Alphabet Soup Week 07: Artists Filed Under D
The 1964 album that ignited my life-long love of music. A prose poem from 1927 that remains as relevant today as it was when published. And a fresh heaping of new tracks added to Alphabet Soup.
Although I’d been subscribing to a weather-related Substack for several years (Michael Lowry’s excellent Eye on the Tropics if you’re wondering; we pay a lot of attention to hurricanes here in Bermuda), it was only last summer that I actually came to understand what a massive platform Substack is, and that it might offer a little more value to me than simply helping me to figure out when to batten down the hatches. When I decided to dig a little deeper, the first topic I searched for was music (go figure!!). Little did I know the joy I was about to discover as I entered the magical world that is #musicstack! I’ve found so many like-minded members of my musical tribe here, along with a level of thoughtful and kind discourse and engagement that’s sorely lacking on so many other social platforms nowadays. I’m grateful to be here.
Last July, very early in my Substack journey, I read something that resonated so deeply that it has stuck with me ever since. Chris Dalla Riva, publisher of the always excellent Can’t Get Much Higher, was interviewing songwriter extraordinaire Billy Steinberg and asked, “Do you remember the first time being moved by music?" to which the response was:
Maybe not the first, but when I was a kid and heard “All I Have to Do is Dream” by The Everly Brothers it felt like a religious experience. I can remember sitting with my friends - kids that I played football or baseball with - and asking if they wanted to come over to listen to some records. They agreed. When I’d put that needle down on the record, I’d immediately feel that special feeling. And I’d look around at my friends to see if they were feeling it, and they’d be laughing at something or talking. It disturbed me that they weren’t moved by a song in the same way I was. I would think to myself, “What’s wrong with them? What’s up with me? Why do I care so much about this song? What does that mean?”
When I think about my first “religious experience”, my conversion came in the form of the first three tracks from the first side of Beatles for Sale. To this lonely, confused and insecure kid, those three songs chronicling heartache, the likes of which I wouldn’t come close to experiencing for close to a decade (initially in the form of unrequited puppy love), ignited a fire within me that’s continued to burn deeply ever since.
I tried to telephone / they said you were not home / that’s a lie / ‘Cause I know where you’ve been / I saw you walk in your door.
Of all the love I have won or have lost / There is one love I should never have crossed / She was a girl in a million, my friend / I should have known she would win in the end.
I think of her / But she thinks only of him / And though it’s only a whim / She thinks of him / Oh, how long will it take / ‘Til she sees the mistake she has made?
Six minutes and fifty seconds that irrevocably changed my life. I would never be the same again. To the uninitiated, I’m sure that sounds like hyperbole, but if you’re here (which you are, because you’re reading this!) then chances are that you know where I’m coming from.
From time to time, I ponder the four questions that close out Steinberg’s response to Chris’s question. On the first question, the adult in me easily recognizes that there’s nothing “wrong” with people that don’t connect with music. I’ll often find myself bemused when someone tells me they “love” music but then can’t name a single band they listen to, or I come to understand they’ve been listening to the same music for the last 20-30 years, or they say something like, “oh I have a couple EDM Spotify playlists I really love”. That’s fine, it’s more than okay to be a casual music fan, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t characterize that sort of engagement with music as “love”. To each their own.
It’s the last three questions, which are really all about me, and what I like, that I find so much more difficult to answer. This love I have for music feels primal and instinctual, like something that was lying dormant until being activated by the music and singing of those four fabulous lads from Liverpool. For quite some time I’ve had the germ of an idea for an essay on my love of music - it’s still a long way off and may require months or years to fully develop - but I do hope to write a longer-form piece on this topic in the future.
Enough (for now) of my philosophical musings on music, let’s jump into this week’s playlist!!
ALPHABET SOUP WEEK 07: Artists Filed Under D
ARTIST: DJ Shadow
TRACK: "Midnight In A Perfect World" from Endtroducing….. (1996)
DJ Shadow’s debut studio album, an instrumental hip hop album constructed entirely from samples, was released in 1996 to widespread critical acclaim. Sound on Sound has an excellent article about the album generally and this track in particular:
“One of Josh Davis’ greatest vinyl discoveries was the 1969 album Songs Of Experience by the then largely forgotten Californian composer/producer David Axelrod, and in particular, the melancholic piano figure of its track ‘The Human Abstract’, set to become the central hook of ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’.
Davis mixed the Axelrod sample with a beat he’d created in his MPC using a slowed-down break from a track by ’60s US psychedelic soul band Rotary Connection
With the beat and Axelrod piano motif in place, Davis added layers to the track incorporating samples including the phased Fender Rhodes chords from Finnish jazz-fusion artist Pekka Pohjola’s ‘The Madness Subsides’ (1975), the eerie flute-like strings from New York avant garde composer Meredith Monk’s ‘Dolmen Music’ (1981) and a loop of a single word from rapper Akinyele’s ‘Outta State’ (1993) to provide the ‘midnight-midnight-midnight’ hook.
The main melody for ‘Midnight In A Perfect World’, meanwhile, was provided by the ethereal female voice on ‘Sower Of Seeds’, a track from the 1976 album Love Is As Open As Your Heart by US soul band Baraka”
It’s an absolutely classic album, one that ranked at #329 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of all time published in 2020.
ARTIST: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi
TRACK: "The Rose With The Broken Neck" from Rome (2011)
It's not clear to me when I first became aware of the work of Brian Joseph Burton aka Danger Mouse, but most likely it was with his production work on the second Gorillaz album (2004's Demon Days). I could (but won’t, for obvious reasons) probably spend a whole post on the various iterations of Danger Mouse's work, from combining Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album to create The Grey Album, to his participation in Gnarls Barkley (two albums) and Broken Bells (three albums), to his six Grammy wins on 22 nominations.
This album, a collaboration with Italian composer Daniele Luppi, was on the heaviest of rotations for me in 2011 and certainly would've ranked as a top 5 AOTY had I been compiling such lists back then. An homage to the Spaghetti Western soundtracks of the 1960s, the duo paired vintage equipment and vocals (even reuniting the choir that performed on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly soundtrack) with guest appearances by Jack White and Norah Jones, who both provided vocals for three tracks each. Widely described as “a movie soundtrack with no movie”, this is an album that I still revisit regularly, and one that I'd love to get on vinyl if and when I ever begin listening to and collecting that medium again.
ARTIST: Depeche Mode
TRACK: "Stripped" from Black Celebration (1986)
Although I’ve been a fan (albeit a fairly casual one) of Depeche Mode (less so in the past decade or so) since first hearing Blasphemous Rumours and Shake the Disease on the 1985 compilation Catching up with Depeche Mode, I’ve never owned one of their studio albums. That is, until I met and married Tina in 1999 and became a “joint owner” of a handful of their albums, one of which was 1986’s Black Celebration. Listening to this album, along with their two subsequent releases (1987’s Music for the Masses and 1990’s Violator) was a potent reintroduction to a band that I hadn’t really listened to for over a decade at that point, and it really broadened my appreciation of their music.
Stripped has become one of my favorite Depeche Mode songs. It’s dark, it’s sensual, and it feels subversive in a way I can’t quite explain.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Rammstein cover that appeared on the 1998 tribute album For the Masses. Rammstein have been hit or miss for me, with far more misses than hits to be honest, and I’ve only enjoyed a handful of their tracks over the years. But what they did with their cover of Stripped was incredible, far superior to the other covers on the album, which is saying something because many were excellent in their own right. It remains my second-favorite cover of a Depeche Mode song - tune in next month for my favorite!
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.
ARTIST: Duran Duran
TRACK: "Planet Earth" from Decade (1989)
Planet Earth, released in February 1981 (ya know, like 43 years ago! how is that even possible?!?), was Duran Duran’s debut single and appeared on their eponymous debut album released later that same year. Although I owned 1982’s Rio on cassette, it’s quite likely that I didn’t hear this song until the late 90s when I moved in with my then girlfriend, now wife, Tina who had their 1989 greatest hits album Decade on CD.
As I listened to this track while compiling the playlist, I heard the line “Like some new romantic looking for the TV sound” and wondered whether they had been responsible for the creation of the New Romantics moniker, which refers to a “UK underground subculture movement characterised by flamboyant, eccentric fashion” (wikipedia). While they didn’t coin the phrase, their song was indeed the first to explicitly acknowledge the fledgling movement, and they are frequently listed among the synth pop bands that emerged from that scene.
ARTIST: Dire Straits
TRACK: "Expresso Love" from Making Movies (1980)
I’m pretty sure I’d never even heard of Dire Straits until the summer of 1985 when my sister and I (each with a best friend in tow) visited Paris with my dad. Yes, this was the summer of Money for Nothing, which was absolutely screaming up the charts and blowing up on MTV. But I was also living in Bermuda in the mid-80s where we didn’t have cable (and for some time didn’t even have over the air TV). My sister’s friend Nicky was adamant that she return from Paris with Brothers in Arms, the latest Dire Staits record, as a gift for her dad. For that very reason, Dire Straits instantaneously became “old people’s music”, absolute anathema to a too cool for school 14-year-old.
Thankfully my “coolness” didn’t hold me back for too long, as a few years later I was properly introduced to the band by a close friend via Alchemy: Dire Straits Live, the double CD issued in 1984. I fell in love with that album in the summer of 1988, particularly the rendition of Romeo and Juliet, a track I’d never heard prior to that year. On the back of that album, and that track in particular, I purchased their third album 1980’s Making Movies from which Expresso Love is drawn.
Several years later, in university, a close friend played the title track from Brothers in Arms and I was blown away. That track has since found its way on to My All-Time Favorite Songs playlist, a status reserved for only 34 songs as of this post. I could have gone with any of a dozen Dire Straits tracks here but, with the way the playlist developed this week, Expresso Love was the perfect song for this slot.
ARTIST: David Gray
TRACK: "Sail Away" from White Ladder (1998)
David Gray’s fourth album, 1998’s White Ladder, is a near-perfect album for me; there’s not a bad track to be found and over 25 years later it stands up very well. It’s amazing to think it may have been consigned to the dustbin of musical history. Almost 18 months after its initial release on Gray’s own record label, it was re-released on Dave Matthews’ label ATO Records, reaching #1 on the UK charts more than a year later. The album had incredible staying power, remaining in the UK Top 100 for almost three years, eventually ranking as the 11th best-selling UK album of the 21st century and 28th all time.
ARTIST: Dubstar
TRACK: "Stars" from Disgraceful (1995)
I came to Dubstar through this track, which was included on the compilation album Ambient Moods, released on Polygram TV in 1996. Jam packed with 17 tracks from artists like Bjork, Massive Attack, Cocteau Twins, and St. Etienne, it was a pivotal moment in my musical journey (Ing, if you’re reading this, thanks for the loan of that CD that summer, it was lifechanging!)
In short order, I’d added 1995’s Disgraceful to my collection, later to be joined by 1997’s Goodbye and 2000’s Make It Better. Stars was the debut single from Dubstar’s debut album, experiencing moderate chart success and receiving widespread critical acclaim. Writing for Melody Maker, Sharon O'Connell and Stephen Sweet had this to say: “Every once in a while an impossibly perfect pop song springs from nowhere and streaks into the stratosphere trailing gold dust in its wake. [...] It's a swoonsome mix of melancholia and joy, where lush synth updrifts and sweet guitar droplets are breathed on by haunting vocals.”
ARTIST: Divine Fits
TRACK: "My Love Is Real" from A Thing Called Divine Fits (2012)
My Love Is Real is the lead single from A Thing Called Divine Fits, the only studio album released by Divine Fits, the band comprising Britt Daniel (Spoon), Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Operators), Sam Brown, and Alex Fischel (Spoon). Released in 2012, the year before I began compiling my AOTY list, this album certainly would have ranked as a top ten for me that year. It was like lightning in a bottle, feeling fresh and new, and I’m disappointed they never released a follow up.
ARTIST: Deee-Lite
TRACK: "Groove Is in the Heart" from World Clique (1990)
Talking about music that felt fresh and new, 1990 found Deee-Lite unleashing World Clique, and its lead single Groove Is in the Heart. While critical reception was mixed, I recall completely falling in love with the album, which I “borrowed” from my sister for like two straight years (I didn’t steal it! It was always in my bedroom right next door!). While the lead single, the soundtrack to my summer that year, was the hook that initially drew me in, the album in its entirety is a beautifully constructed masterpiece of funky house and soul music, an album that 30+ years later I can’t help but “groove” to. Dig!
ARTIST: Daft Punk
TRACK: "Around The World" from Homework (1997)
We round up this week’s musical platter with Around the World, the third single from Homework, the debut album from the legendary French electronic music duo Daft Punk. The video for this song remains one of my favorites of all time, and I can’t resist including it below for your viewing and listening pleasure.
I was planning to try to describe the video, but I think this Wikipedia entry does a far better job than I ever could:
Michel Gondry's music video for the song features five groups of characters on a platform representing a vinyl record: four robots walking around in a circle; four tall athletes (as described by Gondry)[4] wearing tracksuits with small prosthetic heads walking up and down stairs; four women dressed like synchronized swimmers (described by Gondry as "disco girls")[4] moving up and down another set of stairs; four skeletons dancing in the center of the platform; and four mummies dancing in time with the song's drum pattern.
This is meant to be a visual representation of the song; each group of characters represents a different instrument. According to Gondry's notes,[4] the robots represent the singing voice; the physicality and small-minded rapidity of the athletes symbolizes the ascending/descending bass guitar; the femininity of the disco girls represents the high-pitched keyboard; the skeletons dance to the guitar line; and the mummies represent the drum machine.
Life in the key of D: Desiderata
Desiderata (Latin for “things desired”) was written and published by the American writer Max Ehrmann in 1927. According to friends that attended university in the UK, this poem was extremely in vogue over there in the 90s, but it’s only come to my attention within the last decade.
The sheer volume of wisdom enshrined in these 314 words is staggering. As relevant today as it was when originally published almost 100 years ago, this poem has become an all-time favorite of mine. I always have a webpage with the text of the poem handy on my phone to turn to for inspiration whenever I’m feeling down. The words I need to hear can usually be found in there somewhere.
In the event that the above image doesn’t appear clearly enough for those of you reading on a device, I’m reproducing the text below.
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
Thanks as always for being here, I hope you enjoyed this week’s entry and I look forward to seeing you back here next week!
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A lot of great tracks here! Duran Duran sometimes got dismissed because of the way they looked/dressed, but underneath all of that is the reality that they are/were just a really talented band.
I haven't heard David Gray in a while, but "Babylon" was a track a lot of people asked us to play at our wedding reception. Any time I see his name, it reminds me of that night.
One of the first records I reviewed was 'Making Movies.' It quickly found it's way to the top of my list and my favorite record by the band!
I loved this analysis of what’s wrong with them/what’s wrong (or right!) with me. Wholeheartedly agree that music can feel like a religious experience.