I’m gonna do this quickly because I am bone-tired and it’s quite late, and in general, the more time I spend trying to wrap my mind around the Academy’s often-baffling choices, the more intensely frustrated I become.
My beloved A brought this to my attention and insisted that I bring it to yours. Hence:
“…I’d go ahead and proclaim ["Use Somebody"] the instant front-runner [for Song of the Year], but since everything seems to be breaking in Taylor Swift’s (whose ability to sing I still strongly question, no matter how wide-ranging and accessible her abilities as a songwriter undeniably are) favor lately — I’m stunned that little heifer didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize last month! — she seems like the one to beat.”
— me, assessing Taylor Swift’s odds in this year’s Grammy race, in an instant-reaction nominations live blog last December.
“Taylor Swift, whose trophies now require a warehouse, is up for best female vocalist in pop and country. The crossover sensation may be able to write a tune, but she sure can’t carry one, as her live performances over the past year have demonstrated.”
— USA Today music critic Edna Gundersen, summing up this year’s Grammy race in a column earlier this week.
It’s a little better out there this week than the last couple, but we’re still biding our time while we await the imminent monster that is next week. Consider this an appetizer:
It’s not always the case, frighteningly enough, but this year’s annual single-disc roundup of tunes that are vying for the Recording Academy’s highest honors, Grammy Nominees 2010, plays like a mixtape of the year’s strongest, most fascinating music. (Imagine that!) True, you have to sit through the likes of Black Eyed Peas and Beyonce, as well, not to mention subpar material from the typically dependable U2, Sugarland, Rascal Flatts, and Kelly Clarkson, but I say any album which can wrangle aural diamonds from Kings of Leon (the staggering “Use Somebody”), The Fray (“You Found Me,” putting Isaac Slade’s scary-good vocals on a riveting piano-based pedestal), Lady Antebellum (the revelatory “I Run to You”), and Dave Matthews Band (“You and Me,” a sweet fare-thee-well to a fallen comrade-in-arms) onto the very same slice of musical real estate is mighty fine by me.
They invariably end up pissing me off with their unjustifiable inanity, but because I’m a music fan all the way down to my toenails, I always look forward to the annual Grammy nominations. And because I’m an eternal optimist at heart, I always pray that this is the year the recording academy will get it right. Well, I’m not holding out a great deal of hope that the Grammy folks will suddenly correct their typical foolishness tonight by uniformly nominating people who actually deserve the praise, but let me just say this at the outset: if “Use Somebody” doesn’t at the very least nab a nod for Record of the Year, I’m throwing a rock through my television set. Let the concert commence!
The holiday shopping season leaps toward full swing this week, which means the big guns are starting to roll out onto the battlefield. Take a look:
I somehow missed this when it was released a month ago in conjunction with the full-series DVD set, so imagine my surprise to go CD shopping yesterday afternoon and happen across a copy of The Best of Ally McBeal: The Songs of
Vonda Shepard, a solidly assembled compendium of musical highlights from the five-season run of Fox’s iconic dramedy (plus a previously unreleased track, “Something About You”). Included here: Shepard’s riveting duets with Indigo Girl Emily Saliers (“Baby Don’t You Break My Heart Slow”) and Robert Downey, Jr. (“Chances Are”), as well as those old chestnuts “Maryland” and “The Wildest Times of the World” and “Hooked on a Feeling,” and, of course, Ally’s rip-roarin’ theme song “Searchin’ My Soul,” which still makes you wanna get up and shake your ass some twelve years later. The Buzz still loves ya, gal.
The album that the Buzz has been breathlessly anticipating for four long years now finally drops this week, and some pretty interesting stuff drops right alongside it. David, my darling, we have missed you!
Those pesky geniuses at Now! are out to steal a bit of Ultra’s thunder with their latest brilliant compilation, Now That’s What I Call Club Hits!, which features a smattering of hard-to-find dance mixes of recent radio smashes from the likes of David Guetta (his masterful collaboration with Kelly Rowland, “When Love Takes Over,” one of summer ’09’s most intoxicating singles), The Killers (“Spaceman”), Katy Perry (“Waking Up in Vegas,” which I can’t help but kinda sorta like, wholly in spite of the fact that I think she’s utterly ridiculous), Lady GaGa (the hilariously profane “LoveGame”), and Kelly Clarkson (the puny “My Life Would Suck Without You”), among many others.
A and I have embarked on an amazing road trip to sunny, mountain-y Colorado, so this section of this week’s record store report comes to you on location from a lovely bed and breakfast just south of Cripple Creek (the state’s premier gambling mecca, from which I’m happy to report I made off with a cumulative total of $117 last night, thanks to a series of atypically shrewd choices at the roulette table as well as a shockingly loose Monopoly slot machine). I’m sitting out on the second floor veranda typing these very words, and I can’t even put into words the graceful glory of the view beyond this deck’s rails. And I certainly can’t think of three more astoundingly good artists than these to provide this morning with an appropriate soundtrack:
In just a handful of months, when we’re all counting our lists (and checking them twice, natch) of this decade’s finest achievements in music, and happily hurling hosannas upon the heads of those responsible for same, better believe that two of the names you’re going to hear invoked more than once — at least on this compiler’s list — are David Gray and
Michelle Branch, which brings me to wonder all the more if it’s fate, coincidence, or just sweet, stunning serendipity that they have just concurrently released their long-awaited new singles. I happened to catch Gray’s latest effort, the masterfully taut “Fugitive,” 
playing on KGSR a few weeks ago, and my first impression honestly wasn’t so hot. I couldn’t be more thrilled to reveal to you now how foolishly silly that knee-jerk analysis was: the track, which teases Gray’s forthcoming seventh studio album Draw the Line (which is due September 22, and which features a sure-to-be-spine-tingling duet with the queen herself, my divine Annie Lennox, and if that’s not enough to impel to you to camp out in front of your favorite record store, I don’t know what could), picks up right where his shattering 2005 masterpiece Life in Slow Motion left off, and finds Gray dabbling in and pulling from an ever more lushly adventurous palette of instrumentation. One listen to this reminds with such powerful precision why Gray remains the finest lyricist of this (or perhaps any) generation. As for Ms. Branch, her third solo album, Everything Comes and Goes, has bounced on and off the release schedule for most of the past two years, and while there is still no firm date for its arrival this fall, we at least have a delectable new morsel with which to whet our appetites, with her crazy-catchy latest single “Sooner or Later,” which thankfully finds her continuing down the path she began blazing with The Wreckers, the country duo she founded three years ago with pal Jessica Harp. The band is currently on an indefinite hiatus while Harp and Branch tend to their solo careers, but it’s clear from “Sooner” that Branch has taken Nashville into her bones. And whether they realize it or not, Nashville is all the better for it.
Unless new material from Kristinia DeBarge
This coming Tuesday is my thirty-third birthday, and outside of having a nice dinner (and perhaps a soupcon of post-meal canoodling) with A, I intend to spend it doing my favorite activity on this planet: music shopping. Live it up, y’all — there’s some terrific stuff hitting stores this week:
Admire this gal’s gumption if nothing else: Brooke White, the angelic young lady who eternally captured the hearts of most of us “Idol” freaks with her ethereal, ebullient musical stylings during season seven — YouTube her astonishing take on “I Am… I Said” during Neil Diamond week from last year, and just try to convince me you don’t ache for her with every fiber of your existence — has chosen to include on
High Hopes and Heartbreak, her hotly-anticipated post-”Idol” debut, a sweetly mellow (and utterly fascinating) cover of Kings of Leon’s transcendent epic smash “Use Somebody,” a decision that has Sherry Ann utterly aghast. (And she doesn’t even like KOL that much!) As a well-documented fan of that album (and of that song), I wouldn’t normally advocate this kind of thing, but I think the fact that White — whose easy, effortless lilt is about a hundred million miles away from Caleb Followill’s pained (if undeniably compelling) yowl — can put her own spin on an instantly iconic rock tune and hold her own doing so proves that a truly great song can withstand whatever the hell you throw at it. The Buzz loves ya, Brooke baby.
The bikinis are already out in full effect (lord love those becleavaged CenTex beauties), the mercury is already scorching (Austin promises to be in triple-digit territory by next weekend), and the pop has already taken a turn toward the mindless (thank you, Lady GaGa, for reigniting a trend, milady). Means only one thing: the long, hot summer is upon us once again, and spring, with its life-affirming promises of the spirit of renewal, has been sent packing for another year.
Sometime around early April, with the dazzling second act laid down by a white-hot cadre of Colorado boys who call themselves The Fray and the stunning returns to form turned in by Pet Shop Boys, Wynonna, Annie Lennox, and Kelly Clarkson, it became very clear that music as a whole had regained its mojo following a bumpy time last fall, and that, at least creatively, the industry was firing on all eight cylinders. Some damn fine tuneage made its way to the forefront of our collective consciousness in the season just passed; what follows directly is a convincing cross-section of same:
June kicks off with a pair of highly-anticipated returns and yet another dip into the catalog of an artist whose posthumous output has far exceeded what he managed to produce during his short time on this planet. Read on:
He only released one album (the amazing Grace) in his lifetime — he was recording number two when he accidentally drowned in Memphis at the heartbreakingly tender age of 30 — but his influence continues to be felt today on artists as varied as Rufus Wainwright, Radiohead, Duncan Sheik, even Kings of Leon. And in the year in which we commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of that one album’s original release, a new three-disc set, entitled Grace Around the World, arrives to reveal yet more of Jeff Buckley’s devastating brilliance. The collection’s first two discs document, on both CD and DVD, the highlights of the two-year world tour upon which Buckley embarked to promote the record, and the third disc contains the award-winning documentary Amazing Grace, which chronicles the enduring legacy of Buckley’s tragically brief career and life.
After sleepwalking through the past several weeks, we’ve finally got a release slate we can really sink our teeth into. While we wait to see what gifts this week’s lineup of music has in store for us, allow me to throw out this question for discussion: am I the only one who thinks the new U2 record
After Eric Clapton (whose incredible, stripped-down versions of “Layla” and the devastating “Tears in Heaven” notched their album sales of ten million-plus and won their performer a wagonful of Grammys) and Mariah Carey (whose impromptu cover of The Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” became a radio supersmash) showed the network what a commercial goldmine it had on its hands in the early ’90s, a spare and intimate appearance on “MTV Unplugged” suddenly became a mandatory promotional tool — within a pair of years, Neil Young, Nirvana, 10,000 Maniacs, and Melissa Etheridge all had turned in landmark performances — and for many, a nifty li’l comeback vehicle. Take the case of Rod Stewart, who reunited with his former Faces partner Ronnie Wood for an acoustic set and unwittingly hurled his career back into orbit. Thanks to a startlingly fine cover of Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately,” upon which — to the surprise of more than a few — top 40 radio immediately leapt, the resulting live album, entitled Unplugged… and Seated, went on to move more than three million units stateside and produced two additional hit singles (a reworked version of his early classic “Reason to Believe” and a raucous cover of Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party”). Unplugged returns this week in a special expanded edition which contains two bonus tracks — including a radically reinvented take on his 1989 smash “Forever Young” — as well as the original television broadcast, which finally makes a belated debut on DVD. And trust your Uncle Brandon, here if nowhere else: if only for Stewart’s priceless rendition — which can now be enjoyed aurally and visually, natch! — of Tom Waits’ unspeakably magnificent “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda),” this is worth the purchase price. (And memo to MTV, Natalie, and/or whomever else may be in charge of this: I’m still waiting for the aforementioned 10,000 Maniacs episode from 1993 — the recording of which
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.
