Deezer, the streaming music service I use, suddenly offered me an almost ready-made blog entry. Here are 40 songs that I’ve added and listened to frequently in the past year. The asterisks mark the tunes with the least general popularity on Deezer right now. You can take that to mean either that they’re the worst of the lot, or that they’re the choicest, deepest cuts that you need to listen to first. Or you can simply note that two are Swedish acts that aren’t widely known abroad.
Tell me which of the tunes you like! And merry Christmas everyone!
- Alice in Chains: The One You Know
- Allah-Las: Seven Point Five
- Alvvays: Archie, Marry Me
- Andrew Bird: Capsized
- Aquilo: Thin
- Arctic Monkeys: Arabella
- Black Keys: Hell Of A Season
- Black Keys: Tighten Up
- Brian Jonestown Massacre: Panic In Babylon
- Bright Eyes: First Day Of My Life
- Connan Mockasin: Charlotte’s Thong
- Delorentos: Secret *
- Ebbot Lundberg & the Indigo Children: Where Are You Now? *
- Elephant Tree: Wither
- Elton John, Leon Russell: If It Wasn’t For Bad
- Eurythmics: Aqua *
- First Aid Kit: Fireworks
- Florence & the Machine: Shake It Out
- Foster the People: Don’t Stop (Color on the Walls)
- Graveyard: The Fox *
- Greta Van Fleet: Highway Tune
- James Bay: Sugar Drunk High
- Jayhawks: Blue *
- Little Hurricane: Isn’t It Great
- of Montreal: Disconnect The Dots *
- Parcels: Bemyself
- Parcels: Overnight
- Portugal The Man: Feel It Still
- Remo Drive: Blue Ribbon
- Shins: Name For You
- Somali Yacht Club: Sightwaster
- Soundgarden: Fell On Black Days
- Sufjan Stevens: Mystery of Love
- Sunshine Fix: That Ole Sun *
- Teleman: Steam Train Girl
- Weezer: Any Friend of Diane’s
- Weezer: Island In The Sun
- Welshly Arms: Legendary
- Whiskeytown: 16 Days
- White Denim: Magazin
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
I think I’ve heard of Elton John. Sorry, I’m not a music person.
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Florence & the Machine.
Sing daan faai lok.
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kaleberg: Try giving this a spin – in my opinion that’s Elton John just about at his unvarnished best, when he was still young enough that his voice hadn’t begun to deteriorate.
Today’s piece of trivia – first time Elton John performed in Western Australia, he was booed off the stage. Overheard comment from one audience member: “If I want to watch little Pommy poofters, I can just go the men’s toilet at the train station and watch them for nothing.” That’s the good ol’ wild West – hasn’t changed much.
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Upon hearing “If It Wasn’t For Bad”, a friend of mine said that it was the first good newer Elton John track he’d heard.
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“If It Wasn’t For Bad” is the only one of those in my music collection. It holds up a lot better than many of the songs of his I have heard, especially from about 1980 onwards.
I have heard of about a third of the bands on the list, but not heard anything by most of them. I am familiar with the Eurythmics, but not that particular track.
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All of the ones I tried are on Youtube. Welcome to 2019.
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“Aqua” is on the 1983 Eurythmics album Touch. It’s their best IMO, synthesizer psychedelia with amazing vocals.
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Here’s an outrageous suggestion – Amy Shark (her lyrics make a bit more sense if you are Australian). She seems to be mildly popular in the USA, and wildly popular in Turkey – absolutely no idea why; I can find no Turkish connection at all.
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Company I work for is amusingly transparent. Office administrator recently made a big new announcement to all staff that from now on, we would have “dress casual Fridays”. Whoopee. Showing how much the management care about the staff and are constantly seeking to make work easier and more enjoyable. (Cough.)
But then he listed out a set of standards to define what would be acceptable for “casual dress” which are a lot less casual and more restrictive than the clothes most employees already wear to the office every day of the week.
So this big new initiative, this concession to staff to make work more comfortable and fun for one day per week, plus marginally cheaper clothing bills, is actually an ill-disguised attempt to make all of the staff dress better than they do every day. I predict it will fail miserably – staff will see it for exactly what it is and blithely ignore it, just like they have ignored all previous attempts to get them to “dress up” more. What the hell does it matter – if they are not going to be meeting clients, which most of them never do, why can’t they wear jeans and T-shirts in the office? It’s not like we have clients coming into our badly over-crowded and unimpressive office much, if at all – most clients insist we always go to them when we need to have meetings. Annual professional staff turnover is already 30% compared to an industry average of 15%, and that has zero to do with what they wear to work.
Grade: Massive fail.
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