For various reasons not limited to the overhead activity of children in the mornings, last night was the first real time all week that I slept and have thus spent most of the day in a vague state of hibernation despite the warmth of the air. There was a mauve overcast around sunset that turned out to belong to a volcanic wall of gold and bougainvillea over an agate-blue cloud-band. Have some mostly musical links.
For the more than twenty years since
lesser_celery made me a CD of Peter Gabriel's
Melt (1980), I have assumed that the eerily voiced French refrain of "
Games Without Frontiers" was either the singer's own falsetto or pitch-shifted vocals. It turns out to be Kate Bush. I would never have identified her on my own, but then I thought about "
Army Dreamers" (1980).
I grew up on
Arlo Guthrie, but my favorite version of "City of New Orleans" (1971) is almost certainly
Steve Goodman himself in 1970, where he reminded me unexpectedly of a Chicago-accented Stan Rogers. It's driving me nuts that I would swear the first person I heard lead "
The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over" (1977) was Pete Seeger and I can't figure out where.
WERS has been playing nothing but female artists for International Women's Day, which means everything from Chaka Khan's "
I'm Every Woman" (1978), Katrina and the Waves' "
Walking on Sunshine" (1983), and Bikini Kill's "
Rebel Girl" (1993) to Tegan and Sara's "
I'll Be Back Someday" (2019), Orla Gartland's "
Little Chaos" (2024), and Arlo Parks' "
2SIDED" (2026). I had a moral obligation to let my father know when
Rickie Lee Jones came around.
Video quality regardless,
sholio's "
Waking Up in Vegas" (
The Greatest American Hero) remains one of my all-time favorites of their vids.