Who'll be on my August playlist, and how they got here
From algorithms to anniversaries to obituaries to my friend Jeff, there are many paths
Often when hearing one of my monthly playlists or whatever happens to come on at some point in my process, my wife will ask some variation of “Why that song?” or “Why them?”
And often my answer is… “I don’t remember.”
But this writing project has me paying more attention to how specific tracks or albums or artists have crossed my radar, so hopefully I’ll have better answers for her (and you) from now on.
I currently have some 700 songs to sift through— and who knows, I might consider a few more, too — before I’ll have my 40-song playlist for August. But I’ve finished the process that I described in my post last week about listening to what’s in The Funnel, so I already I know who is going to be on there. Now, let’s see if I can suss out for the official record what led me to (re)discover all that music.
(I’m not saying that these approaches that I’ll describe are the only ways that I encounter music, or that any one of these is better than the others — only that I love having lots of different avenues for songs I’m unfamiliar with or artists I’d love to get reacquainted with to come my way. These all play a part in my listening life.)
Similar Artists
The very first thing I do after finishing a monthly playlist is, for about half the artists on it, see which other artists my preferred streaming service says are similar. For each set of recommendations, I’ll select someone that I’m not especially familiar with and pick three of that artist’s most popular songs on the streaming service.
This routine seeds The Funnel with roughly 60 songs from 20 artists, and some of those artists will eventually wind up on a monthly playlist themselves. This month, those artists include:
Bella White
Carolina Chocolate Drops
Claire Lynch
Dinah Washington
Jaime Wyatt
Jemina Pearl
Joy Crookes
Saun & Starr
Hey, What Else Have They Done?
Around 2010, give or take a couple of years, I had a lot of friends and family members who turned 40, and to commemorate that milestone (whether they wanted me to or not) I created CD compilations of one song each from the year of their birth to the current year. Those 41 songs (including one to grow on, I suppose) reliably filled two CDs, even though every mix — customized for its recipient — was different.
Not completely different, though, because I had created for myself a master playlist of ten songs per calendar year to choose from — 450 or so songs by the time I wrapped up that particular project. Some of those tracks were the only songs I knew by the artists who performed them, because I had acquired those tracks solely to give myself more options to choose from for a particular year.
That master playlist still exists on my still-functioning iPod. Recently, I’ve been going through those songs, and upon hearing some artists have looked up other work of theirs — selections from more highly rated albums, or more popular songs of theirs, or simply more recent recordings. I’ve been adding a trio of tracks to The Funnel for these artists, too, including these who have made it onto my August playlist:
Alejandro Escovedo
George Michael (Thanks to “Freedom! ’90,” he was in The Funnel long before I saw the great new Wham! documentary that I keep mentioning.)
Jordan Zevon
Los Chicharrons (It turned out that the track on my iPod had an album title in place of the band’s name, so after all these years I’ve learned their actual identity.)
Maria McKee
Murder By Death
Richard & Linda Thompson
Teena Marie
Happy Anniversary!
When my wife and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary this spring, I dusted off the three-disc playlist that I’d made for our big day, and she created a whole new streaming playlist for us. Both went into The Funnel, and artists who have made it onto the August playlist via that route include:
The Beatles
Dan Baird (He was the lead singer for the Georgia Satellites, and in recent years I’ve seen him put on two tremendous club shows with his band Homemade Sin. But it was another band of his, the Yayhoos, whose version of the O’Jays’ “Love Train” — one of my favorite covers ever, by anyone — that was on our wedding playlist. And a newer band of his, the Chefs, has a new album that also went into The Funnel approximately two seconds after I learned of its existence.)
Miniature Tigers
Willie Nelson (Since the beginning of last year, he has made it onto my monthly playlists with “All Things Must Pass” with son Lukas Nelson, “Beer Barrel Polka,” “Columbus Stockade Blues” with onetime wife Shirley Collie, “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” a live version of “Whiskey River” recorded at Budokan in 1984, and “Still Is Still Moving to Me” with Toots & The Maytals. Willie finds so many ways into The Funnel — a couple of new albums per year, a podcast spotlighting songs he’s written and/or recorded, mentions of his work in books that I read, and in this case, his 1965 song “I Love You Because” being a perfect choice for the day I got hitched.)
Happy Birthday!
For my birthday this past month, the kid of mine who once worried that “All the musicians are dying” made a playlist as my present. I look forward to seeing other artists featured on it making their way onto my own playlists, but these are the first two:
SAKURAN-ZENSEN
Santigold (She could also have made it onto my August playlist for one of the “Similar Artists” tracks of hers that I added.)
Books I’ve Read
My go-to pleasure reading is nonfiction about music. These books often take me forever to get through because I’m stopping frequently to add mentioned songs and artists to The Funnel. This is not a complaint.
Arizona Dranes (thanks to Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, by Gayle F. Wald)
Lucinda Williams (thanks to an essay by Kathryn Jones in Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas)
Priscilla Renea (thanks to Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be, by Marissa R. Moss)
Things I’ve Watched
When viewing movies or shows, I often have the Shazam app ready, just in case I hear something that might not appear on an official playlist or soundtrack album. (The websites Tunefind and WhatSong can also come in handy here.)
Laura Marling (Bad Sisters)
TOBi (Do Revenge)
Jeffrey Melnick, My Friend I’ve Never Met But Who Has Great Musical Taste
If Jeff says it’s good — heck, if he mentions it at all — there’s a good chance I’m going to love it. I just hope I can keep up with his recommendations somewhere other than a recently renamed social media site whose owner is going all-out to drain the joy from interacting there…
Aretha Franklin (The newest-to-The-Funnel track that qualified Aretha for August was among those that Jeff included on his Aretha Franklin AF playlist, but his post about that playlist elicited a reply that sent me to The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations, by Anthony Heilbut — and who knows what other Aretha cuts that book might direct me toward.)
Algorithms, My Virtual Friends Who Think They Know What I’ll Like and Sometimes Actually Do
My preferred streaming service creates a 25-song new-music playlist for me each Friday, and — despite its recent assumption that I want all MPB, all the time — often provides some welcome introductions, reintroductions, and starting points for my own explorations. Such as:
Dream Wife
Kumbia Queers
Latyrx (It was actually a new track by the rapper Lyrics Born, who I already dug, that was included in that weekly playlist. Realizing I didn’t know much about him, I did a little research on AllMusic and learned of this experimental late-1990s duo that he was in.)
Vanessa da Mata (OK, so I do want some MPB, some of the time.)
Recently Late Greats
In this month’s case, the departed artists are pretty well known, but often the obituary pages can provide tremendous introductions to artists I’ve never heard of. (Come to think of it, one such obituary — for Brazil’s Elza Soares — has led to so many songs from her six-decade career making onto my monthly playlists that the algorithms’ assumption that I want to hear lots of Brazilian music makes perfect sense.)
And it just worked out that tracks from these two magnificent singers (relative rarities, in the case of the former) that I added to The Funnel upon their passings shuffled into earshot soon after.
Sinéad O'Connor
Tony Bennett
Miscellaneous
The Isley Brothers (As I mentioned in my post about covers, learning that a track from Make It Big was originally an Isley Brothers song reminded me of how much I did not know about this family band that’s been a force in R&B since the 1950s.)
The Meters (Revisiting a pandemic music-swapping project that I did with an old friend — I’ll have a lot more to say about this in a future post — pointed me toward another prolific group of R&B legends that I have a lot to learn about.)
Nope, I Still Don’t Remember
These two have me stumped. However I came across them, though, I’m glad I did.
Guayacán Orquesta (Absolutely no idea. I mean, at all.)
The Precisions (They’re featured on a compilation that came out last fall — The Skippy White Story: Boston Soul 1961-1969 — but I don’t remember what led me to put that compilation into The Funnel. But having been neither alive nor in Boston in the 1960s, it’s all new to me.)
So, 38 out of 40, I can tell you about. But that’s the easy part, because those 40 making it this far has resulted somewhat from chance. I’ll see you again when I’ve gotten down to one song for each, which is all on me…