I once managed to get Seattle’s tweet pop heroes Tullycraft – a band that no one but me in the Netherlands seemed to care about – to play Amsterdam and then as a reward got to spend a whole day with the band. Life as a fan probably never got more exciting than that. Two decades later, Tullycraft is still going strong, each new album containing a few gems. Such as Tarrytown, my favourite of their latest album, with its catchy lyrics full of inner rhyme about being “Lost in the rhyme with the rain keeping time”.
With a few exceptions (Johnny Cash, mostly, and then only some songs) I am not into country music. Yet I absolutely love this song by Tyler Childers (from eastern Kentucky, unsurprisingly) and have been listening to it regularly for months – and even more often find the opening lines (“Back before birthdays were something she dreads / Back before children had settled her friends”) randomly popping up into my head and even start to sympathize with Childers as he tries Oneida to fall for him. (It’s really this song only: I’ve tried more of his songs and they were all pretty meh.)
After decades of listening to female-fronted indiepop (think Talulah Gosh or Tiger Trap) I wasn’t expecting to be blown away by a new band in the genre. Enter counterexample The Cords, two sisters from the West of Scotland, whom everyone has been talking about lately. Whom everyone should be talking about, indeed, as their songs are so incredibly catchy. This is the final song of their self-titled debut album (released last month simultaneously by Slumberland and Skep Wax) and it so well captures the sadness I feel when I realize that the 13-song album has finished already.
‘Egg punk’, the music of North Carolina’s Snõõper is called, apparently. An “internet-based microgenre”, says Wikipedia. I’m old and have heard everything ready, so I file this in my brain somewhere between Bis and Kid 606. Like both those bands, Snõõper is very much a song band that gives the right kind of energy for a few songs before it starts getting on my nerves. Until then, it is good fun.
Back in the days when songs were something you would have or not have, I had this song by NYC’s Kicking Giant on a compilation cd. As I played it to a friend, he pointed out that she (Rachel Carns) sang “really out of tune”. Yes. Yes she did. So what? I loved the song and 30 years later I still do and that is what matters. And also, did you note the title? So it seemed appropriate to chose that title (in a more internet friendly version) as the name of this music blog.
Oh hi, welcome to this blog. I took a two decade hiatus from writing about music, but as I really gotten back into seriously listening to music in the past year or so, I thought I’d try blogging again.
Despite its title, there will be a few rules. First, each post will be about a single song. For me, the song has always been the essence of music. I may occasionally refer to a full album, but what I post here – and link to – will always be a single song. A song that may be brand new or very old, well-known or super obscure, from the US or from sub-Saharan Africa and one or ten minutes long.
Secondly, each post will be no more than 100 words (a meta-blurb like this being an exception, obviously). That keeps it fun for you to read and manageable for me to write.
And thirdly, this is not a review blog. Unless we know each other, please don’t send me new music to listen to and to possibly include. I’ve been there, I’ve done that and it was fun for a bit, but also got tiring after a while. This is just about what I like.
