Current Earworm

Talking Heads, Heaven

This morning’s earworm is Heaven, by Talking Heads. Specifically the version from Stop Making Sense, the best concert film ever. This song just seems to get better as I get older for some reason. And the stripped down version from the film is the best version.

Krista L. L. Muir, Drugging the Drain

This song by the woman behind the legendary Lederhosen Lucil is catchy as hell. Laura and I will often sing this to each other in the car, which we did yesterday, which is why it's stuck in my brain this morning. Who would have thought that a song about pouring prescription meds down the drain could be so inspiring?

3 Mustaphas 3, Perfidia

I was talking to my wife Laura tonight, and she mentioned that in my absence, she's been leaving the TV on for her father when she goes to work set to a music channel. When she was home at lunch today, as he was eating in the kitchen, he recognized the song "Perfidia" playing on the music channel. There are about a thousand versions of Perfidia out there, and I occasionally trawl Apple Music to listen to as many in a row as I can, but the first version I heard and the one that I couldn't get out of my head after talking to my wife tonight was this version by Szegerely's finest export, 3 Mustaphas 3, sung in inimitable style by Uncle Patrel Mustapha.

Magazine, A Song From Under the Floorboards

I occasionally trawl Apple Music for bands I used to listen to in the dim and distant past (unlike those times when I trawl Apple Music looking for new music I haven't heard yet). Last week, I was listening to Magazine, Howard DeVoto's post-Buzzcocks band. I got stuck on the absurdist classic "A Song From Under The Floorboards".

This weekend, Laura and I went up to Catskill, New York, to attend Dromfest, a tiny scale rock festival where the guy who puts it on invites a bunch of his favorite indie rock bands from the 1980s and 1990s to come play to a couple hundred people in a dive bar just off the main drag in this tiny town upstate. One of the bands that played this year is one of my all time favorites (and probably the one that convinced us to attend), Scrawl, the riot grrrl precursor band that sprung out of Columbus, Ohio, back in the late 1980s. I've seen them probably a couple of dozen times. They're awesome. When they played Dromfest this year, they included a cover in their set. Marcy Mays, one of the two people who are indispensible to Scrawl, introduced it by saying that were going to do a cover, but didn't say what it was. Then the first words came out of her mouth as she sang the song: "I am angry, I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin". My jaw dropped. I had listened to the original probably 15 times the week before.

Here's the original. I'll see if I can find a video of Scrawl doing it; they were incredible.

Log, Measure Once, Cut Twice

Very few people who follow me on social media will know this song, and most of the ones who do played on it. Laura mentioned this song to me in the course of conversation this evening and now it's stuck in my mind. A classic.