Alphabet Soup Week 19: Artists Filed Under J

A varied and eclectic playlist of tracks spanning more than half a century. And some thoughts on finding joy through gratitude.

Welcome to Week 19 of Alphabet Soup! Whether you’re a regular, or just popping in for the first time, pull up a stool, grab a hot drink or a cool beverage, and stay for a while.

A little over five months ago my wife retired from her role as the executive director of a local nonprofit organization. As I recently approached the point of handing in my notice at work, she warned me that the last three months of my career would absolutely fly by. I’m here to report that she was not wrong.

I’m doing my best to finish out my career with integrity. I’ve always held myself to a high standard and that’s not something I want to let slide during the final moments of what has been a fantastic and rewarding career. This is always the busiest time of the year for me at work, a month-long period in which I compile the annual self-assessment to be submitted to our primary regulator, a document that stretches to several hundred pages with appendices. It’s always a mammoth task, one in which I find little joy, and one that my ADHD makes extremely difficult. In fact, it was at this point last year that I decided I wasn’t willing to put in two more years of work, as had been my original plan at the beginning of 2023.

In addition to this busy period at work, we’ve also sold our home (closing in six weeks) and are in the process of downsizing much of our life to a couple suitcases and the few pieces of art that we want to bring with us to our new life in the U.K. Selling or otherwise disposing of furniture and household goods, arranging for the packing and shipment of items, figuring out health insurance for the next year, and putting the finishing touches on six months of travel are beginning to take their toll. In the inimitable words of Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring, I’m beginning to “feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

Thankfully the light at the end of the tunnel is brighter than it’s ever been, and the length of the tunnel is rapidly diminishing. These two facts bring with them an excitement that’s driving my focus and providing the energy I need to keep my head down and get through it. The longest chapter of my life is coming to an end and I’m eager to see what the next chapter has in store.

And with that, let’s get into this week’s playlist! Hopefully you’ll find something in the music or the writing that find yourself connecting with. If you do, please drop a note in the comments and let me know.

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ALPHABET SOUP WEEK 19: Artists Filed Under J

This week’s selections:

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ARTIST: Jill Sobule

TRACK: "I Kissed A Girl" from Jill Sobule (1995)

Starting off this week with Jill Sobule’s biggest (only?) hit, I Kissed a Girl, from her 1995 self-titled second album. This was the lead single from the album and garnered some degree of success in the US (peaking at #67 on the Billboard Hot 100) and Canada (reaching #15 on the RPM Rock/Alternative chart). My first exposure to the song came through the video which aired on The Box, the music video channel which transitioned in the early 90s into a pay-per-request station where users could pay between $1.99 and $3.99 to request up to three videos. According to Wikipedia, “the network was well known for being an "underground" outlet for music videos that were not shown or even banned on MTV, with up to 350 videos selectable at any given time in each of the 170 (by September 1992) different Box affiliates throughout the United States. Each affiliate had a unique playlist, usually customized to the local market, giving great exposure to more local and obscure groups.”

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ARTIST: Joan As Police Woman

TRACK: "The Magic" from The Deep Field (2011)

A second appearance on Alphabet Soup from Joan As Policeman with The Magic from her third album, 2011’s The Deep End. This song, and the accompanying video, are indeed absolute magic. While I’ve never maintained a list of strange and entertaining music videos of the year, if I did this one would have to be up there!

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ARTIST: Jessica Lea Mayfield

TRACK: "Our Hearts Are Wrong" from Tell Me (2011)

Jessica Lea Mayfield has been performing for much of her life after getting her start in her family’s bluegrass band at the tender age of 8. At age 11 she began playing guitar and writing songs, leading to the release of her 2006 EP White Lies. After hearing the EP, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys invited her into his home studio where the pair recorded her full-length debut, 2008’s With Blasphemy So Heartfelt. Three years later Auerbach was behind the boards again for her second full-length, Tell Me, from which this track is taken. Her two subsequent solo albums venture a little further into alternative rock territory and are no less compelling than the neo-country of her first two albums. Almost seven years since her last release I’m eagerly anticipating some new material from Mayfield, an artist I very much enjoy spending time with.

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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: Julie London

TRACK: "Cry Me A River" from Julie Is Her Name (1955)

A week after featuring Cat Power’s I Found a Reason from the V for Vendetta soundtrack, I’m back with another track from the same film in the form of Julie London’s Cry Me A River. The track originally appeared on London’s debut album Julie Is Her Name, released in 1955, and was the biggest chart success of her career. A performance by London in the 1956 film The Girl Can't Help It, propelled the song to chart success, reaching #9 in the US and #22 in the UK. The track is ranked number 48 on NPR's list of the 50 Greatest Jazz Vocals and has eventually gone on to sell over a million copies.

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ARTIST: John Lennon

TRACK: "How?" from Imagine (1971)

When John Lennon’s name popped up in my list of J artists, I asked myself “How on earth am I gonna choose a Lennon track here?” The question provided the answer in the form of How? from the masterpiece that is 1971’s Imagine.

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ARTIST: Jimi Hendrix

TRACK: "The Wind Cries Mary" from The Ultimate Experience (1992)

While I wouldn’t consider myself a huge Hendrix fan, I certainly dipped into his music during my psychedelic phase. I have vivid memories of the walls in my single room bedsit apartment melting in a sea of pastel during a particularly impressive acid trip as 1992’s The Ultimate Experience compilation played quietly in the background. While visual hallucinations weren’t generally a hallmark of my tripping experiences, the quality of that particular batch combined with the musical selection (including Hendrix, Cream, Jethro Tull, The Doors, and Pink Floyd) and the lack of any company on a solo expedition made for a transcendent visual and auditory experience.

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ARTIST: John Fahey

TRACK: "On The Sunny Side Of The Ocean" from The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965)

From one guitar legend to another, one that is perhaps less well known but no less influential. I’m not sure when I first became aware of John Fahey but at some point, I got my hands on a CD of his 1965 release The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death and fell in love with the otherworldly ethereal and atmospheric finger picking of this legendary player. Further research has revealed that, during a late 90s career resurgence, Fahy looked back on his earliest records with a degree of scorn. Indeed, the character of Blind Joe Death himself was contrived as a prank as described in a 1998 article in The Wire magazine:

“Scraping together a $300 budget, he recorded his first album of original compositions for solo acoustic guitar and pressed up an edition of 100 copies at RCA Custom Recorders. Two got smashed in transit and the rest were sent to blues scholars, given to friends, or sold out of the back of his car. Forever the prankster, at once out to test the gullibility of collectors and the potency of folk myth, invented or otherwise, Fahey also dumped some copies in the used record bins of local thrift stores, next to Dean Martin, Liberace and Burl Ives records, on the off chance someone might mistake it for a lost gem. One side was billed as John Fahey, the other was credited to an obscure bluesman, called Blind Joe Death, who Fahey had 'discovered' on one of his field trips. He even added fake scholarly sleevenotes, with fellow hoaxer Ed Denson, to a later edition. The first release on the guitarist's own Takoma label, Fahey took special delight when one celebrity folk scholar was taken in by it.”

Regardless of Fahey’s own feelings about those early releases, they remain incredibly influential. In the words of musicologist Rob Bowman from the Fahey documentary, In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey: “It's hard to imagine what contemporary music would be like if people like John Fahey had not been obsessively fascinated with roots American music from the 1920s and 30s. That's the secret of a whole swathe of modern rock'n'roll. It was his sense of collage, soundscape and dissonance that influence people like [Pete] Townshend, Thurston Moore and Beck.”

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ARTIST: Johnny Cash

TRACK: "Hurt" from American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002)

Rick Rubin is nothing if not a legendary record producer as evidenced by the labels he founded or helmed, including Def Jam Recordings, Columbia Records and American Recordings. While I’m more partial to the two albums he produced for Neil Diamond in 2005 and 2008 (perhaps because of my deep abiding love for Diamond’s music), there’s no doubt that Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash on the quartet of American Recordings albums released between 1994 and 2002 was the driving force behind Cash’s late career resurgence. The final album of the four, American IV: The Man Comes Around, released in 2002, was primarily a covers album. Cash’s critically acclaimed cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt is now considered by many to be one of his greatest tracks.

Interviewed in Alternative Press in September 1994, Trent Reznor had this to say:

“A few weeks later, a CD shows up with the track. Again, I'm in the middle of something and put it on and give it a cursory listen. It sounded... weird to me. That song in particular was straight from my soul, and it felt very strange hearing the highly identifiable voice of Johnny Cash singing it. It was a good version, and I certainly wasn't cringing or anything, but it felt like I was watching my girlfriend fuck somebody else. Or something like that. Anyway, a few weeks later, a videotape shows up with Mark Romanek's video on it. It's morning; I'm in the studio in New Orleans working on Zack De La Rocha's record with him; I pop the video in, and... wow. Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps... Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine any more. Then it all made sense to me. It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. Some-fucking-how that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning – different, but every bit as pure. Things felt even stranger when he passed away. The song's purpose shifted again. It's incredibly flattering as a writer to have your song chosen by someone who's a great writer and a great artist.”

Not really anything I can add to that. It’s a phenomenal interpretation of an amazing song, and the video manages to make it even better.

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ARTIST: Joy Division

TRACK: "Shadowplay" from Unknown Pleasures (1979)

I’m not quite sure when I ended up with a cassette copy of Joy Division’s debut album Unknown Pleasures in the mid-80s, but it was a life-changing experience for me. It certainly would’ve been after The Cure’s Japanese Whispers was released in 1983, but probably not by much. At 14 or 15, I wasn’t really mature enough musically to fully appreciate the brilliance of the album, but I loved the darkness of the sound and wanted more. The album ushered in a period of dark goth and postpunk listening that significantly expanded my known musical universe.

I’ve never gone through the exercise of ranking Joy Division’s songs (The Guardian has, and you can find their opinion here), but Shadowplay would certainly be in my top five.

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ARTIST: Jet Set Satellite

TRACK: "The Best Way To Die" from Blueprint (2000)

Jet Set Satellite was a Canadian rock band active for three albums in the early 2000s. Their greatest success came with their 2000 debut, Blueprint, released on Nettwerk Records. The album produced two top 20 Canadian hit singles in The Best Way To Die and Baby, Cool Your Jets (rewritten as Baby, Fuel Your Jets to celebrate the return of the NHL to Winnipeg in 2013). The band would release two further albums independently, but neither would gain much traction outside of some television appearances.

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Life in the key of J: Joy

I’m gonna keep this week’s closing fairly short. The last six years has brought its fair share of challenges: the death of my mother in 2018, a company buyout and redundancy the following year, Covid, a major health scare in 2021, the onset and continuation of depression and anxiety, and the death of two close friends last year.

I struggled with whether to write about the topic of joy for fear of emulating the toxic positivity that seems to pervade our culture nowadays. The reality is that sometimes life is just really shitty. I’m not gonna sit here and say I take on life’s struggles with a happy and calm demeanor. Sometimes I fight. Sometimes I pout. Or I rage. Or I cry. But nowadays, more often than not, I TRY to cultivate joy where I can.

One of the most important tools that was passed on to me in my early sobriety was the gift of gratitude. I’d call my sponsor with a complaint about life and invariably he’d ask me if I’d made a gratitude list before calling. I hated it. I knew he’d ask. I came to learn that I’d better not call him without first constructing a list of ten things to be grateful for. Which was REALLY a struggle in those early days, laughably so as I look back on it close to 30 years later. It eventually got to the point where nine times out of ten, I’d make the gratitude list and realize that, actually, life was pretty good, and I didn’t really need to call someone else and complain. The knowledge about gratitude in those early years laid a foundation for a manner of living that continues to enable me to deal with life on life’s terms to this day.

The Brene Brown video below concludes with a quote from a Jesuit priest: “It’s not joy that makes us grateful, it’s gratitude that makes us joyful.” I’ve found that to be true as I’ve really been able to lean on a daily gratitude practice for support during the tougher periods of the last six years.

A gratitude practice can take time to establish, so if you’re struggling to find joy and looking for some quick wins there are some great suggestions in this Guardian article.

Until next week, I hope you’re able to find some joy in your journey.

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Here’s the link to the running playlist which is updated on a weekly basis as each new installment is published:

ALPHABET SOUP RUNNING PLAYLIST

Tracks missing from the Spotify playlist:

• Allegory by Murray Attaway (Week 02)

• Face Me and Smile by The Lover Speaks (Week 12)

• From Your Mouth by God Lives Underwater (Week 13)

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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.