devon sproule will save your soul

haven't been seeing a lot of shows lately (there have been a bunch that i might haps have gone to, but didn't care quite enough to go by myself), but no way was i gonna miss a frustratingly rare philly performance by this Virginny (not virginy) gal, whom i first heard/saw the epiphany before last - i think she's been back in the interim, but i was out of town. anyway, never miss her. if you get the chance to miss her, just don't do it!

even though this show was "in the round" with three others - which turned out to mean four folkers on stage with their 'coustics, going down the line and each singing a song in turn, surprisingly little roundness to it, really, devon was pretty much the only one who tried to add some harmonies to the others' choruses. (there was also a whistling meme.) she was also the only one who broke out of the demurely self-effacing/adulatory mode of 'tween-song banter ("wow, you're so talented, how can i ever follow that up!" "i don't think i know that many chords!") which quickly got a bit tired, albeit cute. not that she was impolite - and she was suitably complimentary of her peers - she just wasn't so earnest about it all (like, insisting that she spells "devon" the correct way) in a way that got her cast and played up as the kooky [and/or] drunk one. (which she certainly was, too - best moment was when she raced to the bathroom and back in between someone else's songs, and half-admitted/half-boasted: "i didn't wash my hands!") point being, she was by far the awesome one of the four, and you could tell she kind of knew it too.

not that the others were bad - though i was mildly pained by one john francis, who veered from overweeningly solemn to clumsily saccharine, often in worrisomely strangulated voice (hurt too that he went after d.s. each time. possibly this wasn't a good venue for him tho.) the other devin was more intriguing, did political reasonably well (also, at all); nice "end of the world as we know it" pastiche. anyway he had a nerdy-goofy personable presence which made his songs easy enough to take.

but in particular i enjoyed carsie blanton's mastery of a certain straightforward, but witty, style of writing (about relationships, almost inevitably) that is a lot of what i like in folk music - you get it the first time through, there's a set-up that's either subverted (in a way you forgot to remember to expect) or else not (which may be harder to make work, but can be more satisfying) - anyway; crafted, crafty and formalist (which is only almost to say formulaic, but in a good way, like a "well-written blues.") it's something that happens in other forms too of course - i'm struggling to think of practitioners but stephin merrit comes to mind, and some john darnielle (though that's usually less straightforward)...actually i'm really surprised i'm having so much trouble with this. oh, john hiatt maybe? anyway, not to get sidetracked into a whole discussion about lyrics (though i'd like to have it later when i marshal some more examples - but do you get what i'm saying?)

it's an economy of language - not necessarily few words, but each word being overt in its purpose. songs that are simple enough in their construction that you can remember them easily (for campfire/cartrip singing, especially), possibly even after just one hearing; narrative/linear enough that you can remember the sequence - indeed that the sequence effectively creates the content of the song; and witty and distinctive enough that you want to remember them (rhyming/wordplay is crucial here - it's often where the craftiness comes in, and is also a memory aid), even if remembering is almost beside the point, is just a way of saving/savoring the moment of initial encounter.

because that's the fundamental act of folk music, more, i think, than other musics - the songwriter sharing the song, presenting it, like a piece of handicraft, like telling a story with a practiced, finely-tuned delivery. "it's all folk music," they say, right, cuz it's all made by folks, but to me that's where the folkiness of it comes in - folks playing songs for other folks (and the "songs" part is important, it's not just "music"), in a context of the everyday, a relationship that has to do with shared humanity - and there's that folk[="craft"]/art distinction, too. not that folk can't be arty, for sure - definitely this interpretation is not very coterminous with stylistic/cultural/marketing-based understandings of the genre.

to head off this thorniness (thorn off this headiness?), let me say that what i think i'm actually doing here is trying to justify to myself why i am not an especial devotee of the folk. (at least in its contemporary state.) i.e., that its essence stems from live performance, and i, ultimately, am a recorded-music guy. [whoa - 'nother new can of worms?] don't know if that's a good 'splanation, but it'll do, because we are getting way off from the point of this post, which is that devon sproule rules (that does not rhyme btw) and is awesome.

and btw what she does is not the kind of songwriting i was describing before. (actually i'm not really sure if carsie blanton does that either - i can't really decide if anybody does. oh wait, andrew gregory does; he really does. "shades of john prine?" dunno.) no, devon writes wordy, florid, meandering lyrics, often self-consciously literary, but just as like to be colloquial and off-the-cuff, either way full of precise, lucidly evocative details, typically of the homespun/folksy variety. not at all unlike joanna newsom, really (in style, though usually not in substance.) exactly like the kind of poems that i don't tend towards (i'm more inclined to poems like the songs i described above - pointy, shapely, snappy)...possibly because they ask more of the reader...except that hers are just so lovely i don't mind, and i want to drink them in.

especially when she comes up with a doozy of a musical setting for them, a single simple titular vocal hook ("(baby) does the day feel long?" "(baby) let's go out"), or a whole-cloth stunner of a chorus melody ("plea for a good night's rest" - that one's been haunting me.) more typically her tunes meander to match her words, without choruses to speak of; her unshakable appeal probably comes less from self-evidently undeniable songwriting than the combined potency of the entire package; her fine-spun lyrics, her accomplished pickin', her beguiling, terrifically limber voice (underplayed on the recorded versions, unfortunately though understandably), and probably most of all (if you're lucky/dutiful and go to see her), well, just her ineffable charm - maybe that's the folk part like i was saying, but also the part that transcends folk (qua genre): a great performer is a great performer.

just as devon's music certainly transcends folk - it's country, jazz (well, swing anyway), soul (er, soulful), bluesy-rootsy - poppy too, if you like - and all this with just herself and a guitar, though she's augmented on record. (it's a similar blend to ms. erin mckeown, another modern "folk" artist who's got something special going on.) but then folk by nature is mongrel anyway, or it oughtta be - even the kind of classicist formalism i was trying to get at earlier is something equally germane elsewhere (country, soul, pop); seems dangerous to yoke a genre to a particular songwriting mode (and what's labeled folk these days might just as well be called "acoustic/singer-songwriter," as much of it is, though those are terrible burdensome tags too.) anyway, just as easy as "it's all folk" why not say "none of it's folk." (i mean, my whole point was, maybe i'm not a folk fan, but this folker is too good to pass up.)

well. the devon sproule song that was my obsession for a good two weeks (and this entry has taken so long to write that even that's faded, though the song itself is untarnished) is "keep your silver shined," the title song from her new album, thankfully out and available recently though i heard her do it nearly two years ago when i first saw her, and it stuck with me all that time. you can hear it at herspace. again, no chorus (just the title phrase, soaring upward into wordlessness) - this time i think it's the harmony that really does it for me (how cute is she telling this kid the chords?), along with those little melodic lilts and of course the words - their sound ("a summer swam...a poughkeepsie scam") just as much as their meanings. it's got her cutesiest ("hands in our pockets and our pockets in our pants") and most poignant ("the best of us changed; the rest of us stuck behind") lines, and a wishful wish list it's hard to disagree with. essentially it's a catalog of and appreciation for life's little joys (from apple-picking to dresser drawers, two things i've almost, but not quite, achieved in the last week or so), a good thing for autumn if not quite autumnal. though in effect maybe it is. it's got that october feeling. indrawn communal contentment. glowy.

the "in the round" performance was a nice concept - done right, i think it would have created an especially conducive setting for a folk music interchange, one that allowed these four songwriters a chance to augment their music and performance by playing off one another. i'm not sure how that would work exactly - something like a jam session; a folk-song sing-a-long - inevitably something more fluid, less structured than you're probably gonna get in a contrived concert situation like that. what we got was a measly four songs from each performer - a tease, dev agrees, but also a neat forced encapsulation (should be easy to for each one to be memorable - devon did "silver," "plea," her quirky appalachian swing stomper "ol' virginia block," and a lovely compilation one-off called "julie") - and four roughly parallel but divergent visions of what folk might be. well ain't it all after all? sproule rhymes with soul rhymes with rock'n'roll. it's only acoustic singer/songwriter music, but i like it.

dad-rock, rvstd.

not sure why i've been posting diligently on the parent blog and mostly ignoring this site since i've been home; it's not like i don't still think about music constantly. don't feel like i'm supposed to be writing as casually here, even though i could (should?)

\\\
mused the other day about why i'm so much less interested in making music these days than i used to be; not just that my overwhelming focus on other people's music, in a general sense, both distracts me or controls so much of my attention and also leaves me uninspired to create my own (being so cognizant of the greatness and sheer volume of music that's already been/being made) - but also more specifically that i'm not as interested in the kinds of music i spent my first 20+ years learning how to make (mostly classical, jazz, and rock.) not that i don't still like those, but i'm much more interested at this point in soul, electronica, and pop - a shift that i was of course aware of, but whose full extent it's difficult to determine precisely. by pop i really do mean as broad a category as imaginable, which envelops a lot of soul (pop) and also co-opts a fair amount rock. mom protests such breadth makes the word meaningless, but actually that expansiveness is a lot of the point.

doesn't completely answer the charge, since there's plenty pop i could feasibly create myself, and of course could learn new tricks and branch out further, and anyway one doesn't necessarily have to or even want to be making the kind of music they want to listen to. (maybe the contrapositive.) (and i really need to cut my fingernails if i'm gonna keep at these bach inventions.) creativity-wise, i probably want to aim myself somewhere between night ripper and the fabulous new dj-kicks by henrik schwarz. let me meditate on that and get back to you.

next question: does my focal shift popwards - which is a shift in addition to a mere broadening of scope - mean that my musical taste is getting worse? obviously that's not a question i would phrase (taste ain't a question of good and bad), but objectively as-it-were, i do feel like i've drifted away from caring about certain things in a way that renders me out of line with any given critical consensus. like, used to be i was more or less down with the pitchfork agenda, and it's not so much that i'd rail against it now as i'm not so sure i care. things have gotten too complex to be neatly contained. the more interesting way to ask that, i think, is am i less useful for other people as a barometer/reference for musical opinions than i used to be? i think maybe so. to be blunt about it, dance-pop and electronica are not very popular.
///

and now, as promised: dad rock, revisited. since the term does such a bad job of meaning what it means, which i also want to talk about (q.v. the second half of this post which should have really been two posts)...i think i want "dad rock" to mean the rock that my dad listens to. which just so happens to includes spoon and the new pornographers and liz phair. on dad's desk when i got home were unopened copies of the new albums by bob dylan, paul simon, and los lobos. which is a good reminder that this kind of dad-rock also means the music that at least used to be my favorite favorite, that was back when i was living with my dad.

well these guys are way past old enough to be dads, obv, and worth now taking a look not just trying to account for a "mature" audience demo, but also how check they're navigating the contradictory currents of maturity and rock-and-roll for themselves; forging territory as fresh in its way as rock itself was thirty or forty years ago.

it's probably not supposed to be a surprise that modern times is really good. but i was, kind of giddily, take me by surprise how enjoyable, and manifestly of-quality, on first listen. thing is i didn't really like love and theft, though maybe i just didn't want to give it the necessary attention - something hard-to-articulate annoying about the songs themselves, somehow. did love time out of mind but that was ages ago (and isn't it really quite different?)

anyway, kind of cagey of b.d.(world gone wrong and good as i been to you - faves of my pops' - notwithstanding) to pull this "oh yeah, that's right, he's a folk musician" schtick, as if all those years as a capital-r rock god were just dabbling or moonlighting. (i remember being naively confused when dylan unplugged came out - "doesn't he usually play acoustic anyway?" - well, i was twelve.) but i ain't complaining - this is certainly the best blues album i've heard in a long time (not that that's saying anything), and he sounds like he's earned it. (whereas last album, maybe, it didn't feel quite so convincing.)

the credits say "ALL SONGS WRITTEN BY BOB DYLAN," which is rather amusing. (still not complaining.) and there are a lot of funny jokes in the lyrics too. ("i can't go back to paradise/i killed a man back there" is just the first to stick in my mind.) i'm not sure whether the title is a mediocre joke or just a lazy title. likewise the alicia keys ref. anyway it's clear that bob dylan can age as smoothly as he wants just by doing what he's always done, especially now that we're enough decades into rock history that one really can do anything one wants. (which is also not a complaint about street legal.) okay, i feel about as unqualified to talk about dylanology as about art history. fun album anyway.

surprise (whose title is clearly a lame joke and a lame title) is also a fairly pleasant one, if not so unambiguously. it's sounding better on repeated listenings - and markedly better on even this busted hi-fi than on computer speakers upstairs, so i bet it's fun in 'phones. i'm not quite convinced about the union of paul's steez with eno's bleepiness, at least it doesn't have the preternatural naturalness of the brazilian and african collabos (which are all the more impressive when you stop to think about them.) which doesn't mean it's not fun - i especially like the part (in "once upon a time there was an ocean") where it sounds like it's going to break into "a higher state of consciousness" - though predictably it's too tasteful to really be fun.

basically, paul doesn't make many if any concessions in his writing for this potentially sorta unique circumstance, which is to say electronica-nuanced, er, "textured" singer/songwriter music. certainly he doesn't embrace it in the unabashed manner of davids bowie and byrne (see earthlings and feelings though maybe heathen is a better template for how this might have worked), though it's obv. better integrated than yr standard sticking a drum-loop under any given late-90s AC artist. on the plus side as far as that goes, these are "complexly" structured songs, linear and fluid and fairly far from VCV, which allows for nicely delineated 'sections', texturally. on the minus side, paul doesn't give brian a lot of melodic or rhythmic content to play off of; there's a lot of him pontificating poetically on top of the music without completely engaging with it.

all of which is to say that the songwriting style hasn't changed that much since you're the one, which itself was an extension of his approach on rhythm of the saints. simon used to be quite a respectable pop writer (way more than dylan ever was, for sure), as well as a poet - even hearts and bones had "cars are cars" - but it's been twenty years since graceland, and i assume he doesn't want me talking about the capeman (which might be pastiche pop anyway. oh wait that's all he ever does. oknvrmind.) the contender here would be "outrageous," which is genuinely funky/funny, but when you get down to it never quite manages to deliver a hook.

anyway i guess i could stop being disappointed that, experiments with form aside, simon isn't very interested in melody anymore. otherwise there's not too much to be disappointed by on this album. the lyrics are classic simon, thoughtful and sweet and clever, if at times too much so for their own good. hard to say whether i'd forgive it more after repeated listens; you're the one just sort of made me resent it, but this one seems more personable. it's not like paul simon hasn't been pretty lame for thirty-plus years anyway (graceland an obvious fluke.) from dylan, too, one can't exactly hope for rawk.

los lobos on the other hand. well, they probably haven't rawked as hard as their debut since (and even that just barely felt like it belonged on a label called "slash.") but still i (foolishly?) cling to the 'america's best rock'n'roll band' tag, in hopes that they'll forget "rock'n'roll" itself is nothing if not respectable these days. anyhoo, the town and the city turns out to be as tame and tepid and MOR in affect as their last three-four albs. wouldn't have expected anything different, except the reviews suggested that maybe i could. so no great shakes. (still...9th best reviewed album of the year?)

for the record lobos did rock, indeed rawk, with a vicious grit, on for example parts of kiko and colossal head, their mid-90s career-pinnacle duumvirate. but not since, that i've heard (live doesn't count), and not here either. neither is this anything like the captivating experimental sonic playground of those froom records, even if it is "textured" (that word again) in more interesting ways than the last few. that'd all be fine enough, but it just feels like they've been remaking the same album over and over lately. there's so little inspiration in the songwriting here. i guess there's one or two half-decent melodies (the clock-watching "if you were only here tonight"?), but really nothing stands out. except for the latin cuts, which stick out like sore thumbs - they're tokenistic rather than integrated into the record as a whole (as fr'instance on kiko) - does the obligatory cumbia really have to be labelled as such? (the one on the strokes album isn't!)

i'll buy that this is a little step up from the ride and aztlan and this time (for which i do have a soft spot even though i recognize it's fairly weak.) the loose concept - these songs are more or less about lives of ordinary people living in the titular communities - works out nicely, but i can't help feeling like they're using the premise of glorifying the common man as an excuse to make some pretty pedestrian music. (i haven't heard chavez ravine, for instance, but i'll bet it finds way more interesting ways to explore its similar themes.) would i have liked this if it came out in 1999? probably so - then again it would have had less to make up for.

while i'm on the subject, this is probably a good place to bring up a river in reverse, another, more successful, return to form/my good graces effort from a fallen-off fogey. (the information could probably count here too, 'cept i'm not sure it's actually that good, plus my dad isn't into beck.) if i'd thought it through, i needn't have been too fearful, even though i was mightily underwhelmed by elvis' first album this year my flame burns blue: it's crucial to realize that flame was a jazz album while river is a soul/blues album, and though one might be inclined to blur the distinctions between those genres when the same bloke trades in both in a single year, especially since they both have horns and such, it's clear that "jazz" (and especially "jazz orchestra") is shorthand for "high-falutin' faux-sophisticated dilletantish nonsense" whereas "soul" (a.k.a. r'n'b) signifies "low-down rootsy funky rock'n'roll goodness." besides, after all, allen toussaint is co-credited, and you know he's not gonna lead our man astray.

i know i'm biased, because it came out just before the height of my elvis-fandom-mania, but all this useless beauty marks a clear endpoint after which el's career proceeded in a markedly different fashion. not only did he no longer release only unambiguously great albums (gcw, shhhh), he no longer released "normal" just plain elvis costello albums. starting with 1998's fine but overrated and samey, my god, bacharach collabo, everything had a gimmick, everything felt, on some level like an exercise; everything was the kind of album it was first and foremost, and a collection of songs only after that. even when i was cruel, the "return to rock" album, was "the return to rock album." and see, the so-called "follow-up," the delivery man (easily el's best since atub, btw) wasn't just that but also "the rootsy album."

building on the strengths of that strong release, this is yet again the closest he's ever come to an album of straight-up funky soul, a genre he's been making his love for amply evident ever since get happy!! and it's pretty damn close, thanks to the crack band of actual soul musicians and a half-album's worth of actual classic soul songs (as well as oodles of heart-searing piano playing) by mr. allen toussaint. so i really should stop talking about this like it's an elvis costello album. (and i should also take the reminder that his soulfullest previous cut could only have been the toussaint-assisted "deep dark truthful mirror.") actually, part of what makes this album work so well is that elvis only wrote one and five-halves of the songs, enough that his familiarly arch, trenchant wordplay is plainly evident ("an uncivil war divides the nation" grabs my ear every time) but not so much that it becomes distracting or overbearing, a huge potential pitfall in purely costello soul. (it's hard to be too soulful if you're focused on conveying every half-witty pun and snarky turn of phrase.) which isn't to suggest that toussaint's writerly contributions aren't equally smart - to the contrary, they more than hold their own, and his voice is unmistakable throughout even if he only actually sings an occasional harmony vocal.

i would describe this as a beautifully balanced record, not just in terms of the two principal collaborators' contributions, but also for how well the lusciously soulful musical performances and arrangements complement costello's strong vocal work, and vice versa - all sides attracting deserved attention without detracting or distracting from the effect of the whole. elvis has stumbled into his fair share of stiff mannerism lately in the name of good taste - but there's nothing clinical or stuffy about this record, proof that sometimes pedigrees count for something and good taste can taste just as good. i'd say this is easily the best of the bunch i've been discussing here, but i know you'd just accuse me of favoritism.

Cyclical Headaches: DOTW and "Dad Rock"

Title: Feels Like Friday!
Format: CD-R (80 min)
Date: Thursday night, 13 July 2006
Packaging: white sleeve with "weekly calendar" artist list on back; tracklist inside written on guest checks from petit 4.
Notes: made for Katie for her last Friday at p4 (our last day working together.)

Contents:
1. I Met Him On A Sunday - The Shirelles
2. Welcome to the Working Week - Elvis Costello
3. St. Monday - Billy Bragg
4. On a Monday - Ry Cooder
5. Tuesday Morning - The Pogues
6. Hooray For Tuesday - The Minders
7. Why Don't You Write Me - Simon and Garfunkel
8. This Time - Los Lobos
9. Six Days - DJ Shadow
10. W.E.E.K.E.N.D. - Arling and Cameron
11. Friday On My Mind - The Easybeats
12. Friday - Joe Jackson
13. Friday Night - Lily Allen
14. At The Club - The Drifters
15. Friday I'm In Love - The Cure
16. Dancing Alone - Ashlee Simpson
17. Friday Night Saturday Morning - Nouvelle Vague
18. A Roller Skating Jam Named "Saturdays" - De La Soul
19. Sunday Morning - Margo Guryan
20. Every Day Feels Like Sunday - Of Montreal
21. Seven Day Weekend - Elvis Costello and Jimmy Cliff
22. Wishing the Days Away (Ballad Version) - Billy Bragg
++ Creating Cyclical Headaches - Prefuse 73 + 4 Tet [prefuse 77 tet?]

(you might have noticed...*)

at first the days of the week theme was just going to be a loose concept that not necessarily all the songs would fit, but i came up with so many appropriate songs that it basically became the strict theme. most days-of-the-week songs are about working or partying or both, which are both relevant things for katie and me, plus she likes to talk about days feeling like other days (i.e. "it feels like a thursday"), and we always talk about "fun friday," with greater or lesser irony, depending. so anyway, this was her going-away present.

"i met him on a sunday" is a classic of the "days-of-the-week song" genre (that is, songs where they list all the days, not just songs about one specific day) that happens to start with the first day of the week. i thought about using laura nyro's awesome cover, but then, the original is perfectly fine.

"welcome to the working week" is practically synonymous with "intro track" in my book [being the intro track of e.c.'s entire career] - so much so that i could hardly let myself put it as track one - also, it doesn't mention any days, but it's clearly a week-cycle song, and an ironic song for an end-of-job mix. it's so fraught for me that i can't actually comprehend how well it works in this context, since the weirdness of its failure to be followed by "miracle man" is just too glaring. but that's me, not katie. (who, btw, sort of dislikes e.c. but the song's short too!)

three intro tracks in, "st. monday" kind of starts things off in earnest - a song about not working on monday, which is appropriate because the shop is closed then. luv this tchune too, even though the rest of the album (england, half english) is a bit naff. "on a monday" isn't really a monday song - not that there aren't other obvious ones by the bangles, mamas and papas, new order, etc. - or a work song for that matter, but it is a classic "days of the week" song (that is, mentioning all the days in order, DOTW from here on), which is a form that could easily fill its own mix cd and more.

for some reason tuesday has two of the best songs about it, and they really seem to be reasonably about it, which is even weirder. (i forgot and/or declined to include men without hats' "on tuesday," though it is also pretty great.) i was stumped for wednesday and thursday - apart from duke ellington's "zweet zurzday," which i had on but then took off - but an amg song title search i did after completing the mix revealed some things i'd overlooked in my own collection - one "thursday" by morphine and another on goldie's incredible dj-mix; the undertone's "wednesday week" (i thought of e.c.'s but didn't choose it for obvious reasons), and fischerspooner's "wednesday." none of that matters much, but i did kick myself for forgetting tori amos' "wednesday," which is one of the better songs on an album i like very much (scarlett's walk), and, upon consideration, is more or less about the day. [and so, i included it, in between tracks 6 and 7, on the amended version of the cd i just burned myself. there's enough room too!]

well anyway, it's no great mystery why everyone writes songs about sunday and saturday and friday and monday instead of thursday and wednesday. (because they're kind of boring, and run together, even if one of them is the fake weekend.) and so instead i included a string of DOTW songs, which are always kind of about the humdrum doldrums of waiting for the weekend to arrive. "why don't you write me" only qualifies because of the bridge - but that bridge is totally classic, with each day bringing the contemplation of a different form of suicide. (also, the "writing" theme nicely follows up the bit in "hooray for tuesday" about letters and postcards.)

"this time" cleaves so close to the DOTW formula that it sounds, well, formulaic, but it does fit the mellow midweek mood. "six days" is almost obvious in a similar way, but it's still totally sweet. i wanted to use the diplo mash-up of col. bagshot's "six day war" (the original sample for the shadow track) with "lean back", for obscurist purposes, but the transition didn't work as well, and it's just not as musically satisfying.

"w.e.e.k.e.n.d." is both a ridiculous pastiche (i guess?) of the DOTW genre and by-default constituent. i think of it as ushering in the second (and more important) section of the mix, which is the part about friday and the weekend. the transition isn't quite neat though since "friday on my mind" starts out with "monday morning feels so bad...", and we have to go through the DOTW again to get to the partytime part, which is basically the chorus and the rest of the song. this (at least the latter part of it) and several of the songs that follow also fit into the genre of "weekend songs," a category which is discussed at the very beginning of this deservedly-lauded ilm thread, and which is worth more elaborating at some point.

joe jackson's "friday" was in some ways the genesis of this whole mix (way back in april, on good friday in fact, i wanted to make a mix for katie and petit 4 that included this but started with "the kids are alright", which sadly got dropped here for obvious reasons. but i still want to use it to start a mix sometime.) "she gets paid on friday" is a great hook line. i also like the part where joe goes through all the other days that he's "not talking about."

"friday night" by lily allen is not really a very good day of the week song, since it only mentions friday in the title and first line and is actually about her conflict with some [expletive transformed into funny boingy noise] at the club. but it does set up the next few songs which are also about going out to clubs. plus i'm excited about lily allen these days, or maybe just pop-hiphop-ska in general. "at the club" likewise only mentions friday in the first line ("well friday night has finally come around"), but i always think of it strongly as a friday song, mostly because i see at as the counterpart to "saturday night at the movies" (even though the narrator of this song says "don't ask me to go" to the movies - well, not on friday night anyway.) nice la bamba rip too.

so i guess "friday i'm in love" doesn't fit here because it's not actually a friday night clubbing song, but i wanted to delay it a bit since it is such an obvious (and essential) fun friday song. did i consider for a second not including it? even if the best thing about it is those first seven (!) glimmering notes and the half-a-beat-before-you-expect-it crash of the intro. i also thought it was a nice set-up for "dancing alone", even though that's actually more an homage to billy idol, plus ashlee shouts out a different cure song in the chorus. i definitely think of this as a friday night song too (in particular it makes me think of dancing alone at the 700 club), even though it's sequenced on the album right after "sunday morning blues", which isn't quite right. (ashlee has her own DOTW song, of course: "pieces of me." i considered including it, but it doesn't really fit the formula that well, since her week is only two days long - monday and tuesday - and i don't know where it would go on the mix.)

as a coda to the "going out on friday night" section (the strongest high point of the mix, energy-wise - which is ironic since katie and i are both typically too tired or having-to-work-saturday to actually go out on friday), we have "friday night, saturday morning." not in the jaunty specials original as made famous by rich's iPod, but the downbeat, almost hypnotic nouvelle vague rendition. either would have worked, i guess, but i particularly like this version, which might be my favorite cut on the nouvelle vague album. (did you know that if you look at the cd upside down it says "angen allannou"?), and it's nice to have down-tempo cut for saturday day.

finding saturday songs (saturday night in particular) is almost too easy, and it did seem necessary to have at least one. de la soul's "jam" is an old favorite, and it stays on topic (the chorus even includes a shout-out to the "five days to work") better than most. despite the jump in energy levels, the radio announcer intro fit well after the closing sound effects of the last song, and the awesome drum groove outro leads beautifully into the awesome drum fill intro of the margo guryan song. which also happens to be practically perfect in every way. "every day feels like sunday" singlehandedly alludes to happiness, unemployment, the smiths, and the joke in the name of this miz - and that's just in the title phrase, since i have no idea what the lyrics are about. plus of montreal are a pivotal band around here, in case you couldn't tell, and this is a fine, strong song.

it kind of feels like a last track, honestly, so i sort of hear the rest as "bonus material", or at least a postscript/coda section. indeed, "seven day weekend" was a bonus track on the ryko reissue of blood and chocolate that for some reason was not included on the rhino rereissue (annoyingly, since it means i kind of have to keep both copies) - it's not that bad. in fact i quite like it; it's totally fun, especially the drumming, and it's a perfectly adequate DOTW song with a couple great lines ("if it isn't thursday anymore it must be friday.") "wishing the days away", on the other hand, is prime DOTW song and an absolutely beautiful ballad (in this case - the original rock version was another angelliliPod favorite) in its own right, imbing the potentially bland formula with considerable emotional nuance: "on monday i wished it was tuesday night so i could wish for the weekend to come" says volumes about how we relate to time in a simple phrase. fittingly, it's also a lovely song about missing someone too (i don't really understand the political undercurrent to the lyric, so i'll just ignore that.)

and it's a shame that "sunday night just keeps on rolling" is not the name of the really cool 8-minute instrumental track at the end of the first múm album, but is instead the kind of boring 8-minute instrumental track that comes right before it. because i would have used it to close this mix if it had a different title. (though "slow bicycle" is fitting enough for katie, i suppose.)

one comment - i notice that this cd is fairly heavily slanted towards music i associate with my dad: artists i first heard from him (elvis, billy, ry, the pogues, lobos, joe) and even songs i know he particularly likes (the drifters tune.) not sure why that is except that the DOTW formula tends to be employed by rootsy rock songwriter types, which is to say what i guess some people call "dad rock" (a la the pfm, i think, review of wilco.) if that's a negative stigma then i don't quite agree, although i have learned that listeners of my demographic tend to have some critical difficulty with it.

i particularly recall, the first time tara came over to my house, playing her los lobos' kiko and her being pretty much bewildered and weirded out by it, probably saying something about how it's music her dad would like. that's an album i cherish and have for a long time, but i think that experience substantially changed the way i hear it.

i'm curious, actually, what the critical consensus of the indieocracy would be on, say, mitchell froom's work of the late '90s, which in a sense bridges the xpn-style rootsy "adult" rock of lobos and bonnie raitt and indier-friendly songwriters like lisa germano and mark eitzel with more overtly experimental "hip" stuff like soul coughing and cibo matto (all of whom MF worked with), and which is totally a recognizable and innovative production aesthetic. (actually, S.T. Erlewine's crush on Sheryl Crow is rather relevant here.) this stuff was all, to my knowledge, critically well-recieved to the point of adulation at the time (and by audio geeks too, fersher) - and i was pretty into it, through the influence of my parents and uncle, as well as the e.c. mailing list (significant: froom and his sidekick tchad "tchad?" blake also worked on elvis' great albums from this period, and took then-attractions/now-impostors drummer pete thomas with them for many of the other things they produced) - BUT nobody really talks about it these days, and i don't know if that's because it's so obvious that nobody needs to mention it (as i always assumed, since it was obvious to me) or that people think it's bad, or that people are unaware of it. or what.

i don't think this is dad rock, exactly. people at this site have suggested three pretty completely different definitions of the term, none of which have gotten many thumbs-up as being accurate - so the meaning may be somewhat up for grabs. anyway, there is clearly a large blind-spot in this area for the critical community as i've experienced it, which is happy to embrace soul and country and, of course, the "classic" 60s-70s rockers of the third dad-rock definition, but is either disdainful of or uninterested in "mature" rock songwriters from, say, the 80s onward unless they're young on and on indie-rock labels (richard buckner, m. ward, beth orton though maybe not anymore) or had flagrant punk roots (nick cave, patti smith, tom waits arguably.) amg is an exception because they _have_ to cover all that stuff, and of course their reviewer base definitely has broader tastes than your standard music webzine. but in general i see this as a situation quite comparable to the indifference/disdain towards teenpop.

this should probably be its own post. but i do like how discussing mixtapes like this leads naturally into a discussion of more general themes in my musicmind. although these posts are way too long and splintered to work well as discussion-starters. but whatever. now for the asterisked disclaimer you've all been waiting for....

------

*so, on the first mix that i've made since writing out my list of constraints for mixes, i have neatly managed to break every one of the rules. (1) elvis costello and billy bragg each have two songs on here, although i rather like how they're grouped together both times, at the beginning and end of the cd, as if it was cycle starting over (like the days of the week, hah!) (2) she obviously knows the cure song, definitely knows the of montreal, and probably a few of the others - but i wasn't really stressing that point; she's the sort to appreciate some familiar songs mixed in - besides, how can you have a friday-themed mix without the cure? (3) again, who cares, but i've totally overused "sunday morning" recently (on 50's-60's vs. '05-'06, and, embarrassingly/unintentionally, on vulpine valentine) - with good reason, considering it rulz - and no i haven't forgotten that the de la soul song was on beauty will save the world either. i especially wanted to adhere to rule (4) (tet) on this one, b/c cakie likes him, but couldn't find a good way to open with it, so instead there's a tacked-on bonus track. ("creating circular headaches" being an apt description of the song itself, but also, i suppose, of the weekly cycle, if you want to go there.) all of this is fairly irrelevant, so i'm shifting this paragraph to the end of the post.