Sail the Dirty Mystic Highway (May 28th - June 1st)

Hello and welcome to Work Tunes.


Terrible week this time around tunesters. Lots of hard graft at work and the likely loss of the family pet. But you get by. Music always helps. And here's what I have.


I've slipped in a few Australian classics from AC/DC, Cold Chisel and The Saints. I'll probably have a few more next week. For my Hip Hop fix I've got LL and Plug One and Two of De La Soul. The latest LP from Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band is here, as is a classic from Randy Newman. For a bit of a Soul hit, who better than Sam Cooke and Mavis Staples. Finally, as always a bit of twang from Drive By Truckers.


Check it out:

• Mavis Staples - We'll Never Turn Back
• Conor Oberst and Mystic Valley - One Of My Kind
• AC/DC - Highway To Hell
• Plug One and Plug Two - First Serve
• LL Cool J - Icon
• Cold Chisel - Circus Animals
• Drive By Truckers - Dirty South
• Sam Cooke - The Man and His Music
• Randy Newman - Sail Away
• The Saints - (I'm) Stranded

Top Five Artists Last Week

1. Beastie Boys
2. Melissa Etheridge
3. The National
4. Elvis Costello
5. Bob Evans

Song of the Week : Bob Dylan - Things Have Changed

This week I have had a number of songs following me around, which makes it impossible to choose just one. So instead I'll celebrate the 71st birthday of Mr Robert Zimmerman, known to his mates as just plain Bob Dylan. The song I chose is the Academy Award Winning song from Wonder Boys - Things Have Changed.


Apart from being a solid rocking blues song, this track perfectly suited not just the main character of Wonder Boys (who was a disgruntled author with writer's block) but also His Bobness himself. Once upon a time the voice of a generation, the white people's sounding block for the Civil Rights movement, the poster boy for the radical Left; Bob grew up a bit jaded and a little more laid back. We should have seen it coming though, he signposted it in My Back Pages: "But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."


Things Have Changed reminds me that we all shift our priorities constantly. Some of the things that seem at some point to mean everything to us, that get us fired up, can wind up seeming trivial at best. Certain things are always going to be worth caring about, but so much of the baggage we carry around could just be jettisoned. Bob's refrain "I used to care, but things have changed" is genius in that it could mean he just doesn't care anymore or that the things around have changed so much, it's hard to know what to care about. 


Happy birthday to Bob, the "savage gift on a wayward bus" Dylan.

So Long

Not much more to say this week. I'll be happy when it's over and I get to try again next week, only this time without the terrible hassles and the grief. 


Thanks for stopping by. Hasala malakim.

Playlist January 31 - February 4th, 2011

Hello and welcome to another Work Tunes. I trust we've all had a HUGE Australia Day and we're ready to get back to work and do the hard yards.

To get me through my working week, I've got a list with a few Australian artists both pop and rap, a touch of folk and another 90s classic. It looks like this:

• Paul Kelly – The A – Z Recordings (Disc Three) : Three discs in now and I am really enjoying these live and sparsely instrumented cuts from the master's songbook. Highlights of the Kelly magic on Disc Three include God Told Me To, the timeless political anthem From Little Things, Big Things Grow and the greatest Australian Christmas song ever - How To Make Gravy.

• Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean : I was a little late to the Iron & Wine party. I know now that their earlier stuff was a little quieter than it is now and didn't have the instrumentation of this album. Some songs, such as Godless Brother In Love still have the sombre ebb of earlier cuts, but others have a new noise, at times even a groove. Either way, I like what I know of them and this is the latest.

• Babes in Toyland - Fontanelle : Following on from last week's 90s obsession, I have another classic grunge era set I'd like to hear. Forming in 1987 as a punk band in Minneapolis, Babes In Toyland eventually became a large part of the 'alternative' scene of the early to mid 90s. Fontanelle was their first and best selling full length album. Strange, arty and angry background vocals/voices and dirty guitar fuzz driven by a crunchy bass is what you'll get for your money.

• Edie Brickell - Edie Brickell : Dropping a self-titled album for your ninth release seems rather a strange thing to do. I suppose when you haven't had a lot of success sales-wise since your double platinum effort in 1988 (Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars), you might as well give it a shot. In 1988, 'Rubberbands' was a staple listen for me and then again a few years later at first year Uni, it became a sort of soundtrack. Apart from that, Brickell's Good Times film clip shipped with Windows 95 to show off it's awesome video capabilities (*chortle*). This CD I haven't played yet, but given 88s release is such a timeless classic, Edie's latest deserves a listen.

• VA - Dazed and Confused Soundtrack : Richard Linklater's film about high school in the 1970s took great pains to get everything right. From the clothes to the cars and the little paper cups the kids drink keg beer from, Linklater wanted to capture the vibe and the look of the 70s. One way he did that exceptionally well was the soundtrack. This collection of rock classics includes Cherrybomb by The Runaways, Kiss' Rock n Roll All Night, Black Sabbath's Paranoid and Alice Coopers' School's Out. Conspicuously missing of course is the Led Zeppelin song from which the film takes its name and the excellently used No More Mr Nice Guy by Alice Cooper.

• The National - The Virginia EP : After Bloodbuzz Ohio made #31 in a rather disappointing JJJ Hottest 100, I was speaking with my boss about what bands were at least decent in the list. The National was my first choice. I put him on to some early stuff and it made me want to hear some National too. This is an EP of demos and outakes released in conjunction with a tour documentary DVD (A Skin, A Night) after breakthrough album Boxer and before their latest effort High Violet.

• Pearl Jam - Ten : Another conversation raised by the Hottest 100 was about how in 1992 it was impossible to get Pearl Jam tickets. That led to talk about this album and how I haven't heard it in some time (preferring instead to reach for Vs or Vitalogy). I remember clearly a time when I'd play Ten over and over again all day for days.

• Bliss n Eso - Running On Air : The latest platinum selling disc from the Sydney skip hop duo. I first heard these guys via a free track on iTunes. I'm not sure what song that was, but it was off the brilliant Day of the Dog album and I've been a fan since. With guests such as Xzibit and samples as unexpected as Kasey Chambers, B&E are at their peak right now and blowing up fast.

• Muphin - More Than Music : Some more Aussie Hip Hop (thanks Australia Day), this time from one half of the Muph n Plutonic duo. Muphin always takes the laid back and chilled down verses on the M&P albums, so it's no wonder this solo effort is full of such songs.

• Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band – Outer South : Conor Oberst has apparently released 5 solo albums, but of those I have only heard the self-titled release from 2008. As Bright Eyes I am a big fan of Oberst's brand of self-referencial, tongue-in-cheek morbid dirges and lo-fi techniques. The self-titled solo album is just as morbid but a little less cheeky. I am yet to hear this set with the Mystic Valley Band and I am looking forward to it.

If you hear just one of these albums, make it Paul Kelly. There are some songs on there that have been entered into the national psyche and are as much a part of our shared culture as The Man From Snowy River once was. It might only be a financial services advertisement, but now everyone knows From Little Things, Big Things Grow.

That's it from me. I'm going to get through a weekend of forecasted humidity around a bajillion percent any way I can. I hope you can too.

Peace man, right on.