What I Listened To On My Way To Work Today

The iPod shuffled up this interesting half-dozen for my walk from the train to the office.

Mark Sandman, "Devil's Boots"
This song (from the posthumous Sandman box set Sandbox) is noteworthy for its lack of the bass guitar for which Sandman was so famous. Instead he plays simple piano chords, accompanied as always by Dana Colley on sax. The final Morphine album The Night had quite a bit of piano instead of bass, one of many tantalizingly hints of the new musical direction the band was beginning to explore when Sandman suddenly passed away. This July will make it ten years since Sandman died. I can't believe he's been gone that long.

Joel R.L. Phelps and the Downer Trio, "Ave Patricia"
The first post-Silkworm Phelps song I ever heard, from a CMJ magazine sampler disc circa 1993, one which intrigued me just enough to hunt down his solo debut, Warm Springs Night, which was hard to find even back in the nineties and has now been out of print for ages. Loved the album then, and still do today, both for its music and that it introduced me to the rest of Phelps' solo work which I've found endlessly rewarding.

The Jam, "Man in the Corner Shop"
I first dubbed this great song onto a cassette from public library CD checkout back in the early nineties (long before the home CD-ripping era) and for years longed to have it in digital format, though I could never quite take the plunge to buy the whole disc. And for some reason the Jam is criminally underrepresented on iTunes, with just a few compilation albums available and none of the band's regular releases (including Sound Affects, where this one first appeared), so even with iTunes I had to do without. But there I recently and blissfully stumbled across what I believe is an extended version of the old Snap! band compilation, which included this tune. And now it's mine, for which I'm extremely pleased.

The Replacements, "Sixteen Blue"
Set this gentle remembrance of teenage life next to the raucous "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" (both from the seminal Let It Be) and you'll see what made the Replacements so great: from wistful tenderness to balls-out rock and roll.

The Hold Steady, "Don't Let Me Explode"
My most recent band discovery, courtesy of the estimable Ben Tanzer.

Lou Reed, "Set the Twilight Reeling (Live)"
Interesting that the iPod cued up this one right after the Hold Steady, given that the latter's Craig Finn owes a lot of his vocal delivery to the sing-speak of Lou Reed.