on whatever the hell was going on in his lunatic head.

"Birds and Ships" - Billy Bragg & Natalie Merchant, written by Woody Guthrie. Then I exclaimed, "Gwuff!" when this came on after "Bike," but I'm not sure anything else would have been much better.

"Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" - Nina Simone. Also not a good fit, but what a thrilling song. This is a live version, first verses with piano accompaniment, then, when Nina switches gender after the bridge, with a sort of blues/flamenco guitar. And she really does switch gender. And she sings bass.