So there I am, making a playlist circling around a country-but-not-quite-country vibe I was feeling, and I’m poking around in various recommendation engines for “if you like then you might like” kind of stuff and there’s Katie Pruitt. I might like Katie Pruitt, the komputormachina said, so I put her album on my playlist all casually, like, “oh, here’s another album”. What a buffoon, what an absolute simpleton I was. 185 tracks on this playlist from amazing artists, The Staves and Lera Lynn and Waxahatchee and Joy Williams and Sarah Shook (coming soon, oh lawdy) but here comes Katie Pruitt and…were there other songs on this playlist?
This was a total accident. Maybe fate, if you believe in that sort of thing.
I got a notification from PledgeMusic that Elizabeth & The Catapult had posted an update on the new album project and I popped over there on my phone and it gave me one of those “you might also like” situations and I’m not even kidding you, I hit the wrong spot on the phone and there I was looking at Lera Lynn’s PledgeMusic.
In a Quixotian tilting exercise, I endeavoured to take on use of a Windows Phone 8 device for a while. It was actually pretty good, but synchronizing music from a Mac to it was not, so I decided to take that opportunity to investigate a paid account with Spotify. I have to say I’ve been quite impressed with the catalog breadth and due to the excellent coverage, the rate at which I could take on new random music was increased immensely, not to mention they now send me these emails that say things like “You like (artist), you should listen to (new artist)” and these imperatives are eerily accurate (data mining is getting really effective).
You may know Jenny Lewis as part of indie darlings Rilo Kiley. I’m not gonna lie to you here, folks: I don’t love Rilo Kiley. I tried on Rilo in aught and four when they appreared on the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack with Portions For Foxes and it just didn’t catch my ear. I’ve heard a song or two since, but nothing to make me take a deeper listen. You win some, you lose some.
GASP (Shock!) /awe. Yes, friends. “And other music. Like, also.”
The year, lovers, is 1996 and I am positively enamored with Bringing Down the Horse by The Wallflowers. One Headlight, 6th Avenue Heartache, Three Marlenas, The Difference, Josephine… What an album. Then they played a song for the worst Godzilla movie ever made, and we’re talking about a series of movies that relied on men in rubber monster suits trampling scale models of cities, for the most part.