December 9 – Andy had warned me in advance that Jonathan Coulton attracts the geekiest audience in New York, and it’s true that the IT world was amply represented at the Music Hall in Williamsburg. Coulton is a singer-songwriter who made his name by giving away a “Thing of the Week,” a format by which he challenged himself to write songs on a regular schedule, and he’s amassed quite a catalogue of fascinating, funny, witty, tuneful compositions that speak to smart schlubs everywhere. I expected him to have churned out a bunch of new numbers, but he pleased me (and the rest of the audience, I expect) by leaning heavily on his greatest hits, which include loving tributes to Ikea, George Plimpton, and Soterios Johnson, a suburban dad’s ode to his shop vac, a corporate memo from the office zombie maestro, and highly romantic sagas featuring love-starved mad scientists and computer programmers. His albums feature a tough, tight pop-rock band. In concert he performed solo, and I was quite knocked out by his densely packed energy, though I wasn’t surprised by his charm and skill at entertaining the crowd. He frequently does hilarious arrangements of other people’s songs (my favorite is the bluegrass version of “Baby Got Back”). In this show, the closest he came was hauling out a strange instrument covered with a lot of digital pads – he described it as an electronic man-purse – to play his song “Mr. Fancy Pants,” which somehow morphed into a mashup with “Single Ladies.” As noted before, his song “Skullcrusher Mountain” is a spectacular piece of sci-fi romantic comedy, and Coulton is so confident that the audience knows every word of it that he drops out and lets them sing the chorus. And he brought out Kristen Shirts to lead her ukulele-based, slowed-down version of “Code Monkey,” which brought tears to my eyes. “Code Monkey” is my very favorite JoCo song and has become a frighteningly persistent earworm, that’s how catchy it is. You can read the lyrics here or better yet download his rockin-sockin studio version here, and Kristen’s version (winner of a wacky online competition) here, but be forewarned about its infectiousness.
December 16 – The ever-adventurous Mr. David Zinn invited me to accompany him to Joe’s Pub for HTML clipboard“Our Hit Parade,” the downtown hipster vaudeville co-created and co-hosted by Kenny Mellman (of Kiki and Herb), Bridget Everett, and Neal Medlyn. This edition was a tribute to the top songs of the decade. We made it about halfway through before we had to split – a little too lame and witless to tolerate. If you by what the Billboard charts proclaim were the top songs year-by-year, or for the whole decade, it winds up being a lot of crap, and facetious take-downs of crappy pop don’t hold my interest very long. The evening did start me thinking about what I would consider the best songs of the decade just ending. Which is a consideration that inevitably brings up the song vs. recording dilemma: Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” is absolutely one of the great records of the decade (produced by Mark Ronson), but is it a great song? Sort of hard to tell. Ditto Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box,” Liz Phair’s “Extraordinary,” and Amy Ray’s “Driver Education.” Maybe even Jeff Buckley’s “Everybody Here Wants You.” Hmm. What about Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle”? That was high on my list, but now I’m thinking that may fall in the category of best recording, as opposed to show-tune-style songs like, say, “Another Winter in a Summer Town” and “Will You?” from Grey Gardens or “Pretty Lies” from Taboo or “Totally Fucked” from Spring Awakening. OK, well, in addition to those, here are some of my nominations, in no particular order:
“Top of the World,” Patty Griffin
“In State,” Kathleen Edwards
“Fifteen Seconds of Grace,” Jane Kelly Williams
“Shine So Bright,” Teddy Thompson
“Invisible Tattoo,” Sharon Robinson
“Title of the Song,” Da Vinci’s Notebook
“Extraordinary Machine,” Fiona Apple
“Everything Is Free,” Gillian Welch
“This Is How It Goes,” Aimee Mann
“Perfect Blue Buildings,” Counting Crows
“Vibrate,” Rufus Wainwright
“Come Pick Me Up” and “Wish You Were Here,” Ryan Adams
“Wake Up in New York,” Craig Armstrong
“Casimir Pulaski Day,” Sufjan Stevens
What are yours?
another eye opens 