In case you hadn’t heard, a grassroots movement put Rage Against the Machine on top of the British charts this week (over Joe McElderry from Simon Cowell’s X Factor talent show). This tickles me on numerous levels–but it’s hard for most Americans to understand how attentive Brits are to the question of who’s got the […]

posted 23 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

1. “Meeting Across the River” 2. “Nebraska” 3. “Seeds” 4. “Cautious Man” 5. “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” More than I expected, but I’m sure there’s others I didn’t think of. Some of them would work better as talking blues than others. “Seeds” seems the most anomalous, by virtue of being an uptempo rocker.

posted 7 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

In my youth, when I owned only twenty or thirty albums, I’d guess that about half of them were greatest-hit collections. I was focused on value for money, but it was also an efficient crash course on recent musical history. Many of these records, however, had a song that just didn’t seem to fit. (This […]

posted 30 November 2009 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments

It took me a long time to notice this lyric, from Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”: Just like a rainbow, you know you set me free Now, Vince Clarke has always been a goofy guy, but this is extra-silly. This is not one of the things that rainbows are traditionally good for! “Just like […]

posted 19 October 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

Nobody ever accused Sammy Hagar of being a genius. But I would have guessed that he passed driver’s ed. Unfortunately, the opening line of “I Can’t Drive 55” is as follows: One foot on the brake and and one on the gas Not only can you not drive 55 with that technique, you can’t drive […]

posted 28 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

Five musicians I’ve interviewed who are no longer alive: 1. James Brown 2. Kurt Cobain 3. Left Eye 4. Barry White 5. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

posted 22 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

I hadn’t heard Billy Joel’s “Pressure” in a long time: it hit #20 in 1982, but it doesn’t seem to have entered Joel’s canon of hits. So thank you, Sirius-XM ’80s channel. I thoroughly enjoyed the song this time around, even the throbbing synth sound (which sounds more dated than Joel’s ’50s pastiches on An […]

posted 14 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments

Five B-sides that got regular airplay in the ’80s on Z-100,  then NYC’s leading top-40 station: 1. Prince, “Erotic City” 2. Bruce Springsteen, “Pink Cadillac” 3. Bruce Springsteen, “Jersey Girl” 4. U2, “Everlasting Love” 5. The Police, “Murder By Numbers”

posted 2 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

I don’t hear Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” as much as I used to, which is for the best, really. But it came up last week on the Sirius-XM ’80s station, and I thought of something that I never noticed twenty-four years ago–you don’t need to “install” microwave ovens. You put them on the counter […]

posted 11 August 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

I realized this morning that two recent albums–Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Wonderlick’s Topless at the Arco Arena–have something unusual in common. Their titles include the names of concert venues despite not being live records. Can anybody think of any others? (The MPP is a Gehry-designed shed in Maryland; Jackson Browne recorded “The Load-Out/Stay” […]

posted 6 August 2009 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments