The Hump Day Shuffle: 2004

1. The Shins - Fighting in a Sack - Chutes Too Narrow
The Shins second record is nothing short of fantastic - more up-tempo and jangly than the band's debut and easily one of my favorites of 2004. "Fighting in a Sack" starts with a jittery guitar intro and has James Mercer rushing through the lyrics faster than ever. Only bits and pieces caught me at first, but the image "Marionettes on weakening cables / Huddled up with fear and hate" has stuck with me ever since. The song was on my fall 2004 mix Talkin' Ponderosa Highway Blues.

2. The Walkmen - Bows + Arrows - Bows + Arrows
This is an album that I barely got into at the time, and have subsequently found to be a go-to just as much as the band's last two albums. In general, the Walkmen seem have have this disconnect built into their music. It sounds like the vocals and different instruments are coming from different places, and it's that separation that gives the songs that woozy quality. My top song from the album is "The Rat," but this title track is probably a close second.

3. Robyn Hitchcock - Tryin' To Get To Heaven - Spooked
Hitchcock's version of this latter-day Dylan classic is simple and somber, anchored by a fingerpicked guitar. He leaves behind Dylan's more atmospheric sounds and in doing so drops the sorrow and ache a few notches, trying and achieving instead a more gentle beauty. A huge Dylan fan, Hitchcock has picked a perfect song for his style and sentimentality.

4. Tom Russell - Tonight We Ride - Indians Cowboys Horses Dogs
I came to this song (and Tom Russell entirely, as a matter of fact) from my friends The Little Morts, a punk-country band that left Tucson for Austin a few years back, but not before having a solid couple years of performances that made them one of the Ol' Pueblo's best live bands. Russell is one hell of a songwriter - and should definitely be far better known than he is. Check out these two lines from the song: "If we drink ourselves to death, ain't that the cowboy way to go" and "If our bones bleach on the desert, we'll consider we are blessed."

5. Modest Mouse - Satin in a Coffin - Good News For People Who Love Bad News
I love how Isaac Brock builds some of his strangest tunes around the banjo, an instrument that makes far too few waves in indie rock. Brock's yelp is prevalent as always, but it just sounds so much creepier when the lyrics are "Are you dead or are you sleeping? God I sure hope you are dead." As far as I'm concerned this is the top album of the 2000s.



6. The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It - Hot Fuss
I still can't tell if the Killers have changed a lot since this debut album or whether I just listened to Hot Fuss enough to have it get in under my skin. But I really dig this album - the Vegas sheen of it, the Oasis wannabe posturing and the catchy-as-hell songs. If I were younger, I could see the Killers being a band that excited me and then I grew out of, but it's not like I was in high school in 2004. Go figure. "Smile Like You Mean It" still sounds great.

7. Luna - Broken Chair - Rendezvous
I saw Luna on the band's farewell tour in early 2005 at Club Congress and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen. I knew enough of their music to get the importance of it all and make sure I was there, but I'd never heard any of Rendezvous, which at this point is my favorite Luna album. Check out the trailer for Tell Me Do You Miss Me, a documentary filmed on that tour (and pay close attention to the exasperated disbelief of the cry "I'm in a bunk bed, in Tucson!").

8. Goshen - Believe It's True - Circus Wife
I found this Santa Fe band through my cousin Tommy when I was visiting a few years back. Goshen is drummer Jim Palmer and singer-songwriter-guitarist Grant Hayunga, whose combination of blues and American could only be found in the mountain Southwest.

9. Giant Sand - NYC of Time - Is All Over The Map
Nothing Howe Gelb does sounds quite like anything else, but it always sounds like Howe Gelb, and nobody else can even come close to sounding like Howe Gelb. "NYC of Time" is a fuzz-box rocker that Gelb drops some piano jazz on top of. I'd love to have on the headphones during a tour of lower Manhattan's seedier areas.

10. Social Distortion - Nickels and Dimes - Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll
When I reviewed the album at the time, I called it "gruff, loud and wonderfully familiar." Social Distortion's first album in eight year is consistenly excellent, a solomn tribute to the memory departed band member Dennis Danell, but never a downer. Like the rest of the album, "Nickels and Dimes" is high-energy and hard-charging, and the type of song only an old-school punk rocker could sing:

I’m a vagabond king with a stolen crown
I’m a jailhouse poet, a genius, a fool
I’m the pimp who’s lost his cool yeah baby
I’m your first class taste in a second class town

DOWNLOAD:
Robyn Hitchcock - Tryin' To Get To Heaven (live Bob Dylan cover)
Social Distortion - Nickels and Dimes (live)

and in case you're curious, here's my top 10 of 2004 as I blogged it back in the day:
1. Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News
2. Wilco - A Ghost is Born
3. Green Day - American Idiot
4. Elliott Smith - From A Basement On The Hill
5. Arcade Fire - Funeral
6. Social Distortion - Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll
7. Steve Earle - The Revolution Starts Now
8. Walkmen - Bows + Arrows
9. Ted Leo/Pharmacists - Shaking the Sheets
10. Killers - Hot Fuss

The Hump Day Shuffle: 2003

1. Sun Kil Moon - Carry Me Ohio - Ghosts of the Great Highway
For whatever reason, this is the only Mark Kozelek project I've ever really gotten into, but I absolutely love the album. Overall, it's sort of a Neil Young meets Jesus & Mary Chain vibe... sorta. There's a mysterious beauty to the whole album, but perhaps no moreso than on this song - a slow and careful burner, with fleeting images of youth woven in with an unrequited love.

2. OutKast - The Way You Move - Speakerboxxx
The slightly less huge of two monster hits from this groundbreaking double album, "The Way You Move" has a Motown chorus, live Stax horns and one hell of a soulful groove. The way OutKast chopped, diced and reconceptualized hip-hop will guarantee that this album - slightly bloated though it may be - will live on for decades.

3. Rainer Maria - Mystery and Misery - Long Knives Drawn
A 2003 album I just found a few months ago, this is loud, uplifting alternative rock in the mold of the Breeders. The elements are all there: great fuzzy guitar, relentless driving beat and Caithlin de Marrais up front with one hell of a head-swinging, catchy chorus.

4. Jesse Malin - Wendy - The Fine Art of Self-Destruction
This is a perfect follow-up to the Rainer Maria, high-energy rock n' roll. This solo debut from the former D Generation singer was produced by Ryan Adams. Plus, The Boss is a fan, which never hurts as far as I'm concerned. You get what you expect - leather jacket attitude and all - but it's just so well done. I put "Wendy" on one of my mixes about four years back, and I still love this song.

5. Air - Alone in Kyoto - Lost In Translation Soundtrack
This is easily among the best and most appropriately tied to its film of any soundtrack I've ever heard. French electro-pop perfectly parallels the story of Americans wandering aimlessly through Tokyo. It's no coincidence that the song is titled "Alone" and the film is "Lost." This is a terrific pairing.

6. Emmylou Harris - I Will Dream - Stumble Into Grace
I've listened to the two Emmylou albums that proceeded this one - Wrecking Ball and Red Dirt Girl - a ton, but hardly at all for this one. But the formula and personnel (with Malcolm Burn producing, as he did on Red Dirt Girl) seem to follow suit, so I'm probably just slow to catch up. Emmylou Harris is easily one of the best singers ever, and after Rolling Stone rated singers last fall, I sat down to make my own list, and she came in second behind just Van Morrison. Where that leaves me, though, with a song like this one I barely know, is how to approach the song on its own merits, apart from the singer. Because even the best singers certainly have better songs just as they have lesser ones. We'll see...

7. Ryan Adams - This Is It - Rock N Roll
I can distinctly remember not giving a damn that Ryan Adams decided to turn his guitars loud and mean on this album. Sure it wasn't outstanding, but this album got shredded by critics. I like it, and not just as a curveball from a prolific songwriter. It it hadn't been Ryan Adams' name on the album, I think it would've been hailed as this great rock record that started peeling away the laters of 1980s alternative. Rock N Roll is easily as good as the Killers, or Kings of Leon, or the Strokes or whatever else was getting praise in those days. "This Is It" charges right at you, sharp and loud, but polished, part arena, part dirty nightclub, like a lot of what came before, but served up as good as just about anybody. For me, Ryan Adams peaked with Whiskeytown's Strangers' Almanac,and I was surprised he could turn in such a good rock album.

8. Crooked Fingers - Don't Say A Word - Red Devil Dawn
I bought this album when I first saw the Crooked Fingers play, in December 2003 at Solar Culture, and the band has been steadily rising among my favorites since then. Eric Bachmann is one of the best songwriters working today, and I don't say that lightly. "Don't Say A Word" is violin, finger-picked guitar, and a snare drum, but hardly delicate. Bachmann's rough voice brings all of his songs plenty of character. I've turned back to this album - and this song - an awful lot in the last five plus years. And it's not even Crooked Fingers' best work.

9. Steve Earle - I Remember You - Just An American Boy
This double live album very very closely resembled the first Steve Earle show I saw - half a year earlier, in support of the Jerusalem album, less than two months before the United States launched its illegal invasion of Iraq. The writing was on the wall then, for sure, and Steve didn't let it pass. But in his shows and on his albums, he still wrote and performed what I call his "Fearless Heart" songs, sorrowful and aching and the type of things that bore into you. Emmylou sang the female part on Jerusalem, but Garrison Starr filled in well live and on American Boy.



10. The Decemberists - Red Right Ankle - Her Majesty The Decemberists
I was knocked pretty hard by this Decemberists album - the first I heard and still my favorite, by a long shot. Despite the whimsy, there's a simplicity here, and that's a greater accomplishment than the more elaborate stuff they'd turn to later. If the Decemberists conjure in your mind folks outfitted in full-bore steampunk style, this is those same folks when they still wore T-shirts and torn jeans.

DOWNLOAD:
Decemberists - Red Right Ankle
Rainer Maria - Ears Ring

The Hump Day Shuffle: 2002

1. Iron & Wine - Jesus The Mexican Boy - Tour EP
This CDR was the only recorded music available at the start of Iron & Wine's 2002 tour and featured demos not included on the debut Sub Pop album The Creek Drank The Cradle, which came out that fall. Three songs later found their way onto The Sea & Rhythm EP, while two more were re-recorded for the joint Calexico album. This is a fantastic song, as Sam Beam uses a poor Mexican boy as a stand-in for the compassion of Jesus to show how easily people can let down their fellow man. It's so often true that the poor are the selfless, more clear in their understanding of the brotherhood of man than those who are more fortunate.

2. Crooked Fingers - Solitary Man - Reservoir Songs EP
This covers EP features songs by Kristofferson, Neil Diamind, Springsteen, Prince and Bowie/Queen, and Eric Bachmann's band absolutely owns all of them. He's most similar vocally to Neil Diamond, but he turns "Solitary Man" into a spooky banjo ballad, taking all the breeziness out of the original version and replacing it with a wheezing euphonium. It's a daring and thrilling cover song.

3. Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 2 - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
One of the albums crazier tracks, this interlude is full of electronic beeps and a bassline that sounds like it's climbing up and down stairs.

4. Wilco - I Am Trying To Break Your Heart - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
I could write plenty about the opening song to this brilliant album, but I'll stick to what I remember from first hearing it. I hit up Wilco's Web site when they first started streaming the limbo-stuck album, and soon had a CDR of it, and this song sounded like "Misunderstood," but with the wistful nostalgia of that song cut out and replaced by an alternately playful and menacing dreamscape. It was a song that hit hard, right away, but has enough in it for thousands of listen.



5. Steve Earle - What's A Simple Man To Do - Jerusalem
I listened to this song a ton in the months after it came out, and it's absolutely a record of its time. Like Earle's follow-up, The Revolution Starts Now, it's heavily political and somewhat rushed. Jerusalem came out two months after Springsteen's The Rising, and if the Boss was among the first to tackle Sept. 11 in American popular culture, Earle was perhaps the first to make an album exploring the dark and heinous cloud of the Bush years that were kicked into high gear by the terrorist attacks. This song rides a jaunty organ riff, at odds with its lost-job characters but drawing even more attention to the down-and-out lyrics.

6. Mike Doughty - The Only Answer - Smofe + Smang: Live in Minneapolis
The best live album ever recorded by a hip-hop beatnik gone solo acoustic. Doughty took his Soul Coughing songs and stripped them bare, throwing in some fitting acoustic tunes from his 2000 Skittish album. I searched for years for this album, but it was practically impossible to find pre-bit torrent. I was hugely into Soul Coughing in high school, and between Skittsh and this album I had a huge Doughty resurgence.

7. David Cross - Socks and Shoes - Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!
Biting, sarcastic and defiantly liberal in his political comedy at a time when that sort of thing was practically illegal in this country, Cross nailed the excesses and the hipocracies of the Bush administration from the get go. I laughed my ass off to this album over and over. Calling the $300 Bush tax break the disaster-enabling bribe it was, Cross said the following should've been on a bumper sticker: "I'm an ignorant motherfucker who just watches network news and I vote."

8. Tom Petty - The Last DJ - The Last DJ
I finally got to see Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers live on this tour (with Jackson Browne opening no less!), so I probably overrate this album quite a bit. It drew 1.5 of 5 stars from Allmusic.com. Ostensibly it's a statement of independence from Petty, as well as an expression of fondness for the way rock 'n' roll worked in his youth. That holds up fairly well on this title track, as Petty certainly has a strong point to make about corporate radio stations, but the album has its mine field of duds as well. Still, the album has one of my favorite Petty songs of all time, "Have Love Will Travel," with this exquisite verse:

How about a cheer for all those bad girls
And all the boys that play that rock and roll
They love it like you love Jesus
It does the same thing to their souls

9. Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers - Buffalo - Sonoran Hope and Madness
When this album came out, I bought it at Zia, save it for the next weekend, then played it in my car as I drove up the Mount Lemmon highway. Now that's a great way to introduce yourself to a record. Sonoran Hope and Madness is sadly the last Roger Clyne album I consider outstanding, but a streak of four in a row is damn good anyway. "Buffalo" was and is my favorite song from the album. It's pure Arizona, starting with a spare strummed acoustic, then the drums hit and the electric guitars and the song just starts exploding. At its core, the song is about fighting against the loss of nature at the expense of concrete and iron, something as personal to Clyne as anything.


10. Okkervil River - Lady Liberty - Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See
I got into Okkervil River a few months after this album came out, and the one-two-three punch of the opening tracks just floored me. "Lady Liberty" is the third one, and by that time I was hooked by the band's ramshackle energy and the passionate yelping of singer Will Sheff. Soon after, Okkervil River swung through Tucson for a show on Thanksgiving, and later the band stayed at my house, up late into the night having beers and chatting about music, life and everything. Great times.


DOWNLOAD:
Iron & Wine - Jesus The Mexican Boy (demo)
Mike Doughty - The Only Answer (live)
Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers - Buffalo (live)
Okkervil River - Lady Liberty (live)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 2001

1. The Shins - Pressed In A Book - Oh, Inverted World
The Shins hit fast and furious among my crew. It seemed that everybody was talking up this album and the kind of effortlessly catchy indie pop that sounded so fresh at the time. It still does, but the shine has worn off the album a bit for me by now. And for what it's worth, I never had a clue what this song is about, and I never cared. I just listened to it endlessly anyway.

2. Bob Dylan - I Can't Get You Off My Mind - Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute
For my money, this is probably the best tribute album ever released. Probably the smallest name on the list is Ryan Adams, and his take on "Lovesick Blues" is amazing. But the best of the bunch here is Dylan, who practically croons, and adds an accordion to the perfect country shuffle of Larry Campbell on guitar. This is a careful and reverent cover, but one performed with joy.

3. Whiskeytown - The Ballad of Carol Lynn - Pneumonia
An album recorded before the band split, but then released after Ryan Adams' solo debut, Pneumonia is unlike anything Whiskeytown did before. Gone are both the country heartache and the raw, hard-charging rock tunes as the band took a more classic pop sound. I used to think that this record and Wilco's Summerteeth were spiritual cousins, but I've kinda backed off that as it seems to point the way more for Ryan Adams solo work. This album opener is an absolute beaut, though.

4. Dan Bern - New American Language - New American Language
The title track from Dan Bern's best album, this minor key ballad is as heartbreaking as it is captivating. I especially love the opening lines:

She said love, love, love is everything
I said ok, I guess, whatever
She said what does that mean
I said nothing, it's just good to have a backup plan

5. Jay Farrar - Feed Kill Chain - Sebastapol
Despite how much I liked about half the songs on this first solo album from Jay Farrar, it's really also the point that I began to lose track of him. I was a huge Son Volt fan, and I got to catch them live touring for the band's third album - which was the last one with that version of the band. With his solo work, Farrar just seems sort of ornery, but he still hits it out of the park sometimes. This song, along with "Voodoo Candle" and "Feel Free" are right up there with his best work.



6. Weezer - Photograph - Weezer
This was one of the last albums I stood in line to buy at midnight (Dylan's Love & Theft just may have been the last). After the band's first two albums - the uber popular blue self-titled and the critical smash Pinkterton - I didn't think they could do much wrong. And I listened to this endlessly for that summer. The album came out right when I moved back from Phoenix and picked up a serving job that was quite a drive. So this album, Billy Bragg's Workers Playtime and the promo copy I had of Jimmy Eat World's then-titled Bleed American were my driving music for almost three solid months.

7. Iron & Wine - A History of Lovers - Home Recordings
I heard the bright, horn-filled version of this song from Iron & Wine's collaboration with Calexico long before I heard this home demo version, and it shocking how somber the song started out.

8. Greyhound Soul - Nothin' - Alma de Galgo
One of Tucson's best bands for close to 15 years, Greyhound Soul is one of the more immediately recognizable bands there is, thanks to Joey Peña's rough desert drawl. I called their sound "peyote blues" at one point back in the day, around the time of this second album, which had the band taking a bluesy turn, with a double keyboard sound. This is a band whose audience has never swelled large enough to be on par with the quality of the music.

9. Wilco - Venus Stop The Train - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos
A fantastic song that's only turned up on a Jay Farrar solo album, Venus Stop The Train is one of the chief reasons that all Wilco fans need to have the YHF demos as well as the regular album. The band was on such fire that they could have put it out as a double album with repeats of the songs and still landed on as many year-end lists as there were.

10. Old 97s - Question - Satellite Rides
This is a sweet little ditty from yet another album that I listened to incessantly in 2001. It's a love song both simple and clever, and Rhett Miller delivers it with just and amazing level of honesty.



DOWNLOAD:
The Shins - Pressed In A Book (live KXCI)
Dan Bern - New American Language (live)
Iron & Wine - A History of Lovers
Wilco - Venus Stop The Train
Rhett Miller - Question (live)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 2000

1. Mark Knopfler - Silvertown Blues - Sailing to Philadelphia
I liked this album quite a lot when it came out, but since I've hardly listened to it at all, save "What It Is," one of Knopfler's all-time best songs. Knopfler's fascination with American lore takes his songwriting to some dull places sometimes. But the songs always sound great.

2. The Whites - Keep On The Sunny Side - O Brother, Where Art Thou?
This is a fantastic soundtrack album - one of the most cohesive and consistently excellent ones of all time. This fresh take on the Carter Family classic is a mellow bluegrass shuffle, a perfect afternoon song.

3. Dynamite Hack - Boyz In The Hood - Superfast
The most fratty of the white dudes in acoustic guitars covering rap songs mini-trend, this was a mild sensation for its audacity if nothing else. Even stupid shit can be somewhat cool if its never really been done before. These Weezer wannabes are ultimately very harmless, and nearly a decade later, I have almost as much nostalgia for this short-lived gimmicky hit as I do for the original, which I heard second-hand to begin with. Regardless, The Gourds' version of "Gin and Juice" is way, way better.

4. Neko Case - Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis - New Coat of Paint: Songs of Tom Waits
This is a perfect incongruous song for Neko Case to cover. For one, her light touch makes this as stunning as the original. For another, re-inverting the gender mix-up somehow makes the song even stranger. Case's sweet vocals contrast with the thought of Waits' primal growl moreso than Waits' growl contrasts with the songs female narrator. If you ever hear one cover of a Tom Waits song, this one just might be it.

5. Calexico - Ritual Road Map - Hot Rail
This is one of those short instrumentals that acts as pitch-perfect glue for a Calexico album. Cinematic and drony, it's a disquieting little interlude, and one of those early Calexico artifacts that simply couldn't ever be out of place for them, nor could it ever have come from another band.

6. Pearl Jam - Light Years - Binaural
Binaural was the newest CD I had when I bought my car, so naturally it was what I mainly listened to driving around those first few weeks of greatly expanded freedom. And not really at all since. This song made it onto a mix (my first one originally made on a burned CD instead of a tape, which means my first CD burner and first car were purchased within about a month of each other. Nifty). I wish I had more to say, but this was the first Pearl Jam album that failed to really interest me. And with that new CD burner, I got so much new music I had little use for an uninspiring Pearl Jam album.

7. Ryan Adams - Oh My Sweet Carolina - Heartbreaker
This is a gorgeous, gorgeous song - perhaps the best one Ryan Adams has ever written. With just the perfect backing vocal from Emmylou Harris, this song is the heartbreaker the title is refering to.



8. Steely Dan - Gaslighting Abbie - Two Against Nature
I am in the distint (and immediately dismissed) minority that says this Steely Dan comeback album was worthy of the Grammy it won over Radiohead's Kid A (and Midnight Vultures and Marshal Mathers). Two Against Nature is simply a better album. The songs are so smart and sarcastic, the tunes so perfectly funky, the Becker and the Fagan so unapologetic in the pursuit of their long-out-of-style muse. Pitchfork gave this a 1.6, and couldn't have been more wrong. Have any of the complainers actually listened to the record?

9. Billy Bragg - Against The Law - 'Til We Outnumber 'Em
This Woody Guthrie tribute features Billy Bragg singing the fresh "Against the Law," which he dug out of the archives and turned into a bluesy romp, before handing vocals off to bluesman Corey Harris. I like Bragg's version just as well.

10. Steve Earle - The Boy Who Never Cried - Transcendental Blues
This album is gonna end up as one of this decade's best as far as I'm concerned. Earle's masterpiece, it's his most musically varied album and the songs just kill. These lyrics are some of the best Earle has ever written, telling the story of a boy who never cried, until his very last day, when he "shed a single precious tear, for a boy who never cried." Damn.

DOWNLOAD:
Billy Bragg - Against the Law (live)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1999

1. Flaming Lips - Suddenly Everything Has Changed - The Soft Bulletin
It's actually very weird to come across a song from this album on shuffle, alone out there among the scattered masses. Aside from "Waiting For A Superman" and "Do You Realize?" I don't think I've heard anything from this album, except for in its entirety. A left-field triumph. (And you gotta love the subtitle of this one: "Death Anxiety Caused by Moments of Boredom")

2. Mike Ness - Cheating At Solitaire - Cheating At Solitaire
I had a great of weeks rediscovering this album last summer when I saw Mike Ness at an unbelievably packed Club Congress. This album was in such heavy rotation that year that it's probably still one of my most played albums ever. This is a slow and hot bluesy burner of a song, full of pain and regret and just one of the best songs Ness has ever written.

3. Blink 182 - What's My Age Again - Enema of the State
Those dudes beat me to 23, but I knew enough skate punks around that time who were on the verge of burning out or making major changes that it was a song that rang with just enough truth. And even those same skate punks still held on to just a little bit of love for the now-MTV-saturated Blink 182, for their years-earlier show in Prescott, and the to-this-day-pretty-good Cheshire Cat album.

4. Modest Mouse - Other People's Lives - Building Something Out Of Nothing
A hodgepodge compilation album just before I got into Modest Mouse, this one is still a bit of a curiosity for me. When I first heard this album, I had a hard time connecting the dots between it, Modest Mouse's earlier stuff and The Moon And Antarctica, which is still my favorite of theirs. And all that really says is that I didn't have much of an excuse not to be listening to Modest Mouse in 1999. Damn.

5. Clem Snide - African Friend - Your Favorite Music
This is another one I hit a couple years late, but man, Clem Snide blew me away with Your Favorite Music. This was a band I felt like I'd been missing. "African Friend" is a perfect example of Clem Snide - a bit sad, a bit weird, with a passionate country shuffle, a great chorus ("Come lay on the couch, with me. 'Cause nature's too wild and free. Come lay on the couch. We don't have to work on our tans") all working together to make for a memorable song time and time again.

6. Pavement - Anna Don't Cry - Terror Twilight
It must be due to the lack of an intimately close connection with the first Pavement albums as they came out, but I've held Terror Twilight as my favorite since I heard it. The good Dr. Chung was hugely into this album and played it all the time in our old 8th Street house. And "Anna Don't Cry" is the best on the record.

7. Jimmy Eat World - 12.23.95 - Clarity
The Clarity 10th anniversary tour was too short, too far away and too sold out for me to catch a show, but I would've loved to have seen Jim Adkins & Co. tearing through this album anew. This shimmering song has the simplest lyrics of the whole album: "I didn't mean to leave you hanging on. I didn't mean to leave you all alone. I didn't know what to say. Merry Christmas, baby."

8. Bueno - Errands - Finding Humor In The Tragedy
I've been making mental demands on myself to sit down and write a good and long post on this band, hometown friends of mine and one of the best punk bands of all time. I will. Until then, just a quick bit of this song, a quick burst of demanding energy that I'll forever use to help myself find inner peace. That's not remotely a common reaction to a punk song (especially one with the outgoing chorus of "failure is my religion") but this song and album will always be an important part of me. R.I.P. Brian.

9. The Magnetic Fields - Grand Canyon - 69 Love Songs (vol. 2)
Until my friend Doug sang "Book of Love" at Cory & Shannon's wedding in November, I'd have told you that "Grand Canyon" is the best song on this wonderful concept triple-album. It's quick and beautiful: "If I was the Grand Canyon, I'd echo everything you say, but I'm just me, I'm
only me and you used to love me that way. So you know how to love me that way."

10. Old 97s - Lonely Holiday - Fight Songs
If I were blogging in 1999, this album probably would've been at the top of my year-end list (fighting out with Beck's Midnight Vultures and Wilco's Summerteeth for the No. 1 slot). The Old 97s did nothing special, but everything they did was perfect. The country-pop combination, the harmonies, the lyrics and every note from every guy just right.



I was at this game:


DOWNLOAD:
Mike Ness - Cheating At Solitaire (live)
Pavement - Anna Don't Cry (live)
Bueno - Errands

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1998

1. Soul Coughing - White Girl (live) - Rolling single (limited edition bonus disc)
This live Soul Coughing set has the band at its absolute best - and just about to call it quits. No other song I know uses the word "discombobulated." Doughty and Co. should just go ahead and release this live set as some sort of 10th anniversary deluxe edition and create a whole new fandom.

2. Tricky Luz - Trace - Tricky Luz
I picked up this his four-song EP (on a CDR) from a local band I used to go see. My buddy Aaron played bass, and Tricky Luz had a pretty good run for a few years around the university area. The songwriting was top notch and the musicianship was way better than you'd expect from a college group that played mostly acoustic rock tunes. For more on the singer's current projects, go here.

3. Gillian Welch - Rock of Ages - Hell Among the Yearlings
Welch is an amazing talent and has somehow crafted an absolutely unique sound out of the most basic elements. David Rawlings guitar playing is always standout and Welch's voice has the perfect timelessness for her Americana lyrics, rooted in religion, family, tall tales and the endless restlessness of this country's youth.

4. Semisonic - DND - Feeling Strangely Fine
I'd have written Semisonic off completely as "Closing Time" saturated the radio in those days, except for my friend Courtney threw this song on a mix she made. Dan Wilson has an great sense of good pop music, and no matter how sick of his hit I am, I'll always like this bittersweet also-ran.



5. Portishead - Half Day Closing - Roseland NYC Live
My friend Jared brought this video over right after he bought it, and with the lights off and everybody staring silent and slightly on edge at the screen, you might of thought we were all gathered to watch a horror film. Such is the intensity of Portishead, captured live in all their spooky and mesmerizing glory.

6. Cake - Let Me Go - Prolonging The Magic
I remember this album hit late in the year, and was the Christmas break soundtrack around my old house on 8th Street. The crew gathered nightly, and for nearly two weeks we didn't bother to clear the beer bottles off the old coffee table. And we played Cake over and over, tying the nights together with the quirky confidence that was at the band's core. I've hardly listened to this album since (save "Mexico," which wound up on a couple mixes), but it all just rushes back.

7. Golden Smog - Keys - Weird Tales
The funky bassline and electric piano make this song seem a bit of out of place on this alt-country supergroup record. But why would a bunch of musicians get together for a project so clearly rooted in fun above all else and not try messing around a bit? A South Florida murder ballad, this tune represents exactly what's so great about the Golden Smog records - something you wouldn't expect to hear if you on any of these musicians' "regular" albums.

8. Pearl Jam - Off He Goes - Live On Two Legs
I saw Pearl Jam the summer of 1998 at Veterans' Memorial Collesium in Phoenix and it still ranks among the best shows I've seen. Nearly 30 songs stretching into almost three hours, and I couldn't have been higher on the band at the time. Those first five Pearl Jam albums yielded so many excellent songs that the band could pick and choose night by night and never fail to offer a great show. This No Code single gets some extra guitar licks and an even more passionate delivery from Eddie Vedder.



9. James - Destiny Calling - Best Of
One of two new singles on the Manchester band's 1998 hits collection, "Destiny Calling" has one of the greatest opening lines I've ever heard: "So we may be gorgeous, so we may be famous, come back when we're getting old." Tongue-in-cheek 1990s humor at its best. James closed an amazing decade long run of great singles with this one, almost a sly look back on the whole thing, with their trademark chiming guitar, strong rhythm and Tim Booth's soaring vocals.

10. Dan Bern - Cure For AIDS - Fifty Eggs
This album was in regular rotation around my friends for years - most for the brilliantly hilarious "Tiger Woods," but this song got plenty of attention too: "They day they found a cure for AIDS, everybody took one little pill and was OK." Bern's fantasy tale spins and spins as you might expect it to ("For three solid weeks everyone I met was nude"), but somehow never manages to lose an element of sweetness at its core.

DOWNLOAD:
Soul Coughing - White Girl (live)
Tricky Luz - Trace
Dan Bern - Cure For AIDS

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1997

1. Wyclef Jean - Anything Can Happen - The Carnival
This album was huge with pretty much everybody I knew back in the day - I couldn't go to a party freshman year in college without hearing it. The Carnival was universal, and outstanding. "Anything Can Happen" should've been a single - it's one of the danciest tracks on the album.

2. Pavement - Stereo - Brighten The Corners
Another hot-hot-hot record from my early college days, this is Pavement at the height of the band's coolness. Like "Cut Your Hair," "Stereo" just about broke Pavement to a much larger mainstream audience, which in retrospect would've been monumentally weird. If the frat crowd would've grown tired of Dave Matthews and embraced Pavement it would've felt like the world was spinning out of control.

3. Bill Hicks - Bullies of the World - Arizona Bay
I'm one of countless people drawn into Bill Hicks through Tool's Ænima album, which dedicated the album to the late comedian, sampled Hicks' take on drugs and music and also used Arizona Bay as the basis for the title track. This rant about American is eerily prescient given the horrors of the Bush years. America as Jack Palance in Shane, a character which imdb calls the "archetypal Western villain."

4. Neko Case - High On Cruel - The Virginian
On this first record, Case is a drastically different singer and musician than on her excellent new album, Middle Cyclone. It's so twangy that it's a shock at first to listen again to this old stuff. This is roadhouse, barroom country, something that would be perfect in the soundtrack to the type of movie that would have Dwight Yoakam as a down-and-out, abusive husband. This would be early in the movie, a Friday night out in fresh Wranglers and cowboy hats, with the couple still in love, though the good times are fading away.

5. Bob Dylan - Dirt Road Blues - Time Out Of Mind
I don't think I could find a way to state the lasting significance this album has had in my life. The rennaissance that this was for Dylan is something that pushed me far deeper into his music. And the album itself is a bluesy and vivid masterpiece that is perhaps the one album, above all others I have, that transports me immediately out of the moment and into some sort of cinematic imaginative land, where the pictures and settings are always different, but the music of Time Out Of Mind always is always there, driving my thoughts. Oh, and this song would also fit very well into that "movie" I just mentioned on the Neko song.



6. Foo Fighters - Everlong (acoustic)
Years after the Unplugged craze, this stripped-down version of the Foos biggest hit nonetheless got huge. I can remember hearing it on the radio at least as often as the original single version. It's a great song to transition to the acoustic, with a melancholy that doesn't show up as well on the full band version.

7. The Refreshments - Buy American - The Bottle And Fresh Horses
One of the best bands ever pissed away by a record company, the Refreshments are country and rock in equal measure, and catchy as hell. This second album easily stands up to the best things Roger Clyne has done.

8. Bruce Springsteen - Who'll Stop The Rain - 85 - 75: The Outtakes
I picked up this bootleg double album at Disc Go Round in Madison a few years back, and it's up there with the Bob Dylan Witmark demos as the best bootleg I've ever heard. The sound quality is tremendous, pulled off the original soundboard master tapes and planned for the 1975-1985 box set. I can't believe they didn't use this CCR cover for the set. It's the full E Street glory given over wholesale, in proud homage, to a beautiful and profoundly important song.

9. Morphine - Empty Box - Like Swimming
Morphine had one of the best and most unique sounds of all time, let alone in alternative music. It's a low groove all the way, slow and smoky, with Mark Sandman's deep, deep croon and Dana Colley's baritone sax combining for a musical noir that sounds like a slow-dripping molasses. I was lucky to see them once, and saddened that Sandman died, barely two months before Morphone and Soul Coughing were set to play a double bill at Phoenix's Celebrity Theatre. I have no doubt that would've been one of the best shows of my life.



10. Yo La Tengo - Sugarcube - I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One
This is an all-time indie rock fuzzy classic. It's sweet and catchy, rock music boiled down to its most joyout elements. And the Mr. Show-ish video is priceless - one of the coolest things ever!

DOWNLOAD:
Foo Fighters - Everlong (acoustic)
Bruce Springsteen - Who'll Stop the Rain (live CCR cover)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1996

1. Pearl Jam - Habit - No Code
On their fourth album, Pearl Jam hadn't shown any signs of slowing, as far as I was concerned (and still am). This isn't necessarily a straight-up anti-drug song, but Vedder is obviously singing to someone who he thought would've been above the whole thing.

2. Wilco - Misunderstood - Being There
This is an intensely personal song for me, from my favorite band of my generation. Jeff Tweedy has always made this song about an explosion of passion, fighting to rise above the mundane and the shouldn't-be's. I caught Wilco on this tour and they brought the house down. It's still a song and an album I listen to all the damn time, definitely one of the best albums of the 1990s. This opening song sets an amazingly high bar, and Wilco meets it.

3. The Roots - Ital (The Universal Side) - Illadelph Halflife
I didn't know what this was at first, but it's Q-Tip's fault. I'm new to this album (1999's Things Fall Apart was my first Roots album), and the quest turn from Tribe's MC had me wondering how I had a hole that big in what I know of their work. But it says great things about the early days of The Roots that they not only snagged one of the best rappers of all time (at the height of his career, no less) and made him fit so seamlessly.

4. Dave Matthews Band - Two Step - Crash
This is more along the lines of where I was in 1996 - Dave Matthews headlined my first big, real concert, the H.O.R.D.E. Festival in Phoenix in 1996. It was July and 115 in the sun (probably why I don't really remember Rusted Root), but once the night began to cool and the music filled the sky, it was one hell of a time. I caught Dave Matthews once more, then lost interest precipitously as I found music that seemed to have a lot more to say for me. But this is one of his best, and though I can't say how many years it's been since I've listened to it, there's no denying that Matthews and his band could really turn out a great jam.

5. Alejandro Escovedo - Gravity/Falling Down Again/ Street Hassle - More Miles Than Money
This 12-minute medly closes Escovedo's 1998 live album (but was recorded in 1996, so shuffle says it belongs here) More Miles Than Money, which was part of several Alejandro albums I picked up in short order after hearing him sing backup on Whiskeytown's "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight," from 1997's Strangers' Almanac. Every song he did captivated me, and it's been that way since. I've seen him a couple times and it's felt like being in the presence of a legend. I'm glad he's finally getting some due from more mainstream audiences. Thanks, Bruce.



6. Belle & Sebastian - The Stars of Track and Field - If You're Feeling Sinister
For the longest time, this was the only Belle & Sebastain song I liked at all, even the tiniest bit, and that's mostly because I love the notion of someone give a shout-out to the stars of track and field. And I just read the lyrics for the first time, so now I'm not sure what to think. But it's still a catchy and atmospheric song, and one I bet would've moved me more into the band's corner if I'd heard it then, instead of years later.



7. The Wallflowers - One Headlight - Bringing Down The Horse
Jakob Dylan's big break, and it's his eyes that are remembered the most. The truth is, this is a very good song on a good album, one that was certainly worth playing over and over in 1996. But I always liked "Sixth Avenue Heartache" so much more. Regardless, it was nice to see someone playing a lot of Hammond B3 in that era.

8. Johnny Cash - Rusty Cage - American II: Unchained
There's little to say about Rick Rubin's work with Johnny Cash, other than Thanks. That Nashville had little need for Cash for about two decades prior to this new collaboration is simply stunning. And what the American Recordings series produced was simple and stunning music. The series is marked by these unlikely and inspired choices for covers, and the stark black & white album cover images. Cash turns this Soundgarten screamer into one of his own, like so many others.

9. Modest Mouse - Space Travel Is Boring - This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About
Early, loose Modest Mouse was a confounding thing when I first heard it, but now this album is a comfortable and necessary sound, and I appreciate so much more how they continued to evolve along the way.

10. Soul Coughing - Super Bon Bon (Propellerheads Remix) - Super Bon Bon single
Ugh. The original song was so awesome, with its dominating, funky bass line and M. Doughty's scatty, beatnik rapping. A sorta drum-n-bass thing just doesn't work for me. So I'll just pretend the Irrestible Bliss album version came up. In November of 1996, six of us piled into The General's old Crown Vic for a drive to Tempe to catch Soul Coughing (and Geggy Tah opening!) at Gibson's. Much has been written about that epic journey, but for now I'll just say it was one of the coolest days of my life. Thanks ma-yan.

DOWNLOAD:
Wilco - Misunderstood (live)
Soul Coughing - Super Bon Bon (live)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1994

1. East River Pipe - Axl Or Iggy - Shining Hours In A Can
I think I came to this album about 10 years late, but it fight right in with that Flaming Lips/Modest Mouse/Wilco surge I was on. This song is on my Time & Space Lounge mix, right in between Clem Snide and Low. Great shimmering indie rock guitars, and it opens one of the best lines I've ever heard: "You thought you were Axl, or Iggy, but you were nothing like that."

2. Tom Petty - A Higher Place - Wildflowers
This is one of the albums I could never live without, and this song is one I've put onto several mixes. I'd consider this a career achievement for Petty, even given how constistently outstanding he's been for 30 plus years. Petty sings "When I add up what I've left behind, I don't want to lose no more," and makes the damn thing sound hopeful... Now that's a skilled performer.

3. Lyle Lovett - Hello Grandma - I Love Everybody
I don't think anybody has ever married clever songwriting with honey smooth vocals like Lyle Lovett. This shuffling, jazzy country tune has a guy calling the grandma of an old flame, only to find he's dialed wrong and has to backtrack, saying "I ain't called this number in too many years." A throwaway song in somebody else's hands, it's a subtle charmer here.

4. Rusted Root - Ecstasy - When I Woke
I don't really listen to Rusted Root much these days, but I had my era of fandom. I saw them live at the HORDE Festival, and definitely dug what they were doing. It's a full and frantic type of intensly rhythmic acoustic music that I once called "organic techno," full of energy and definitely danceable.

5. Weezer - Only In Dreams - Weezer
(So I admit it, I cherry picked on this list... I thought it was getting obvious... the shuffle went to about 30 songs before I got my 10... just wanted to clear the air.)
I don't think I ran into anyone throughout college who didn't like this album. It was an undeniable classic within about four years, one of those albums you could (and I did) put on at a party and play straight through, and not only please the crowd, but have folks arm-in-arm in the living room, hoisting beers and singing every word. It's an album I caught the first time around and loved even more on the second wave... and this 8-minute album closer is pure joy.



6. The Refreshments - Down Together - Wheelie
A storied band around these parts, the Roger Clyne-led Refreshments mixed an extra bit of pop sensibility into the mix of country, rock and punk that bands like the Gin Blossoms and Sidewinders had established under the fairly nonsensical label of "desert rock." "Down Together" is one hell of a song, and you gotta love this shout-out: "We could all wear ripped up clothes / And pretend that we were Dead Hot Workshop." This version is from the band's self-released debut CD (which was apparently a run of only 500 copies - I snagged a download from the excellent AzLocal blog)

7. Johnny Cash - Flesh & Blood - Unearthed
Johnny Cash's resurgence through his partnership with Rick Rubin is amazing and fitting for a legendary musician, and I don't doubt that I'd know next to nothing about Cash myself these days if it weren't for the five volumes of his American Recordings albums and this five-disc box set. On the VH1 Storytellers disc, Johnny talks about writing this song in 1971, on a trip to a lake with June: "It was one of those magic days, you know, when the sun was just right and the temperature was just right and the breeze was just right and she was just right. I let her drive on the way back and I wrote a song called 'Flesh & Blood'."

8. R.E.M. - Strange Currencies - Monster
For some reason, this is one of the most sold-back CDs ever, one of those albums you see a stack of for $5.99 in any used rack, to this day even. I still have mine, and while it's not my favorite R.E.M. (that would be it's predecessor, the stunning Automatic for the People) it has plenty of high points and not much in the way of low points. The third of five singles, "Strange Currencies"

9. Meat Puppets - Severed Goddess Hand - Too High To Die
What a hell of a record - more melodic and self-assured than the Meat Puppets more experimental and punk albums, this is one that I'll always hold dear. It's a hodge-podge of sounds, even for the Meat Puppets, and there were years that I couldn't get enough. "There's a gleamin hope for an understanding / Timing's gone and there's been no planning / Two heads, one dream / Two-thirds a crowd it seeems." Man, I love this song.

10. Green Day - Burnout - Dookie
A slightly more palatable album title than Turd, Dookie is the perfect major-label debut for the Beavis & Butt-Head age, of which I was a full and willing participant. For some reason, I'll always associate this album with that cartoon duo, and it makes perfect sense. Because no matter how irreverent and juvenile the humor was on Beavis & Butt-Head, those two shitheads wouldn't for a second tollerate any shitty music. And Green Day was definitely not shitty music.

DOWNLOAD:
Emmylou Harris, Sheryl Crow & Mary Chapin Carpenter - Flesh & Blood (Johnny Cash cover)
Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers - Down Together (live)
Meat Puppets - Severed Goddess Hand (live)
Rusted Root - Ecstasy (live)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1993

1. Flaming Lips - She Don't Use Jelly - Transmissions From the Satellite Heart
I clearly remember liking this song back in the day, marveling at how something so weird could be so cool and so catchy, simultaneously. And I actually had friends who were really into the Flaming Lips overall, not just this random hit. But I took probably another seven years before really catching up with the band. Then after another few years I watched Fearless Freaks and couldn't get enough. As my friend Marc says, Wayne Coyne would be the ultimate cool uncle.

2. Tom Waits - Carnival - The Black Rider
For some reason, the theatrically oriented Tom Waits albums are the ones that have taken me the longest to get into, and in the case of The Black Rider, I don't think I've even listened to it straight through. It's not that the album is too weird, but man I just like those earlier folky albums so much better. As this instrumental sails on by, I can't help but think of people in weird costumes dancing some strange, impressionistic thing that I don't understand...

3. Archers of Loaf - Plumb The Line - Icky Mettle
I'm a huge fan of Eric Bachmann's solo album and pretty much everything he's done with the Crooked Fingers, but I've hardly listened to the Archers of Loaf. Like the Tom Waits song previously, this is one of those albums that gets me thinking about how musicians with consistently excellent but widely varied projects throughout long careers are approached by fans, who inevitably come in from all sides. I happened to hit Bachmann in about 2002, and it's that era of his music I like most, but there's always more to explore. And this one, with the anthematic chorus "She's an indie rocker, and nothing's gonna stop her," just calls out for more exploration.

4. Nirvana - Milk It - In Utero
Between this song and the Flaming Lips, it could hardly be more clear how much more interested record labels were in actual music during the early 1990s. Nirvana would never have been on a major label if they'd hit about six years later. Rock music of this sort, this hard, this slanted, this passionate and this alienated is an amazing thing, and to hear it everywhere made my early teens a very exciting time (strictly speaking in hindsight, of course).



5. Stone Temple Pilots - Plush (acoustic) - Thank You (originally released as B-side to UK version of Creep Single)
I always liked this song - both the album version as well as this acoustic performance - and I wasn't in any sort of place as a budding music fan to start in on the backlash that has since doomed STP to a second-tier status. Now I can easily see how derivative they might have been, and I don't to this day have a single clue what this song might be about, but none of that is the point when you're 13.

6. Phish - Sparkle - Rift
A bunch of years back, when I was living in Phoenix for a short stint, I forced a buch of my closest friends to pick a favorite song or few, and from that I burned a CD of their favorite music, an effort which made the distance and time significantly easier to manage. Well, my friend Rod, who was going to school in Madison and still lives there, picked this as his tune. I never saw Rod as a big jam-band fan, but there's something mischievous about this song, with it's chorus of "Laugh and laugh and fall apart" that makes perfect sense.

7. The Cranberries - How - Everyone Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?
For a while I've thought this is one of the great underrated albums of the 1990s. I started turning back to it heavily as a college freshman, when Brit-Pop was huge and this album was kind of a footnote on the front wave of that trend. It's powerful, atmospheric, catchy and the right mix of sensitive and edgy (or so I thought). "How" is part of the albums very strong closing trio of songs that would surprise anyone who thought the band was summed up by the sappiness of "Linger." The Cranberries might not have been a band with a ton of staying power, but this first record is a masterpiece.

8. James - Say Something - Laid
My favorite 1993 album is Uncle Tupelo's Anodyne, but this is a very close second. It was one of my staple albums from a bit after it came out, straight through college, and has seen a resurgence in the last year or so. It's a masterpiece of brooding, thoughtful alternative rock. The lyrics of this have always grabbed me, from the openining line " You're as tight as a hunter's trap / Hidden well, what are you concealing," straight through to the refrain: "I'm open, wide open, wondering." This is the type of song and album that makes you a music fan for life.

9. Jackson Browne - Sky Blue and Black - I'm Alive
This song is an absolute heartbreaker, and perhaps Browne's most powerfully poetic song. The whole album is a wrenching emotional wreck, but this is its core, a simple piano ballad that is the very dictionary definition of lost love, with its echoing pain and disorientation that makes even the sky look a different color.

You're the hidden cost and the thing that's lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I'll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows
And the faces on the avenue

10. Bruce Springsteen - Living Proof - MTV Plugged
This is the live album that rescued his otherwise doomed Human Touch/Lucky Town period, and showed a defiant Boss still itchin' to rock. "Living Proof" will never be mentioned among Bruce's best songs, but thanks to this heartfelt performance, it feels like a song worthy of someone with his talent. It sure beats the façade-slick and soulless version from Lucky Town.

DOWNLOAD:
James - Say Something (live)
Jackson Browne - Sky Blue and Black (live)
Bruce Springsteen - Living Proof (live)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1992

1. Stone Temple Pilots - Wicked Garden - Core
I've been up and down on this album so many times over the years. I was big into it right away, for all the reasons any 13-year-old would dig a hard rock album that was blowing up all over the place. Then I grabbed onto the "copycat" backlash. Then jettisoned it from my collection all together. Then reacquired it, for old times' sake. Then listened to it occasionally for a couple years. Then re-thought the flaws - chiefly how obviously derivative it was. Then watched Weiland's ridiculously made-for-tabloid personal life take more and more strange turns. Then found Velvet Revolver turning my stomach. Then kinda forgot about STP all together. Then found it on shuffle, and remembered every bit of those ups and downs.

2. John Mellencamp - Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat - Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
Yikes. As much as I like the idea of an all-star blow-out tribute to Bob Dylan, this thing reeked of exploitation from the outset. Dylan was skeptical and hesitant from the beginning, and on a whole separate plane of existence musically, in the midst of a rather uncommercial folk revival period. And the guest list had plenty of wrong choices. But despite all the problems, there are some impossibly excellent gems from the project. Not this Mellencamp number, mind you. I'm thinking more the excellent "Masters of War" from Pearl Jam and the bury-all-egos "My Back Pages," which is what an all-star blow-out tribute should be all about.

3. Emmylou Harris - Smoke Along the Track - At The Ryman
I only started digging into Emmylou (besides the greatest hits album) after seeing her play in San Francisco a year and a half ago, and I snagged this live album mostly because I wanted to hear her cover Steve Earle's "Guitar Town." It's excellent, but I stopped there for some reason. The fact is nothing she's ever recorded has been bad, and the backing band on this one is excellent, so a brand new track like this one seems familiar and comforting right off the bat.

4. Flaming Lips - The Sun - Hit To Death In The Future Head
I still find it hard to believe that the Flaming Lips have spent nearly 17 years on Warner Brothers Records. But in 1992, major labels actually were willing to sign left-field acts. This isn't the earliest Flaming Lips record I've managed to acquire, but it's the earliest one I've listened to with any regularity, and I got to say, it's just plain weird. I love that about the band, but I love it much more when the music reached higher peaks. This song kinda sounds like the Meat Puppets, if they grew up a few states further east, which up until the Soft Bulletin is a description that could've been applied to just about anything the Flaming Lips came up with.

5. Arrested Development - Mama's Always On Stage - 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of...
Another album I had from pretty much when it came out, but this one I've actually managed to keep to this day, to my endless surprise. I liked the hits, and as a young teen never had the patience for anything else. Just a bit too commercial to fit in with the Native Tongues bands, and too much of a one-hit wonder to fit in anywhere else but made-for-TV 90s compilation albums, this is a curious album to hear after so many years.

6. Bob Dylan - Diamond Joe - Good As I Been To You
See, this is what Dylan was all about when Columbia tried filling Madison Square Garden with hosanas in a transparent attempt to move a double album of Dylan covers. A collection of traditional folk covers (with a horrible album front) must've been the last thing the label wanted their legendary act to deliver, but damnit if the songs don't sound fantastic. The chameleon struck again...

7. Beastie Boys - Groove Holmes - Check Your Head
Wow. When this one came on I thought I'd stumbled onto a Medeski, Martin & Wood track I didn't know I had. I've never been a huge Beastie Boys fan, and though over the years I gladly copied all their albums from Mr. Chair I think I've only ever listened to the songs I already knew from radio. This is funky organ-driven jazz. Weird.

8. Mary J. Blige - Intro Talk - What's The 411
It was Mike Doughty's cover of "Real Love" on his Skittish album that finally made me check out Mary J. Blige, and while the album has never thrilled me, I found enough unexpected features to come out with thumbs up. For one, she brings in Busta Rhymes as a prominent contributor, which is never a bad thing. Still, "Real Love" is the album's highlight, and I have to confess I'll always prefer Doughty's version.

9. The Pharcyde - Officer - Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde
Another early (mid?) hip-hop classic that I never got passed the hits on. Jazzy and funky, it's an interesting notion in 2009 to stand this album alongside The Chronic, which brought a sort of paranoid intensity and an entirely new theory of sound to West Coast hip-hop. (The proceeding sentence was courtesy of the fact that I only really know "Passin' Me By" from this album, and the fact that I'd rather any song from The Chronic have come up on shuffle instead.)

10. Morphine - You Speak My Language - Good
Even thought I'll never see Good as anything other than a warm-up for the excellent Cure For Pain, one of the albums I played to death for several years and would still call one of the top 10 records of the 1990s, it's worth remembering how out of place a sax-bass-drums trio was in the early 1990s. I love the band, and even though I did get the opportunity to see them play once, I remain heartbroken by Mark Sandman's death, which was mere weeks before Morphine was supposed to join Soul Coughing for a show at Phoenix's Celebrity Theatre. I have no doubt that would've been a show I'd still be talking about in 2009.

DOWNLOAD:
Morphine - You Speak My Language (live)

The Hump Day Shuffle: 1991

1. Bob Dylan - Seven Curses - The Bootleg Series, Volume 2
I can't fathom why Dylan left this off The Times They Are A-Changin' album. It's a song of mystery and the sort of dreamy, psychedelic storytelling that characterized "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall." Dylan's early songs had tremendous structure - here the entire song is rooted in numbers and counting (Seven Curses, of course). Any other songwriter alive would have this song at the top of a Best Of album. But not Dylan; he tossed it, and let it sit there for nearly 30 years. And here's how that translated: only one person to my knowledge has covered "Seven Curses" (Tom Russell), while my collection has more than a dozen covers by nine bands of "Hard Rain," and nearly 20 versions by a dozen different people of "Blowin' In The Wind."

2. Guns N' Roses - Garden Of Eden - Use Your Illusion I
What was bold and a marketing coup in 1991 seems especially unnecessary now. This is one of the songs that could've easily been clipped to make one really kick-ass Use Your Illusion album. Then, nowadays - perhaps right before the release of Chinese Democracy - Geffen could've put out the ultimate Deluxe Use Your Illusion, and pull all those purged songs back out of the vault. Instead, no matter how great the keepers are, the Use Your Illusions are remembered as the ultimate "filler" records.



3. U2 - Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses - Achtung Baby
This has long been my favorite U2 record, by a long shot actually, despite the fact that I got into it about eight years after it came out. I can cite the general atmospherics, I suppose, but it's not like U2 never brought that sort of dreamy soundscape before. More than anything, it just really hit me, and "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" is a big part of that. Bono sounds like a wiseman and a searcher simultaneously on this song, and it's one of the bigger "builders" of the band's catalog. When I kicked off this weekly shuffle with a prologue picking my favorite album for each year of my life, Achtung Baby came out on top for 1991, and this is just the second time in the weekly shuffles that a song from the year's favorite album has come up (X's "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch," from 1981's Wild Gift)

4. De La Soul - My Brother's A Basehead - De La Soul Is Dead
I don't know this album as much as Three Feet High And Rising, and it wasn't part of my teen years, so hearing this song fresh so far removed from the album's time definitely creates a disconnect. Regardless, De La Soul brought at least two amazing albums to the world in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and it takes a blind, stubborn dismissiveness to ignore that fact. Rural Northern Arizona isn't the most enlightened place to grow up, and the anti-rap pull was strong there, so I missed a lot the first time around.

5. Sebadoh - Rennaissance Man - III
I got the reissue of this a couple years back, trying to figure out exactly what the big deal was with Sebadoh, and I think I'm still searching. My freshman roommate had the Rebound EP, which I still love, but with the stubbornly low-fi recording approach, the band's earlier stuff seems to throw up a deliberate veil that I can't seem to get around to actually find the songs.

6. Billy Bragg - Rumours of War - Don't Try This At Home
It's not like Billy Bragg got political as his career went along - quite the opposite, in fact - but those political songs just started seeming so much heavier. The strings (cello especially), the spare piano and the hazy slowness of Bragg's vocals make this sort of song a far cry from his frantic strumming and shouting of the early 1980s. But unlike most musicians, Bragg handled the disparity in styles without skipping a beat.

7. Gin Blossoms - Just South of Nowhere - Up And Crumbling
What the world got to know of the Gin Blossoms was a band just passed its peak, about to embark on a heartbreakingly steep decline. The jangly bar rock that sent the band soaring to begin with had all its edges sanded away by the major label executives (A&M in this case, long since having lost its rep as an artist friendly label). Then the band's creative force, Doug Hopkins, was kicked out of the band, killing himself not long after. It's a heartbreaking and amazing story, chronicled in great detail by Hopkins' friend, Brian Smith. Seriously, if you want one of the best pieces of music journalism around, read Smith's Jusus of Surbubia. The Gin Blossoms will always remain one of my favorite bands; check out Dusted if you want one of rock's all-time great unheard records.



8. DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - Summertime (reprise) - Homebase
This is what I knew of rap in 1991, instead of De La Soul, but Summertime has had a bit of a rennaissance with me over the last couple years as it hit me that aside from all the Fresh Prince hype, it's one hell of a song. With Jazzy Jeff and Quincy Jones on hand, this fell right in between the goofy kid rap and the Hollywood blockbuster musical commercials that defined the rest of the Fresh Prince's career.

9. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Suck My Kiss - Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Now we've come to my favorite 1991 album at the time. Nothing was cooler in junior high in my mind, not even Pearl Jam's Ten or Nirvana's Nevermind. It's still a high-water mark for alternative rock. That "Suck My Kiss" was about the fourth single really speaks to the album's quality. This song is bouncy, hard (but not heavy, an important distinction then), with just about the most authoritative bassline in alternative music.



10. Pixies - Head On - Trompe Le Monde
I've always had a hard time remembering whether this was a Pixies song covered by Jesus & Mary Chain, or the other way around. Hopefully this little exercise will serve to make it stick in my mind that it's a Jesus & Mary Chain original, covered excellently by the Pixies. "Head On" might be from the band's swan song, but it's as strong as anything the Pixies ever did.

DOWNLOAD:
Bob Dylan - Seven Curses (live)
U2 - Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses (live)
Gin Blossoms - Just South of Nowhere (live)