I came across this video while helping out a friend who is having jambalaya tonight, because having and especially cooking jambalaya without listening to Fats Domino is kind of sinful. I’m sharing it with you because of the two absolutely outstanding saxophone solos and also the completely inexplicable yo-yo guy. The one guy waving a hankie ends up playing the trumpet eventually. The other guy? He’s a mystery.
Tag: music
#REVIEW: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, by Olivia Rodrigo
I know, I know, the number of people on the planet who were hoping to find out my opinion on this album is approximately zero. That includes my wife. No one needs this review. You’re getting it anyway.
I just looked, and I’ve talked at least briefly about all three (yes, three; she released a kickass live album last year) of Rodrigo’s previous albums in this space. I owe the fact that I pay attention to Olivia Rodrigo at all to the fact that I’m a teacher; I never wrote the entire post and at this point it’s irrelevant, but her first album creeped me out on a deep and fundamental level as someone who is supposed to be an advocate for kids, and I never said a whole bunch of things about the people responsible for her career when she was a minor because I know how the internet works and they would be interpreted as me talking shit about her. And then Guts came out and bad idea right? was a world-class banger and a lot of the trepidation I had went away; it was clear pretty quick that the no-longer-quite-a-kid had more maturity and control over her own music than I’d been giving her credit for, and if the adults had been steering her wrong as I’d thought, she’d either gotten new adults or started ignoring the old ones.
All that said, I can boil the “review” part of this down to a single sentence if I want to: the last time an album has dominated my listening time as thoroughly as yspsfagsil was Dark Matter, Pearl Jam’s most recent album. That should be enough for anyone who has paid attention to my opinions on, well, anything; Pearl Jam is my favorite band of all time and at this point in my life is not going to be dethroned. This thing came out on June 12 and I’ve probably listened to it at least twenty times all the way through since then. I’m not sure there’s a song on here that I like as much as bad idea right? but the duet with Robert Smith, what’s wrong with me, is her best song.(*) drop dead, stupid song and maggots for brains are great tracks. Hell, I’d say the first five tracks on the album– those three, plus honeybee and u + me = <3 (**) are as good an opening five as any other album I can think of. I don’t love less, I suppose– in general the higher-energy songs rank higher in my esteem, and less is all high-register and piano; I kind of want to know what Billie Eilish would do with it– but there are no weak songs on here, and the most amazing thing is Rodrigo released a pop album in 2026 and the shortest song is still over three minutes long. I have grown so tired of music clearly written for TikTok. There’s none of that.
I genuinely can’t wait to see where Rodrigo’s career goes in the future. I started that sentence off saying “in twenty years” and then remembered I’m turning fifty this weekend. Let’s just say the future and go with that. Either way, this kid’s the real thing and if you have any interest in pop music at all and you haven’t at least streamed this yet, get on that.
(*) Olivia Rodrigo being singlehandedly responsible for making The Cure relevant to an entirely new generation was not something I was expecting of her during the Sour years, and I love it. Recall that The Cure’s latest album was also unexpectedly fantastic.
(**) yes, she literally says “you plus me equals a heart” in the refrain.
2025 in Music
I bought 59 albums in 2025, way off of last year’s pace, which was admittedly kind of insane. Here’s the list, and then I’ll talk specifically about a few of them. This isn’t a “best of” list by any means, just some albums I find interesting.
And yes, “bought” is the right word, as I generally don’t stream music. I played around with Spotify for a bit this year and then cancelled it when they started showing ads for ICE, and I currently have a Tidal account that I’m not really using.
Let’s start with the band of the year, an award that isn’t even meaningful enough to be rendered in capital letters and which I spent no time thinking about prior to writing this sentence:
In the absence of a new Pearl Jam album this year (and I got one last year, so I can’t complain) a new Counting Crows album is about the best thing I could have asked for– and I not only got that, I got a tour, which I had tickets to. I saw two concerts this year, both in the same venue in Indianapolis; Weird Al was the other one. The Crows have still absolutely got it. There are other bands from my era that are still making music and touring, but … not all of them should be, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
I’m only picking Problematic because the cover has his face on it, but Norman Sann was absolutely my big discovery in hiphop this year. Dude is phenomenally talented and he’s also a huge geek without really letting it take over his music– like, he’ll drop a reference to Baraka from Mortal Kombat into the middle of a verse, but Nerd Rap is a genre all to itself and this, I think, is not that. I picked up five full-length albums by this guy this year and I very much am impatiently anticipating more.
(Goes and looks, discovers a sixth album came out in September!)
So make that an even 60 for the year, then.
The Sinners soundtrack sparked a sudden and fairly intense interest in streaming Irish rage music, which has cooled a bit, but I’d never really listened to the Dropkick Murphys before this year and I should have started before now. For the People, their latest release, and The Warrior’s Code from 2005 got the most plays. I’ll pick up the rest of their catalog sooner or later but haven’t done it just yet.
I think this is the second time Olivia Rodrigo has shown up on one of these things. I still have issues with how the adults around her handled her first album, but she’s an adult now and she dropped a live album on us late in the year. Live pop isn’t completely my thing– I will never get completely used to the idea of singing over your own voice as a backup track– but there’s a ton of energy in this recording and Robert Smith randomly showing up for a couple of duets in front of a very young crowd who appears to have no idea who the hell he is is a nice touch.
Finally, I just picked up the deluxe edition of Mad Season’s Above last week, and it’s long enough that I haven’t even listened to the whole thing yet, but it’s a Goddamned crime that I had never heard of this album until recently. Do you know who Mad Season is? They released one album– this one– in 1995. They’re a supergroup: Layne Staley from Alice In Chains, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, Barrett Martin from Screaming Trees on drums, and John Baker Saunders from The Walkabouts. The album is fifteen meaty tracks (the shortest is 4:11, and two are over seven minutes) and one of the very few concerts they did. I’m just now starting to listen to the concert. It’s a remarkable fucking project and I’m pissed that I didn’t completely internalize it in 1995 when I should have.
What did you listen to this year?
Friday melancholy
Today would have been Mom’s 74th birthday.
I’m sitting alone in the office listening to the new Taylor Swift album, which I, being a man of intelligence, have not purchased yet, since she’s sure to release an extended edition with 2345 more songs any minute now.
Initial verdict is it’s okay. Not sure about the song about Travis Kelce’s dick. And apparently at least a couple of them that I didn’t pay close attention to the lyrics of are about Charli XCX and, instead of Taylor’s exes, one of Travis’ exes, which is an exciting new realm of petty for Taylor to move into.
I dunno. I feel like I should be doing something more significant than sitting in my office, listening to pop music, and waiting for a game to download, but it was an insanely long day (eight teachers out, so I not only covered a class on my prep, I doubled up my advisory too) and this might be the limits of my mental capacity at the moment. At least going to bed at 8:00 last night stopped my stomach from trying to invert itself.
I remain
Defiantly unraptured, as of yet; we shall see if TikTok Jesus takes me tomorrow, as my understanding is that the end of the world has been rescheduled. Again.
I had one girl show up to school today in what I very well might have called a wedding dress on an older human; I decided not to ask any questions, and by afternoon she was in a cheerleading T-shirt and shorts, so … I still didn’t ask any questions. I don’t know if Jesus having child brides is a thing, or if he’s okay with his child brides going to school on the day he marries them? I have degrees in religion but I’m not as up to date on the fever swamps of evangelical Christianity at the moment, and unless someone starts paying me for it I have no intention of venturing any further than I already have. They are wrong, again; it is the only thing that they have ever been. What an immense surprise.
Solar systematic reach for celestials
I dunno what the headline means either, but a new Atmosphere album just came out and I’m listening to it and that lyric from “Neptune” stood out for some reason(*). I have been playing Silksong for several hours, hating most of it, and I still stand by my thorough review from the other day. The game’s fucking masochistic; it’s not fun-hard, it’s bang your head against the wall until the pain stops hard, and I can’t explain why I’m still playing the fucking thing. I’m not relaxed when I’m playing, I’m stressed out and angry, and that’s … not only kind of shockingly immature for a motherfucker who is going to be fifty in less than a year, it’s also not really a good use for leisure time? Like, there are other things I could be doing. There are even any number of other unpleasant things I could be doing that would at least result in, say, the house being cleaner or some sort of shit like that.
It is possible that I spend too much of my leisure time doing things that actively make me unhappy. I should find a therapist and have a conversation about that.
(*) Also don’t know why the album is called “Jestures,” but I’m on my first listen so it might become apparent eventually. There’s no title track.
The Weird Al show
My God, that was an incredible show.
Al Yankovic is 65 years old. It was literally 90 degrees in the shade in Indianapolis yesterday evening. I have no idea how anyone on stage even survived the experience in the first place, and they put on a two-hour-plus show featuring at least a dozen costume changes (everyone in the band, not just Al himself) and startlingly impressive dancing. If my foot ever ends up above my head, it is not going to be on purpose, and it is likely that I have either just died or am about to. Al did a high-kick like five or six times during the show. And when I talk about costume changes, I don’t mean, like, wearing a different shirt. I mean getting into a full-blown fat suit complete with facial prosthetics in three minutes and then doing an entire song in that getup, or doing the last fifteen minutes of the show in Jedi robes.
The man’s voice is still on point, too. The set list was ridiculous; some of the songs were done medley-style where he’d do a verse or two and then move on, but he’s been doing albums since the early eighties and while there probably wasn’t literally a track or two from every single album, the show absolutely spanned his entire career. I discovered that there are Weird Al songs that I probably haven’t heard in thirty years that I still have memorized. I was singing along with songs and mentally trying to jump ahead to the chorus to figure out what the hell I was singing.
The polka was new, and there were at least a couple of songs that were unreleased. He covered the costume changes with video vignettes featuring every single time anyone on a TV show has ever mentioned him, random little clips of weirdness, and a bunch of junket-style interviews with celebrities where I’m pretty sure some were him being inserted into other interviews, some were him interviewing people who had no idea who he was, and some were piss-takes where everybody was in on the joke.
(I’m going through my MP3s right now. Nothing was played from Poodle Hat. No, that’s wrong, he did Ebay. Still looking.)
(Okay, I’m pretty sure the only album he didn’t do a song from was 1993’s Alapalooza. That’s it.)
Anyway, yeah. Best birthday ever, y’all.
View from my Hotel Window: Indianapolis, Weird Al edition
Kinda meh! But we’re here.