Category: Music

Here’s something a little lighter than the last couple of entries, seeing as it’s a weekend and all: Pop-music blogger Jason Hare has a regular Friday feature called “Chart Attack!” in which he posts the Top Ten songs from a past week ending on the same date, and goes through the songs. This week’s entry,… Continue reading Chart Attack!

As noted a little while back, I recently bought Tom Waits’s Orphans collection, which includes a number of covers that are given his “lounge singer from another planet” treatment. Most notable among these is probably “Sea of Love,” which I first heard through the Robert Plant side project the Honeydrippers, but has been covered by… Continue reading Cover Songs That Shouldn’t Be

I did an iTunes run recently, and picked up Tom Waits’s three-disc collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, along with a couple of other albums (TV On the Radio and the Decemberists among them). As is my usual practice, I put these records into the “Party Shuffle” on iTunes, so I get a chance to… Continue reading Too Much Tom Waits

It’s that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend? The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a “best of 2006” list, as it keeps records of… Continue reading 2006: The Best Music

We’re back in town, and I’ll schedule some science stuff for later today, but first I want to take a moment to note the passing of the hardest working man in show business. Much as we’d like to see him shake the cape off and run back to the mike one more time, James Brown… Continue reading Can We Hit It and Quit?

We’re off to do our annual holiday trek all over New England. We will have sporadic Internet access, but don’t expect any blogging before next Wednesday. Not that anybody’s going to be reading blogs over the weekend, anyway… If you’d like some seasonal music, below the fold is a list of the 21 songs from… Continue reading Christmas Songs That Don’t Suck

The problem with the holiday season is that it just flies by so fast– it seems like you’ve barely finished clearing away the Thanksgiving dishes, and then you find that you’ve already missed Mellowmas. Haven’t heard of that one? Well, it’s a new holiday invented by jefitoblog and Jason Hare, explained by jefito thusly: For… Continue reading The Good, the Bad, and the Mellow

Along with tacky an inescapable Christmas music, December brings lists, as every publication that deals with music at all puts out their own compilation of songs or albums of the year. The definitive Uncertain Principles Songs of 2006 list will be coming up, but if you’re just dying to see ordered lists of pop music,… Continue reading Season of the List