Alphabet Soup Week 04: The B Tracks

A pair of reggae classics. A couple trip hop gems. A closing trio of gravel-voiced baritones. All that and more in this week's installment of Alphabet Soup!

Jan 24, 2024

Welcome to week 4 of Alphabet Soup!! Hard to believe I’m already into my fourth week compiling the weekly playlist (my third entry as weeks 1 and 2 were combined into a double post). When I started this playlist series, I wanted the weekly compilation exercise to be an enjoyable experience, one which would continue to be fun, easy and manageable. In hindsight, limiting the musical universe to tracks from my physical CD collection has helped to accomplish those goals. I’ve really been enjoying digging back into my musical past and I’m having fun putting the playlist together each week.

As a long-time lover of mixtapes, mixed CDs and playlists, track selection and sequencing has always been very important to me. But for this series I wanted the compilation process to be simple and relatively light touch; I didn’t want to labor every week to try to create the “perfect playlist”. Thankfully it hasn’t been an issue. I have an Excel file containing the artist, album, and track listing from my former CD library, so it’s been fairly straightforward to select a couple dozen candidates for each week’s playlist. Then it’s a matter of narrowing down the track listing to a batch of ten songs that work well together and shuffling the track order to get a sensibly sequenced playlist. So far, so good and - my God - the music! Revisiting this music again has been amazing!

And with that, let’s get straight into this week’s tracks!

ALPHABET SOUP WEEK 04: The B Tracks

TRACK: “Baltimore” from Classic Reggae Volume One (1992)

ARTIST: Tamlins

We ended last week’s installment with Freedom Ain’t Free by Brother Ali from his 2007 album The Undisputed Truth, which leans heavily on a sample of Nina Simone’s Baltimore, the title track from the 1978 album of the same name. This week we start off with a cover of that track by Jamaican reggae act The Tamlins. From my research this track doesn’t appear to have been on an album but was a one-off single released in 1980 on Taxi, the label of legendary Jamaican producers Sly and Robbie (Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare). Although the song appears on close to a dozen reggae compilation albums, I first heard it on Classic Reggae Volume One released by Profile Records in 1992.

TRACK: “Book of Rules” from Rockers OST (1979)

ARTIST: The Heptones

Staying in the reggae genre, we move on to a track from another compilation album, in this case from the Original Soundtrack from the 1978 Jamaican film Rockers. This is right up there with my favorite reggae compilation albums of all time and features truly incredible music from legendary reggae artists like The Maytones, Junior Marvin, Gregory Issacs, Burning Spear, and Third World. If you’re a fan of classic reggae and haven’t listened to this amazing soundtrack, do yourself a favor and give it a listen. You won’t be disappointed!

TRACK: “B-Drum” from Question (1998)

ARTIST: Purple Penguin

At some point in the late 90s, - the summer of 1998 in the imports section of an independent record store in Houston comes to mind - I came across the Bristol-based record label Cup of Tea Records by way of their CD sampler Cup of Tea Records: A Compilation which included a slew of amazing new (to me) trip hop artists including Statik Sound System, Monk & Canatella, and Purple Penguin. I ended up with at least a dozen CDs through the artists discovered on that compilation, including Question, the second album released by Purple Penguin in 1998 on which the track B-Drum appears.

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.

TRACK: “Blindfold” from Big Calm (1998)

ARTIST: Morcheeba

Growing up in Bermuda was challenging for a budding musical explorer. In the 70s and 80s I was exposed to a very limited selection of musical genres and selections. There was plenty of R&B and soul on one or two of the local radio stations. Country music figured heavily on the morning show favored by my parents (they weren’t country music fans but liked the show’s host). Casey Kasem was a breath of fresh air every weekend and was always an eagerly anticipated introduction to new music. But there remain major black holes in my musical knowledge simply because of the vast troves of music to which I was never exposed.

Slowly but surely my musical universe expanded whether due to a visit from one of my British cousins (The Cure’s Japanese Whispers, 1983), or a friend returning from boarding school for the summer (U2’s War, 1983), bringing with them a wonderful new set of musical discoveries. As I reached my late teens and headed off to university in Canada things opened up an awful lot for me. But it would be some time before the musical discovery situation in Bermuda would change in any meaningful way.

I have a vivid recollection of asking the guy behind the counter at “Soundstage”, one of the two record stores in Bermuda at the time, if he had Who Can You Trust?, the debut album by Morcheeba. He looked at me sideways and said, “what’s a morcheeba?” Suffice it to say, that the musical retail experience in Bermuda at the time was tired and that’s putting it kindly. Thankfully, Bermuda-based musical discovery expanded significantly in 1998 with the opening of Music World, founded by a couple guys who loved music and loved their customers enough to find whatever it was they were after.

I did eventually get my hands on Morcheeba’s debut album, but not until I’d already sourced and fallen in love with their second album, Big Calm, which remains my favorite of theirs.

TRACK: “Back to the Old House” from Louder Than Bombs (1987)

ARTIST: The Smiths

I’d eventually come to own half a dozen studio albums and compilations by The Smiths, but in the summer of 1987 my musical universe was absolutely dominated by Louder Than Bombs, the first album of theirs I ever owned. Such a vivid memory of lying in the spare room of my grandmother’s house nursing a broken collar bone from a recent accident and contemplating my current relationship, which was on the rocks. It’s so incredible how one song can take me back to a place and time complete with the emotions and even physical sensations of that moment.

TRACK: “Beautiful Day” from Revolt (1999)

ARTIST: 3 Colours Red

Beautiful Day is the lead single from Revolt, the second album by British rock band 3 Colors Red. This was their most successful single, peaking at number 11 in the UK singles charts in January 1999.

TRACK: “Brilliant Mind” from Some Kind of Wonderful OST (1987)

ARTIST: Furniture

I’ve been a hopeless romantic for as long as I can remember, which is one of the reasons I loved a trio of John Hughes’ movies as a kid: Sixteen Candles (Jake across from the church as Sam leaves the wedding while the Thompson Twins’ If You Were Here starts playing), Pretty in Pink (sorry, but the better ending would’ve been Duckie and Andie ending up together. Poor Duckie), and my favorite of the three, Some Kind of Wonderful (Keith chasing down Watts on the rain-soaked streets of LA).

There’s no denying that Hughes’ writing was problematic, peppered as it was with racism, homophobia and misogyny (particularly his work for National Lampoon). But as a blissfully unaware kid in the 80s who was 13, 15, and 16 when these movies were released, it was the themes of weirdos, outsiders and unrequited “love” that grabbed my attention. The music Hughes selected for his films was also a huge draw for me, with the soundtracks for Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful (on which Brilliant Mind appears) being amongst my favorite of all time.

TRACK: “Blur” from The Secret of My Excess (1995)

ARTIST: Ron Hawkins

Ron Hawkins is lead singer of the influential Toronto-based alternative rock band The Lowest of the Low. The band’s debut album Shakespeare My Butt, quite possibly a desert island disc for me (I’ve never actually compiled that list), was voted by Canadians as one of the Top 10 Canadian Albums of All Time by Chart magazine in 2000. Blur is from Hawkins’ 1995 solo debut The Secret of My Excess which, while a little hit and miss for me, did contain a handful of standout tracks (I also recommend checking out Hey Valerie and Lulu).

TRACK: “Bleeding Muddy Water” from Blues Funeral (2012)

ARTIST: Mark Lanegan

I was extremely late to the Mark Lanegan party with my first real exposure to his music (outside of his work with Queens of the Stone Age) being through his amazing 2012 release Blues Funeral. Although I’ve since managed to listen to some of his other solo releases (2001’s Field Songs, 2004’s Bubblegum and 2013’s Imitations) as well as a couple of his collaborations with Belle and Sebastian’s Isobell Campbell, I certainly haven’t done his catalog justice, something which I need to go back and rectify. Having said that, I’d be surprised if anything could top Blues Funeral for me as I consider it to be an absolute masterpiece.

TRACK: “Bad as They Seem” from Everything I Long For (1996)

ARTIST: Hayden

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why I was so in love with Hayden’s albums, particularly his debut from which Bad as They Seem was the lone single. His voice, while not technically good to my ears, is intriguing and compelling. His lyrics are at times deeply affecting. Revisiting Everything I Long For in its entirety as I prepared this week’s entry only reinforced my appreciation for an album that’s aged gracefully and has really stood the test of time.

Life in the key of B: Breathe

If I’m being completely honest, I was happy to see the back end of 2023 which was a pretty shitty year for me. After ringing in the new year with an amazing hike from Dana to Petra in Jordan, I was excited and energized to return home and start making 2024 a fantastic year. But three weeks into the year I’ve already been down with Covid (and struggling with the related brain fog and a lack of mental acuity), I’ve laid a good friend to rest, and I’ve been battling a couple other health issues. My mental and emotional health has taken a bit of a hit as a result.

But I came across this image the other day and it was exactly the reminder I needed to just breathe and take comfort in the knowledge that “this too shall pass”. If you’re struggling as well, give it a try: pull that fresh air into your lungs, surrender your burdens to the breath, and let them go. Hang in there, all will be well…

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.

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