Liner Notes 2024

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Sometimes the mix is just a bunch of songs that I like or want to include for one reason or another,other years it’s built around a theme, this is one of those years. This year the songs are paired off one by a boy, one by a girl and each relating is some way or another. Usually on a similar theme but sometimes the relationships are different than that.

Click Here or on the picture to return to the mix itself.

Beyonce / Beatles

Ameriican Requiem: Cowboy Carter is one of my favorite albums in years, there is so much great stuff to explore. This track for example, Thanks to my daughter Sarah, I can report that the core guitar riff comes from Steven Stills “For What it’s Worth”, he even gets a writing credit on the song.

Blackbird: This is here because the next song on Beyoncé’s album is a cover of it. It’s a very straight up cover complete with the same odd way that the Beatles like to separate their mixes in a very extreme manner with the instruments on one side and the vocals on the other. Paul McCartney wrote this song about a young black woman who he saw walking, she was quite striking and it lead him to build a story in his head abut how she built a good life against all odds. Literally to him it was about a “black bird” - bird being slang for a woman.

Irma Thomas / Bill Withers

Two songs about dysfunctional relationships - one of the best topics for pop songs.

Anyone Who Knows What Love Is: I must admit I had never heard of the Queen of New Orleans Soul until this song was used in the background of a TV show I was watching. Her voice is wonderful, The song has a great Phil Spector Wall of Sound vibe and it was written by Randy Newman a few years before he started his own recoding career. As lush and lovely this song is I don’t think this relationship is going anywhere for very long, but maybe I don’t know what love is.

Use Me: Much more straightforward and clean, a big hit for the wonderful Mr. Withers. I don’t see any future for this relationship either.

Halsey / Peter Gabriel

Gasoline: I must confess I don’t know Halsey too well, I like this song, I like what I’ve heard of Halsey in general, and the protagonist here is crazy enough to pair well with the next song here.

Solsbury Hill Musically, this song is super cool, lush and melodic and building up to a kinda crazy climax. (I swear one of those voices at the end does a raspberry). About a guy who slowly gives into the crazy in his mind - or maybe he’s breaking out of the crazy we all take for granted in our daily life.

Taylor Swift / Joe Jackson

Mastermind: I asked my daughter Sarah for a beginner’s Taylor Swift mix. She’s obsessed as are many others who’s musical taste I respect. So I wanted something to help me better understand what all the fuss is about. Not sure I’ll ever become a Swiftie, but I can say that the music is good and comes from an intelligent place with a lot of substance. This was the song that I attached to first. A song about a woman is smarter than those around her and who wants to take control of her world. She doesn’t feel empowered to explicitly take control of the situation so she engineers everything to create a relationship. After all, she’s only cryptic and Machiavellian because she cares.

It’s Different for Girls: At the other end of the spectrum Joe Jackson’s character is completely lost trying to understand his girlfriend, women in general, life, motherly advice and pretty much everything.

Bob Dylan / Joan Baez

Boots of Spanish Leather / Diamonds and Rust

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez sing about each other. Way back in the early 60s when Joan Baez was the toast of the Folk Revival and Bob Dylan exploded all over the world they were together as a couple for a time. It sounds like it didn’t end well, particularly for Joan. We can debate if “Boots of Spanish Leather” is about Joan, but it fits reasonably well enough, and I like thinking that she meant enough to him to write something so sentimental. There is no doubt that Baez’s song is about Dylan and their relationship past and present. (present being 50 years ago when she wrote the song).

The Penguins / Lauren Hill

Earth Angel: My earliest musical influence was my sister, particularly the records she left me when I was six and she got married and moved out, leaving me a swell pile of 45s and a couple of LPs. In that set was Earth Angel by the Crewcuts. This is the original version by the Penguins , just because I like it better, but those 45s were quite influential on my musical tastes.

Doo Wop (That Thing): Chastity is one of the most common themes in Doo Wop music - at least a guy trying to work his way around chastity. Ms. Hill turns all of that on it’s head with this song to encourage both men and woman to avoid “that thing” until they are good and ready for it. I guess it’s a doo wop song but I don’t know too many doo wop songs where the horns just explode like that. I mentioned above that Cowboy Carter is one of my all time favorite albums, so is The Miseducation of Lauren Hill.

Lana Del Rey / The English Beat

Two Ska cover songs - Lana Del Rey’s not really ska cover of “Doin’ Time” by Sublime, which is kinda sorta a cover of “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. It is also Ian Jacob’s #1 most played song on Spotify for 2024. This is paired with “I Can’t Get Used to Losing You” by the English Beat - ska covers Andy Williams, what more could you ask for?

Justin Bieber / Nina Simone

Holy Featuring Chance the Rapper - Never have I ever included a Justin Bieber song in one of my mixes, this came up as a recommendation somewhere and it caught my attention so here it is. Musically interesting and an intriguing mix of spiritual and romantic, and I like the line “running to the alter like a track star”.

I Put A Spell On You: Nina Simone on the other hand is a steady presence in my music mixes. She has many different musical styles - this is the stuff of her’s that I like best, the big lush horns and strings around that one and only voice.

Tori Amos / Tom Petty

These are mostly here because they are two great songs that I like a lot, not so much because I can come up with any thematic blend of the two. Both are about a young woman trying to establish herself and find her own identity I give the girl in Tom Petty’s song a much better chance at a happy ending than Tori’s protagonist.

Silent All These Years: Just feels sad, so much goes unsaid in this song, it feels like there is about a thousand pages of backstory to this four minutes and ten seconds.

 American Girl: It took me years and help from my friend John Gladys to understand that this wasn’t just a poppy song about a girl hanging near the beach, but rather a girl trying to build herself up from a crappy hotel room in the madness of LA. (can your really convince yourself that the sound of a car engine is a wave crashing on the beach)?

The Cranberries / Zac Bryan

Two songs of somewhat unrequited love. Both are in a relationship with someone who is not "into it" anymore.

Linger: He's cheating, she's wrapped around his finger waiting for him to pull the trigger and end the relationship. Ugh. 

Something in the Orange: He's clearly smitten but she is not giving him anything, maybe she'll turn the car around, probably better if she doesn't.

Johnny Cash / June Carter Cash

The battle doesn’t end once a couple is in a relationship, two songs with both partners singing about where things are frayed and the intimacy that time brings in to a deep relationship.

Jackson: Johnny Cash is off to the big city like a peacock to get into all sorts of trouble, in the end June may be more in charge than he is.

Poison and Wine: They both know each other deeply and to their soul, but maybe the don’t really know anything. I’ve listened to this song and felt the deep intimacy, then the next time I listen I hear to seemingly endless separation between the two.

A Song For You

I’m breaking the format with our final song here, it’s a song about relationships but for this year it has a deeper meaning for me personally. My sister died in September, a couple of weeks later I found myself in New York with my son who took me to the Whitney museum to see an exhibit around Alvin Ailey and his dance group. It was a pretty odd setup - there was a video running constantly across about the top third of the walls. Dance is not a static thing that lends itself well to museums - videos allowed a display of the art of the dance. Around the gallery were artifacts inspired by the dancers, or art that inspired Alvin, or just art that fit well.

At one end they had the “Aids Quilt” section that included Alvin’s patch. After looking at that I walked back to the main gallery and saw on the video a memorial dance to Alvin just after he died. The dancer was one of the company’s main guys and a very old friend of Alvin’s and this is the song he was dancing to. His face was awash with pain and his motions were urgent and pained and powerful. It crushed me - brought all my feelings about Jane to the surface all the loss and pain. I miss her, she was lovely. Dance is so much more than I ever realized.

This is the version of this song from that video - something the apparently choreographed many years before Alvin died. The song is by Leon Russel, honestly, I like his version better than Donny’s but this was the one in the song and I used Leon’s in a mix a couple of years ago.