This is the second in the relaunch of the song obsessions posts, two and a half years after my last regular song obsession post . Song obsessions are those songs that get stuck in your head. This series of posts isn't about what I or the other panel members think is best, but what our brain latches onto, those ear worms that loop around and around in your head. - Adrian ( me ): Tyler Lyle - The Wine Maker's Love [...]
Two and a half years after my last regular song obsession post I've decided to relaunch the series , this time as an every-two-weeks affair. I just found it was a great way to ask my friends and fellow music fans what they're really obsessing about at the moment. Song obsessions are those songs that get stuck in your head. This series of posts isn't about what I or the other panel members think is best, but what our brain latches onto, those ear worms that loop around and around in your head. [...]

The Tree Ring @ San Diego Women's Club by Natalie Kardos . The Tree Ring top my list of top song obsessions for 2011. Frontman Joel P West also appears on the list. Song obsessions are those songs that your brain picks for you, those ear worms that get stuck in your head and have you singing them to yourself or going back to hit repeat on your ipod. I like the idea of reporting what my brain got stuck on each year. Here's the list of the songs that were stuck in [...]

The Tree Ring @ San Diego Women's Club by Natalie Kardos . The Tree Ring top my list of top song obsessions for 2011. Frontman Joel P West also appears on the list. Song obsessions are those songs that your brain picks for you, those ear worms that get stuck in your head and have you singing them to yourself or going back to hit repeat on your ipod. I like the idea of reporting what my brain got stuck on each year. Here's the list of the songs that were stuck in [...]

It's only been a little while since my last mixtape , but really September and October can be seen as part one and part two of the same mix. This one starts out with some soul and then movies into indie rock and folk. It's a good one... Go ahead and check out the playlist (below) or the liner notes . Adrian's October 2011 Mixtape (zip file, mediafire link) - You can download the zip file with [...]

I haven't done a monthly mixtape in a long time even though I've been wanting to get back to them. Here's my first and if you stay tuned for a couple of days, I've got part two of the mix, October 2011 , coming up. I hope you enjoy it-there's a nice mix of music here. Go ahead and check out the playlist (below) or the liner notes for it. Adrian's September 2011 Mixtape (zip file, mediafire link) [...]
On Friday I saw Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel , recently out of his self-imposed reclusion, play an acoustic set at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge. In the Aeroplane over the Sea is an album of great importance -perhaps so Important that it needs to be capitalized-to me, as it is to many people, so you would think that I was unbelievably excited about this show in the days leading up to it. I was excited but I tried [...]
The recently reunited Archers of Loaf ( myspace ) played on Jimmy Fallon last Friday. I haven't found a late night performance so inspiring in a long time. It makes me want to play in a rock band. Thrash around on guitar. Or bass. Write cryptic lyrics about life and girls. Jump up and down. Yell so hard at the mic that spit flies everywhere. Do sweet air kicks. Turn turmoil into distortion and distortion into music. By now you should know that I'm a big Archers of Loaf fan . Looks [...]

summer sky; idea shamelessly stolen from Natalie My friends, the Colliers, recently moved to LA and I wanted to send them off with a nice mix that would help them get settled in the City of Angles. Since then I've been listening to it a lot and I thought it was just too good not to post. I'm pretty excited about it! Go ahead and check out the playlist (below) or the liner notes for volume 1 or volume 2 [...]
Ken's Song - A Traditional Era from David Tree on Vimeo . First is a video from Zambia. Traditional guitar and vocals with adorable kids and grandmas dancing and singing along. Take note that the (homemade?) guitar has bottle caps attached to give a buzzing quality to the sound. That buzzing timbre is common to African music, but it's most common in West Africa. - Fool's Gold is possibly just another white American group using African idioms in their music, but [...]

Today would have been the truly incomparable Sam Cooke's -called the Inventor of Soul -80th birthday. He started singing in soul groups and ended up in the influential Soul Stirrers . Eventually he took that gospel sound into secular music, first in 1956 with a reworked gospel song called "Lovable" released under the pseudonym Dale Cooke in order to hide his identity from gospel fans who might not like his foray into secular music. He left the Soul Stirrers in 1957 to pursue pop music. [...]

"Nothing Like You" by Frightened Rabbit was my top song obsession, photo by ipickmynose 2010 has been the oddest of my life, full of contradictions: the most amazing and most boring times; the most lovelorn and most disinterested; the most outgoing and most antisocial. It'll take years to see what it all means and where it will lead, but I have to say it was pretty good. But these contradictions led to a vast and odd array of music getting caught in my head, twisting and turning around in there and begging to [...]

I didn't realize John Vanderslice ran a construction company in Cape Town under a pretty poor fake name. What can't that guy do? By the way, his free EP is further proof that he's the nicest guy in indie rock and it's totally worth checking out. Here's my favorite track: John Vanderslice - Streetlights (mp3) (Oh, he also has a new album coming out January 25. You can hear a new track .)

Jonsi @ Coachella by Natalie Kardos This is a continuation of part 1 of my recent song obsessions. Just a bunch of great songs that have been running through my head over the last few months. Paul Jacobson & the Madison Arm - Six O'Clock News (mp3) ( unreleased , band website ) Heather turned me on to this song. A cover of the Kathleen Edwards original, it stunned me. Built in a [...]

To be continued in part 2, Just because I don't do a weekly column on song obsessions anymore doesn't mean I don't listen to songs obsessively. These are just some of the songs that have burrowed their way into my ears in the past few months. Carissa's Wierd - Die (mp3) ( buy ) It's difficult to describe what makes this song so obsession-worthy but it's a song that I've listened to dozens of times in the last few months first alone as [...]

Sharon Jones @ Outside Lands, photo by Natalie Kardos I have no never-ending mental catalog of soul but I know my stuff-my collection includes all of Stax's and Motown's singles from 1959-1968 among other stuff. It makes me happy when I hear a new artist doing soul right , like Mayer Hawthorne , Raphael Saadiq or Candie Payne . In the last few months, I've heard two albums that I really think have done soul and soul-funk right-it's soul that's authentic but still [...]

rural south african soccer The World Cup starts today and I'm in the thick of it. A game will be played 500m from my doorstep in a few scant hours. The anticipation is madness; I think the country will explode before the first game. My South African parents didn't listen to pop music but we did have Graceland . My brother and I would blast the opening accordion riff of "I Know What I Want" and dance around the living room while my parents were out. After that I started collecting music on [...]

a reissue of an early Tamla record You know I love soul. I love Motown's soul pop sound. I love Stax's hard driving soul and soul-funk. I'm into Dusty's blue-eyed soul and some of that Northern Soul sound. But sometimes I want that other stuff, that down and dirty rhythm and blues, with sauntering bass lines and tight-but-rough horn lines. With swinging drums and voices that tell you they know a little something about the world. That music that makes you feel like [...]

Joe Pug by Adrian Bischoff Certain phrases skew themselves toward certain types of music. "I Will Follow" has a tendency to be in pop music-think Little Peggy March's "I Will Follow Him" or Death Cab for Cuties's "I Will Follow You into the Dark"; for whatever reason, "Bury Me" has a tendency to be in folk music. Perhaps its the genre's overall fascination with death. Death and bad-man ballads are common in traditional folk music from the American South, a tradition that carried into country, bluegrass, folk-revival and the various forms of music [...]

I love Ace Records' oldies/ R&B compilations so I've picked some up without really knowing much about them. Some I listen to pretty frequently while a few have fallen by the wayside. The other day this song, from the waysided Goldwax Story, vol 1 , came on and I was blown away. Sam Cooke's voice is among the top two male vocalists in pop history (with Smokey Robinson being the other), in my opinion. I knew this wasn't Sam Cooke but if I closed my eyes, I could almost be fooled. Louis [...]