Best of 2008 and 2009

Due to being back in school and the economy being down in general, I didn't have enough money to buy a ton of new albums in 2009. In fact, there are several I would like to own that I missed. So, instead of making a best of 2009 I compiled a best of 2008 and 2009, figuring that my best of 2008 was poorly circulated anyway. If you were on the mailing list, this is the disc listed as 0809. Also, by spreading it out over two years I was able to limit it to one song per album. The whole collection ended up leaning fairly alt-country and has a nice warm feel for much of it. Enjoy.

1. Mudcrutch – Shady Grove (from Mudcrutch (2008))

Tom Petty and his high school buddies, most of whom ended up in the Heartbreakers, make a great bluegrass band. What makes this album better than just about any Tom Petty album, though, is that it is more collaborative with shared vocals and shared songwriting. This song, an inspired take on a traditional number, showcases the band’s instrumental prowess.

2. Hayes Carll – Beaumont (from Trouble In Mind (2008))

I’ll admit it, I bought Hayes Carll major-label debut for the same reason most people did: the funny song titles. “Drunken Poet’s Dream,” “Wild As A Turkey,” “She Left Me For Jesus” and “Faulkner St.” were all promising titles, but the album’s best songs turned out to be the more straight-forward, and often more serious, ones, such as “It’s A Shame” and “Beaumont.”

3. Jill Sobule – Palm Springs (from The California Years (2009))

At first I thought I was drawn to this song simply because the syntax of lines like “I took the Prius. / It gets good mileage” is so prototypically Sobulian. I realized there was more to this song, though, than Sobule’s signature objective detachment revealing an underlying sense of solitude. Though this song seems hopeful at its beginning, the refrain, “something’s gonna happen to change my world,” sounds like a portent. The song reaches its climax with the statue of Sonny Bono, the town’s hero. The song’s speaker is like Enoch Emery in Flannery O’Connor’s Wiseblood, chasing down Sonny Bono like he does the mummified midget.

4. Kimya Dawson – Loose Lips (from the soundtrack to Juno (2008))

Leave it to a crazy chick like Kimya to make an anti-Bush song out of a WWI propaganda slogan. “They think we’re disposable? Well, both my thumbs’re opposable. Spell that on your double word and triple letter score,” ranks with the best signifying ever.

5. Elvis Costello – Turpentine (from Momofuku (2008))

This song sounds like a leftover from a Warner Bros.-era Attractions album, most likely Brutal Youth. As a general rule, these are my least favorite of Costello’s albums, but they all had at least a few good songs, and they all had songs that could have been even better had Costello taken more time to develop them. This sounds like an outtake, but it sounds like it could have been the album’s big single, a “Sulky Girl” in the making, and like he decided to take the time to develop it right. Also, the Imposters – the Attractions with a new bassist – provide more than ample backing, giving a layered production that sounds reminiscent of Imperial Bedroom, Costello’s 1983 attempt at sonically recreating the Sgt. Pepper’s sound, and frantic playing that is like a more rocked up Delivery Man than what comes off as rather stilted on Warner albums like Spike and All This Useless Beauty.

6. Bob Dylan – Shake, Shake Mama (from Together Through Life (2009))

Dylan has recorded so many blues shuffles that they rarely intrigue me anymore, especially when they have a title as silly as “Shake, Shake Mama.” Before I heard Together Through Life, I decided from the song titles that this would be my least favorite song on the album. It was easily in the album’s top half and slowly crawled over other favorites like “If You Ever Go To Houston,” which seems an update of 1970’s “Wanted Man,” and “Forgetful Heart.” What makes this song isn’t only the groove but the strangeness of many of the lines, and the later revelations concerning where many of them came from. The verse about Judge Simpson, for instance, is lifted more or less wholesale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

7. Flowers Forever – Strange Fruit (from Flowers Forever (2008))

I was somewhat impressed by Flowers Forever when I saw them open for Daniel Johnston. I was blown away by their energy in the studio. This civil rights anthem was most famously recorded by Billie Holiday and was written by Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym of Lewis Allen, who later gained fame for adopting the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I do not know if he ever appeared before HUAC himself.

8. Prince – Dreamer (from LOtUSFLOW3R (2009))

This song features Prince the political preacher, a face he has worn time and time again, starting with 1981’s “Sexuality” through to 1991’s “Money Don’t Matter 2Night” (the Spike Lee directed version of the music video for this is astounding) and 2004’s “Dear Mr. Man.” These songs have, in many ways, become less nuanced, and have certainly become less implicit (though “Sexuality” was simultaneously explicit). “Dreamer” is perhaps the least implicit of all, paying direct tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose spirit Prince is trying to embody in all of these works. Prince’s guitar work here begins by seeming to channel Lenny Kravitz channeling Jimi Hendrix – rocked up, but not too much. Then it becomes a bit funker – Prince channeling Lenny channeling Prince channeling Jimi, which is looser than it sounds on the page. By the end, the final solo channels Jimi directly.

9. Amos Lee – Won’t Let Me Go (from Last Days At the Lodge (2008))

I purchased Last Days at the Lodge as a birthday present for my girlfriend, Sarah. The first or second time through the disc, she commented that she didn’t like this song because it sounded like Michael Jackson. I know what she meant, but I disagree. The song features Lee trying out his falsetto for the first time, but he doesn’t consistently use it throughout the song. Having heard a number of Michael Jackson records, I don’t think he can sing any lower than he does. At first thought, I thought this seemed to channel Al Green. It has a little of an early-70s R&B vibe to it, and there’s no doubt it’s a song of seduction. After listening a little more, I realized that the way Lee glides between his lower range and his falsetto comes closer to mirroring Prince. The similarity goes beyond the vocal styling. The lyrics of the second verse open with “Stood around while you dated that old fool Parker.” Using “old fool” as an insult sounds like it comes straight out of a Prince song, and Parker sounds like a name he would use. The next like, “Whole time I knew he wasn’t no damn good for you” features Lee wrapping his vocal chords around “you” like it’s a double note, which is another Prince move. The verse ends with “all I wanna do is make sweet love to you,” peeling up into the falsetto. The song fades out with Lee’s voice double-tracked, singing his own background vocals. The whole thing comes off sounding like what many of Prince’s mid-to-late nineties genre experiments would have founded like had they been successful. A week or so after I gave her the CD, I caught Sarah singing along with this in the car.

10. Flight of the Conchords – Robots (from Flight of the Conchords (2008))

Dance techno that sounds inspired by Ween and 70s sci-fi kitsch. The music is catchy and the sci-fi is fun. Part of the sci-fi is simply funny, such as the binary solo which is just a voice repeating 0 and 1. The rest of the sci-fi kitsch shows up in the hilarious and nearly touching pseudo-social commentary that fills the track, much like it did films like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, films made at a time when 2000 did seem like the distant future where anything was possible. There is the line about how there is “no more unethical treatment of the elephants… of course, there are no more elephants, but still it’s a good thing,” and then the whole story line of man enslaving robots and forcing them to work “for unreasonable hours,” pushing us humans to near empathy. Also, is it just me or does it sound like Kermit the Frog saying “Their systems of oppression – what did it lead to? Global robo-depression”?

11. Scarlett Johansson – I Wish I Was In New Orleans (from Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008))

Critics lambasted Anywhere I Lay My Head, the album where ScarJo and David Sitek rummage through Tom Waits catalog, but I thought it was surprisingly well done, and this is only one of many standout tracks, chosen perhaps because it nicely segues into Randy Newman, a real New Orleans pianist.

12. Randy Newman – Piece of the Pie (from Harps & Angels (2008))

I read an interview with Newman where he said him and his manager were having dinner somewhere and all of a sudden this guy came and banged on this huge plate-glass window, flipped off Newman and then walked off. When Newman asked his manager who it was, he said it was John Mellencamp. Newman sent him flowers hoping he’d take the whole thing in good fun, but apparently the feelings weren’t returned. If this story isn’t wholly apocryphal, Johnny Cougar should quit his whining. The only person who comes out good in this song is Jackson Browne, who still comes out ignored. Newman throws the first stone at himself – “the rich are getting richer; I should know” he sings.

13. Nellie McKay – Crazy Rhythm (from Normal as Blueberry Pie (2009))

McKay’s best Doris Day covers are those from Day’s time with Les Brown’s orchestra singing the big band hits. “Crazy Rhythm,” a jazz standard, has often been recorded as an instrumental but the lyrics perfectly describe syncopation’s intoxicating powers. Also interesting is how the lyrics describe jazz as “low brow,” though it is not often seen so today. Bob Dorough guests on piano.

14. Levon Helm – Growin’ Trade (from Electric Dirt (2009))

“Growin’ Trade” is probably the most lyrically intricate piece of music released in 2009. It is a dramatic monologue set to music. The audience in unclear, but over the course of the song it becomes more and more clear that the speaker is growing marijuana, “a crop you grow to burn,” and that he feels shame for it. This captures the cultural zeitgeist evident in shows like Weeds, where hard times and unforeseen circumstances have forced otherwise honest people into the drug trade. Whereas Weeds uses that premise for laughs, however, “Growin’ Trade” is all tragedy, a recession-fueled tirade against the ills of corporate farming.

As the song opens the speaker is characterizes as a man whom “hard labor” has “never bothered.” Right away, this draws a sympathetic, if not empathetic, ear from the listener. The more mature I become, the more appreciation I have for work and the more disdain for sloth, so from my perspective, I admire the speaker immediately. We soon learn that the speaker is going through hard times though, enduring “seasons of calamity.” The speaker complains that he’s “half the size that he used to be / and half of that is gone.” “Gone” suggests finality, meaning that there is not enough labor for him to do to rebuild himself. Furthermore, this metonymically extends to the land. Not only is the farmer’s muscle gone, but so is his land as it is getting bought up by corporate farmers. We finally get the specific reason for falling on hard times: the increasing difficulty to make a profit as an independent farmer. The speaker reports that “seedin’ ten” crops will “only get you five” and that his livestock have nearly starved to death. The first verse ends with the like “I gotta do what I can to survive,” which suggests the speaker will do something that compromises his values, maybe even something illegal as suggested by the first line of the chorus, “The law won’t be forgivin’.” That something turns out to be growing marijuana, hinted at by the phrase “I used to farm for a livin’. Now I’m in’ the growin’ trade” that recurs in the chorus, and confirmed by connecting various references throughout the song, such as “a crop you raise to burn.”

We learn more about the speaker’s moral struggles in the second verse. He sees himself as part of a tradition of hard-working men dating back to his grandfather. He describes the farm as his “legacy,” as something that must be carried on to the next generation. He also is concerned however with the loss of dignity that occurs when he is forced to turn from the work of farming to the drug trade. This further develops the notion of the speaker as a hard worker trapped by economic hardship. The second half of the second verse moves in a different direction, showing how hard work has been replaced by paranoia. Helm croons that there’s a “shotgun on [his] shoulder / where a toe sack oughta be.” Each of these has a metonymic relationship to a specific type of work. The toe sack, a name for a sack which potatoes were bought in and which was later reused to harvest cotton by hand, is symbolic of the hard work the speaker has endured, but it has been replaced by the shotgun. The shotgun is there for protection, of both the speaker and his crops. The speaker is worried that “the thieves are getting bolder / and the feds may be wise to” him, and he needs the shotgun to fight them off.

The sense of paranoia which begins in the second verse is much more emphatic in the third verse, which opens with an image of “helicopters in the distance.” The helicopters may be real or imagined; may be used to spy or drop fertilizer. The speaker reacts by saying that whoever is in the helicopter “is going to meet some resistance,” although the irony is that the helicopter may not be a police helicopter at all. The helicopters are supposedly “getting closer every day,” but the description of them never gets more specific, hurting the speaker’s credibility. The speaker sounds like a man crazed. He says “there’s no price too big to pay” to save his farm, and implicit in that is a threat of violence. He says that “they [have] take[n] it all away,” and the listener quickly realizes that “it” is more than just the land or the marijuana or even the ability to grow crops and control production – “it” is the speaker’s identity. The speaker is being driven by a loss of self so deeply affecting that he feels no reason to live. He says there no difference “between a cot in the jail house / and a bed beneath the clay,” but the lyrics sounds patterns here betray him. “Bed beneath” creates a soft alliteration that makes the grave sound more inviting than jail. Furthermore, the rhyme scheme in the third verse is abababcbb. “Jailhouse” is the only end word without a rhyme in the verse. This disrupts the rhyme scheme and makes the jailhouse sound uninviting, as opposed to “clay,” which restores the rhyme scheme. In the end, the speaker is defeated, having lost himself and having resigned himself to an early grave, fighting no one to save his imagined dignity.

Another layer the song has is the speaker’s spiritual struggles. This theme is first suggested in the first chorus, and illustrates one important feature of the performative aspects of music as opposed to looking at lyrics purely as poetry. When Helm sings the line “the law won’t be forgivin’” the first time, he slurs “law” so that it sounds like “Lord,” and one can imagine by extension that “law” suggests not only law and order but the Law as handed down to Moses. Verse two begins “the summer beauty of the cotton fields / was like a view from Heaven’s door.” He also notes that his granddad “said that harvest time was what the good Lord made us for.” These lines suggest that the speaker sees farming as being God’s work, and so by becoming a marijuana grower as opposed to a farmer he sees himself betraying God. After this, God leaves the song until the end of the third verse, signaling perhaps that the speaker is having trouble coming to terms with his relationship with God. At the end of the third verse we have the line where death, the “bed beneath the clay,” is declared to be no different than jail. This suggests that the speaker may feel that death will entrap him and punish him. He may believe that he has doomed himself to hell. The final line of this verse – “I guess there’s nothing to do now but pray” – finds the speaker once again seeking solace in God, suggesting that he has found his way back and no longer feels shamed out of his spirituality by being a marijuana farmer.

Another aspects of this song which is striking are the multiple levels of diction appearing side-by-side on the page, creating what Yusef Komunyakaa would call the “neon vernacular.” There is a blend of low diction, – “big,” “work,” “good,” – middle diction, -- “labor,” “seasons” – and high diction – “calamity,” “dignity.” There is also a good blend of the rural farmer’s voice, suggested by dropped endings and jargon such as “toe sack,” “live stock,” and “seedin’,” and the more street-wise voice of the urban drug runner, embodied in phrases like “the feds may be getting wise” and “they’re gonna meet some resistance.”

The sound in “Growin’ Trade” also makes good use of various effects. For instance, even when police aren’t being mentioned, they are always lurking in the song’s sounds. In the first verse “hard labor” connotes prison even though the speaker has labored as a free man. “Crops” and “crop” both appear, and both sound very similar to “cop.” As the paranoia grows in the song, so does this sound pattern. At the beginning of the third verse, “cop” is contained in “helicopters,” and as Helm performs it “heli-” is mumbled to the extent that “copters” may as well be “coppers.” Later, “cot” again echoes “cop,” further suggesting the threat of police intervention. Sounds call to sounds throughout and Helm excellently manipulates the rhyme scheme throughout, using a series of slant rhymes to create tension just where it is needed.

15. The Jayhawks – Rotterdam (from Music From the North Country (2009))

The Jayhawks always stun me with their beauty. Every note is beautifully played and sung on albums such as Tomorrow the Green Grass and Rainy Day Music. When the Jayhawks announced the release of Music From the North Country, a greatest hits collection, I was excited to get an overview of the albums I didn’t have, but was thrilled when I heard a deluxe edition would be released with an album’s worth of outtakes, b-sides and alternate versions. “Rotterdam” comes from the deluxe edition. It does not disappoint. This is the most American song every about Manchester, so much so that when one hears Gary Louris singing about the train, one can’t help but imagine the American railroad rather than one going through England. The mountains and the prairies and the babies that open the song sound more West Virginian than Liverpudlian. The overall effect of the song, like so much of the Jayhawks work, is to leave the listener in a state of joyous peace.

16. Jakob Dylan – Valley of the Low Sun (from Seeing Things (2008))

This song evokes John Wayne, but then dismisses him. Lines like “I know soldiers are not payed to think, but something is making us sick” unmistakeably evoke a political message, but don’t quit us quite as hard over the head as some of Jakob’s father’s early, acoustic songs. Jakob has been making music for nearly twenty years, but this is his first opportunity to shine as a solo artist, and it is interesting that he does so with a stark acoustic album. The comparisons could be obvious, but if you listen closely they really aren’t. Yes, Jakob and his dad have both recorded acoustic solo albums and both have described a war-torn world contemporary with our own. There is something unique about the way the younger Dylan constructs his narratives though. In some ways they are looser, less bound to form. Rather than make grand statements, Jakob lets his images float, lets them bump into each other while he sits on the sidelines just imagining what we can make of them.

17. Bob Dylan – Red River Shore (from Tell Tale Signs (2008))

Tell Tale Signs is a compilation of Dylan’s unreleased leftovers spanning the period between 1989 and 2006. Time Out of Mind is perhaps Dylan’s most heralded album from this period, and yet when it came out many of the people who played on it expressed shock that “Red River Shore,” the best song recorded at the sessions, was left off the album. Tell Tale Signs reveals other errors in judgment with regard to that album, but certainly leaving off this gem was one of the most egregious. This song is a ghost story, but the mystery is who the ghost is. Most commentators have felt that the speaker is pining for a girl who is long dead, wishing her back to life. Lazarus and the attendant possibility of being brought back certainly loom large here, but I’m not convinced that the girl is dead. It is the speaker who is certainly dead, whether he realizes it or not. The girl may or may not be dead, but since the song is really about the speaker’s state, whether she is alive or dead matters little. There are several parts of the song that suggest it is the speaker who is dead, such as “the frozen smile that’s on my face fits me like a glove.” The speaker has “been out where the black winds roar,” which doesn’t sound like a place mortals have visited. He even admits that “some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark to be where the angels fly;” if he gained that knowledge through experience, then the speaker is surely dead. Coming back now, in a different time, searching for the girl who he feels a soul mate too, the speaker talks to people, but they don’t seem to be listening. When he says “I wonder if anybody saw me here at all, except the girl from the red river shore,” the listener knows that none of the people he talked to were aware of his presence. Sadly, although the speaker continues to search in vain, even if he finds the girl from the red river shore she may not be interested. The speaker says she is “true to life,” and the irony is she can’t be faithful to both life and a dead man.

18. Elvis Costello – Red Cotton (from Secret, Profane and Sugarcane (2009))

Elvis Costello culled the songs for Secret, Profane and Sugarcane from a number of projects he had been working on that had just never gotten finished. He reworked several of them into a more or less Americana theme that would work with a nice acoustic-country feel. While I am not convinced that the effort as a whole hangs together as successfully as King of America does, many songs stand out as being quite brilliant. “Red Cotton” is one of the Secret Songs, a project Costello was recruited to work on. As I understand it, The Secret Songs is to be a new musical/opera based on the life of Hans Christian Andersen, though the songs from it that appear on Secret, Profane and Sugarcane seem to have more to do with P.T. Barnum. As I understand it, the people behind The Secret Songs have since passed over Costello in favor of Nellie McKay, and Costello remade the songs to fit into Sugarcane’s Americana shtick. The song is now from Barnum’s point of view and in it, according to Costello, “Barnum reads an abolitionist pamphlet while manufacturing souvenirs of the ‘All-American Tour’.” This seems a bit simplistic to me, especially for a song nearly intricate enough to challenge “Growin’ Trade.” The song begins with Barnum “cutting up her pure white dress / that [he] dyed red.” Right away, the listener must situate themselves. The white dress suggests Barnum is referring to a female, which brings in all sorts of gender issues. Her dress is white, suggesting purity, but Barnum has dyed it red, suggesting violence. The white dress in particular suggests sexual violence, and in addition to rape perhaps murder with the sound of “dyed/died.” In the context of abolition and the Civil War, it is likely that this refers not only to misogyny, but also couples that with racism. The red cotton of the title may be the dress of a slave raped by her master, a practice common throughout the South. Furthermore, the dress is being cut up and the scraps are being put “in cheap tin lockets” to be sold as souvenirs, showing that this practice further commodifies sexual violence. Still, when those in Europe buy these American items, the violence is what “time erases and memory mocks,” showing how commodity fetishism causes the consumer to ignore the commodity’s history. Costello accomplishes all of this within the song’s first four lines. As the song goes on, though, Barnum realizes that the slaves are transported in “coffin ships” and to them the new world is only one of “auction blocks and whips.” Later still, he describes the “sheet on your fine linen bed, / the blood stained red on each cotton thread,” confirming the sexual violence suggested in the opening lines. By the end of the song, Barnum is ready to quit capitalizing on icons of the slave trade. The last two verses are perhaps the most powerful – strong statements of what is wrong with Barnum’s trade and how it undercuts society. Barnum says “the Lord will judge us with fire and thunder / as man continues in all his blunders. / It’s only money. It’s only numbers. / Maybe its time to put aside these fictitious wonders. // But man is feeble. Man is puny. / And if it should divide the Union / there is no man that should own another / when he can’t even recognize his sister and his brother.” In that final couplet we are reminded of the violent miscegenation which led slave owners to have two families – white and mulatto – who lived in resentment of each other.

19. Ry Cooder – Spayed Kooley (from I, Flathead (2008))

This song cuts two ways. It opens with Cooder wryly declaring that certain people are going to make a lot of money off of homeland security. Cooder’s speaker, though, has all the homeland security he needs, and it is a dog. This sounds like a cruelly delightful satire of how much the Bush administration has spent in Iraq in the name of “homeland security.” As the song continues, though, it becomes clear the speaker wants to secure the homeland, and the border, against immigrants, and that his dog has been trained to be racist. This level of the song opens with the lines “empty out your pockets, let him see your hands. / Be sure to talk good English so he can understand.” The second line of the couplet makes it obvious that the speaker has a problem with Hispanics, especially those who haven’t learned English. The line before it is perhaps more revealing, though. “Empty out your pockets,” in the song’s immediate context, means to show that you are not armed. It also means to hand over your money, though, and has insinuations of loss of privacy and robbery by coercion. As soon as the song moves into its more racist direction, it also serves to simultaneously undercut that position by making the speaker out to be a villain. I, Flathead is the last of three concept albums in a row that deal with Hispanics in Southern California, and his work with Buena Vista Social Club and long history of appreciating Latino musical styles suggests that this undercutting of the racism is what Cooder intended all along.

Women's History Month: Jill Sobule

Jill Sobule is an amazingly talented songwriter and musician. Each of her albums is remarkable in its own way. She is most well-known for the original song titled "I Kissed A Girl," which is a tongue-in-cheekier lesbian tale than Katy Perry's take on it. She is also well known for "Supermodel," an anorexia ode which graced the soundtrack to the nineties cinema landmark that was Clueless.

The above two songs came from her second album, 1995's Jill Sobule. Sobule's best album, though, is likely 2004's Underdog Victorious. One song is a compassionate narrative biography of It-girl Joey Heatherton that comes off as being about Britney Spears. "Cinnamon Park" is a pot-infused hippy song complete with a Chicago sample. The real gem is "Jetpack," a story about being in love with a girl too rich and self-absorbed to appreciate her, and the strain the social class difference causes in their relationship. It's Marxist heartbreak at its finest.

Prozak and the Platypus

So when I heard that Jill Sobule was prepping a new album, I got excited. When I heard that the album was a rock opera, I was ecstatic. Now that I've heard it, I'm back to excited.

The packaging is great. The cd booklet is a forty-page graphic novel that lays out the story line. The story itself is a bit jumbled and confused at times, but it has great potential. The protagonist is a young woman named Prozak. She has given herself this name.

After Prozak's mother committed suicide after a long battle with depression, her father uprooted the family and took them to Australia. He is working on studying the sleep patterns of everyone's favorite cloacal monotreme, the platypi. His hope is that by studying their patterns, he can figure out the chemical balance of the mind during REM sleep and develop an anti-depressant for people who have trouble dreaming. Prozak, distraught after her mother's suicide, thinks he's just doing it to ruin her life by dragging her away from the comforts of home. In rebellion, she runs away, names herself Prozak and fronts a punk band.

Meanwhile, Prozak forges an unlikely frienship with a talking platypus her dad is working with. With this friendship enters a fair amount of imagery drawn from aboriginal mythology. Prozak enters the platypus's mind and is then able to make peace with herself.

That is a pretty complex story line, and the album's 11 songs barely top the 32 minute mark combined. I really feel there was some more space available to further develop the album's complex themes. For what is there, the music is pretty good. It shows a good deal of variety. "Watch me Sleep" is the kind of singer-songwriteresque, guitar-piano-violin arrangement I'd expect, but from there its all over the map. "Talkin' Platy" is, sadly, not a talking blues, but is a fair stab at punk. "Skyhook" sounds like it could be an outtake from Ween's "The Mollusk." "Jitters and Creeps" features what sounds like some nice, alt-countryesque 12-string picking.

Somehow, I suspect the song "Empty Glass" is a tip of the hat to rock opera entrepeneur Pete Townsend, who used Empty Glass as the title for a solo album. (I also suspect the title "Deep Blue" is a reference to the George Harrison b-side of the same name, but I have no idea how to tie that to the concept of the rock opera.)

The lyrics were composed by Elise Thoron, which means I did miss out on Sobule unique brand of cynicism for much of the album, but I was pleased to discover her as a new talent.

The website for the album, http://www.prozakandtheplaypus.com/, offers up a script and direction for those willing to stage the musical in all its glory. Anyone got a platypus costume I can borrow?

100 Albums, 100 Words (30-21)

30. Prince – Purple Rain (1984)

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to praise an album that contains life; electric word, life; it means dancealicious grooves and a few scintillating ballads, and maybe some explicit lyrics. Prince exploded with this album, fusing his admiration for Carlos Santana guitar licks to his love of old-school funk beats. He took musical chances, from the bassless “When Doves Cry” to the hyper-technofied “Computer Blue,” and they just about all work. Despite being infamous for spawning parental advisory labels, “Darling Nikki” is gorgeous, almost as much so as “The Beautiful Ones,” one of the greatest singles that never was.

29. James Brown – Live At the Apollo (1963)

It is all here – everything that made James Brown the greatest. Even from this relatively early point, the groundwork has been laid for Brown’s mind-melting funk in this sweaty r & b workout. Start and stop rhythms punctuate James’ blistering exultations of joy and sorrow in the guttural space beyond words. Perhaps the strongest instrument on here is the crowd, and James knows how to play it like a master, calling and responding until he has to scream. If only we could watch him dance, then this album might be able to save the lives of everyone whose lost someone.

28. Afroman – The Good Times (2001)

Bob Marley he isn’t, but Afroman uses more reggae than just about any other rapper out there, and with skill. Afroman’s underrated raps also incorporate rock and gospel. Lyrically he’s an imaginative MC who is not afraid to push a few buttons. In “Crazy Rap,” Afroman raps about getting head from Colonel Sander’s wife. In “The American Dream” Afroman includes homosexuals and teenage mothers in his vision of a unified America broken free from the bounds of corporate slavery. “Because I Got High” cracks on Hitler. Varied as his subjects seem, they all refer to unity in a diverse world.

27. The Clash – London Calling (1979)

All those annoying little ska boys are a small price to pay for this landmark of jazz-punk fusion. Finally garnering The Clash the attention they deserved in America, London Calling blended horns and guitars more naturally than anything by the E-Street Band by making horns rhythm rather than lead instruments. The record showed the band’s deep roots, shown by “Wrong ‘Em Boyo”’s transformation of “Stagger Lee,” something most other punk lacked, allowing it to carve out new musical terrains. From “London Calling” to “Lost In the Supermarket” to “Train In Vain,” it made the world want to rock the revolution.

26. Jill Sobule – Underdog Victorious (2004)

A breakup in three acts with an epilogue. Act One: Jill is tired of being the poor person in her relationship and its really dragging things down. It’s not looking good for the couple. Act Two: Jill retreats from the relationship by engaging in activism, singing a series of political songs dealing with issues ranging from drug abuse to schoolyard teasing to child prostitution in Israel to the intolerance of fundamentalist religious brainwashing. Act Three: The Post-Breakup Blues. The album ends with a hint of future bliss as she falls in love with the female cop who pulls her over.

25. Prince – Dirty Mind (1980)

“Naked funk” is what Prince labeled the bare-bones, demoesque style he unleashed on Dirty Mind, and naked certainly seems to be his modus operandi here. “Sister” is a song about you-know-what with you-know-who. “Head” is about something that goes on below the shoulders, or below the belt. Many of the lurid encounters leave the narrator confused and alone, however, and the album ends on a serious note with the intoxicating dance groove of “Partyup,” a song that suggests late-night dancing as a way of escaping the paranoia created by Reagan’s Cold War policies. This is the first great Prince album.

24. Stevie Wonder – Innervisions (1973)

Falling in the center of a fabulous quintilogy, Innervisions is a massively powerful album, seamlessly blending political and spiritual concerns into a harmonic tapestry of funk, soul, gospel and jazz. “Living In the City” is one of the most powerful singles ever, and the thematic template for Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message.” “Don’t You Worry About A Thing” and “He’s A Misstra Know It All” are similarly powerful attacks on being self-centered. Between the white-hot funk of “Higher Ground” and “Jesus Children of America,” Stevie slips in some beautiful ballads, like “Visions” and “Golden Lady,” making this a very balanced album.

23. The Doors – The Doors (1967)

In April of 1993, this album changed my life. In the short-term, it inspired me to start collecting records, learn to play piano, write crappy psuedo-poetry, and listen to The Doors endlessly. In the long-term, it not only made me see pop cultu re as something serious, but as something worthy of serious study. It led me to discovering music beyond the Doors and real poetry that bore little resemblance to Jim Morrison's drug-addled ramblings. I'd never heard organ before, and the sound was a revelation. It played over and over at my thirteenth birthday pa rty. Adolescence still chills me.

22. Nuggets – Original Artyfacts From the Original Psychedelic Era (1972, 1998)

Few box sets can brag of being hitless, but this one can, and does. Originally twenty-seven tracks of exquisite acid rock madness, Rhino expanded the original two-record set to four cds, featuring three times the tracks that appeared on the original. The result is no less glorious for the distillation. Many songs sounds like dead on imitations of different artists – Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane – but the reverse seems just as likely after a few spins. From Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction” to The Standell’s “Good Guys Don’t Wear White,” this set is a treasure trove of underappreciated gems.

21. Elvis Costello – This Year’s Model (1978)

A promotional poster for this album claimed it was “made in 1953 for 1983.” This album is thirty years ahead of its time, which means we’ve almost caught up with it. Rockabilly-fueled punk, this album paves the way for 80s New Wave. The Attractions are in top form here, playing every instrument like it is the lead. The bass in particular stands out, especially on tracks such as “The Beat” and “Living In Paradise.” The stop-start feel of many songs pushes the adrenaline. For being considered a forerunner of the punk movement, this sounds big enough to be arena rock.

Jill Sobule Charity

Jill Sobule is an indie icon. Her music is smart; she's among the most affecting lyricsits I know and her words are carried along on gorgeous melodies.

I came to Jill Sobule's music relatively late, around the realease of her most recent album, Underdog Victorious. I saw the video for "Cinnamon Park," an early seventies power-pop throwback (it samples Chicago, but has the spirit of the Raspberries with Melanie sitting in). The song was wicked catchy and the video was wild, so I ordered the album immediately. It quickly became one of my two most-played albums of 2004 (along with Nellie McKay's Get Away From
Me). "Cinnamon Park" also soon became my least favorite song on the album. I didn't enjoy it any less; the rest of the album was just that tremendous. "Jetpack" is the best love song cum social-class awareness ever. It far surpasses runner-up "Workingman's Blues #2" (sorry, Bob), and that's saying something. Her musical range is astonishing too. The lounge-dance vibe of "Joey"is as accomplished as the rockabilly rave up of "I Saw A Cop." Now I have all of her studio albums and am a fan of every one.

The problem is, Sobule is in danger of not having another album. She has it written, but needs the money to properly record and promote it. Instead of trying to broker a deal with a label, she is taking matters into her own hands. Sobule is asking fans to sponsor her album, and is offering various prizes depending on their level of sponsorship. Check it out and lend her a few bucks:

http://www.jillsnextrecord.com/

http://www.jillsobule.com/

***NEWS ALERT***

By the time I posted this, Jill had exceeded her goal and is no longer accepting donations - go Jill! Hopefully, she will stop somewhere near Kansas (or wherever I might be living at the time) on tour. In the meantime, while we are all feening for her next disc, go out and buy whatever you don't have and give it a spin. You are bound to be impressed!