Doug's A-Z Listening Experience: Surprise Song Follow-Up

Unlike so many of my goals in life, the A-Z Listening Experience is still going strong. I just plowed into the Is which gives me the chance to give an update on the Surprise Songs from D-H. (Remember, these are songs that I have in my catalog that I have no memory of hearing in the past. So, they cannot be songs where I say: "Oh YEAH! This song is so great!" They have to be total surprises.)

D is for Diggin' Up the Heart by Brandon Flowers. (Disconnecty by Grandaddy was a close second.)

This is off the album that he released last year that a lot of people liked but that I never listened to except in the car with Christina and the kids and even then, the kids kept requesting certain songs. So, I never caught this one and I like it better than anything else on the album because it's a Brandon Flowers Nevada song. The best thing to me about Brandon Flowers is that he continues to write about Las Vegas and, when the characters aren't in Vegas, they are somewhere out in small-town Nevada. When kids from the Sun Belt listen to his stuff, they don't have to try and imagine themselves in New York, the docks, or the Midwest. In this song, it's about a guy who is in prison out in the desert where he can smell the sagebrush when he is out in the yard. Sure, the story in the song could have been about a kid in the Midwest, but because Flowers specifically marks the location in the song (the desert, the girl in the song being Humboldt County queen), it evokes driving through Winnemucca (county seat of Humboldt County) on I-80, coloring the whole song with memories of vast blue skies, blistering heat, sagebrush, and utter emptiness. 

E is for Execution of All Things by Rilo Kiley. 

I have always liked the sound of Rilo Kiley, but there is something in the way that Jenny Lewis swears that is incredibly ugly to me. It seems that in the first few tracks of this album that there were enough of Jenny Lewis swearing to deter me from the whole thing. (Personal preference, of course. Other people might find the way she swears cute or endearing or empowering. I find it ugly. That's the only way I can describe it.) So, I never got to this song which is a great angry song about havoc being rained down on the head of an ex. (This explanation doesn't make sense because this is track three. Whatever.) This is really the apex of Rilo Kiley for me because I like the sound of this album (previous album was kind of boring, next album because really slick) and it isn't marred by the ugly swears. (I can't write this in any less prudish way. Sorry, man.)

F is for Flake by *shudder* Jack Johnson.

That is the most difficult sentence I have ever had to write. I cannot stand anything else I have ever heard by Jack Johnson. I cannot stand his vibe, his voice, his lyrics, everything he stands for. (Laid back dude on the beach with an acoustic guitar who strums idiotic ditties without a shirt but with a shell necklace and all the girls think he is so deep and so talented.) If someone asks me what music I like, part of the description is "...and I cannot stand Jack Johnson." And yet, here I am, completely besotted by Flake. I was shocked that when it first started playing, that I didn't give it an immediate thumbs down like all his other songs. But the songs evolves into something much more interesting and cool by the end and I could not get it out of my head. I spent the rest of the Fs hoping that something else would come along to knock it out of first place. I kept relistening to it, hoping that I was mistaken. Instead, each relisten further confirmed a most inconvenient truth: I liked a Jack Johnson. (Even worse, according to one of my beach bum friends, this was a popular Jack Johnson song back in the day.)

G is for Good Old Days by the Lodger. (Close runner-up: Generate by Collective Soul. Seriously.)

It's a very simple peppy British song. Nothing much to it. Which makes it almost a perfect song. It's like a Whoville Christmas after the Grinch stole it, without all the trimmings and trappings and roast beasts.

H is for Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez. (Close runner-up: He Seng by Carsick Cars.)

Jose Gonzalez is one of those soft acoustic men from the early 2000s that people recommended to me and when I listened to their albums and thought they sounded same-y. No idea how we go this particular song (it must have been popular because we also have a version of the song that is sung by some chorus), but divorced from the rest of the album, it really shines.