Haim’s Something to Tell You: Behold, the Weirdlings

That brilliant trio of California sisters, Haim, have a new album out called Something to Tell You. It’s great, I love it, but it’s also haunted. It’s haunted by strange digitized voices of varying pitches. I call them the Weirdlings.

An entire blog post about one guitar lick – Kings of Leon, “Sex on Fire”

I realize I’m immensely late to the Kings of Leon party. Like so late to the party that nobody’s funny-drunk anymore, but are now thinks-they’re-funny-but-in-fact-are-just-drooling drunk.

25. “Simmer,” Silversun Pickups

This is actually the opposite of what this blog is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be: a random song comes up on shuffle and it reminds me of something; my shuffled life. This song couldn’t have been played any less randomly. But it speaks to the power of music and how it works in my brain.

The Song Has a Will of its Own: Juliana Hatfield and the Art of Covering Yourself

You don’t have to look too deep into this blog to realize that I’m a big fan of Juliana Hatfield. She’s the only artist who has two songs among the 22 I’ve blogged about, plus she got a mention in my “10 Songs that Made Me Happy in 2014” list, through her band Minor Alps.

20. “Georgia,” Yuck

The second I hear this song’s first strum of its first chord it transports me here: I’m running on a path surrounded by nature. It’s early March, but unseasonably warm after a cooler day before; the kind of day where you can smell spring: grass, wet from melting snow, mixed with the optimistically musty scent of fresh mud.

18. “El Scorcho,” Weezer

Somewhere in between obsessing over Death From Above 1979’s The Physical World, I managed to tap shuffle and along came my old friend, “El Scorcho.” He’s a good friend. He takes me all the way back to the turn of the century. Those nail-biting times when we were all sure our computers were going to explode, plummeting society in chaos when the clock hit midnight on January 1, 2000.

17. “Simplicity is Beautiful,” Juliana Hatfield

Once upon a time, there was a kid in university who was suddenly touched to his core by the music of a woman just a few years older than him. He walked around campus listening to her music on his Walkman. He was a bit of a loner. The good news about that was that it gave him a lot of time to listen to music.