Tag: Erin McKeown

Behold, a special collection of songs about individual states in the United States of America!

I can’t say if this is the first time I’ve had a radio show on Independence Day, but it is the first time I’ve prepared something special for the occasion. Presenting Affairs of State, a one-hour set of music dedicated to the States part of “United States of America.” As it turns out, there is a wide representation among the 50 states (51 if you count New Model Army) in the Lacking Library, but I have selected the best 16 examples for this evening.

I’ve done a couple dozen all-covers shows already, usually during fundraising, but for some reason have never come up with a name for them. It must have been because the painfully obvious Version Control hadn’t occurred to me yet, a real embarrassing confession given my day job in the realm of code. At any rate, it is here, and we are going to be versioning them semantically starting now.

When I was younger, still developing my musical tastes, in an era where the Beatles were closer to those days than Nirvana are to these, I hated on Yoko. It's what we all did. The older me, like Stephin Merritt and the many other luminaries on Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono, appreciates the inexpressible beauty and uncompromising nature of her art.

Hailing from the southwest of France, The Llamps build on a sound that's equal parts New York City grit, San Francisco psychedelia, and spaghetti Western twang, which makes for a pan-global main dish.

She once wrote a song over text message with Rachel Maddow, a micro-story that actually provides deep insight into this adventurous Canadian with an effortlessly capable voice and a finely honed instinct for finding the beating heart of a song.

Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.

I will let you in on a secret weakness: a band like The Rare Occasions can seize control of my playlist just by showing up with a surplus of pop hooks and grade AAA harmonies.

Tonight, we have Fruit Salsa! A fresh variety of fruits, from the ordinary to the exotic, is selected and cut up into an hour's worth of delectable desert. Somewhere in there, The Soft Boys give us a live version of a Tin Pan Alley classic.

The engineer looked through the diminishing dawn murk and spotted the specialist’s orange scarf. The sound of the balloon-tired swamp bikes spread through the Estonian bog like hot molasses, obscuring their location but not their presence. Unnoticed in the bike’s twin V mud-wakes, a nearly-vertical black snorkel tube trailed the pair.