Brandon's Buzz

Lisa Stansfield — “All Around the World”
(from Biography: The Greatest Hits) —

Via a press release in my email last week, I was quite excited to learn that my fierce, flawless Lisa Stansfield is blessedly returning to record stores in September with a new two-disc live album, the news of which compelled me to immediately fire off an email to her publicity team begging for an interview for Brandon’s Buzz Radio. (This same PR firm helped me wrangle an interview with the one and only Meat Loaf a number of years ago, so I’m feeling pretty good about my odds in this endeavor.) Watch this space for more developments on that front whilst you enjoy the coolly seductive slice of pop perfection that carried La Stansfield to global superstardom exactly a quarter of a century ago. (I was stunned just now, scanning the Buzz archives, to discover that Miss Lisa has not one time in five years popped out of the Hive’s speakers, and that’s just shameful. Consider that error now officially corrected.)

Bob Schneider — “Let the Light In” (from Perfect Day) —

It is an awful, wonderful beast, this nation, this country which — quite literally — was founded with the words We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. Rights truly are unalienable and certain in this awful, wonderful behemoth of a republic that our forefathers created and that our fathers — indeed, my father — fought to maintain. What the Court affirmed on Friday, ultimately, is the notion that when we decide to cast an entire subset of Americans’ rights to the swirling winds of fate and/or to the shifting whims of a popular vote, then — sooner or later — every American’s right to do, or say, or be, or live, or pursue happiness in whichever way they choose to is bound to be tossed up for grabs.

It is an awful, wonderful nation that is governed by humans with distinctly human foibles, but it is a nation whose history nonetheless nearly always — to steal a saying from the sages — bends toward justice, and toward fair, and toward right.

Takes a little longer than we might like sometimes, but love always conquers.

There are days when identifying as a gay man, a gay Texan, a gay American plainly sucks. Happily, today is not one of those days. Today, I am equal.

Kelly Willis — “Don’t Know Why”
(from Translated From Love) —

Sherry Ann will tell you that any and every day is a good day to blast some Kelly, but this being SA’s birthday makes it feel like a particularly apropos occasion. (Happy birthday, Sherry Ann; the Buzz hopes you’re living it up wherever you currently find yourself!)

Genesis — “I Can’t Dance” (from R-Kive) —

“Progressive rock bands, according to their fans, are supposed to stop about two albums into progressing and progress no more. . . . I think the secret to Genesis’ longevity is that they are the progressive rock band who progressed. And that’s why they’ve survived.”

— British comedian (and rabid Genesis fan) Al Murray, simply shedding light on the band’s four-decade-plus status as one of the world’s pre-eminent rock bands, at the end of Genesis: Sum of the Parts, a riveting documentary that premiered on cable’s Showtime last November. (Parts has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray and includes candid, no-holds-barred interviews with all the band’s principals — including Mike Rutherford, Phil Collins, and even Peter Gabriel, who split from the band in a hellacious huff in the late 1970s before embarking on one of the most magnificent solo careers in music history — and is exceedingly worthy of a couple of hours of your time. As, for that matter, is the album linked above: R-Kive, a first-of-its-kind three-disc, thirty-seven-track compendium of the greatest of Genesis’ hits alongside hits and highlights from Collins’ and Gabriel’s ravishing solo work, plus selections from Rutherford’s hit-making side gig Mike + the Mechanics. Taken as one, a veritable Genesis-inspired abbondanza awaits you, people.)

Tegan and Sara (featuring The Lonely Island) —
“Everything is Awesome!!!”
(from The Lego® Movie [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]) —

Conventional wisdom has it that “Glory” — Common and John Legend’s moving anthem which they co-composed for the film Selma — is the front-runner to nab the Academy Award for Best Original Song this evening. And while that result wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, I can’t help but find myself rooting for The Lego Movie‘s gloriously goofy “Awesome” to nab the Oscar tonight, because a) Tegan and Sara are involved, and Tegan and Sara are — no pun intended — everything as far as the Buzz is concerned, even when all they’re doing is singing such an electrically innocuous earworm such as this; and b) despite — or, perhaps, because of — its hilariously bent, wickedly subversively adult tone, Lego was inexplicably left out of the running in the Best Animated Feature derby, leaving “Awesome” as the only opportunity for Academy voters who are passionate about the uproariously funny film (of which I choose to believe there exist many) to honor it. “Everything” is awesome, possums.

Idina Menzel — “River” (from Holiday Wishes) —

Robert Downey Jr. (with Vonda Shepard) — “River”
(from Ally McBeal: A Very Ally Christmas) —

Joni Mitchell — “River” (from Hits) —

Miss Idina landed a knockout blow last night on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, with a beautifully restrained take on one of the Buzz’s all-time favorite Christmas chestnuts: Joni Mitchell’s wrenching “River,” the obligatory sad song of choice for many a holiday mixtape, you can be sure. Despite her booming voice and soaring range (and despite the fact that she was ostensibly on the program to sell some records), Menzel gets beaucoup bonus points for choosing, largely, to undersing the song, allowing the tune’s simple elegance to emerge by not overloading the lyric with thrills and trills. (Much as I love her, you can bet neither Celine Dion nor any other diva of her caliber would be so moderate in her approach.) My favorite cover of this Joni classic remains Robert Downey Jr.’s gorgeously gruff version — which he performed on Fox’s one-time signature series Ally McBeal when he was a member of its cast in one of its misbegotten, past-its-prime later seasons — but last night’s staggering performance (which you can check out in the video embedded below) instantly makes Idina’s effort a riveting runner-up.

(PS: As for Queen Joni, she’s creating a stir all her own this season with Love Has Many Faces, a spankin’-new four-disc box set of hits and favorites from her forty-year career, including “River” and “A Case of You” (the latter of which would easily in the upper echelon of my list of the greatest songs in the history of ever), all stunningly remastered for the first time in years. If this thing isn’t at the very top of your Christmas list this year, joo are a fool.)

Whitney Houston — “The Star-Spangled Banner”
(from Whitney – The Greatest Hits) —

Two hundred years ago today — September 14, 1814 — while temporarily imprisoned on a British warship in the Chesapeake Bay as Baltimore’s Fort McHenry was under siege, a Maryland lawyer by the name of Francis Scott Key, inspired by the sight of the American flag still waving in the wind after a brutal night of battle, penned the words that became our National Anthem. And on a crisp January night in 1991, just before the commencement of the twenty-fifth Super Bowl and just ten days into the first of what would become a series of Mideast military skirmishes (this one a battle against Iraq for Kuwait’s sanctity in the Persian Gulf), the wondrously glorious Whitney Houston cemented her reputation as the greatest voice of her generation with a thrilling, thunderous performance of those very words. You don’t have to be particularly patriotic to appreciate the brilliance of the contents of the grainy video below, but as a way to mark such a significant milestone — especially given that we as a nation seem once again to be inevitably marching to war in a hostile land whose methods and mores we are never going to alter in any meaningful way, whether we foist one bomb upon them or one hundred — it bears noting that nobody has ever (or, likely, will ever) sung our song’s lyrics with more passion, more purpose, and more grace. Happy 200th birthday to The Star-Spangled Banner.

Madonna — “Vogue” (from Celebration) —

This fascinating factoid churned pretty quickly through the Twittersphere, so you’d be forgiven for having missed it entirely, but just in case you, like me, were fourteen in 1990 and are given to enjoy a bit of useless trivia: Slate.com tells us that, with last week’s unfortunate passing of Lauren Bacall (at age 90), all sixteen of the pop cultural icons and legends, almost all of whom were scions of Old Hollywood balls and beauty, that Miss Madonna name-checked during the thrilling climax of this instant-classic turn-of-a-decade smash — a loving, gorgeously etched homage to the movie-star era — have now shuffled off of this mortal coil. Seems a fair bet that we’ll never see the likes of Bacall and those broads ever again, and Miley and her cabal of tartlets could take a comprehensive lesson or two from their grit and grace. True glamour rarely sounded so glorious. Rest in peace, Betty. (Incidentally, if you’d care to do further reading — both on this tune and the rest of Madonna’s hit-filled career, before and after — I put together a playlist of her best-known pop classics in April 2010, and you can find that piece by clicking right cheer.)

Sinead O’Connor — “Take Me to Church”
(from I’m Not Bossy I’m the Boss) —

With its crunchy guitars and catchy pace, this tune is likely a bit jarring for those fairweather fans who only know Sinead for her gorgeously spare chartbusting epic “Nothing Compares 2 U” (echoes of whose equally stark video — which, amazingly enough, celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday next spring — seep brilliantly into this clip’s color palette), but those of us who recall O’Connor from her “Mandinka” days will no doubt feel right at home worshipping at the altar of “Church,” the irresistible lead single from Sinead’s tenth studio record I’m Not Bossy I’m the Boss (due out this Tuesday). Any random ten seconds of this late-summer gem are instantly more compelling than the whole of that nauseating nymphet Iggy Azalea’s discography, and I’m ready to fling a hallelujah up into the heavens that, with her strongest effort since at least 1997’s “This Is to Mother You,” Sinead is once again getting more attention for her music than for her musings on the sexual efficacy of yams. Amen.

Don Henley — “The Boys of Summer”
(from The Very Best of Don Henley) —

“When the song came out [in 1984], for me then, the idea of being 50 was so far away. . . . And then here I was singing that song [now at 50] and I’m a very different person from that person who was listening to that then. . . . You realize that time is passing on, people are leaving the planet, people are coming on to the planet, and the boys of the summer change — who those boys are changes — but for a time you are that thing and you’re still that thing that you were. Some people who aren’t with us anymore can still be that in memory, but not physically. It is quite sad.”

— the terrific Tori Amos, describing to The Huffington Post’s Noah Michaelson what was going through her mind when she decided to cover Don Henley’s Grammy-winning solo classic smash while on the Scandinavian leg of her latest world tour (this one in support of her languid new record Unrepentant Geraldines) earlier in the year. The shaky YouTube clip of this performance — which I’ll embed at the bottom of this post if I can remember how the hell to do it — held me enraptured just moments ago; once again, Tori proves just how peerless she is at the act of drilling down to the very heart of a song — any song! — and yanking its inherent melancholy core to the fore. (And do know that when I say “any,” I mean exactly that, and if you ever heard Tori’s heart-wrenching take on the old children’s chestnut “This Old Man” — one of the brilliant b-sides of her “Caught a Lite Sneeze” single in 1996 — then you damn well know what I mean.) (PS: Don’t mind me if I spend the remainder of this day trying to wrap my blown mind the fact that this classic track will celebrate its thirtieth birthday later this year, a fact made all the more crazy by the fact that I can still clearly remember the first time I ever heard it on the radio in that gloriously alive autumn of 1984. Fear not, Tori: we’re all getting older, babe.)

Emmylou Harris — “Boulder to Birmingham”
(from Heartaches and Highways:
The Very Best of Emmylou Harris) —

The brilliant Sherry Ann has been aflame of late thanks to Rolling Stone‘s hellaciously half-baked new list of the one hundred greatest songs in country music history, a collection of tunes that contains two hideous tracks from that irritating twit Brad Paisley (which, incidentally, is exactly two more than Sammi Smith, K.T. Oslin, Kathy Mattea, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Crystal Gayle, Lacy J. Dalton, Janie Fricke, Shawn Colvin, Deana Carter, and Trisha Yearwood combined managed to score). (RS printed only the top 25 songs in the latest issue of the magazine; the full list can be viewed here.) Sherry’s (and my) problems with this list are far too legion to list here (although, let it suffice to say that any list that purports to compile the hundred best anything with regard to country music and yet hoists Taylor Swift’s singalong piffle “Mean” all the way up to #24 while unceremoniously stranding Rosanne Cash’s searing, stunning “Seven Year Ache” in the mid-60s and making poor Juice Newton hang on by her fingernails all the way down at #92 at very least needs a new panel of nominators, if not an entirely new governing philosophy). So in honor of Sherry Ann’s birthday today, I am giving her, from across the miles, the greatest gift I can: the Buzz’s turntable is spinning one of her favorites from the glorious Emmylou Harris — ridiculously, another artist whose brilliant work as a lead vocalist makes nary an appearance on the aforementioned list — and crankin’ it all the way up to eleven. (Happiest of happy birthdays to the greatest friend a guy ever had. You are the best, Sherry Ann!)

Shivaree — “Goodnight Moon”
(from I Oughtta Give You a Shot in the Head
for Making Me Live in This Dump) —

In honor of last night’s total lunar eclipse — in which the moon passed through the darkest parts of Earth’s shadow on the same night that Mars made its closest approach to Earth (hardly a near-miss at just over fifty-seven million miles, but nonetheless close enough to cast an eerie red pall over the moon’s reflection) in about six years — that lit up social media like a Roman candle as Monday faded into oblivion, I can think of no better tune to serve as the soundtrack for some ravishing photographic evidence of the galactic traffic jam. (The top photo is from The University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, and the bottom photo is from Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, Calla-forny.)

Pete Yorn — “Burrito” (from Day I Forgot) —

Convenience store comestibles may well not be the preferred romantic motifs of priests and poets. But just try to name a pop song that better captures the kinetically heady rush of new love.