Alphabet Soup Week 03: Artists Filed Under B

One of my favorite live performances ever. A downtempo classic from a surprising source. A staple of the coffeehouse playlist. All that and more on this week's installment of Alphabet Soup!!

Wow, how is it already the third week of 2024?! The year already feels like it’s flying by! At some point in the last 5-10 years, time began passing much more quickly for me than it had previously. A couple decades ago my dad told me this would happen; he didn’t say when it would start, but he was clear about the fact that it was coming. With time being a relative phenomenon, our perception of the movement of time is relative to our age and, at some point (for me it was probably in my mid-40s), you reach a threshold where everything changes.

As a five-year-old, one year was 20% of my life. As an aging kid in his early 50s, each year now represents less than 2% of my life. The result is that sometimes weeks feel like they pass in the blink of an eye and months and years start to feel like they’re literally flying by.

I have no qualms about the speed with which time is racing by, and am more than comfortable, quite happy even, with the idea of growing old(er). I’m certainly far closer to the end of my working career than the beginning, meaning the third chapter, which promises to be the best yet, feels like it’s right around the corner. I’m excited to see what the future holds and interested to see whether and how my perception of time will shift when I free up an 8–10-hour slug of time from each weekday.

What does sometimes feel alarming is how quickly weekly and monthly tasks come due, like this weekly playlist. Given my commitment to producing this playlist on a weekly basis, I’m finding myself grateful that I thought to set up a criterion for track eligibility. The musical universe is so vast that this one foundational parameter serves to filter my choices down to a very manageable level: Alphabet Soup comprises tracks that appear on CDs that were in my physical collection prior to ripping them all to mp3 and disposing of everything (an act I now look back on with some degree of regret). Adding this parameter has made the playlist compilation process much simpler than it may otherwise have been. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying revisiting these older tracks and albums, some of which I haven’t listened to in decades. And I’m excited for the weekly opportunity to share a bunch of great music with you all!

With that, let’s get into this week’s music!!

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ALPHABET SOUP WEEK 03: Artists Filed Under B

ARTIST: Beth Hart

TRACK: "LA Song" from Screamin' For My Supper (1999)

Only a very few talented singers are lucky enough to possess a voice such as that commanded by Beth Hart. She’s had well-documented struggles with addiction and mental health issues from which, thankfully, she has emerged, perhaps not unscathed but certainly unbowed, and she remains a powerhouse of a vocalist.

Highly recommended viewing: Beth Hart’s rendition of LA Song from her November 7, 2008 concert at Paradiso in Amsterdam remains one of my favorite live performances of all time.

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ARTIST: Bic Runga

TRACK: "Get Some Sleep" from Beautiful Collision (2002)

Get Some Sleep is the lead single on Beautiful Collision, the July 2002 debut album from New Zealand’s Bic Runga. After the success of 2000’s Together In Concert: Live album from her tour with Tim Finn and Dave Dobbyn, Runga’s solo album debuted at #1 in New Zealand, ultimately achieving 10x platinum certification.

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ARTIST: Blue Rodeo

TRACK: "5 Days In May" from Five Days In July (1993)

By the time I graduated university and left Halifax in the late 90s, Blue Rodeo was already a musical institution in Canada. I haven’t really kept up with them since 1995’s Nowhere to Here, but their 2001 Greatest Hits compilation may well be among my top 10 greatest hits albums. 5 Days in May was the lead single from their best-selling 1993 album Five Days in July, which went 6x platinum in Canada.

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As you make your way through this week’s playlist, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do any of these tracks really stand out for you? What do you like? What don’t you like?

Please click the button below to leave a comment.

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ARTIST: BushX

TRACK: "Glycerine" from Sixteen Stone (1994)

For 99.5% of the world’s population, Sixteen Stone was the debut album of the Gavin Rossdale-fronted band, Bush. But for those of us living in Canada at the time, the album was released by an outfit named BushX. The band name Bush was already taken in Canada by a late 1970s rock band fronted by Domenic Troiano, who later joined The Guess Who for two albums (1974’s Flavours and 1975’s Power In The Music). By the time The Science of Things was released in 1997, Troaino and Rossdale had reached an agreement under which Bush was permitted to use their name in Canada. You could say Bush had an appendedxtomy. I just did.

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ARTIST: Better Than Ezra

TRACK: "The Killer Inside" from Deluxe (1995)

When preparing this week’s playlist, I went back and listened to Deluxe in its entirety, something I probably haven’t done in over 20 years. I left the experience feeling like the album has aged well, with hardly a bad track in sight. Good was the lead single and the huge hit from the album, which moved over a million copies and was certified platinum less than a year after its February 1995 release. But for me this track and Porcelain remain the highlights of the album.

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ARTIST: Bif Naked

TRACK: "Never Alone" from Bif Naked (1996)

Although I wasn’t fanatical about tracking my music and compiling AOTY lists back in the 90s (I had a hard enough time making it to class on time and keeping up with my coursework), Bif Naked’s self-titled debut would certainly have been near the top of my list in 1996.

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ARTIST: Babble

TRACK: "Just Like You" from Ether (1996)

When I first heard Ether, the second album by Babble, I was enthralled by the laid back, Eastern-influenced, more downtempo than trip hop vibe of the album. In researching this week’s playlist, I was surprised to discover that Babble was none other than Tom Bailey and Alanna Currie, two thirds of the Thompson Twins, who were a threesome in their most popular early 80s incarnation. To my ear the music couldn’t be much further musically from their big hits of the 80s including Lies, Hold Me Now, and Doctor Doctor. I love the stylistic evolution and wish they’d released more than two albums under this moniker, because both were fantastic.

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ARTIST: Ben Harper

TRACK: "Another Lonely Day" from Fight For Your Mind (1995)

It feels like I heard Ben Harper everywhere in the mid to late 90s. Which makes sense as I spent most of my time in coffee shops and Ben Harper is nothing if not a staple of the “coffeehouse music” playlist. His is a style of music that feels of a time and place for me and isn’t something that I listen to much anymore. But tuning into this album immediately took me back to an extremely important and transitional period in my life: mid-1997, a newly sober university graduate, back home working my first full-time job, and on the verge of meeting and falling in love with my now wife. Little did I know it then, but within a year there wouldn’t be many more lonely days ahead for me.

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ARTIST: Black Uhuru

TRACK: "Bull In The Pen" from Liberation: The Island Anthology (1993)

While I never owned a studio album by the legendary reggae band Black Uhuru, I was a huge fan of their music, especially their compilation album Liberation: The Island Anthology. While Bull In The Pen originally appeared on the 1983 studio release Anthem, for the Spotify playlist I’ve included the release from the 1985 compilation album Reggae Greats as it’s the same version that appeared on the Liberation anthology and is my preferred version of the track.

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ARTIST: Brother Ali

TRACK: "Freedom Ain't Free" from The Undisputed Truth (2007)

Brother Ali is the stage name of Wisconsin-born, Minnesota-based rapper Ali Douglas Newman. Freedom Ain’t Free appears on 2007’s The Undisputed Truth, an album that generated controversy given its critique of the United States’ government and political system. Ali had been set to tour with Gym Class Heroes on a Verizon-sponsored tour, but after the release of Uncle Sam Goddamn Verizon ultimately withdrew their support of Ali, forcing him to withdraw. Freedom ain’t free indeed.

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Life in the key of B: Balance

At a time of the year when I’m tempted to make all sorts of changes in my life in the form of resolutions or intentions, I’m reminded of the importance of balance, a state of being I manage to maintain far more consistently now than I ever did when I was consistently trying to fit everything in.

That’s it for this week’s installment! Thanks, as always, for being here.

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Here’s the running playlist which will be updated on a weekly basis as each new installment is published.

Tracks missing from the Spotify playlist:

• Allegory by Murray Attaway (Week 02)

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Thank you for reading Joy in the Journey, I appreciate you being here! If there’s someone in your life you think may enjoy this post, feel free to share it.