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Friday, Dec 6 2019, 6AM
"Even if you didn't listen to a word of Lost Souls' lyrics, you'd struggle to remain unmoved by the rivers of raw emotion flowing through it. But pay attention to the tales of tough times and broken relationships that [Jimi] Goodwin is spinning and your heart feels like it's been whacked with a cricket bat wrapped in a blanket." There is "the full-tilt blubfest of 'Cedar Room', with its chorus howl of "I tried to sleep alone, but I couldn't do it". Read this tribute to Doves' debut album: //bit.ly/2OWQjTV
The song's lyrical concept, about being abandoned by previous generations who promised us so much, is not abstract. Yannis Philippakis explained:
"I'm getting to that age now where I'm thinking about being a father - not imminently - but I'm closer to the age at which my father made a decision to not be with his kids, and I'm like, well how am I going to respond to that responsibility? How am I going to behave?"
Happy birthday, Peter Buck, born on this date in 1956 in Berkeley, California, Here's an Allmusic biography of this important musician: www.allmusic.com
“Not the meat of your thigh/Nor your spine tattoo/Nor your shimmery eye/Nor the wet of the dew....” Listen to Adrianne Lenker rip this solo on her guitar: www.youtube.com
Today is Ride's Mark Gardener's birthday. He was born in 1969, making him....uh..50 years old. Here's an interview this year about the new album, "This Is Not A Safe Place.": bit.ly
That's birthday boy, drummer David Lovering (born in 1961), singing on this love (ring) song.: www.youtube.com
This is a cover of a famous 1966 song by Lee Dorsey, written by Allen Toussaint and backed by The Meters. Here's the original: www.youtube.com
Speaking of working....Frontman Michael Stipe references 19th-century poet Henry David Thoreau in the lyrics ("To throw Thoreau and rearrange"), completely by accident. He wrote: "My friend Chris told me that I was our generation's Whitman, I think because I was an ecstatic, and I liked men and women, and I was a poet in his eyes, even though I hated the word poet. Anyway I meant to write Whitman into the song, but I got mixed up and wrote Thoreau in instead."
See Broken Social Scene performing "World Sick" live in New York in 2011: www.youtube.com
It will be good fortune for you when you go to hear this Baltimore duo at The Crocodile on Friday, March 20th, 2020. Jenn Wassner says of this song: “Life is change. Change is loss. This song is about how hard it is to let go, and the feeling of celebrating and mourning it all at once.”
This is a R.E.M. cover. Watch First Aid Kit perform it live with birthday lad Peter Buck: www.billboard.com
Does this song sound familiar to you? Leonard Cohen got additional songwriting credits for this, but not because he was actively involved, rather the band felt the song had strong similarities to Cohen's "Suzanne." Here are Mr. Cohen and Judy Collins performing "Suzanne" live: www.youtube.com
Request for Julianne! Follow this link to Rachel Flotard's Twitter page: twitter.com
Birthday fellow Peter Buck explained: "There was an old guy in my neighborhood who would be out gardening at 2 a.m. in his suit and tie. I'd see him when I was out trying to get a beer at the Magic Mart or somewhere. It's basically a metaphor for the uselessness of everything."
Cartalk is the project of Los Angeles-based musician Chuck Moore! Not Car Talk, the Click & Clack show. Find more from Cartalk here: cartalk.bandcamp.com
Wow! This is the first track from Fugazi's 1988 self-titled debut. It has been covered like crasy. Here are 10 covers of this classic song: www.verbicidemagazine.com
The Vinyl Factory calls Black Flag "the band that defined American hardcore": thevinylfactory.com
Right now, we know they'll be at the PNE Amphitheatre in Vancouver, BC on Sunday, May 24th, 2020. Watch them perform "Daddi" live in the KEXP studio earlier this year: www.youtube.com
"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh-huh..." Enjoying that Peter Buck guitar playing? You'll want to sing along: genius.com
They'll be at The Showbox on Wednesday, March 18th, 2020.
"Vitalogy" is older than Bailey, our producer today. It was released on this date 25 years ago.
“Feeling lonely is one of the most common human feelings, right?” the band said in a release. “Well, being a musician doesn’t really help. Your whole life is constantly moving and the only thing that remains is yourself. And dealing with yourself. Oh gosh, we all know how boring and angering that can be. ‘Riding Solo’ is about this. About us.": bit.ly
In this song, Salt-n-Pepa rhyme about a man who gets it done for them, and all the freaky things they are willing to do for him. This kind of stuff exists mostly in the realm of male rappers, which makes the lyrics kind of surprising when you break them down. Ellen DeGeneres did just that on her 2003 HBO comedy special, Here and Now, where she did a spoken word performance of the song after explaining that it's one she can really relate to.
Ahhh......the Friday song. It's not too late to get tickets to the SMooCH benefit tomorrow night at The Showbox. Redd Kross, Devotchka, and Dude York will perform!: www.kexp.org
Happy eighth birthday, Ms. Oona Buzz! This one's for you!
Rudy Willingham's "Dunk Reactions" has appeared on several KEXP DJ's (including John's) top ten lists. It's not too late to submit your list. You have until 6:00 p.m. tonight!: www.kexp.org
Go back to July, 1969 (Maybe.) in the video for "Rocket Fuel": www.youtube.com
There's a space theme here....Beck referred to this song as one he can liken to looking at the heavens with the aim of finding a higher power to deal with.
The Folk Implosion were an American band founded in the early 1990s by Lou Barlow and John Davis. The name is a play on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: www.allmusic.com
Eddie Vedder introduced R.E.M. upon their induction into the Rock Hall of Fame in 2007.: www.rockhall.com
Go hear Nada Surf at The Neptune Theatre on Tuesday, January 14th, 2020.
Songwriter Ric Ocasek was The Cars' frontman, but he had bass player Ben Orr sing lead on this one. Unlike some singers, Ocasek had no problem handing off a hit to a different bandmember to sing: Orr, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, also got the lead on "Drive."
The band's biography says, "Avalanche Party were formed high in the wind swept, bracken laden heights of the North Yorkshire Moors by two brothers who spent their summers hunting with bows and arrows and camping by firelight, and their winters snowed into their isolated hill top home with nothing but the sounds of Bo Diddley, Link Wray, Wilko Johnson and Jimi Hendrix to keep them company."
Get "Keep On Going," a KEXP Song of the Day from Belgian band SONS: www.kexp.org
You could purchase a "I Spent My Vacation at Murder City Devils" T-shirt at their merch store: www.themurdercitydevils.com
"Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction...": www.youtube.com
This song began as a breakup lament. Read an oral history of "Pretend We're Dead": www.spin.com
Throwing Muses played live for KEXP listeners from the Triple Door in 2014: www.youtube.com
Birthday celebrant Peter Buck wrote, "Over the years, a certain misapprehension about 'Fables Of The Reconstruction' has built up. For some reason, people have the impression that the members of R.E.M. don’t like the record. Nothing could be further from the truth… It’s a personal favourite and I’m really proud of how strange it is. Nobody but R.E.M. could have made that record.”
Written by the band while they were on tour, Michael Stipe explained: "(It's) about a mother and child, especially the strong bond that exists between them. The voice is neither hers nor the child's, however. It's someone else commenting on the sense that the bond between a mother and child is the most powerful love of all... I think it's significant to state that it's not a song about defenestration." (Defenestration, from the word fenestra --window, is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.)
"Black Aura My Son" will be released on January 17th, 2020. You can pre-order it on Deserta's Bandcamp page.: deserta.bandcamp.com
"For me, indie selections from this last decade have developed into audio Polaroids, as Questlove would aptly say, and more than any other cut from my late-teenaged years of hipster pretension, M83’s “Midnight City” stands out the most." Read a 2017 discussion of this "nostalgia track": atwoodmagazine.com
Happy birthday, Peter Buck, born on December 6th, 1956. Here's the video for "Pretty Persuasion": www.youtube.com
Bill Berry said in 1986 that the song was specifically about acid rain. The video was filmed upside down in a rock quarry, and snippets of the environmentally concerned words flash on-screen throughout: "Buy" the sky, "Sell" the sky, etc.: www.youtube.com
"Rise at the moon..." Don't you love this song? Here are the lyrics: www.musixmatch.com
Enjoy an analysis of this song's structure and lyrics: www.grin.com
This lovely cover was heard in the seventh episode of the new Watchmen TV show, titled "An Almost Religious Awe." The track will appear on Reznor and Ross's album "Watchmen: Vol. 3 (Music from the HBO Series)" due out December 16.
See a full live performance by Odesza in the KEXP studio in September, 2017: www.youtube.com
Karen Orzolek told Rolling Stone regarding the soundtrack for ""here The Wild Things Are": "My job was to come up with simple, childlike melodies reminiscent of hooks of great old pop songs that you can't shake." She succeeded.: www.youtube.com
This song was originally recorded by a group from Beaumont, Texas called The Clique, who released it as the B-side of their only Top-40 hit: "Sugar On Sunday." The song was written by the group's producer Gary Zekley along with Elliot Bottler, Mitchell Bottler and Brandon Chase.
