Jim Connelly

Certain Songs #2529: Sturgill Simpson – “In Bloom”

January 14, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: A Sailor’s Guide to Earth
Year: 2016

. . .

On his third album, Sturgill Simpson’s ambition burst into full bloom: A Sailor’s Guide to Earth was nothing less than a song cycle about a father explaining to his newborn how to exist on this crazy plane of existence.

And so it was an album of risks, as he expanded his musical palette to include rock, blues, and tons and tons of horn-inflected soul, throwing his big voice over big soundscapes. That said, one of the biggest risks was the Nirvana cover smack dab in the middle of the record. And not just a Nirvana cover, but a Nirvana cover that redirected, if not redefined the song’s original intent.

Certain Songs #2528: Sturgill Simpson – “Turtles All The Way Down”

January 13, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Metamodern Sounds in Country Music
Year: 2014

. . .

Like Jamey Johnson or Whitey Morgan, the second Sturgill Simpson starts singing, I get instant flashbacks to when Waylon Jennings helped me fall in love with country music, which we’ll definitely discuss when we get there.

Certain Songs #2527: The Strokes – “Juicebox”

January 12, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: First Impressions of Earth
Year: 2006

. . .

And so the second Strokes album, Room on Fire, was pretty good. And over the years, as we get away from the circumstances of its release — follow-up to a impactful album — it sounds even better. But at the time, it kinda felt like More of The Same, which was the exact opposite of a second album we discussed a couple of weeks ago, The Stone Roses’ Second Coming, which was slagged as being Not More of The Same.

Second albums are a trap, man.

Certain Songs #2526: The Strokes – “Hard to Explain”

January 10, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Is This It
Year: 2001

. . .

On the song that was the first single released from This Is It, producer Gordon Raphael compressed drummer Fabrizo Morettis drums so much that they sounded like a drum machine, which I guess begs the question why not use a real drum machine? But of course, the answer is in the question, and even if Moretti’s snare is almost fully lost, there is so much forward momentum in “Hard to Explain,” it almost doesn’t matter.

Certain Songs #2525: The Strokes – “Last Nite”

January 9, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Is This It
Year: 2001

. . .

The biggest song on Is This It combined two flavors you wouldn’t think would taste great together and made a cool punk-adjacent hybrid out of them.

The first element was the jangly guitar rock of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, whose initial signature hit, “American Girl” was lifted pretty much wholesale for the opening, the guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr bouncing against each other as the song builds into its verses, at which point bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti go all Motown on us, just as Julian Casablancas sings the first verse.

Certain Songs #2524: The Strokes – “The Modern Age”

January 6, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Is This It
Year: 2001

. . .

Hey Millennials, wanna feel old? Is This It has been out for over 20 years! Hey Zoomers, wanna feel ignorant? The whole “Nepo Baby” discussion y’all recently been having happened around this record when it came out. Hey Boomers, ahhh never mind.

Certain Songs #2523: The Streets – “Dry Your Eyes”

January 5, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: A Grand Don’t Come For Free
Year: 2004

. . .

I always find it weird when my favorite song by an artist isn’t really typical of what they normally do, which means that I might give people who haven’t heard of that artist the wrong impression. Like if “Love Hurts” was the only song anybody ever knew from Nazareth, which it probably is. (Unless it’s “Hair of The Dog.”)

So let me start off by saying that “Dry Your Eyes” sounds like absolutely nothing else on the second album by The Streets, 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free, which is basically a hip-hop concept album written and performed by Mike Skinner, who has been releasing Streets albums for nearly two decades.

Certain Songs #2522: The Stratford 4 – “Telephone”

January 4, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Love & Distortion
Year: 2003

. . .

I know I’ve probably mentioned this before — with over 2500 of these suckers, I’ve probably mentioned everything before — but in the early 2000s, one of my main ways of getting new music was passing a hard drive around between Tim, Kirk & I. Because we all had different methods of finding music, one of us would always discover something the other two hadn’t.

And thus, the hard drive, the totally offline way we would share music with each other. And so, I’m pretty sure it was Tim who turned me on to The Stratford 3, the shoegazey band from San Francisco, and their two albums, 2002’s The Revolt Against Tired Noises and 2003’s Love & Distortion.

Certain Songs #2521: The Stranglers – “(Get a) Grip (On Yourself)”

January 3, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: Rattus Norvegicus
Year: 1977

. . .

While further investigation revealed I didn’t really like them all that much, my initial exposure to the music was of The Stranglers was a positive one, as it was on a 1982 compilation called Burning Ambitions: A History of Punk. The whole thing was a bit cheeky — punk had only been around for five years, but people were already calling it dead from the start, of course — but as I was still playing catch-up, having neither unlimited time nor funds, it was a great overview of what I’d missed, as none of punk’s biggest bands (Clash, Pistols, Ramones, Jam) deigned to participate.

Certain Songs #2520: Stories – “Brother Louie”

January 2, 2023 by Jim Connelly

Album: About Us
Year: 1973

. . .

It’s a shame that most younger people people now associate this song with an admittedly great (at the time) TV show that kinda fell into purgatory after its creator, the comedian Louis C.K., admitted to a whole bunch of bad behavior involving his dick and a power imbalance with the women who didn’t want him to show it to them.

I’m not here to re-litigate any of this — though those who decry “cancel culture” might wanna note that C.K. won a Grammy in 2022 — but rather to point out that I was a bit uneasy with the use of “Brother Louie” in the first place, because it took the chorus out of the context of the rest of the song. But I was OK with it, because it probably turned people on the the original, which still sounds great.
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