listening to Your Favorite Songs 2024, part 6

Let's rock...

Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.

"Kissed Me in Seattle" - Teenage Tom Petties
from Finlay of the Terminal Buildings
"These lyrics are what i would call "tightly themed" where they take an idea and just run with it, like Friday I'm In Love or countless 60s pop songs. I also think the romanticising of the US from a UK perspective is funny, it creates kind of a tragic undertone to the story. It's got a classic pop feel that really comes out in the bridge and the backing vocals, and the whole thing is ridiculously catchy!"

This song is adorable and Teenage Tom Petties is a delightful name for a band. I'm on the record as being very into songs that list the days of the week (Craig David's "7 Days"), names of women the singer would like to sleep with or have already slept with (Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5") or songs that combine the two ("Tired of Sex" by Weezer). And let's add another list song category: lists of places. On "Kissed Me In Seattle," the singer's heart's ass gets kicked from L.A. all the way to Maine, which, yes, is even funnier in the context of songwriter Tom Brown being from England.

The conceit for this Teenage Tom Petties project is interesting—a concept album from the perspective of an adolescent in the '90s, recorded in commensurate style, "at home on a Strat, practice amp and a neighbour’s bass guitar." I'll have to listen to the whole thing! Good rec!!

"Flash In The Pan" - Jane Remover
from Kurt
"cuz it goes"

I was playing some Your Favorite Songs in the car for my husband as we were speeding over to an adjacent town to enjoy a Friday night at the mall. Have you ever tried the Pasta da Vinci at the Cheesecake Factory? It paired well with a viewing of Gladiator II, though I did get a little sleepy by the end of the film. Here's an approximation of how the conversation went when I played "Flash In The Pan":

Him: Whose song is this?

Me: This is Jane Remover. She makes a sort of deep-fried, pop/rock hybrid music. She came out as trans in 2022, and before that, she was recording as dltzk and putting out crazy electronic mashups when she was like seventeen, in a genre called "dariacore" that became a whole thing on Soundcloud. I don't think it had anything to do with the show Daria other than the cover art was screenshots from Daria. But then she basically disavowed "dariacore" and went in a new direction...more...shoegaze-y...

Him: Oh, cool.

Aaaaaanyway I dig this song. It has the skittish, crispy production that I've grown to expect from producers who were born after 9/11, but the candied melody feels like it could have been cultivated in a Swedish recording studio in the 1990s. In stream-of-consciousness bursts, Jane navigates a frustratingly ambivalent romantic situation; her lover sounds dreamy but whatever he's serving up is clearly not enough. "I left my patience back in Newark Penn Station" has skyrocketed to the top of my personal Hot Hyperlocal Reference 100 chart, though if we are talking NJ Transit, I tend to leave my patience in Secaucus, when my transfer inevitably fails to arrive.

"Emotional Terrorist" - Thou
from Jay Papandreas (blogger)
"Thou's music often gets descriptors like 'unpleasant' and 'heavier than sin' but their large catalogue of cover songs speaks to pop sensibilities you might not expect from the Baton Rouge band. On their 2024 album, Umbilical, they bridge the gap between their originals and covers, and the product is sublime. There's another song on the album that borrows its chorus from 'Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)' by Billy Joel, albeit screamed and surrounded by a wall of noise. 'Emotional Terrorist' is a song that sounds evil, and it is, but it's got a soft center to it. It's a blackened grunge song, if there is such a thing. There's a lost Soundgarden single in the bones of this track and everything built out from that core is evil as all hell. It rips."

Dear LORD. This is heavy. I have to respect this band for just taking everything, guitar bass drums vocals, down to the very bottom of the sonic register and the "how are you feeling?" cartoon mood poster. Everything gets rendered in this overwhelmingly bleak texture, but the overall energy is mobilized and active, rather than apathetic and dreary. On yesterday's blog, I listened to a song by the British metal band Heriot and thought "this sounds super heavy," and then this Thou song said "hold my beer" or maybe more accurately "hold my burnished pewter chalice cursed via the carnage of a multigenerational blood feud"...or something like that.

I also checked out that Billy Joel-quoting song, "House of Ideas," and it's amazing to see Billy's jaunty midcentury mindset rendered with such punishing instrumentation. Music is so cool, man.

"AA BOUQUET FOR YOUR 180 FACE" - Saya Gray
from DaveyTweetWorld
"No one writes complex genreless but somehow catchy tracks like this. Most exciting current artist to me"

I have a music blog called I Enjoy Music, which you are reading now. I try to listen to a lot of new music, or new-to-me music. I try to keep up with others' blogs and newsletters, as well as the bigger music websites, and I even have a print subscription to Rolling Stone for the first time since high school. But there is so much music that comes out, it's like a deluge of music on a weekly basis, and so I inevitably miss stuff.

Happily, I do this end of year extravaganza in part so that others can show me what I have been missing—and this Saya Gray song is probably my favorite new listening experience yet. It's a perfectly intriguing slice of...alt pop, I guess?...with an oblique groove, unpredictable layers of sound, and a charismatic vocal performance. I kept trying to think of music writer-y ways to describe the song—a Fiona Apple and Jon Brion for the 2020s? In Rainbows-era Radiohead divided by Third-era Portishead?—but honestly you should just hear it for yourself. Like the Extreme song says, sometimes you need more than words to show you feel that your love is real. I am now locked in on all future Saya Gray offerings.

"Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" - Taylor Swift
from Madeleine
"Objectively I think there are probably "better" songs from this year, or even from this double (kind of) album, but this song is still My Favourite. I love that it's a 100% Taylor Swift Original, no cowriters, and that she's just manic with resentment for five and a half minutes. I love the way her voice sounds on it, and I love how the instrumentals and production sound like a haunted cowboy train station. Although it is a serious song it still has some of what I think of as Taylor's "silly goose" energy in that there's lots of outsized metaphors and you can tell she's really having fun singing it. This is not a very cool or niche pick — but I know in my heart that this is my favourite, and picking anything else would feel dishonest."

This is such an elite pick from Madeleine. This song feels like the true The Tortured Poets Department thesis statement, a grayscale blaze of massive ego and bruised feelings that finds Taylor where she clearly loves to be most: imagining herself as a ghost, haunting your ass.

Swift spent her early career pursued by the specters of other relationships ("Haunted", "Back to December") but somewhere around Reputation she got tired of that lifestyle and initiated ghost protocol. In 2017 she appeared in the "Look What You Made Me Do" video as an exhumed corpse; in 2020 she staged a mock funeral for "my tears ricochet"; now in 2024, she's leaping from the gallows and levitating down the street to ruin your festive shindig. Did you save her some baked Brie?

TTPD didn't quite match my freak when it came out in April, but giving this particular song another listen now, I am struck by Swift's willingness to come across as genuinely nuts. She heard that you were talkin' shit and you didn't think that she would hear it! And she did, and she's pissed! "You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me" was the line that turned into a meme, but I'm stuck on "I was tame, I was gentle, 'til the circus life made me mean." A fascinating heel turn for someone who once wrote a song about how mean people suck, for someone whose most recent tour hosted 10 million people all wearing pastel sequins and exchanging friendship bracelets. There's clearly more happening in Swift World than just shiny happy people holding hands, and the more I think about it, the more I kind of love Angry Taylor—I just want to hear more of that rancor in the actual music, which means we have to figure out how to conjure up Angry Antonoff as well. Open to suggestions...

Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.

Thanks to all the song recommenders <3 See you...tomorrow...