Song of the Day
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Song of the Day: “Happy Days”
While McCoy Tyner is known far and wide for his indelible influence on jazz piano, his contribution to the genre would still be staggering if he had decided to throw in the towel in 1965, after leaving John Coltrane’s quartet. However,…
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Song of the Day: “Memphis Blues”
The story goes that up-and-coming composer W.C. Handy, an admirer of Scott Joplin and John Philip Sousa, was waiting at a small-town train station somewhere in the Mississippi Delta in 1903 when he happened to overhear a man playing the guitar.…
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Song of the Day: “Can’t Get Used to Losing You”
In the furor surrounding the unexpected release over the weekend of Beyonce’s “visual album” Lemonade, the general attitude toward Queen Bey’s newest creation is surprise, exuberance, and unadulterated glee. Much of the groundbreaking project, which the mega-artist somehow recorded and…
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Song of the Day: “Berlin Got Blurry”
Strangeness is not altogether a new concept for Parquet Courts, a NYC-based band that resists labels but falls somewhere between garage rock and post-punk, with an overarching sympathy for “indie” (whatever that means today). The arty group have gained notoriety…
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Song of the Day: “Too Small For Eyes”
The delicate, wounded sound of Kristine Leschper’s voice is the first thing that stands out from her band Mothers’s new release, When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired. Like a reed instrument, it trills and dips with a gentle dexterity…
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Song of the Day: “Hey, No Pressure”
Anything you want your life to mean It can mean Hey no pressure …Ray LaMontagne sings on his gritty, head-nodding new single, “Hey, No Pressure,” a track that fully embraces the strains of Jimi Hendrix and psychedelia that rose to the…
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Song of the Day: “Devil In A New Dress”
We can accuse Kanye West of a lot of things—arrogance, insensitivity, paranoia, ingratitude… the list goes on. But one thing he is not guilty of is dishonesty. The longer he spends in the international media spotlight (and he’s going on thirteen years…
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Song of the Day: “Misunderstood”
The incredible cacophony of the bridge on Wilco’s definitive ballad “Misunderstood” is all the more striking because of its contrast with the rest of the tender, harmonious song. The brilliance of songwriter Jeff Tweedy is on full display here as…
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Song of the Day: “Clean Up Woman”
Sometimes the energy in a song is so palpable that you can tell the musicians have hit gold. That’s the case with the 1971 single by Betty Wright, “Clean Up Woman,” a soul song whose popularity at the time signified its…
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Song of the Day: “Up From The Skies”
In February of 1968, Jimi Hendrix’s album Axis: Bold As Love hit #3 on the charts in the United States. While still dominated by experimentation, both in terms of the music and in studio production, the album highlighted Hendrix’s lyrics…
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Song of the Day: “White Shoes”
You can get your hair all wet sleeping on the riverbed Kiss a frog and then dissect, gotta find out what’s inside And you can have my bad side too, anything you wanna do Sure anything you wanna do …Conor…
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Song of the Day: “Hard To Tell”
The genre of bluegrass receives its fair share of criticism. Considered by some to be a backwater of the teeming estuary of American music known as country, bluegrass, characterized by a decidedly twangier sound, gets unfairly stereotyped as the redneck’s music…