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Tuesday, Apr 30 2019, 6AM
In 1997 a version of Perfect Day was released as a charity single for Children In Need and it topped the UK charts, earning over £2,100,000 for the charity. The song release a host of well-known singers and performers, including Lou Reed opening and closing the song. Among the other musicians on the track are Bono, David Bowie, Suzanne Vega, Elton John, Emmylou Harris, Tammy Wynette, Shane McGowan, and Dr. John.
It's no secret: Lou Reed, the inimitable Velvet Underground frontman was a bit of a cranky dude. Just ask any journalist who interviewed him and they'll define him, with a smirk and a politically correct reserve and respect, as prickly. He could be particularly grumpy about interpretations of his music, especially the many takes on his "Sweet Jane." There was one, however, that he actually liked: This one by the Cowboy Junkies.
According to the BBC, Reed himself called the Canadian band's 1988 version "the best and most authentic version I have ever heard."
Garvey describes New York in the song as "the modern Rome, where folk are nice to Yoko." "That comes from John Lennon," he explained to The Independent. "In his last press conference when he left England for good, he said: 'Why wouldn't you go to New York? Every nation on Earth represented, all getting along – it's the modern Rome'. Then he said: 'Besides, they're nice to Yoko.'" Yoko Ono responded to the namecheck by penning an open letter to Elbow. She wrote on her official website: "Dear Guy, Craig, Mark, Pete and Richard, Yes. New York has been kind to me as your song says. Thank you (sic)."
"For John, he always wanted to come and live in this city, ever since he saw Bob Dylan on the famous album cover (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan). And I played the catalyst to make his dream come true."
"But in sleepless nights, I am still living in the memory of my sweet husband, who was virtually kicked out of his own country that he loved so dearly and learned to live in this bleak port city just so his woman and he could live in peace."
"Two sides of the coin. Life is. Have a great time in New York.
We loved it. Love, Yoko."
The song's lyrical concept is about being abandoned by previous generations who promised us so much. Philippakis explained to Consequence of Sound:
"Our ancestors built up, progressed and built civilizations and they built amazing cities. And now at the point of precipice where we're kind of in a perilous situation in many ways socially and environmentally, they're not around to help. And we're not adults. Sometimes I'm just like, where are all the adults?"
Shortly after "Brown Eyed Girl" became a hit, Bang Records executive Bert Berns died and Warner Brothers bought out Morrison's contract. He was given three sessions to records the album Astral Weeks. Morrison said at this point, he was literally a starving artist. He had little time for reflection about his work. He needed money to survive. Rolling Stone magazine later named Astral Weeks #19 on its list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, saying that it defies easy description and Morrison was "never this open, and naked, again."
"Where Morrison’s version waltzes between the hedges like a stoned opera, The Waterboys’ soars. Both records voice a very specific feeling of hope intertwined with sorrow (the song’s spirit!), but The Waterboys version is ethereal, powerful, life-affirming, cinematic in a way not quite achieved by Morrison’s original. Maybe it’s the violin, bowed in such a way it captures the wetness of every raindrop on garden leaf. Or it’s the voice of lead singer Michael Scott, oozing with tangible yearning and lived pain, sliding the song’s emotion into the roof of your mouth and down your throat." Read the full article, "The Waterboys Made an Incredible Van Morrison Song Even Better", here: bit.ly
It's a message we all need to hear and/or say in these tough times: "I Am OK" The band tells us: "The song describes a time in everybody’s life that make you lose faith in yourself, in someone else, or in life itself and you just need to hear from someone that one day everything will be OK again. That no matter what, with time and patience we all will be OK.” Read more in their interview with KEXP: bit.ly
Comebacks come no more enigmatic than The Barrel, the first single to be taken from Aldous Harding’s third album, and its accompanying video. It featured the New Zealand-born singer-songwriter performing stylised dance moves and giving knowing looks to camera while variously wearing a tall white hat, a white ruff and enormous platform boots; a grotesque blue mask and a T-shirt and white underpants accessorised with a pair of maracas. The lyrics were as puzzling as the video: “I know you have the dove, I’m not getting wet … show the ferret to the egg, I’m not getting led along.”
Perhaps understandably, what the whole thing was supposed to be about was the subject of considerable online debate. Depending on whose interpretation you plumped for, the video was either a homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a nod to the national dress of Wales (where Designer was partly recorded and where Harding currently resides), analogous to the faintly disturbing vision of pregnancy found in Sylvia Plath’s 1960 poem Metaphors, inspired by postmodernist poet Susan Howe’s book Singularities, which surveys the 17th-century First Nation wars in New England, somehow related to menstruation or – a more cynical view – a canny artist doing a load of self-consciously weird stuff on screen with one eye on the end result being GIF-able and meme-worthy. Whatever it was, Harding wasn’t letting on: “I feel we’re expected to be able to explain ourselves after we’ve worked the space and have purpose, you know, in a little bag that you carry around everywhere,” she told NPR. “But I don’t necessarily have that in me.”
Shovels & Rope are out on tour but they don't have any dates west of Colorado. Tonight they're playing in Columbus, MO. Find all their dates here: shovelsandrope.com
Brandi Carlile gave passers-by quite the surprise earlier this month when she joined Dave Grohl at Seattle’s Pike Place Market for an inspired busking session. The Grammy winner says the impromptu performance took her back to the more lean years of her career.
“It was really surreal, because I used to stand right there with all my hopes and my dreams and the two chords that I knew, trying to make gas money." Check it out here: youtu.be
This song reached No. 36 in the UK Singles Chart, although the single version had slightly changed lyrics; replacing the words "I don't give two fucks about your review" with "I don't give a damn about your review".
The Cure's The Top was released on this date 35 years ago!
That recording that starts out this song is the iconic and ever-present "Tamales Oaxaqueños" recording, used by street vendors throughout Mexico City. bit.ly
A video of this song appears as a special feature on a DVD of the TV show Friends. Instead of "Yoshimi," they change the lyric to "Phoebe". The video intercuts scenes of the show with Lisa Kudrow.
Yanya started releasing music on Spotify and YouTube three years ago, but she first started putting music on Soundcloud when she was 18 or 19. In March she released her debut album, Miss Universe, an abstract and contemplative study of the mental and physical, tackling ambitious themes including anxiety, "how the soul experiences," and "what is paradise?" Yanya wrote most of Miss Universe in one year, but some songs (like "Monsters Under the Bed," "Baby Blu" and "Heat Rises") were written a year or more earlier.
The Chemical Brothers on the new album: “Anger and frustration aren’t necessarily emotions you associate with dance music, but young people seem to be having opportunities taken away from them at the moment, and there’s an atmosphere being created because of that and it’s very powerful. We wanted to channel that into something.”
This was the KEXP featured song of the day for September 23rd, 2008
Björk explained the line, "There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behaviour" during a 2011 Q&A with The Guardian: "At the time I wrote it I was referring to my childhood and probably talking about how I felt more comfortable on my own walking outside singing and stuff than hanging out with humans... I experienced harmony with kids, the mountains and the ocean surrounding Reykjavik and animals I guess but found grown ups rather chaotic and nonsensical."
Guitarist Johnny Marr commented to Q Magazine that one of the best things about the song "is that keyboard drone. It's like Goldfinger on bad acid. Which is kind of The Smiths in a nutshell."
Beach House are playing The Moore on May 8th & 9th! We're giving away tickets to the show on the 8th all day. Keep listening for your chance to win!
Australian musician Harriette Pilbeam is releasing her debut record under the name Hatchie on June 21st via Double Double Whammy. Titled Keepsake, the album follows last year’s spectacular debut EP Sugar & Spice.
“Without A Blush” has a Cocteau Twins meets Carly Rae Jepsen soaring pop splendor to it. Hatchie calls the song “the perfect introduction to the feelings & sounds on the rest of the record,” which means this album is likely going to be very good.
No Seattle date on his current tour but you can head up to Vancouver BC to see him on September 10th. Tickets & info: ticketleader.ca
You can pre-order the new album on pink vinyl and they're coming to the Tacoma Dome on November 23rd
This is the B-Side to “Poison The Well” their Record Store Day 7″
Vocalist Jehnny Beth told Q magazine regarding this song about obsessional love. "I'm interested in the dark side. I think we all are. The back of the drawer is where the interesting things are."
My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult are playing a show in Portland on May 10th! Tickets & info: bit.ly
L7 are playing "The Bash" on June 9th. It's a music and craft beer festival at America's Car Museum in Tacoma. Beer & cars, what could go wrong? thebashtacoma.frontgatetickets.com
In October 2017, The Afghan Whigs were live on The Midday Show! Check out their full performance here: www.youtube.com
John Peel, BBC Radio 1's longest serving DJ, who died in October, 2004, was a great champion of The Undertones' punk anthem and was often quoted as saying he would like song's line "our teenage dreams so hard to beat" on his tombstone.
The same lyrics formed the title of a BBC 1 radio documentary celebrating his life and work and the DJ once played the song twice in a row on Radio 1 because "it doesn't get any better than this".
Speaking of ‘Wednesday’s Child’, the frontman James Cox has said: “This is one of the songs that got me into a really strange head space to write. When writing; I quite often go heavily into research worm-holes - going really deep into subjects I’m curious about until it’s so uncomfortable I’ll have to shelve it for a while.
“Wednesday’s Child is fundamentally about our communication with others, focusing on misunderstandings - not only between loved ones but also how we treat strangers.
“While I was in this weird research hole I became really obsessed with the idea of mass hysteria - especially in Puritan colonial America and the witch-hunts. Shifting blame onto someone else because you are too afraid to take responsibility is an age-old phenomenon that we will never learn from. I feel that happens today with our society and especially with how the press can demonise the innocent to protect the real evil. People are so easily convinced to attack the defenseless and defend the powerful.”
The Cure album The Top was released on this day in 1984. After recording psychedelic album Blue Sunshine for the one-off project the Glove during summer 1983, Robert Smith finished off the year composing and working on two other studio albums at the same time: The Top for the Cure and Hyæna for Siouxsie and the Banshees. Smith was still the official guitarist of the Banshees while he wrote The Top.
While mastering "House of Jealous Lovers", James Murphy used techno music as a benchmark for the track's bass frequencies. After hearing the DFA's mix, Sub Pop, the band's record label at the time, and the band both reacted negatively and initially refused to release it. Vocalist Luke Jenner hated the mix, feeling that it sounded unfinished.
Truly, a Lizzo and Missy Elliott collaboration is a real-life fable; a cherished rap icon and a soon-to-be-coronated, years-in-wait talent coming in hot with a track that flows freely with their combined confidence and mic skills.: n.pr
The Budos Band Saxophonist Jared Tankel talked with John on being bi-coastal and the new album, V, all on the weekly KEXP show, Sound & Vision bit.ly
Hot 8 Brass Band made a video for this Joy Division cover: bit.ly
Ibibio Sound Machine performed live on KEXP, Feb 4 from London and International Clash Week! Check out that performance (bit.ly) and you can also see them live at Pickathon this year! pickathon.com
The song is remarkably prescient in its theme of technology leading to a society where information is exploited. Corporations and governments were using computers in 1979, and hackers found the flaws. David Byrne drew inspiration from a book he read about computer crimes, which included a story about a guy who forged deposit slips with his bank account number and got patrons to inadvertently put money into his account. Another story was about someone who used a touch-tone phone to break into the General Electric computer network and steal supplies. With the big boys owning this technology but having trouble controlling it, Byrne saw a bleak future. He told NME in 1979: "There will be chronic food shortages and gas shortages and people will live in hovels. Paradoxically, they'll be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches. Calculators will be cheap. It'll be as easy to hook up your computer with a central television bank as it is to get the week's groceries. I think we'll be cushioned by amazing technological development and sitting on Salvation Army furniture. Everything else will be crumbling. Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there's this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience - but as more information gets on file it's bound to be misused."
This was the first song the group produced themselves, splitting with Martin Hannett, who the band credit for teaching them the mechanics of recording. "Producing ourselves we get more satisfaction," frontman Bernard Sumner told The Face in 1983. "We know what we want and we can do it. With Martin the songs often turned out different, sometimes better, sometimes not."
Written from the perspective of someone who’s always looking over their shoulder, fearing a bouncer who might check their bag for booze or a neighbour who might phone in a noise complaint to the guards, Drifting is a particularly brilliant snapshot into the day in the life of the idle and the lonely. Its striking La Haine-inspired music video by Hector Dockrill, which was filmed in Ballymun, bolsters the song’s message with Sabre saying that he aims “to tell as many different untold Irish stories within a grander film”. Both the song and the video capture the moments where we unwillingly lose control, leaving our fate in the care of something else. “We turn around and now we’re drifting . . .”
"Behind the Wheel" was Depeche Mode's twentieth UK single and the third single from the album Music for the Masses.
Modern Mirror is out July 12th but you can pre-order and download Ellipsis now: drabmajesty.bandcamp.com
Here is Echo & The Bunnymen live at St. George's Hall, Liverpool 1984 performing "No Dark Things: bit.ly
Editors were live on KEXP last May: www.youtube.com
“I’VE STRUGGLED MY WHOLE LIFE FEELING LIKE I DON’T FIT OR BELONG ANYWHERE, KIND OF LIKE RIGHT NOW. HEARING THIS, I SUDDENLY FELT CONNECTED AND NO LONGER QUITE SO ALONE IN THE WORLD.” See Trent Reznor's speech inducting The Cure into the Hall of Fame earlier this year: www.nin.com
