As if there weren't already enough to love about Dirty Projectors--e.g., their last album, Rise Above--Dave Longstreth's new summer music playlist, commissioned by New York Magazine, is brilliant & charming & funny, and--most important--great to listen to.
To wit:
1. Jackie Wilson, "Lonely Teardrops"
"I've been looking for ecstatic voices, and Jackie’s got it. Once, while driving the family minivan on a summer vacation, my dad got a speeding ticket listening to this song. It made him drive too fast. Is there anything more summery than driving too fast?"
Listen to the mix, and read along with his annotations, here.
It's a couple of months old, but here's Robert Forster writing about his latest album The Evangelist and his final work with Grant McLennan, who died last year.
He lived in a small two-storey tower at the back of a house, and I climbed the stairs to his bedroom, where he’d set out two chairs. He then played me three songs. Two of them were amazing, and one in particular, Demon Days, I immediately thought was one of the best four or five he’d ever written. It was a waltz ballad, and as he strummed and sang it, with a beautiful instrumental section included, I looked at him in wonder. And I’m glad that at that moment, as the room went still, I said: "For the next 18 months, I’m going to be writing just to catch up with you." He laughed, but it was true.
"Demon Days" is one of my favorite songs of this year. It's truly a McLennan song, and Forster sounds as if his voice is on the verge of breaking just singing it. So sad.
Speaking of Duffy, Bernard Butler produced a couple of the songs on her album Rockferry. Not only that, but David McAlmont provided backing vocals on two of the songs.
This pleases me greatly, as one of my favorite albums from the 1990s is the album Butler and McAlmont made together, The Sound of McAlmont & Butler. A couple of months ago I was inspired to dig it out of a box and rip it, and I've been listening to it obsessively ever since.
While the two of them created some incredible music separately (Butler in Suede, and McAlmont both solo and with Saul Freeman as Thieves, whose "Unworthy" is one of my favorite songs of all time), I like them best together, where they created two of the best pop songs of the 90s: "Yes" and "You Do".
Here's "Yes" in all its soulful, operatic glory:
Out of laziness, I missed the Dirty Projectors show last week in San Francisco. I'm pretty disappointed, because I'm sure I missed an amazing show, and Rise Above--their most recent album--is one of my current favorites.
If you're not familiar with the concept of Rise Above, here's how I described it around eight months ago:
[it's] a reinterpretation of Black Flag's Damaged, made without listening to the original album, recorded on a four-track that Dave Longstreth picked up mid-inspiration at the local music shop (apparently), but with merely a 25-year-old memory of said album and its songs & lyrics ...
I love this because--yes, taking the story with a grain of salt--Rise Above is what Damaged sounds like inside of Dave Longstreth's head! This is how his twenty-five-year-old memory of the album has evolved, and that's pretty neat. Frankly, it sounds better than Black Flag ever did, to me, and probably a lot worse to people who grew up listening to Black Flag.
The best thing about Rise Above--and what makes it all work--is the sense of urgency in Longstreth's voice; "Police Story" may start with Getty Address-style strings, but then he wails:
This fucking city
is run by pigs!
They take away the rights
from all the kids.
As a reference point, Longsteth's take on punk sounds very much like early Scritti Politti: scratchy, nervous guitars combined with a mix of anxious yelps and R&B crooning.
And, perhaps despite itself, some moments of really intense beauty. The album closes with "Rise Above", one of the most conventionally pretty songs the Dirty Projectors have ever recorded, and a gorgeous end to a truly brilliant album.
2008 started with a glut of indie pop, for me: Magnetic Fields, Raveonettes, Nicole Atkins, Vampire Weekend. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But, well, it all started to feel like I was in a bit of a rut.
Which is why I'm so happy that the last month or so has brought some real honest-to-goodness pop and R&B: Duffy's "Mercy" and Estelle's "American Boy"; new Usher, new Erykah Badu, new Lil Wayne; a rediscovery of Girls Aloud's "Can't Speak French"; and perhaps most unexpected, an incredible track from Mariah Carey!
It's a good year.
I love Rick Astley even more after reading his thoughts on Rickrolling in this LA Times interview.
“Listen, I just think it’s bizarre and funny. My main consideration is that my daughter doesn’t get embarrassed about it.”
The thing is, I actually really enjoy "Never Gonna Give You Up", and honestly, I'd rather watch its video than most of the things people link to on the web. So there.