Doin' the Friday Shuffle

1. "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got that Swing" - Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook
Ella swinging like crazy.

2. "He Was My Brother (Alternate Take)" - Simon & Garfunkel - Wednesday Morning, 3 AM
This album underwhelms me; a little too safe, a little too mannered, and none of the songwriting greatness that would emerge later.

3. "Let It Be" - The Beatles - 1
Hard to argue with this. Just a great song.

4. "Buckets of Rain" - Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
I love the harpischord-like sound of the guitar here. Not sure what causes it (steel strings?), but it's a great, spiky sound that pairs with Dylan's voice in a very complementary way.

5. "Bad" - U2 - The Unforgettable Fire
OK here. Brilliant live.

6. "Beige to Beige" - John Mellencamp - Human Wheels
A laid-back sound with a defining fiddle line, reminiscent of the songs on The Lonesome Jubilee. "Beige to beige" is a great metaphor of what going through the day-to-day of life can often feel like.

7. "Well Du Liebst (Reprise)" - Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz - Der Gloeckner Von Notre Dame (Original Berlin Cast Recording)
German-language cast recording of the stage version of the Disney film--ala it's never progressed beyond Berlin.

8. "Prologue: The Carousel Waltz" - Richard Rodgers - Carousel (1994 Broadway Revival Cast Recording)
Overtures aside, this must be the greatest piece of non-vocal music ever written for the Broadway stage. It fits the show and its musical themes so completely and perfectly, wonderfully setting up the sound and style and harmonic language of the score to come. Amazing, then, that Rodgers wrote it for something else years before he and Hammerstein started on Carousel.

9. "The Lazarus Heart" - Sting - Nothing Like the Sun
Cool, clean jazz-rock from an underrated and unjustly forgotten album.

10. "We Suck Young Blood (Your Time Is Up) - Radiohead - Hail to the Thief
Radiohead will try anything. This comes across as a 21st Century slave chant, replete with hand claps.

Until Whenever