A chastised me yesterday for not leaving this post on the front page a bit longer (just the way the timing shook out, darling!), and because I am profoundly proud of how the final product turned out (and because it took about four tedious hours of cutting, pasting, and tinkering to splice it all together), I’m throwing this back up on top for the day. Three hundred sixty-seven days ago now, inspired by a flash of genius and grace at a traffic light one summer evening, I started a new “song of the day” feature on this website entitled Honey from the Hive. I had multiple goals when I decided to open up this Pandora’s box: I was looking for a way to goose reader traffic and make Brandon’s Buzz much more of a daily destination than an occasional read, as well as a way to shoehorn even more music-related fare into a blog whose primary purpose for existing was already to wax poetic on my eternal love of song. Most importantly, I had long been searching for a way to impel myself to write: write anything, write something, for this site every day. (Sadly, there are still occasional gaps between updates — though not nearly as many as there used to be — but otherwise, I couldn’t be more thrilled with how year one of this little side project has taken shape.) Looking at the list of 242 songs below is quite a trip: a wide cross-section of clashing styles are represented here — perfectly apropos, this, given my maddeningly broad tastes — and in just a minute or two, you can relive a brilliant year in the life of a lovably insane music fan, and understand with renewed clarity how every piece of my life — every friend I make, every breath I take (ha!), every movie I see, every conversation I start — is irrevocably colored by my passion and respect for the masterful melodies that score each of our days.
JULY 11: Dierks Bentley(featuring Del McCoury & The Punch Brothers) —
“Pride (In the Name of Love)” (from Up on the Ridge) —
Bareilles follows up her Grammy-nominated radio smash “King of Anything” with this pleasant, harmlessly charming little piffle whose surprisingly sweet video — which features the likes of Josh Groban, Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles (an absolute hoot rockin’ out in her jammies), Ben Folds, Cary Brothers, and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine lip-syncing this tune’s lyrics — is an utter, unexpected delight. A few more smartly-played moves like this, and I’m really gonna have to start liking this girl a lot more. (Said video can be seen in its entirety below, and if you’re up for a little extra credit reading, my buddy Blake recently chatted with Sara and has filed this dispatch.)
Life has been a bit crazy the past couple of weeks, but the record store report is back in action, and wouldn’t you know it’s just in time for the quarter’s three busiest frames. Holiday shopping season is in full swing, kids, and the music business is playing along mightily. Dig in:
Recent smashes from almost all of A’s favorite gals — Katy Perry (“Teenage Dream”), Sara Bareilles (“King of Anything”), Sugarland (“Stuck Like Glue”), and Ke$ha (“Take It Off”) — not to mention midlist hits from Maroon 5, OneRepublic, and Paramore, punctuate the track list for the new compilation Now That’s What I Call Music! 36. Also noteworthy from the Now folks: following up their pulse-pounding pair of discs celebrating the best of the ’80s, they have now turned their gaze to another decade with a strong new collection, Now That’s What I Call the 1990s, a masterful mix of grungy garage rock standards (Blind Melon’s “No Rain,” Collective Soul’s “Shine”), fair Lilith-era lovelies (Joan Osborne’s “One of Us,” Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You),” Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch”), and the passionate prom-night epics of the day (Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be,” Shawn Mullins’ “Lullaby”). Of course I have a few quibbles with the song selection here — let it suffice to say that “Missing” and “Mr. Jones” and “You Oughta Know” and “Hold My Hand” and “I Don’t Want to Wait” must land front-and-center spots on the inevitable Volume 2, no excuses — but if you ever doubted that the ’90s brought us every bit as much terrific tuneage as the decade it succeeded, this record stands as a stark testimony to the fallacy of that argument.
Fall’s new music slate looms large, but for this week at least, it’s still awfully lean out there, with only one major release vying for attention. If one-day sales reports are to be believed, however, that one release is looking competitive to be the crunchy’s best-selling album by week’s end. Dig in:
My startling lack of use for one Sara Bareilles and her relentlessly cheery brand of power pop has been documented well in a handful of previous Buzz posts. Regardless, I am man enough to admit that I find myself utterly intoxicated by “King of Anything,” the masterfully melodic lead single from Bareilles’ sophomore album, Kaleidoscope Heart, which makes landfall this week. I have not a clue how the remainder of this record sounds — and, for all I know, “King” is an anomaly and Heart is otherwise more of the same — but I think Sara still deserves major props for stepping outside the box and seeing where the groove might take her, and I’m greatly looking forward to seeing where it might take me. (Take note: Target has an exclusive deluxe version of Heart, which contains three bonus tracks, including a strings-laden acoustic take on “King.”)
Last weekend, the Buzz inaugurated a new “song of the day” feature entitled Honey from the Hive, and if I do say so myself, the debut week of this endeavor was a smashing success. (Judging solely by the empirical evidence, tonight this site is finishing up its most heavily-visited week in nearly five months, which tells me that readers enjoyed their initial drops of honey and decided to come on back for more helpings.) And just in case you missed any of last week’s tunes, allow me to offer up a quick recap:
SUNDAY: Dierks Bentley(featuring Del McCoury & The Punch Brothers) — “Pride (In the Name of Love)” (from Up on the Ridge) —
To here, I’ve had precious little use for this gal, whose meandering melodies have rarely failed to drive me anything other than batshit crazy. (A quick search of the Buzz archives reveals no fewer than seven previous posts echoing that very sentiment.) But give Bareilles credit for this much: she beats the sophomore jinx big time with this funky lead single — which has clearly been influenced by doo-wop-era ditties from The Shirelles and The Marvelettes — from her forthcoming second album.
Lotsa great stuff in the pipeline this week, including the latest effort from a much-deserved Grammy winner who, regrettably, has never gotten her proper due from the record-buying public. I probably won’t be able to change that with one measly paragraph inside the Buzz’s record store report. But I can damn well try.
Head on over to your local Target store this week, as Bravo has teamed up with the retail giant to release exclusive DVD season sets of some of their most-watched series, including their insanely popular Real Housewives franchise, Flipping Out, Top Chef, and Kathy Griffin’s riotous My Life on the D-List. A was particularly agog about this promotion, because while on a transcontinental JetBlue flight some time back, he got sucked into watching a four-hour marathon of a Bravo program entitled Million Dollar Listing, which follows three egocentric, young, ridiculously telegenic real estate agents as they wheel and deal their way through the mega-intense shark tank that is the greater Los Angeles housing market. I am man enough to admit that I was enormously dubious when he first told me about this show, because as a man who openly detests television — and simplistic, slickly edited reality television, at that! — A is not at all within eighteen miles of Bravo’s target demographic, but having now watched four of the six episodes which comprise Listing‘s second season — the DVD set of which is available as part of the aforementioned Target promotion — I can attest that this is a fabulous, fascinating program. (And having just bought a house last year, I can testify that all the minutiae contained therein — the haggling, the negotiating, the whittling down of purchase price, the endless inspections — are not exaggerated in the slightest for the benefit of television.) If you’re at all curious about the madcap world of high-end real estate, this is definitely worth a look-see, and I wish to take this opportunity to publicly thank A (of all people!) for bringing it to my attention.
Yup, it’s that time of year again: the 51st annual Grammy Awards are nigh. And while predicting the outcome is often a painfully useless exercise, simply because the Academy voters rarely use logic in choosing their winners — witness, if you will, Herbie Hancock’s w-t-f Album of the Year victory last year, to name just one bizarro choice — the Buzz has enough opinions about who should win the coveted trophies this year that I am willing to go out on a limb and try to guess who will win.
For as meek and measly, as dull and dreary as January’s slate of music has been so far, the month sure is ending with a hell of a bang. It’s a full week on tap, kids. Live it up:
And now, a very special announcement: the first two seasons of that ridiculously brilliant classic early-’90s sitcom Blossom arrive on DVD this week. Starring the spectacularly spunky Mayim Bialik — who, I just got confirmation today, will be appearing on Brandon’s Buzz Radio next week to promote this very release — as an unusually perceptive pre-teen swimming upstream against both a screwy (yet oddly loving) family — musician parents, one who stuck around (the dad, played to perfection by the hilarious Ted Wass) and one who hightailed it to Gay Paree (the mom, the gloriously gorgeous Melissa Manchester); and a pair of brothers, one ditzy (Joey Lawrence, playing dumb to the hilt, honey) and one drunk (Michael Stoyanov, edgy, ditto) — and the onset of puberty, the show’s crackerjack ensemble also grew to include the terrific Jenna von Oy (as Blossom’s best friend Six — as in, the number of beers it took to conceive her, she helpfully reveals in the pilot) and the dashing David Lascher as Blossom’s steady boyfriend Vinnie. Back in the day, “Blossom” was the butt of a great many jokes because of its occasional lapses into preachy pretentiousness, but it’s quite worth the effort for a chance to watch this cast play nimbly off of each other. As blatant a precursor to the twin triumphs that were “Dawson’s Creek” and “Felicity” as can be found, it’s high damn time this show made it to DVD. Buy it at once.
The latest contenders for the highest honor the music industry bestows — the Grammy award — are being announced tonight in a special concert (which, as I type this, finds Celine Dion mercilessly butchering Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen”), and I, your humble servant, am here with instant analysis of the big news.
BEST NEW ARTIST: What an unmitigated disaster this lineup is! I can get with Duffy (whose debut record, the enchanting Rockferry, I loved), and I can even get with Adele (whose breakthrough hit “Chasing Pavements” is causing quite the radio ruckus this fall), but where the hell are the names of Leona Lewis and OneRepublic on this list? I’d even have taken those annoying starlets Katy Perry and Sara Bareilles over the likes of Lady Antebellum, Jazmine Sullivan (who?!), and The Jonas Brothers (!!). Gag me, folks!
ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Not that I necessarily agree with these selections (although it’s a fair bet that at least two of them will appear in my forthcoming year-end top ten, and that’s two more than the Grammys and I usually share in common), but this is an atypically progressive gathering of nominees for this usually staid category, agreed? You can almost bet on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss‘ brilliant collaboration Raising Sand winning the trophy come February — Krauss is the Academy darling, after all; the woman could hack up a hairball on record and get the gold — but don’t count out Coldplay‘s surprisingly spry Viva La Vida. Also nominated: Lil Wayne, Ne-Yo, and Radiohead.
RECORD OF THE YEAR: Leona Lewis finally gets some love, as her fabulous smash “Bleeding Love” grabs a much-deserved nod here. She’ll have tough competition from Coldplay (“Viva La Vida,” the band’s very first number one single), who have previously won in this category (in 2004, for “Clocks”), Plant & Krauss (the moving “Please Read the Letter”), M.I.A. (the left-field summer smash “Paper Planes”), and Adele (whose nomination for “Chasing Pavements” pretty much anoints her the front-runner in the Best New Artist category over presumed favorite Duffy). My money’s still on the divine Lewis, though.
More thoughts once I have parsed and fully processed the complete list of nominations….
Generally speaking, at least where music is concerned, the holiday shopping season really gets going the first week of November. But with next Tuesday being Election Day and all, and with more emphasis than ever being placed on first-day sales, the record companies are largely shying away from that as a viable release date. Consequently, this week is beyond crowded. I advised you all last week not to get complacent; read on to see why that was a fair warning.
The acronym’s a nifty play on those controversial print ads which made their target a pop culture buzz magnet last spring; alas, the thirty-two point letters on the album’s cover akshully stand for Original Music Featured on ‘Gossip Girl’. An entire array of under-the-radar acts fills this collection, although appearances are made by The Kooks, Junkie XL, and current flavors of the week The Ting Tings. Could be fun, could be a sprawling, self-indulgent mess.
Sorry for the brief delay in this week’s record store report — Sherry Ann has been so antsy anticipating this, it’s hard to ponder how she survived the pre-Buzz days — but here we go, with yet another brilliance-packed week before us. Buckle up, kids: we’ve got fourteen albums to discuss.
Solid proof that you shouldn’t judge books by covers: in the same week in which word has broken that Rob Thomas’ second solo album is due next spring, Matchbox Twenty’s guitarist (and former drummer) Paul Doucette — who, throughout his band’s entire history, has never failed to represent himself as an irritatingly sarcastic horse’s ass — scores a home run as the leader of a fascinating new side project, The Break and Repair Method. An album of pleasant melody and stunning depth, Milk the Bee finds Doucette manning both the piano (and adeptly, at that) and the microphone (and while his vocal prowess is certainly no match for Thomas’, Doucette’s timbre proves to be surprisingly rich), creating a ten-track set whose sensibilities land somewhere in between Wilco’s and Keane’s on the yardstick of pop. (Even if you ultimately choose to let the album as a whole slip by you, be at least sure to check out track number five, “Calling All Electrical Prints,” the kind of sweet, haunting love song Jeff Tweedy only wishes he could write.)
Interlude — Everything I’ve needed to know about life, I’ve learned from Sting
So, then came Cascada.
Yes, that nightmarish, migraine-inducing German dance trio — who have just morphed Rascal Flatts’ soaring, searing triumph “What Hurts the Most” into a ridiculous, ear-splitting slab of hopped-up Eurotrash that makes DHT’s intolerably wretched recent remake of Roxette’s pop classic “Listen to Your Heart” sound positively stately by comparison — incited the most vicious argument A and I have ever had.
