Tag: Shibboleth

Welcome to a near-biographical experience as we focus on songs named after (and occasionally about) real people you may have heard of.

It was a day of jet-setting, starting in the dark hours of morning, and it wasn’t going to be over until the studio light went off. To keep up the energy levels, we presented a double-header of a special, first an hour of The Famous Polka, featuring songs titled after real (mostly) people, and following that two hours of Balkan Fever, with music that was far from exclusively Balkan but all fed into that manic two-step non-stop feeling.

On this, Hurray for The Riff Raff and I agree: don’t mess with bison.

A very quiet night, perhaps everyone is hunkering down for the leap day. Featured is IDLES, who all look like they could recommend a good IPA, and also would be willing to kick my ass for thinking so. Tonight featured more than our usual ration of covers, starting with a not-unlikely take on Beck’s “Loser” and following up with takes on tracks originally made famous by Muppets and Devo.

Mimi Parker, vocalist and drummer and half of the Minnesota band Low, passed away a couple of weeks ago while I was traveling. It’s a shocking loss and an abrupt end to a musical career that was still unfolding; the band’s last two albums, coming at the tail end of a discography that spans decades, showed a blossoming new direction for an act that was famed for their quiet and glacial approach. We open the show with Low’s rendition of a Bee Gees classic in tribute.

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.

The Gaslamp Killer earned his nickname by ruining the vibe of clubs in San Diego’s Gaslamp district with his incongruous DJ sets, so we must conclude those clubs were lame.

The haberdasher heard a light thump and roll, then felt something tap against a shoe. It was a peach pit. Looking up from the stack of brochures, they saw the orthodontist grinning and wiping their mouth with a sleeve, glancing at the gap on the blanket where the fruit was drying in the sun, clearly suggesting that perhaps another one was in order. The tandem moped leaned against the back of the Gate of Hercules, shielded by its bulk from the bright Croatian summer sun. The peaches had hours to go, and they had forgotten to bring a game., having only whatever reading material they had managed to scrape up in the Hotel Pula lobby.