Seven Songs for the Week #48

New St Vincent. What’s the style? What’s the vibe? Daddy’s Home was a fine album, but I prefer my St Vincent unnerving and futuristic please. Oh, I see you are on fire on the cover and shouting “what are you looking at?” on the single. Excellent.

It was news to me that Luther Vandross before he was solo star Luther Vandross was the lead singer and songwriter for a band called (checks notes) Luther. The two Luther albums have been out of print for 40+ years, but one of the spin-offs of having one of those rights companies like Primary Wave buying your catalogue is that they’ll look down the back of a sofa to see if there’s anything to release to pay off the massive loans they took out to own all of Stevie Nicks’ b-sides or whatever. See also: the recent announcement of a totally redundant Best Of album for Bruce Springsteen, a business decision made by the new rights holders of his music.

I love the charts, still. It’s different being a chart watcher now compared to the 80s or 90s or 00s which all had different ebbs and flows. Recently I found out about Billboard’s TikTok chart and how there are some curious anomalies there. This entered at number one this week. Why? No idea, I’m not on TikTok. Still though, gives you hope that millions of new ears are landing on a song like this for the first time, including mine.

Title track and first single from upcoming Kacey Musgraves album. That album cover isn’t good enough, is it? So, heard this on SNL this week, lovely song, you expect a big chorus but then get blind-sided by the understated Deeper Well refrain. Good stuff. I’ve been wracking my brain because it reminds me of another song and I can’t put my finger on it. I thought it might be something off Crowded House’s Intriguer album, but maybe not. It is Neil Finn-y, this song. You can hear him singing that line. Co-written by Daniel Tashian who is in The Silver Seas, a band who had a bit of a moment about 15 years ago.

So many people when writing about James McCartney go “poor James McCartney” and it’s now a bit tiresome. He’s ends up being a punchline. This is odd as Dhani Harrison has been putting out underwhelming music for a while, and Sean Lennon is allowed do his thing… but James’ dad is still above ground and James has the gall, nay, the nerve, to make music with him, all while not looking as cool as Dhani or Sean. This is a good track, very McCartney as in it is tuneful, gossamer light, more going on than you initially think. Produced by David “Memory Almost Full” Kahne.

Every now and then I take down my copy of Pink Floyd’s The Endless River and play it, go “this is nice”, then put it away again. It’d be my favourite of the three Roger-less albums because it is very true to the concept of what PF are without Rog: lyric-less. There are bits that remind you of other bits of Floyd and I described this record this week as a parallel Pink Floyd Greatest Hits if they’d somehow made a career out of their early 70s Soundtracks. For the most part it’s Rick & Nick & Dave, doing their thing, there’s not an overwhelming cavalcade of extra musicians like on A Momentary Lapse of Reason. This track does not feature Rick, in spite of the Us & Them style piano, so I can only assume that it’s a latter day creation and not from the original 1993 sessions.

New Eels and, not gonna lie, the cover and in particular the exclamation mark made me think that this track was going to RAWK. It does not, it’s twinkly contemplative Eels instead. Which suits the end of this playlist.