Marc Fagel's Blog: Jittery White Guy Music: The Blog, page 36

My Top 1000 Songs #804: It's About Time

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Indie pop act The Lemonheads are probably best remembered for 1992's breatkthrough LP It's A Shame About Ray (and that album's unforgettable title track); but I've always had a preference for the following year's follow-up, Come On Feel The Lemonheads. It opens with a 3-4 song run of drop-dead perfect tunes falling somewhere between jubilant power pop and m...

My Top 1000 Songs #803: Raspberry Beret

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Yes, it feels like a bit of a cheat, once again dipping into the vast and wonderful Prince catalog and settling on one of his catchiest pop tracks rather than something a little slinkier. But, hey, when my friend described my music taste as jittery white guy music, supplying a name for my book and this blog, she wasn't kidding. 
"Raspberry Beret" (like much ...

My Top 1000 Songs #802: Texas Snow

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Notwithstanding my occasional nods to popular songs well known to the unwashed masses, I can't shy away from my love for songs that seemingly nobody else has ever heard. Like this amazing tune from late 90s/early 00s-era San Francisco indie pop act Oranger (who were great, go check 'em out). "Texas Snow," off 2000's Quiet Vibrationland, sounds like a post-p...

My Top 1000 Songs #801: Romeo's Tune

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Mississippi-born Steve Forbert is one of those Great American Singer-Songwriters you (ok, I) kinda take for granted. I can place him alongside Warren Zevon or Jackson Browne (or, yeah, Dylan and Springsteen and Carole King), right up through Freedy Johnston and Amy Rigby and Josh Ritter (the last of whom probably bears the most direct imprint of Forbert's s...

My Top 1000 Songs #800: Steal My Sunshine

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

One of the fun things about first discovering music as a kid in the 70s was that the radio was littered with silly, embarrassing one-hit wonders, cheesy little tunes perfect for a 9-year-old with no musical context and not quite ready to experience the broader spectrum of what rock & roll had to offer. (Readers of Jittery White Guy Music --the book--are fami...

My Top 1000 Songs #799: The Naughty Villain

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Back in Elephant 6 mode again today... and while long-running indie band Elf Power never attracted quite the same level of fanaticism as, say, Neutral Milk Hotel (last heard from a couple days ago) or Olivia Tremor Control, lacking the drop-dead killer LP, they have a lot of interesting, widely varied music spread across their much lengthier discography. "T...

My Top 1000 Songs #798: Burial Art

One of the newest songs to make the list, with the usual caveat that, in fairness, it should take a few years before one can honestly consider a song to be an all-time favorite--but The Connells' "Burial Art" was a rare track that I've played incessantly for the past few years and still love (and, likewise, the rare example of a band with a deep catalog who managed to interest me in their new music decades into their career).

The North Carolina jangle pop act were one of my absolute favorite band...

My Top 1000 Songs #797: Everything Is

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Neutral Milk Hotel's two albums (1996's On Avery Island and especially 1998's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea ) rightfully retain their legendary status, intense listening experiences that need to be heard with reverence and only on special occasions to avoid them feeling ordinary.
But before that, Jeff Mangum, like the other musicians in the Elephant 6 collect...

My Top 1000 Songs #796: Video Killed The Radio Star

I took a couple days off... one to work on the election, one to have a good cry over the election. I could use a mental health break right now, and I don't know if it'll be a few days, or four years, or--depending on those four years--much, much longer. (Ironically, our last song here was "Ask Me How I Am"--and the last thing I need is for someone to ask me how I am.)

Still... nothing (aside from friends, family, and cats) aids a mental health break more than music, so I decided I need the distra...

My Top 1000 Songs #795: Ask Me How I Am

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

I still have such fond memories of my original discovery of Top 40 AM radio in 1975--9 years old, a small, plastic, hand-held transistor radio, hours in my room after school just absorbing every single song that came on. Didn't know the artists, or if I'd ever hear the song again, or even have enough musical context to discern good songs from bad--just that...