Somebody Likes It

We'll edit for the moment that I think Jimmy Buffett's real missed business opportunity could have been something called Jimmy's Buffet (just trays, warmers, cheeseburgers, presumably. Margarita machines). Admittedly, some of these episodes are excuses for us to take a ball peen hammer to the material, and there's some of that exercise here, but there are undoubtedly aspects to Buffet's ascent tha...

Let's just get something incredibly obvious out of the way up top about this episode - there was a hiatus in between the time Ryan selected this LP and the time we were actually able to convene and record it, and by contrast, Fontaines DC are actually hyper prolific, meaning, by the time we laid this bad boy down, they had turned out an additional avalanche of tracks. Nevertheless, there is someth...

So, to be obvious about it, we talk about Canada here, like a LOT. Entirely too much. The Guess Who will do that to you. All of the usual and a few unusual bits are trotted out. We are aware, and we are fond of Canadians. But the deep dive in this case is kind of unavoidable. Apologies to all the Gords north of the border. Maple! For all my friends. We canvass the practice of the forty-seven minut...

Marc Bolan went out like a Roman candle or a speed bump or in some such way an incandescent rock star dies at twenty-nine, and left in his wake a glitterbomb of glam stardust and swagger a mile wide and a few albums deep. It's hard to overstate his impact: T Rex enjoyed a run from 1970-73 where they charted like the Fab Four. Eleven singles in the UK top ten, among them 'Get It On,' cornerstone of...

I'm not sure what that has to do with the band 10 cc exactly, what with their high highs and low lows, the same band capable of trotting out a perfect all time classic like 'I'm Not In Love' along side some sort of song about Minestrone (which somehow actually charted). 'I'm Not In Love' alone could have made for a solid hour of chatter, what with the story about how they laid down layers upon lay...

Let's say you have a band. It's mostly you, though you bring in a rotating cast of characters to help you fill it out. You don't love touring, but do love snapping together pop punk ditties with a surgical top-down-in-the-summertime sonic aesthetic. You tend to pair these with dada-esque videos, and somehow it makes sense. Though it's your act, your last name is a nom de plume . You may understand...

A quick search online provides many examples of the extreme torture, pain, and suffering inflicted by the heavy metal device known as the Iron Maiden. It's legendary status puts fear into the eyes of even the strongest of humans and caused the slow, excruciating death of thousands. You will also find pictures of a large 19th century iron coffin device, lined inside with sharp spikes, into which pe...

At this point it feels almost antithetical to what we're worrying about in 2022 to talk about the pandemic, like we’ve come to regard it as some sort of distant, fuzzy memory. The scourge wasn't that long ago, and if you judge by my last trip to the supermarket, some folks are still sweating the outcome. A few months back Ryan and Mark and I put together our pandemic mixtape show, a glorious (and...

It is tempting with Marvin Gaye to start with the last chapter. To skip ahead to the tragic end, dog ear the page, and work backwards. But that robs us of a certain sense of who he was at his epiphany, a competitive and deeply original talent who shone in the spotlight, bucked the trends that made Motown buckets of cash, and crafted what Ryan termed 'a sexy protest record.' And that's what it is....

Given time, pressure, and the varied perspective that arrives with age, we can be forgiven for re-imagining the opinions we formed in our halcyon days. But as long as music bears the burden of snapping us back to the moment when we first made its acquaintance, it feels, if only for a brief time, like we haven't aged a day. Ryan's friend Daniel Rich sits in on this show, and he brought us a gift: T...

Charlie Martin's pandemic experience has been much like the rest of ours, until it wasn't. Martin, one half of the having-an-indie-moment act Hovvdy, spent much of the first two COVID years huddled up with his Mrs, tethered to extended family from afar, until they deemed such time safe (or safe enough) to venture out. Imaginary People, Martin's solo LP, emerges as an exploration of perspective, or...

So let's just start with the obvious: we don't know where the scarf is. We don't know if the legends about said scarf are real, nor do we have insight from various Gyllenhaals as to the status of the aforementioned scarf, and we don't know with certainty that Taylor Swift, when you break up with her, is contractually obligated or otherwise driven to write ten minute super catchy ditties heavily in...

It's pretty common in our collective rear view to gaze upon the halcyon days of early March 2020 and chuckle about our earnest belief that this COVID thing? We'll be past it in a couple of weeks. Of course now, in a story that's been beaten into a fine mist, we know the pandemic had other plans. It is with tongue planted firmly in cheek that I suggest that this development did manage to affect the...

This sometimes happens when life intervenes, and if we're being honest there's a lot of that that's been happening lately. Shane's been touring, Mark's been on the road for work (I suppose that's touring too, of sorts), and Ryan and Kevin have been juggling schedules. We figured the perfect antidote to the layoff was a brand new mixtape show, and no better excuse than a re-examination of 2019's be...

It can be difficult to recall on occasion that Willie Nelson is more than just the proverbial Kevin Bacon of country music: true, he's recorded with everyone, true, he's become revered beyond his wildest dreams among a large swath of the American music loving public, and true, he once managed to wrangle his way out of trouble with the IRS, in part, by cutting some Doritos commercials. It's been a...

It's a weird byproduct of doing this podcast that occasionally —and I realize that this idea is counterintuitive—finding a record square in the midst of all of our collective sweetspot may affect our banter when we lay down the show. It's rare when it happens, but it happens. We ran into an interesting set of circumstances with Barrie and their initial release Happy To Be Here, from the SXSW set M...

Mixtape shows are funny (beyond whatever shenanigans actually happen during the taping itself): you tend to think about the songs you're going to add to the show via the unique prism of that song's application to a given theme. For our Labor Day Mixtape Show, we decided (cleverly? You decide-) that we'd bring to bear songs specifically about Work, Birth (or Babies) and/or British Parliament (thoug...

At some point during the week before we laid down this episode, one of us circulated a Honda scooter ad starring Miles Davis from the 1980s. If you've ever seen it, it's more or less...terrifying, which is a helluva thing to accuse of a Honda scooter commercial from the 1980s. Miles could be well and truly ominous when he wanted to be, even when (sort of) pitching something. He was, after all, kno...

I don't really know how to explain this other than the way that I'm about to, but the first time I heard In The Meantime , I had a pretty good idea that this track was pretty much the best that Spacehog had to offer. And I don't mean that it's because the song is a transcendent masterpiece, a triumph to eclipse all of their others. It sounded, for lack of a better term, like a band poured everythi...

So to be completely fair (and you'll notice this straightaway), there's an elephant in the room in this episode. We ran into a weird situation - Mark actually left his usual recording array at home accidentally, and we decided to soldier on rather than go home and get it. The result is a sort of weird "conference call" quality to the broadcast (a fact that we lampoon for probably too lon...

It's hard to escape your own predispositions, and come to think of it, that's probably why we call them that. We each bring the tapestry of our unique experience into the ear we lend to a record, and it's as important as the record is itself in determining our ability to fall for it. Music can be a complicated bundle, but falling in love with an act is always collaborative. The listener, by the ve...

Long before he found himself wandering around emitting, out loud, sounds associated with brain cell loss, Ozzy Osbourne leapt into a solo career that, one might competitively say, is more responsible for his legacy than his work in Black Sabbath. Oh sure, some things remain constant - he still doesn't linger in the recording studio - and he’s surrounded here by musicians that would prove iconic —...

By now the Jenny Lewis story has been told far and wide: child actress becomes indie darling, and is anyone really surprised when she assembles an allstar team to pull together her latest record (helmed by Beck)? Probably not. But behind the polished veneer of her most recent release, a few of us wonder if she's been comfortable too long. Too many high fives and back slaps (is that still a thing?)...

Adam and the Ants, perhaps the birthplace of the of the Sexy Revolutionary War Guy costume, is our focus as we welcome back our full complement of goofballs back into the fray. There's lots to discuss - Malcolm McLaren, dream journals, Jerry Reed comes up for some reason, and a girl who is reviewing all of the LPs in her husband's "Stupid Record Collection." All in all, it's not hard to...

Pinning down the Roots' legacy isn't quite as simple as acknowledging their current role slow jamming the news on The Tonight Show: in fact, before they were invited into our daily national households, The Roots had to first shake folks up. Things Fall Apart became the ascendant touchstone for a band that always had chops but never felt dangerous - from the fiery Jim Crow imagery stamped on the co...