These are, uh, four of my favorite things: fourth edition
Memory + Creativity. Records + collectors. Great songs + interpreters. Pies + my dreams.
Another short-form “favorite things” post. Some things that are doing it for me lately.
That’s How I Remember It podcast, with Craig Finn
Photo of a younger version of Craig Finn by WoodyJoe, via Wikipedia One of my favorite lyricists of the past 20 years is The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. He’s a top-tier storyteller whose songs combines echoes of Raymond Carver with strains of Springsteen and Westerberg. What separates his podcast from the 8 billion other This Famous Person Interviews That Famous Person podcasts? Its focus. Finn uses every interview to further explore the connection between memory and creativity. That’s it. And it’s fascinating. So far I’ve listened to the episodes featuring author George Saunders, songwriter Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers), Adam Duritz (Counting Crows), and John Darnielle (Mountain Goats). A lot of musicians because I’m me, but Finn talks to comedians, show runners, screenwriters…
Do Not Sell At Any Price by Amanda Petrusich
I would never have called myself a cassette tape collector or CD collector. And I’m not a vinyl collector now. Each of those are just ways for me to hear music I love. I’m a music lover, not an artifact collector. So the people and history that Petrusich—a fantastic writer for The New York Times, Pitchfork, and more—features in her dive1 into the collectors of rare early 78 rpm records2 (78’s, to the heads) are fascinating to me. These guys go beyond just the Saturday crate diggers and Sunday record store browsers. A true bunch of characters. And Petrusich does them justice—not condescending but warm, affectionate even, to the point where you start to feel the magnetic tug of this world on her….she’s trying to stay objective and journalistic, but she’s getting sucked into their obsessive, questing world. She gets the sickness, for sure.
Cassandra Wilson covers
Photo by Jonathan Chimene In the late 90’s, my cousin Mark introduced me to an album I’d never have found on my own: New Moon Daughter3 by jazz singer Cassandra Wilson. I’ve never forgotten his pitch: “Her voice, man. It’s so rich. It’s like a freakin’ cello.” And he was not wrong. Lately I’ve been going back to her versions of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and U2’s “Love Is Blindness.” Her performances are stellar and I love the earthy-but-strange instrumental arrangements. Both songs do exactly what a cover should: give new dimension to the original without trying too hard to reinvent/obscure what made the original great.
With moderately-sincere apologies to you out-of-towners (I guess you’ll just have to come into town to taste for yourself), the hand pies at Pie Fight4 come to me in my daydreams about once a month. They sweetly (and flakily) haunt my waking hours until at last I relent and make my way to the little window storefront to order a couple (always the Blueberry Lemon—pictured above—and then whatever else strokes the taste buds that day, often some version of caramel apple, though). Some of you might say, “pfffttthh, it’s just a bougie version of a Pop Tart5.” To which I would reply, “What part of insanely elevated Pop Tart is bad?”
Literally. At one point, she is in scuba gear in a river abutting an old record manufacturing plant. As the plant shut down, rumor has it they heaved their surplus 10-inch shellac records into the river.
78’s predate LPs and 45’s. They’ve had a recent resurgence—along with the rest of vinyl—but nearly went entirely extinct at one point.
The album earned Wilson a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance in 1995.
Because of my big time SLC Influencer status, if you go to Pie Fight today and give them the code #MadisonArm, they will look at you funny and ask if that’s a kind of pie. You’re welcome!
Or McDonald’s pie.