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.

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.

It's a steamy Florida night, and it marks the debut of Julius C. Lacking on the airwaves of WFIT, a university radio station in Melbourne, Florida. The random nature of the playlist is born of a catastrophic home furnishing disaster that hopelessly jumbled the contents of the vaunted Lacking Selection, the music library which Julius has been aggregating for the last twenty years. The process of its re-cataloging and collation, which promises to last decades, will henceforth be known as The Lacking Organization. Let it begin.