I made this CD for my roommate, Blake, earlier in the year. I also wrote this to accompany it, but I never gave it to him.

Enjoy.

1) Loudon Wainwright III – Rufus is a Tit Man
2) Loudon Wainwright III – One Man Guy
3) James Taylor – Steamroller Blues
4) Temptations – I Wish It Would Rain
5) Kate Wolf – Sweet Love
6) Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell
7) Al Green – Simply Beautiful
8) John Gorka – When He Cries
9) Shirley Brown – Woman to Woman
10) Sam & Dave – Hold On, I’m Coming
11) Sam & Dave – Wrap It Up
12) Eddie Floyd – Knock on Wood
13) The Pretenders – My City Was Gone
14) The Cars – Let the Good Times Roll
15) Old 97s – Bird in a Cage
16) Bob Dylan – A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
17) Michael Buble – Home
18) Patti Page – Old Cape Cod
19) Eartha Kitt – Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)
20) The Golden Girls Theme


The first track is just fun, well-thought out, and what a dad! I’m sure if my dad was a musician, he would’ve written many a funny song for me, but never would it be so explicitly lewd, boyish, and something I could look at lovingly while at the same time want so badly to sneak the album to a friend’s basement where we could listen and giggle while gnawing on Topps Baseball Card gum.

With Loudon’s live version here, you can almost hear the middle finger strumming the guitar, his sly smile smirking through the bottom half of his face when he sings, “One Mayeeayeeayeean Guy is Me!” Whereas Rufus’ 21st century cover of his father’s beautifully written dirge takes on a new timely topical meaning (Oh my God! You’re Gay!), Loudon’s was clearly written in response to the whining of critics and record execs that he was too difficult to pin down, too free with his view on what a song was, what a performance was. See at the time, music was just beginning to see itself as a package that could be shrink-wrapped, reproduced en masse, and musicians thusly began to receive pressure to reproduce such studio quality performances live. Now today, with Ashley Simpson making the front page of major newspapers across the country for lip syncing her vocals - granted only *some of her vocals - it’s impossible for some performers to refer to themselves so freely, so generally. Ashley Simpson is a bad example, but people like Caprice Bourret, Victoria Silvstedt, Willa Ford, models each in their own right, have albums, Willa’s at one time was in the top ten on billboard, and her video was number 1 on TRL - at the height of TRL and Carson Daly’s popularity. Loudon is to me a fore-thinker, not a genius, but a wise artist willing to look at the present and see the impending struggle true performers would face in the years to come. He was right to fight with management. It may have kept him from being a household name where I grew up, but let’s face it, few of the household names where I grew up ended up being true artists. Even Sir Paul, when prodded by Mojo sometime last year, went so far as to explain which of the Beatles songs, and there were many, were just about drugs and not something more. Fucking Paul McCartney spoiled for millions the true mystery of what it is to be at the same time commercially viable, critically bowed before, and socio-economically viable in every way. I mean, that’s more than likely never going to happen again. Wilco can’t sell like the Beatles, because Tweedy looks progressively more like a Ming Dynasty shitzu and they haven’t appealed to the general pop community since “Box Full of Letters,” when I was throwing on flannel shirts, black jeans, and strapping my hat to my belt loop. Music today is in dire straits, and there aren’t any clear favorites to pull us out. Maybe Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was wrong, there isn’t any one clear band that’s going to lead this generation’s push into importance. Sometimes, I wish I was a baby boomer.

Steamroller was a Jeep standard back when I had the Jeep. I used it to whip girls into a frenzy of industrial strength sexual tension. It never worked, but that’s ok. James Taylor will forever remain that one musician I belong to. Do you know what I mean by that? I mean, no matter what he does, what court room he ends up testifying in to some crazy charge like *gasp* gadzooks! child molestation, I will forever be a James Taylor fan.

I heard this song for the first time when I would wash cars with my dad as a toddler. The Temptations, The Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, and Neil Diamond, among a couple others were the tapes my dad had in the garage, and more often than not, we listened to the oldies, because for lack of explanation, it is and will forever be car washing music. It’s muscle memory for me to find that station when washing cars. So, this song, as amazingly sad as it is, and incredibly well crooned, is above all else, a sudsy memory, but it is gorgeous. And I really have been feeling the thoughts of the song. They just say it so well, so believably.

I first heard this Kate Wolf song as a cover John Gorka did on a tribute album, and I liked it. I like her downer tone, her sort of quiet snarl, and just the way she little more than whispers “sweet love...” it’s beautiful.

Al Green. I’m not even going to talk about the sex part of Al Green. He does enough of that - Jesus, did you see him on the Daily Show? - If he’d gone on pantsless, as much as he flopped around on that couch, he - and Stewart would’ve too - would have exuded their loads for all the American public to see. Gross. So I did talk about the sex part. It’s Green. He just whips it out of me. I mean, the simplicity, the fuzzy hum over the song. The mistakes. The audible inhalation. It’s all so ... sex in a stairwell. It’s so upside-down hooking up in a second floor room of someone else’s house. The beauty in the awkwardness.

The sincerity with which he sings this utterly ridiculous song is what I love most about it. Oh, and I wrote a poem my senior year about a boy who made a face like Charles Bronson. It made me laugh.

When I was working retail in London, we had this CD, Latenight Tales, part of a collection that was being released in London at the time, this one was selected by a pair of famous DJs, Sly and Robbie. Jamiroquai had a selection, Fatboy Slim had one, but this one from Sly and Robbie was a real gem. Selections from Motown and Stax, mixed in with New Wave and modern tracks, all of which made sense together. But this one track, I remember hitting me differently every time. Sometimes, I hated this song, I thought this dumb bitch should just shut up, dump the man, and move on. Sometimes, mostly on the night’s I’d mop the awful orange rubber flooring, I’d find myself sympathizing. Perhaps it was the fact that i always think of the Donna Summer video for “She Works Hard for the Money” when I do things like mop and sweep, and I projected Shirley’s voice onto that hard working woman on her hands and knees, cleaning the bathroom of some dingy gymnasium so that her husband could go and sleep with some woman named Barbara. Gross.

The version I have doesn’t sound like the original version of this song. Sam and Dave sound as if they’re on their last breath. I picture these two grey-haired fools in puke green and powder blue leisure suits circa 1981 crooning in some Miami hotel banquet room to a group of retired Stax Records employees and tow-headed frat-tastic spring breakers at the Ramada Inn singing here. But this song is still so pungent. The horns, their back and forth, just the make-up. It’s impenetrably great. And if you know anything about Sam and Dave, their egos riding higher than their drug habits, they’d each be working the far corners of the stage because they couldn’t stand each other, but they sound as if they’re sitting on stools, or rather, bouncing up and down from sitting to standing on stools next to one another cum Simon and Garfunkel circa turtlenecks and jeans. So together. So in tune with one another.

The rip through the title words of this song sounds as if they’re saying “Rabid Love” which is what it is. Fucking Rabid. This song is rough and meaningful. “Wrap it Up, Lady. I don’t care. I love you, and I’ve got two and a half minutes to tell you because Stax are cheap bastards and want us to fill this album with one more top forty track so that you and I can afford to keep doing drugs, living in this orange condo, and driving my gold Mercedes, which I still think was a wrong decision. I’m sorry baby...”

Knock on Wood was such a good song the first time in the sixties when you had better knock on wood, because you’re lucky she’s with you, that they decided it should be rereleased as a disco track in the seventies because you’re lucky you’re still alive after eating all that whipped cream, doing all that coke, and making out with that dude that looked like a chick.

I love this baseline so much. It was used as Rush Limbaugh’s lead in on his righty radio program recorded in Cape Girardeau, Missouri and syndicated across the country and around the world. But then, you get into this song, and it talks about something I feel. Where did you go, St. Louis? I look at you now, and all I see are just tons and tons of families, unhappy with their lot in life. 2.5 car garage for 2.5 cars. 2.5 storey house for 2.5 kids. 2.5 weeks of vacation a year. it’s like a half-life. What happened? What happened to weekends spent watching the Cardinals after a long day of golf. What happened to winters spent with the kids on Art Hill because you could give two shits what the market was doing today? It’s like everything that mattered at 12, now, at 24 seems to have gone away. And I’m sure at 48 it’ll be only faint memories. I mean my dad talks about taking a quarter to the store to buy chocolate and Coke and coming home and putting the dime that remained in his piggy bank. Sheesh. My kids are going to need money clips for their diapers. Ok, enough complaining. Chrissy did enough.

I used to sing this song to myself all the time. My mom was chairperson for the school auction when I was a Junior. They had a New Orleans theme “Let the Good Times Roll.” Well, at the time, I was unaware there was another song of that title. A Fats Waller song, I think, or Louis Jordan, it’s a great tune, but this song, by Ocasek, stuck with me every spring. I’d sing it in my car. Just lay back, relax. Let ‘em roll-oh, let ‘em roll. Hopefully, you’ll soon be doing the same thing. Just a little reminder to chill out.

This is a great song I discovered on a drive back from Bowling Green with my then girlfriend, Caroline. Or no, it was Florence, Kentucky. Somewhere around Louisville I put in this CD I’d found in my CD case a few days earlier. Not mine, some burnt CD a girl made - it was chick music, chick handwriting - and some numbskull at the college radio station, WGRE stuffed it in my case when I left my CDs there by accident - who am I to complain?... As we stumbled up the border into Indiana, the sun fully set for a while, Caroline on Jumbo coffee numero 5, I was driving, and this song hit us both like a brick, we went “Aw...” in unison the minute Rhett Miller sings “... but at least it’s your cage.” Great tune - great version of this tune.

I listened to this song about a million times when I heard it. It’s drive, it’s length, it’s repetition, it’s message. It’s an unbearably perfect song. And what he says at the end there about working until you’re so confident in yourself that you’ll be able to face all odds, shine your light against the mountain so wide, so high, so that all who see it, see you, and know you, and love you, and hate you will know it’s your light, because it’s so noticeably you. Brilliant. For me that line was about my movie. I can’t wait to have the confidence in my creation to the point that I can project it on a screen a mile wide a mile high a mile deep.

As much as I hate Michael Buble, for his infomercials, for his attack on the Norah Jones’ of the world, for his poor Frankie imitations - which often times, as he neared death, I found to be Frankie imitations as well - and generally for being a schmuck, something about this tune hits hard. Sure it’s schmaltzy, but he’s right. It’s a nice sound. It’s a sad state of affairs when you’re a jazz singer singing in Paris, Rome, and I think he mentions London, and you want to go home. To Chilicothe, or even Chattenooga, regardless, home is home is home is home, and it acts as a lure whether it was the best 20 years of a person’s life or the worst, something about it constantly pulls at them. Knowing a place is a very human thing. Hearing someone talk about St. Louis, be it in person or on television, I still want to know who or what were involved: exact locations, people, and or zoo animals with whom I may have been acquainted. Perhaps it’s the know-it-all in me.

Something about being required to sing a song at school. Something about knowing the lyrics so well that you’re able to bend them and shape them and make them your own. I didn’t like this song at first, but by the time I was finished singing it, it’d become a whole new song for me; I love Jeff Buckley for this very reason. His ability to take and make songs his own is an admirable feat, something all artists should strive for. Elvis did it with Perkins and Big Mama Thornton. I did it with this song. Girls grabbed their hearts, guys patted me on the back. I owned all two minutes of that stage. It was fun.

I love this Cole Porter song. He was such a funny writer. I still haven’t seen De-Lovely, but Eartha Kitt only had a few big recorded hits, and this one, I hadn’t heard until I heard it in the gym’s locker room - one of the nice things about working out in an upscale gym: different sound systems in different parts of the gym means lots of new music. I found myself singing along with this one uncontrollably. I am in love with Earth Kitt now. I liked the Louis Armstrong version, but I love the way she slurps up every vowel.

The Golden Girls theme was always something I looked forward to. That and “As long as we’ve got each other...” at the beginning of every Growing Pains episode were such good songs, not to mention TV Themes. The piano’s drive here, is how I’d imagine the gravel on 231 skipping beneath my car as I rushed to be your friend again if I had the means to do so. I love the fact that “the biggest gift” equals the best friend. It’s so eighties. It’s so true.

Here lies the brains behind the mixes I make.