I haven’t been too impressed by the recent spate of new album releases, so I found myself over the past few weeks revisiting some of my favorites from years past.
I was also inspired by a rewatch of HBO’s The Wire, which, if you don’t know, includes several Irish wakes for dead detectives. These wakes take place in an Irish cop bar in Baltimore. As part of each memorial, the survivors sing The Pogues at the top of their lungs.
That leads us to the first song on the November Rediscoveries playlist.
1. “A Pair of Brown Eyes” (1985)
This ballad off of The Pogues’ Rum Sodomy & the Lash album (produced by Elvis Costello) captures the “drunk to hell, nearly lifeless” poetic pathos of Shane MacGowan’s singular voice. The band brings you into the mythic desire that leads MacGowan “a-rovin” all over Ireland for the pair of brown eyes he once spotted looking at him through the legs of the drunks in a bar brawl. The song leaves you wanting to put your arm over MacGowan’s shoulder as the two of you stumble up into the emerald hills.
2. “The Boatman” (1991)
I listened to a lot of The Pogues while watching The Wire, and the 20th century interpretation of Irish traditional songs led me back to a band from my high-school years. I first heard The Levellers when they appeared on stage at the original Boston Garden in 1992 at WBCN’s New Music concert (this was also the first time I saw Phish, though I only went to the show because I wanted to see The Spin Doctors).
Of all the bands who played that night, The Levellers captured my attention with their electric fiddle. The next day, I headed to Coconuts at the local strip mall to purchase their album, where I quickly fell in love with the freedom-seeking spirit of “The Boatman.”
3. “Interstate Love Song” (1994)
My journey back to the 1990s somehow landed on this once-unavoidable MTV hit from Stone Temple Pilots, which came off their second album, Purple, in the heart of the Grunge Era. Thirty-two years later, this song is still catchy as hell.
Of course, the song, from his wife’s point of view, is about the late Scott Weiland’s lies. Away recording the album, he was lying to his wife about staying off heroin. Three decades on, we now know that his lies—“all of these things you’ve said to me”—resulted in his divorce in 2000 and later his overdose in 2015, which makes this timeless tune all the more tragic.
4. “The Colored F.B.I. Guy” (1989)
There’s a guest guitarist on Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple named Paul Leary. He’s the lead guitarist for The Butthole Surfers. Outside of their incredible name, The Butthole Surfers didn’t make their way into my CD player much when I was a teen. I wouldn’t discover them in any proper sense until the mid-2000s, when I watched the Fearless Freaks documentary about The Flaming Lips. The filmmaker interviews the lead singer of the Surfers, who basically accuses Wayne Coyne (lead singer of The Flaming Lips) of stealing their sound.
At that point, I was a big fan of the Lips, so I decided to check out more of The Butthole Surfers, and I gotta say, the accusation holds weight. They’re definitely two different bands, but if you like the Lips, then you’ll dig The Butthole Surfers.
This tune, off their 1989 EP Widowermaker!, is a good 2:46 introduction to their skills, but if you want to dive off the deep end, check out “Revolution Part 2” on the 1991 Pioughd album (Apple Music combines Pioughd + Widowermaker! onto one release, by the way).
5. “Keep on Chooglin’” (1969)
Leary’s extensive guitar playing on “The Colored F.B.I. Guy,” combined with the downbeat rhythm reminded me of this classic from Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Coming in at just under eight minutes, “Keep on Chooglin’” is Creedence at their best: simple and swampy with a fiery guitar, a kick-ass harmonica solo, and John Fogerty’s voice of America. The band rips; they just keep on chooglin’ without rest, picking up the pace when it requires it, settling back when the song begs them to, an uncompromising jam.
6. “I Was Real” (2019)
The repetition of “Chooglin’” sent me to one of my favorite bands these last few years—75 Dollar Bill—and their hypnotic “I Was Real.” 75 Dollar Bill is a duo, though they’re not afraid to expand their sound with other musicians and even, when necessary, a full marching band; the album I Was Real contains ten different musicians, all bringing their best.
The titular song, “I Was Real,” lasts about 17 minutes, and like “Keep on Chooglin’”, its repetition allows the chaos of the guitar work to soar. Last night, this song was playing on the Alexa while the three of us cleaned up the table after dinner, and it kept playing when my wife and I left the room and my fourteen-year-old stayed behind to wash the dishes. She continued to listen to it (unconsciously, I suspect) for a few minutes, but around the nine-minute mark, the volume and pace picked up a bit, which must have brought her back into the present because she very quickly said, with some attitude, “Alexa, stop!”
That’s the kind of hypnotism this song can conjure. It lets you depart into your mind, coloring your thoughts without you even knowing it, until the question, hello, what am I listening to!? demands your attention. If you’re reactive like a fourteen-year-old girl, you’ll just holler stop!, but if you let the question be asked with excitement rather than with the fear that you’re doing something weird, and you let the full seventeen minutes play out, I suspect, just a few minutes later, you’ll add 75 Dollar Bill to your music library.
7. “Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind” (2006)
Keeping with the repetitive and hypnotic, let’s move to Yo La Tengo’s incredible “Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.” The guitar is more incendiary than what dances over the rhythms of “I Was Real.” Ira Kaplan holds nothing back on this eleven-minute jam; he might as well be playing in front of a bonfire where Jimi Hendrix’s strung-up corpse is alight with the pain only a zombie brain can feel.
“Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind” is the first song on their album I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, and it sounds like it. The chaos that Kaplan brings to this piece is a six-string dare to every other rocker out there. Here, listen to how I play. You wanna duel? I am not afraid of you and I will beat your ass.
Upon first hearing this song in college, I had to reconfigure everything I thought I knew about Yo La Tengo. I’d loved them since my then-girlfriend, now-wife introduced me to them (I had avoided a lot of indie rockers due to my jam band blindness), but “Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind” brought them to a whole new level in my estimation. It cemented the fact that, no matter what they released, I’d go in listening with expectations soaring.
8. “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” (2004)
Recorded a couple of years earlier than “Pass The Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” this is Wilco’s version of “a hypnotic rhythm beneath chaotic guitar.”
Coming in at eleven minutes, Wilco takes a little longer to release the chaos. First, we get Jeff Tweedy’s mumbling “telescopic” poetry, “Spiders are singin’ in the salty breeze; spiders are filling out tax returns, spinning out webs of deductions and melodies on a private beach in Michigan.”
And then we hear the first tinkling of it, a guitar that sounds completely divorced from the rhythm section, playing the notes between the notes. It continues beneath the second verse, raises its attention after the break, and then, bam! the whole band kicks in and Wilco becomes Wilco in the mid-2000s, which is to say, one of the best bands in the world, and then, back to the hypnotic, but now the guitar won’t let go, and we’re all “the stone that raises us from the dead and carries us all home.”
9. “Indian Love Song” (1995)
There are three names you have to learn (if you don’t already know them). The first is Warren Ellis. Warren plays violin. Warren’s violin is a fireball streaking over your earballs. Warren doesn’t give a fuck. You love Warren. Nick Cave loves Warren. Warren is a Bad Seed.
The second is Mick Turner. Mick plays guitar. Mick’s guitar is, perhaps, the only guitar that can survive an encounter with Warren Ellis’s violin and come out of it talking about How does my hair look? He plays calmly, tricking you into following him, step by step, down into the volcano.
The third is Jim White. Jim plays drums. Jim is the starfield, the distant supernova, the black hole of noise and percussion whose gravity sucks the fire and chaos into wherever he tells it to go.
Together, they are The Dirty Three, and this is their “Indian Love Song.”
10. “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” (1992)
There’s only one voice capable of following up the raucousness of the Dirty Three. The whiskey-drowning gurgle of Tom Waits, singing the chorus that sits at the heart of every song on this playlist: I don’t wanna grow up.
You can get the whole playlist on Apple Music. Enjoy!