🎵 Today’s listen: “Immunity” by Clairo. It’s studio-produced lounge pop from a lo-fi bedroom pop YouTube sensation. “Sofia” is my favorite song on it. It reminds me a lot of my old “Blonde Redhead” albums.

🎵 Today’s album: “Heard it in a Past Life” by Maggie Rogers. It’s a decent pop album and I really like her voice, but overall it wasn’t a terribly interesting listen for me.

🎵 Today’s listen: “1989” by Ryan Adams. It’s a melancholy, largely acoustic cover of Taylor Swift’s massively more famous album of the same name. I think reinterpreting these songs was a great idea, but I prefer the big, studio sound of the original album.

This album is probably known as one of R.E.M.’s lesser efforts. When it came out in 2001, I didn’t like it. Compared to R.E.M.’s earlier work, it felt pat and drowsy. The mid-tempo arrangements lacked insistence and energy, and all the studio sound effects felt unnatural and unmusical to me at the time. I played it once and didn’t listen to it any more.

A few years later, one of my friends said, offhandedly, after “All the Way to Reno (Our’s Gonna be a Star)” came on the radio, that he absolutely loved the album. I got to hear it through new ears, and came to love how good it sounds, and to think of the songs as dark, late night, chill-out rock, whose arrangements and instrumentation move between spareness to lushness in interesting ways.

🎵 Today’s album: “The King is Dead” by The Decemberists. It’s acoustic, Americana-inspired, and is one of the best produced, best sounding albums in my collection. The sound is so warm and the melodies so gentle that it’s easy to forget the album’s themes of death and rebirth.

🎵 Today’s album, “Cut & Stitch” by Petrol Girls. It’s fun, furious, feminist punk rock, peppered with rage, teeming with energy, tinged with emotion, and full of interesting and varied soundscapes.

🎵 Today’s album: “Diatom Ribbons” by Kris Davis

Kris Davis is a jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader. The New York Times crowned “Diatom Ribbons” as the #1 jazz album of 2019:

Kris Davis, 39, has spent years as her generation’s powerhouse pianist in waiting. No longer. On “Diatom Ribbons,” her skills as a composer, band assembler, system builder and improviser — a musical auteur, basically — come fully into focus. Ms. Davis builds her compositions on crooked patterns and splintered loops that somehow become a kind of magnetic touchstone, bringing together wildly diverse musicians in tangled unity.

I don’t listen to jazz that much anymore but I used to listen to it for hours on end as I read and wrote my way through my senior year of college. (It helped that I could get countless jazz CDs for free at the library.) “Diatom Ribbons” is more edgy and experimental than the classic jazz I grew up on, but I found it quite enjoyable. Listening to it is like visiting a musical world I kind of understand, and kind of don’t, but feeling warm and welcome all the same.

🤫 Don’t mind me, I’m just testing new 🎧 today. 🎵😃🎵

🎵 In lieu of music this morning, I’m listening to the folks at The Incomparable overanalyze The Rise of Skywalker. It’s fun to listen to, especially because the last two Star Wars movies were so divisive. It will be fun to hear Gruber’s take on “The Talk Show” someday.

🎵 Today’s album: “Two Hands” by Big Thief. I saw this album on the top of Bob Boilen’s top ten albums of 2019 list. I liked it a lot more than I liked UFOF, but I don’t think this band speaks to me. I probably will revisit the first half of this album sometime, but that’s about it.

🎧 Does tremolo that ping-pongs between the left and right channels bother everybody who listens through headphones, or is it just me? It literally makes me feel seasick. 🤢

🎵 I can’t decide on an album to listen to this morning. I wish there was a playlist for “how do I start the work week on a Thursday after nearly two weeks off?” I guess Jason Snell’s 2019 Selections playlist will do for now.

🎵 Album of the day: Better Oblivion Community Center’s eponymous debut. B.O.C.C. is the duo of Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst. I’m only familiar with Conor Oberst, and I think this album fits in very well with the rest of his work. It is quiet, moody indie rock. The songs are beautiful and the production sounds good.

🎵 Album of the Day: “Designer” by Aldous Harding. It is a quiet, intimate, folksy album that reminded me a little of Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star.

🎵 Album of the day: “U.F.O.F.” by Big Thief. I found it on several “best of 2019” lists. It’s a quiet folk-rock album, with ruminative lyrics and a sound that borders on dream pop in places. I’m not sure if it really speaks to me, though.

🎵 Today’s album: “So” by Peter Gabriel. It’s a masterpiece. I kind of forgot that, and had not listened to it in several years. I barely know what else to say.

🎵 Today’s listen: Hawksley Workman’s “For Him and the Girls”. The songwriting is strong and eclectic, some of the hooks are really catchy, and he played all the instruments and recorded it himself. The top track for me is “No Sissies” though I’m not sure how well its title has aged.

Today I learned that the Beatles' “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is widely reviled. From the Wikipedia article:

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is often the subject of ridicule. In 2004, it was included in Blender magazine’s list titled “50 Worst Songs Ever!"[61] and was voted the worst song of all time in an online poll organised by Mars.[62] In 2012, the NME’s website editor, Luke Lewis, argued that the Beatles had recorded “a surprising amount of ropy old toss”, and singled out “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” as “the least convincing cod-reggae skanking this side of the QI theme tune”. That same year, Tom Rowley of The Daily Telegraph said the track was a “reasonable choice” for derision, following the result of the Mars poll, and it subsequently came second (behind “Revolution 9”) in the Telegraph’s poll to determine the worst Beatles song.

I always liked that song, and never thought of it as anything other than a light, fun song that is supposed to be—big shock here—light and fun. I’m more apt to be critical of art that takes itself too seriously.

🎵 I’m changing pace today with a classic rock album: “The Kids are Alright” by The Who. I’m very familiar with some of the tracks, of course, but I don’t think I’ve ever listened to this album.

🎵 I’m taking the “COMPLEX Best Alternative R&B Artists” playlist on Apple Music out for a spin today.

🎵 House music, which is not normally my thing, sounds much more exciting with my more bass-heavy V-Moda headphones. 🎧

I spent most of my workday listening to music today, and really enjoyed it. One album I revisited, thanks to a remaster and, basically, nostalgia, was “Green” by R.E.M. Green was my first R.E.M. album, which I got when I was in middle school. (I don’t remember how I learned about them. I know it wasn’t from hearing “Stand”. It was probably from browsing “Rolling Stone” in a bookstore.)

Now, instead of reading liner notes while I listen to an album, I surf the web for album reviews to read instead. The best “Green” review I found today was by Andrezj Lukowski on Drowned in Sound:

Green is the end of something and the beginning of something else and the continuation of something greater, but rather than get lost in grand narratives, maybe let’s focus on what it sounds like.

For the most part, Green sounds like innocence, a sense of youth and light and simplicity and clumsiness and play that had not been in the band’s makeup when they burst out of the Georgian murk with the Chronic Town and Murmur.

I don’t really know what the changes the remaster did to the album. It may have just made everything louder. Whatever the improvements were, the album sounded great on my super nice headphones. Of course, when I was a kid, listening to “Green” on repeat in my bedroom, I had real, but very cheap, speakers, so the experience isn’t exactly comparable.

On other R.E.M. album remasters, I have found that I can understand every one of Michael Stipe’s elliptical, nonsense lyrics on R.E.M.’s oldest songs, and that isn’t always a good thing. By the time R.E.M. made “Green”, Michael Stipe’s lyrics were a lot more straightforward, and his singing was clear and up front in the mix.

Anyway, “Green” was and is still great. It was fun to revisit it today.

I did a little audio geekery this evening. I set up shairport-sync on the little Ubuntu server that sits toward the back of my desk, so that I can AirPlay to it from all my iOS devices. AirPlay is great because it transmits audio over WiFi with no quality degredation, and AirPlay devices are always listed in iOS, unlike BlueTooth speakers, which have to be connected to. Next, I configured PulseAudio to automatically switch to my headphone DAC/Amp when I turn it on. (My DAC/amp is a portable one with an internal battery, so I can’t leave it plugged in all the time.) So far, so good with the new setup! By far the hardest part of the setup was searching online for the correct instructions to type into the terminal. I was happy to learn that shairport-sync is now in Ubuntu’s repositories, but I think that things like this need to be easier to discover, and possible to install, in the GUI.

🎵 I am enjoying the album “All Mirrors” by Angel Olsen.

🎵 I love “Dream Boy” by Beach Bunny. It’s such a fun song, and everything about it is great, from the lyric to the vulnerable vocals to the production. I wish it had been around when I was younger and listened to a lot more power pop and emo—it would have fit right in.