So, it’s the last day of the month and time to take a look back at this semi-successful Song of the Day project. Posts: 24 Days of month: 31 The idea was to create my own writing exercise, giving myself something fixed to write about — songs — so that I would get in thecontinue reading

It’s almost the end of this month-long Song of the Day project and I’ve fallen sorely behind. At the beginning of the month, looking ahead to Christmas vacation at the end, I thought that the last two weeks of the month would be when I could really spend some time crafting posts, thinking about songscontinue reading

You know those album tracks — remember album tracks? — that you don’t think you like and don’t pay any attention to, and then you hear them on their own and suddenly realize you actually like them? This is one of those. I love the New Pornographers, but Challengers has never been my favourite ofcontinue reading

We’ll have to muddle through sometime. Makes me cry, every time I see it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g4lY8Y3eoo

A song with a chorus that references Tokyo and a video full of running. If it were a Venn diagram the overlapping part would be miniscule (and the rest of it would be filled with Haruki Murakami’s wonderful book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running). Great things about this song: the hornscontinue reading

So Khodorkovsky is released in John LeCarre cloak and dagger fashion, the same way Solzhenitsyn was released in the 1970s, with reports that he is going to Germany to join his sick mother. Except, someone calls his mother, who is still in Russia. Confusion reigns, at least on Twitter, where I see this exchange: Englishcontinue reading

Off until 2014!

One of the great love songs that no one thinks of when they’re thinking of love songs. Perhaps because the original recording was in 1987, and the subsequent recording — this slightly countrified version, that adds on Georgia’s vocals — was buried in an album of mostly covers, Facebook, in 1990. Perhaps because there’s nothingcontinue reading

I never listened to Sleater-Kinney, was never a fan. I think their first albums came out during the years I was living abroad, and then I never caught up afterwards. But recently, prompted by my love of Portlandia, I decided to plumb the depths of the S-K catalogue and see what I liked. I camecontinue reading