I have for a while reported my recent music listening on The Platform Previously Known as Twitter, but since that’s increasingly barren of my friends (rightly, in my view), I thought I’d begin modulating toward posting the report here. It’s broken into tweet-sized bits, which has the advantage of keeping me from going on and on about random topics, but does incline toward a bare-bones style of reporting. Here we go:
It’s been a while, so perhaps time for my last fortnight according to last.fm:
1 Elvis Costello [& The Attractions] 15 scrobbles
2 The Beatles 10
3 The Band 9
4 Beyoncé 7
5 Kirsty MacColl 7
6 The Clash 7
7 Frank Zappa 6
8 Juliana Hatfield 6
9 Michelle Shocked 6
10 Steve Earle 6
As always, this omits the Mountain Goats, which always turn up in a high slot in my play count, in part because they release so much music that random shuffle (my default*) will turn up more of theirs.
Sadly, this also misses out a couple of my favourites from the past weeks:
A flashback to ‘Mongoose’ by Elephant’s Memory…
Ed Watson pointed me to ‘Endurant’ by Bloodywood:
(Great as the cut is, this vocal style makes my flesh crawl, as I feel it in my throat.)
The world may weary of my promoting the music of my late friend Mikey Iafrate, but every time I hear his voice I think how strong this or that track is, and then feel the wave of grief to remember that he’s died…
Oh, and I rediscovered in the last week that my memory transposes the lyrics of the Marshall Tucker Band’s ‘Another Cruel Love’…
… with the defining melodic hook from the Allman Brothers’s ‘Jessica’.
(As Dickie Betts plays the riff, just sing along ‘It’s another cruel love, passing me by-y-y…’)
* Actually, I don’t use a strict random shuffle, but an awkward simulation of a weighted shuffle that favours tracks that I haven’t heard recently, and tracks that I’ve given higher rankings (on Apple’s five-star scale). But it’s a kludge, and I’d relish a chance to adopt a music player with a more sophisticated shuffle function.