I’ve been reading the fan mail lately and one of the things that’s consistently come up is a desire for more. “Hey Bobby — your infrequent, random missives are super interesting. Totally not a worrisome window into a slightly deranged mind! Is there any way you could tell me what you think more, though? I really value the opinions of strangers on the internet! Signed, Randy from Des Moines” or “Hey Sunshine! Your postings are great — I re-read them all the time and hang my favorites on the fridge! Is there any way you could figure out how to weave your unsolicited suggestions into my life even more, though? Alexa and Siri aren’t doing it for me anymore. Sincerely, Beth from Tulsa.”
Well lucky for all you Beths and Randys out there there is. And it’s only fitting that we choose a dark, rainy morning to announce the launch of Sunshine Radio — what I’m certain will be a constant ray of light in each of your lives from this point on. After talking to several millenials at a recent focus group (shout out to Bree and Spencer) I decided to leverage this “streaming” thing they kept talking about and level the site up again. (Coming soon, augmented reality goggles.)
What I’ve done below is take every song I’ve written about the past three years and drop em in a playlist on Spotify. Singles are on there once, albums that made the year end lists get two entries, and “bands you should know” posts get several from the YouTube channels I created. You can subscribe to the station and it’ll automatically update as I continue to add to it (either crawling further into the depths of the old site or adding new stuff as we move forward) and share it with your friends if you think it’s worth the time. There’s over 300 songs on there already (20-plus hours of goodness!) — from rock to rap to electronica and beyond, everything you expect from my oddball collection of tastes — so plenty to keep you busy and (hopefully) interested. And remember if you find something you like it means I wrote about it at some point, so go back to the pages to see what else there is to know. I’ll also be going back to create playlists from the “bands you should know” posts so you can give those a listen in a more convenient way, but the main station will be the ever-evolving entity. So sign up and see what you think — it’s a little angry, a little sweet, and a little weird. Just like me!
Since it’s such an auspicious day, I thought I’d throw in an extra round of goodies for folks with the first of those “bands you should know” playlists — and since they hail from the number one place on the planet (#GPOE!), it’s only fitting they should be first out of the gate. So we’ll kick things off with the beloved band from my beloved city by the lake, Wilco. It’s a perfect time since I had the pleasure of seeing Tweedy in concert this week (another fantastic show — the new material sounded great alongside the band classics) and he’s actually dropping ANOTHER new album today (vinyl only for now, unfortunately) in honor of Record Day. He dropped the first single off it (“Family Ghost,” which sounded solid the other night) and recorded the album at the same time as Warm (which came out a whopping five months ago), so should be good. This review from Rolling Stone seems to think so. (And is written by someone I think I’d like to be friends with.)
All that goodness, as well as my last post, got me thinking about the band and how many great songs/albums they’ve had the past twenty odd years. So when one of my readers (we’ll call him “Gabriel” to protect his identity) started calling me an idiot for saying Summerteeth was my favorite album (“EVERYBODY knows it’s Yankee!”) I decided to come up with a playlist to see how things shook out. Based on that (and some deep meditation at a Tibetan retreat), here’s what I came up with:
- Summerteeth
- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
- Being There
- Sky Blue Sky
- Wilco (The Album)
- A Ghost is Born
- Schmilco
- AM
- The Whole Love
- Star Wars
Out of curiosity I also asked “Gabriel” what HIS list would look like, and he came back with the following:
- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
- Sky Blue Sky
- A Ghost is Born
- Being There
- Wilco (The Album)
- Summerteeth
- AM
- Schmilco
- The Whole Love
- Star Wars
As you can see, they’re not too far off, despite his reacting like I called his kid ugly (which I’m sure he is — probably looks just like him) — consensus that we prefer the early material to some of the more recent stuff, that we think Yankee is amazing, and that we really don’t like Star Wars (the album — the movies are amazing. “Gabriel” actually said he regularly cosplays as Chewbacca on the weekends because he barely has to use makeup (just on the top of his head (ZING!)) and already speaks so similarly (DOUBLE ZING!))
The main distinction is where we put Summerteeth and Ghost — I stand by my love of Summer (I AM named after its top export after all), but will concede that Ghost was better than I remembered. Historically I tend to shy away from that one a little because you could tell some of Tweedy’s more destructive impulses were winning out (as confirmed in his recent biography when he describes being at the scary depths of his drug dependencies at this time). Songs devolved into aimless noodling and/or pointless noise (two of the album’s tracks clock in at nearly half an hour combined) and lyrically you could tell he wasn’t in a good spot. That said, there were still some beautiful melodies in there (“Hell is Chrome” and “Company in my Back” are but two examples) so while I still don’t rate it as highly as “Gabriel” (apparently he likes music that’s reminiscent of him — rambling and incoherent at times) it tightens that cluster in the middle of my list a little. See what you think as you listen to the below — and feel free to send me your rankings. There’s nothing the internet needs more than white people debating “important” issues!