Eleven Albums from the Past 30 Years

A little over three years ago I wrote a number of blogs about albums I can’t live without – my desert island picks, if you will – and I ended up with 58 albums. Since then I’ve listened to a whole lot of music, including new discoveries and some older releases that I’d overlooked the first go around, and I thought I’d summarize my favorites in my next few blogs.

Incidentally, while I’ve written several times about the merits of physical music mediums – most recently in January of this year – I haven’t captured the case quite as eloquently as David Holmes in this month’s issue of Esquire. Check it out.

So here goes – in reverse chronological order – a bunch of albums that I’ve listened to over the past three years. And to Holmes’s point, I actually remembered these albums rather than relying on Spotify to tell me my play history.

Sammy Rae – Let’s Throw a Party (2021).  This is only an EP, so if I’m allowed to bend the rules, I’d couple this release with 2018’s The Good Life – also an EP – for one full-length album. My wife and I got to see Sammy Rae in November (and all of my children are seeing her in their respective cities – she’s managed to attract the attention of my 19-year-old all the way up to my 53-year-old self) and she is easily among the top five performers I’ve ever seen. If you have a chance to see her, do it, even if you don’t think her albums are the bee’s knees, which they are. Ebullient, energetic, contagious, Rae is also a vocal gymnast with a kick-ass band. Thanks to my son for exposing me to this artist.

Black Pumas – Black Pumas (2018).  I also got to see this band in 2021 – my first show in 18 months due to the pandemic, and this is simply the best rock band to come out in recent history. Offering swampy, Austin soul, this duo churns out melodies over intoxicating grooves and doesn’t let up. And singer Eric Burton is…well…as amazing as the aforementioned Sammy Rae. A powerhouse. And a kick-ass logo and album cover to boot! Rae could learn a thing or two about their graphic design.

Flying Colors – Second Nature (2014).  Oh, the alluring bombast of prog rock! It’s a genre that these days often borders on metal, which isn’t in my wheelhouse, but wowie wow wow, this release by Flying Colors, a sort of super group with former members of Dixie Dregs, Deep Purple, Dream Theater and others, is the bomb, offering grandiose, anthemic rock that’s complicated and heavy without going over the edge. It’s also melodic as hell, which is what I always desire. This release – the band’s second – is the better of their three releases, and it accompanied me for many hours as I worked on my basement in 2020. I wish I could remember how I first heard of them; I think it may have been the podcast Political Beats. As with so many albums from the CD Age, it’s too damn long and the final two or three tracks should have been scratched, but those first six tracks would make a killer normal album-length venture.

Queens of the Stone Age – …Like Clockwork (2013).  This probably should have made my list from 2019. I first heard the song “I Sat by the Ocean” while driving home late at night and nearly pulled the car over. What the hell was this? A pulsating, edgy ditty with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind lyrics and a unique vocalist. Wonderful, as is the whole album, toes dipping in melancholy and angst that often hits the spot for me. Why it took my TWENTY YEARS to discover this band is mind-boggling, but as I’ve admitted before, I have my blind spots. Like, nearly my entire periphery.

Bright Eyes – The People’s Key (2011).  Kudos to WXRT for playing the song “Jejune Stars” one afternoon while I was driving (You see? It really does pay to drive sometimes and listen to whatever is out there) and thought, hot damn. I memorized just enough lyrics to do a Google search upon arriving home and discovered once again that I was listening to a band that was TWENTY YEARS OLD! I’m seeing this band this Saturday in Chicago and am really excited to see how this band plays live. (Update: they were excellent.)

The Red Button – As Far As Yesterday Goes (2011).  Damn, this is good. Once again Spotify gets credit for this one, as the title track of this band’s sophomore effort came up while listening to Emitt Rhodes’s radio (Rhodes will come up in my next blog). I actually thought the song was a Rhodes recording; it was such early-70s-powerpop-perfection, but this comes from a duo of veteran LA musicians, and they really hit the nail on the head after their 2007 debut. Once again, I learned about a band ten years AFTER the fact. Sensing a trend?

William Shatner – Has Been (2004).  I’ve written about this one before but failed to include it in my top albums back in 2018. With Ben Folds at the helm and with contributions by Joe Jackson, Aimee Mann, Henry Rollins and Brad Paisley, this is a terrific blend of comedy, insight, vulnerability, irony and sentiment. If you’re skeptical, I get it, but listen to the first three tracks on the album and then tell me Shatner doesn’t have something very real to offer.

U2 – How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004).  I remember seeing the iPod commercial with the accompanying U2 song “Vertigo” during the summer Olympics and thinking, well hell, this is refreshing! I love the tune, and probably the first 7 or 8 of this release before it starts to wane a bit. But for me, this is superior to the critically praised All the things You Can’t Leave Behind, and it represents the last gasp of a band that has probably overstayed its welcome. I’m still pissed that I’ve never seen these guys live. Hell, one of my daughters has seen them twice!

Kate Schrock – Dames Rocket (2000).  I’d completely forgotten about this gem, but then last year when I was cataloging my CDs on Discogs I happened upon this album again, having to clear away the cobwebs before my memory started to come back. Of course! I love this album! And those horns were arranged by my old Berklee buddy Tom Snow! I was delighted to be reacquainted with this singer from Maine. The album gets better as it goes, with “River,” “The Wait” and “St. Jude” absolutely killer. Wonderful.

k.d. lang – Ingenue (1992).  Another one of those gems that I simply forget to listen to, but after revisiting it I recalled that this is the real deal. Lang’s voice is unrivaled, absolutely perfect, and the music on this LP offers complex textures: sensual, moody and passionate, desire oozing from the grooves. The album takes it’s time – perfect for sitting back in the recliner with a bourbon in hand on a cold, winter’s evening. The final track, “Constant Craving,” got some radio play back in the day, but the penultimate “Tears of Love’s Recall” is one that really grabs me. 

Psychodots – Psychodots (1991).  Digging into the band The Bears led me to this follow-up band – with the same members minus Adrian Belew – and I spent the next two months listening to this album. The song “Stella” is perfect; I once played it on repeat for an hour straight on my back patio. This band played its last show just a few months ago in their hometown Cincinnati, and I’m sorry I never saw them in any formation, including the original band, The Raisins, whose LP I’m still on the lookout for.

That takes me through the 90s! I’ll add twelve additional album next week as I cover the 80s through the 50s.

WORDLE STRATEGIES

My daughter introduced me to Wordle last week, and in short order I determined that it was probably best to have a strategy or at least consciously choose how I want to play the game going forward. Others have undoubtedly already done this work, but I thought it would be a fun mental exercise to try to come up with the most efficient and successful methods.

To help make these decisions, I thought it best to learn what the 20 most-used letters are in the English language in order of usage. They are:

E A R I O T N S L C U D P M H G B F Y W

(NOTE: an even better bit of information would be to discover the most-used letters in five-letter words, but I’m not sure how to find this information.)

OPENING WORDS

For starters, it might make sense to guess a word that uses as many of the top-five letters as possible.  The word I came up with is RATIO, which is comprised of four of the top-five letters (A R I and O), and also the sixth (T), leaving out only E. Certainly, there are times when none of these letters will be helpful, but if you’re playing the odds, it might be a good method to follow.

Another possible first word might be one with as many highly-used consonants as possible, since vowels might not be as helpful in guessing a word. STERN would likely be a good one, as it uses the four most highly used consonants, plus the most popular vowel.

STRATEGY #1

It seems to me that the most “honest” approach to solving Wordle is to guess an initial word and then use any letters that you’ve guessed correctly in each subsequent guess. For example, if you guessed the word RATIO and Wordle tells you that the A is in the correct place and that there is a T in the word, your second guess would have to keep the A in the second position and use a T somewhere in the word. So perhaps I would guess TAMED for my second entry. This strategy certainly poses challenging scenarios, as sometimes it’s very difficult to come up with a word that uses the correctly-guessed letters, especially after three or more guesses. But that’s not how the game works; Wordle doesn’t force you to use letters that you’ve guessed correctly in subsequent guesses, which opens up the following very interesting scenarios.

STRATEGY #2

Even if I stand firm on using the word RATIO as my first guess, it might now make sense to ignore whatever letters I may or may not guess correctly in my first word and now use as many of the remaining top-ten letters as possible. I can do this by entering the word CLUES as my second guess. The words RATIO and CLUES will use up nine of the top ten most-used letters, substituting U – the 11th most-used letter – for N, so it employs ten of the top eleven letters. If I don’t get the results I’m looking for, a good third guess might be the word HANDY, which uses A once again, but now adds the heretofore unused H, N, D and Y, that latter of which is often a sneaky overlooked vowel in words like CYNIC.

Starting with RATIO, then CLUES and then HANDY, if necessary, might be a good strategy, but it doesn’t use the top fifteen letters; it uses 13 of the top 15 letters, plus Y (and A twice). There might be a better way.

STRATEGY #3

What about trying to use all of the top-15 letters in the first three guesses, regardless of how many letters you guess correctly? If I were to apply this scenario, I could guess the words MENUS, CHARD and PILOT. All fifteen top-15 letters are used. I wouldn’t worry about what letters I guessed correctly in my first two guesses; I’d simply enter these three words and then spend guesses four through six on getting the correct word.

STRATEGY #4

Finally, I might decide that I really want to include the letter Y in one of my first three guesses, since this letter can often be used as a vowel. In this case, I might enter the following words: PRICE, LUSTY and MANGO, which encompasses 13 of the top 15 letters, plus G and Y in place of D and H.

THE HYPOTHESIS

There may be two objectives in determining which strategy to employ: the one that’s most successful and the one that’s most challenging, as sometimes it’s good to make the brain work hard. I believe STRATEGY #1 will be the most challenging, but my guess is STRATEGY #3 will probably be the most successful.

To find out, I’m going to play five games of Wordle using all four methods (plus an additional attempt at Strategy 1 using a different word). Sure, the results won’t be statistically significant, but it’ll be at least a clue into how best to approach the game.

THE RESULTS

I played twenty-five Wordle games, and given my limitation as a wordsmith, here are the results:

Strategy 1A (Starting with RATIO and sticking with correctly-guessed letters) is definitely the hardest, as expected. I got four of five words, but it took a long while, ranging from 100 seconds to over seven minutes (yeah, I know. I was stumped). Now, this strategy may work for someone who’s very quick and clever with words, but for me this didn’t work.

Strategy 1B (Starting with STERN and sticking with correctly-guessed letters) had better results. I got four of five words again, but my times were quicker: from 55 seconds to just over two minutes.

Strategy 2 (Starting with RATIO and CLUES) was very quick when it worked, but it only worked 3 of 5 times. When I guessed correctly, my times ranged from twenty-one seconds to a bit under two minutes. 

Strategy 3 (Starting with MENUS, CHARD and PILOT) was the most successful. I got all five correct – three of them in four turns, which is of course the fewest turns this strategy allows. Additionally, my times were pretty good, with three under a minute, one at 90 seconds, and one that took just over three minutes (and shouldn’t have taken that long. I was being dim.)

Strategy 4 (Starting with PRICE, MANGO and LUSTY) worked pretty well, but not as successfully at Strategy 3. I got four of five correct, ranging from 33 seconds to just under three minutes.

CONCLUSIONS

So which method is best?  In terms of brainpower, I think I would go with Strategy 1A: use RATIO as my first guess and then use any correctly-guessed letters ongoing. If I don’t want to exert myself quite so much, STERN would probably be a better bet.

For speed and wins, Strategy 3 (Starting with MENUS, CHARD and PILOT) appears to be best, though I only tested the methods five times. It may be that strategies 2 or 4 are better over the long haul.

Of course, there are words that will be a challenge regardless of strategy, and sometimes I come upon a word that I simply don’t know. I imagine other players employ slightly different methods for solving their puzzles, but having a strategy is probably a better bet than just winging it.

I’ll likely immerse myself in Wordle for a week or two and then go back to my dreaded crossword puzzles, an art form that I will never remotely master.

Baseball Digs its Own Grave

Major League Baseball was already in trouble. With dwindling attendance after peaking in 2007, game times ballooning to 3 hours and eleven minutes (even after instituting some foolhardy rule changes), and lagging World Series TV ratings, it could be argued that baseball is on its way out, crying uncle to the multitude of other forms of entertainment. Hell, I raised three kids to love baseball, and they tell me that baseball isn’t really a thing their friends are interested in. Sure, maybe they go to the ballpark once a year for the hell of it, but as far as checking box scores and standings and tuning into games on TV, baseball has largely lost the next generation of fans. Of course, having World Series games that start at 8:09PM EST hasn’t exactly helped, has it? Why the MLB insists that they can gain the most market share by having as few young people watch the game as possible is perplexing. Football seems to have factored young fans into its calculous, but baseball has its collective head up its collective ass.

Ah, but not as far as we thought, apparently, because they’ve managed to push it in a little further still. 

Yes, Russia is invading Ukraine, America has just suffered through the worst two crises since World War II, people have lost full-time jobs and found only part-time jobs in return, the planet is heating up and water levels are rising, but baseball players and owners – these entitled pricks who get to play a game or get to be billionaires – are fighting over money. Never mind the multitudes who will be adversely affected as a result: the restaurant and bar owners, hotel chains, vendors, and local tourist attractions. Baseball has flipped them the proverbial bird. Screw you. We want our money!

It’s akin to something I read in Politico last week about the shenanigans that the far left in San Francisco employed recently during the pandemic. Autumn Looijen, co-founder of the Recall SF School Board campaign is quoted:

Imagine you’re in San Francisco. There’s been an earthquake. You’re out on the sidewalk in a tent because you’re not sure if your home is safe to go back to. And you’re cooking your meals on the sidewalk, you’re trying to do normal things. You’ve been there for months. Finally, your elected leaders show up and you’re like, ‘Thank God, here’s some help.’ And they say, ‘We are here to help. We’re going to change the street signs for you.’

Yep.

She’s spot-on, of course. And the same quote could be applied to Major League Baseball. The American people have endured several punches to the gut these past two years and could use some fun, lighthearted entertainment. So what does baseball do?  Shut down and argue about money.

I have cancelled my MLBTV subscription. This will put a strain on my marriage this summer. It will make my life less pleasant. I will have to find new things to do on weekday evenings when all I want to do is crack open a beer and enjoy the quintessential summer game. 

Screw ‘em. I’m done.

Deceptive Downbeats (reprised)

On Adam Neely’s latest video (fantastic, as always), he discusses something called “post-facto metric ambiguity,” a fancy term that I’ve written about previously, albeit under a different term: deceptive downbeats. It’s a way to describe a musical passage – often at the beginning of a piece – that’s difficult to rhythmically understand until a downbeat is established. I love this stuff, and there are a bunch of tunes that trip me up even after I know the “correct” way of hearing them. Neely addressed the intro to The Beatles’ classic, “Drive My Car,” and it’s one of many examples one can turn to. I definitely recommend Adam’s video (and his channel in general) and have copied below my original blog on the subject matter, written almost exactly ten years ago.

Deceptive Downbeats (a musical observation)

February 02, 2012

When listening to music, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as a surprise: a harmony that doesn’t resolve as expected, a lyric that takes a comedic twist or a melody that jumps an odd interval away.

What excites me the most (and what lays to rest any question of my geekdom) is a rhythm that doesn’t change time signatures, but that still manages to fake the listener out, intentionally or not, by calling the downbeat into question. In this scenario, what you initially hear as the “one” beat you come to find is someplace else entirely, and your ears are left to add or subtract a beat or a half a beat in order to get back in synch with a song, like dancing to a CD that skips and having to make an adjustment before you step on your partner’s toes.

My favorite example occurs in the Yes song, “Yours is no Disgrace."  For over three decades I’ve never failed to hear the first chord as landing on the “and” of four in a 4/4 measure.  Give a listen:

I hear the song as: 

But once the band kicks in, it sounds like Yes has subtracted a beat, inserting a measure of 3/4 instead of 4/4 (and with Yes, this is an entirely plausible proposition). In truth, the time signature remains constant for this part of the song, but my ears hear the downbeat incorrectly. The first note lands on the “and” of one, not four:

Even with this knowledge, I still hear the rhythm the way I always have, and after thirty years (note: now forty!), I guess I kind of like it that way.

Another example is Sting’s “Ghost Story.” This song starts similarly, with an instrumental passage absent an obvious count-in.  But even when Sting’s voice enters, the downbeat is in question:

I’ve always heard first note coming on beat two of a 4/4 measure: 

But as soon as Sting sings “Another winter comes, his icy fingers creep,” a half a beat is added, and it become clear that all along the initial note of each phrase had in fact landed on the “and” of one:

Sting uses this deceptive tactic often, though I suspect in his mind there’s nothing deceptive about it since he hears the downbeat where it should be, and there are probably many listeners who hear it correctly right off the bat. But to me, my faulty instincts add to the pleasure of the song, providing just enough jolt to keep things interesting.

AN ADDENDUM: I was going to add a “part two” to this idea many years ago and never did, but there are a few more examples I can think of off the top of my head:

The piano that begins the outro of Supertramp’s “Crime of the Century.”
The intro to “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones.
The intro to “Fortress Around Your Heart” by Sting.

Great stuff! Shoot me a message if you’ve got some other examples.

The Film, Avalon

If pressed to name my favorite movie of all time, I’ll either answer Rear Window, Hitchock’s 1954 suspense thriller, or Avalon, Barry Levinson’s 1990 family biopic. The latter barely registered at the box office when it was released during my final semester of college, but its absence from Best Picture contention a few months later was – in my mind – a glaring omission. I thought it was cinematic perfection, the very reason we have “the movies.” It’s also the kind of film that is no longer made. But back in 1990, Levinson, riding high after his Oscar win for Rain Main two years earlier, was largely given free rein to write and direct whatever he wished, and drawing from his own childhood, he struck gold with Avalon, a tale about the fragmentation of the family – and perhaps of society itself – after the rise of television and suburbia.

My roommate Mark and I had seen a preview for the film on TV, and we decided to devote a weekday evening to watch it at the theater near the capital in Madison, Wisconsin. The addition of a couple of young women – one of whom was transporting us to and from the movie – initiated a mild debate about which film to see: Avalon or Welcome Home, Roxy Charmichael. The latter wasn’t without merit: the poster offered an enticing Winona Ryder dressed in a hot pink dress, revealing quite a lot of leg, but cooler heads prevailed, i.e., Mark and I had made our decision and we weren’t budging, a dangerous position given the potential ridicule we might have garnered if the movie was a dud. Fortunately, by film’s end, all four of us were either suppressing tears, or – in the case of one of the women we were with – outright blubbering. It was one of those movies that struck a chord, with its themes of family, loss, and legacy.

No less important than the film itself was the haunting score by Randy Newman, which, although nominated, didn’t earn Newman his first Oscar win, however deserved (he could have just as easily won for his score for Awakenings that year, but that wasn’t nominated, and his first Academy Award win wouldn’t occur for another eleven years). The music from Avalon stayed with me for months afterward, actually waking me from dreams, all without the aid of additional viewings. I’d heard the score once, and my subconscious remembered it. It was that good. 

I didn’t see the movie again until the fall of 1992, when I recorded a VHS tape it off of cable, and I purchased the soundtrack on CD around the same time, eventually transcribing some of the themes from the score into a “piano highlights” piece that I still have. Nearly thirty years later, while shopping at a record store in Columbus, Ohio, my son came across a vinyl copy of the soundtrack, and I came to learn that Reprise Records released the record in 2020 as part of its “The Sound of Movies (…and Television!)” series, a noble endeavor for the movie/vinyl enthusiast. I now own Avalon on CD, DVD and vinyl, and the movie poster adorns my basement wall. I’ve seen in probably twenty times or so, and over the years I’ve enjoyed showing it to my children and a few friends who I felt might respond well to it.

In 2015, Levinson and Newman were interviewed about the film during its 25th anniversary, and it’s well worth a read if you’re a fan of the movie or the score, or both.

Here’s hoping the movie gets more recognition in retrospect than it did upon its release.