Consonants and vowels all together, equally

I don't have any Oscar winners on this list, so I'm going for something a little more meta this week.

Ryan Adams' album Gold uses New York and Los Angeles as frames; the first song is "New York, New York" and I brazenly used these songs at the beginning and end of a mix I made for a friend moving from NYC to LA. I'm a sucker for the end-of-the-album slow song with strings. When it's good, it's very effecting; when it's bad, it's all but unlistenable. "Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd." is the former.

( Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd. )

Really late because I was so distracted by the Grammys, but as usual, better late than never!

I'm doing this off a list of about 60 songs that by the end of the year I'll pare down to 50, and each week I wonder which song I'll do that week, and each week the universe guides me to one. So with this week, and this song, which was played on the Grammys. Not that I have anything wrong with covers or collaborations, but I do like knowing the originals. And this original is not only pretty damn good, but has a funk lick played on an electronic clavichord.

( Superstition )

By starting with two songs that can bear a lot of analysis, I may have set up the wrong impression for these posts. Sometimes, I'm just going to say, "it sounds really cool." Other times, like today, I'll say something that doesn't have much to do with the song itself, and so with "Under the Milky Way" by The Church.

( Under the Milky Way )

I'm starting this project with "Midnight Sun" by Ella Fitzgerald. But I'm not going to talk too awfully much about Ella, or even the composers, but instead about the arranger, Nelson Riddle—because it's the arrangement that put this record on my list.

( Midnight Sun )