Reporter's Notebook

Our TOTD yesterday was bumped from its regularly scheduled time because of two breaking news stories. So here it is now, via a long-time Atlantic reader: a summer-vibe track from Warm Brew’s latest album, “Ghetto Beach Boyz.” From a Vibe interview following the release:

The Venice, Cali-bred hip-hop group are more reminiscent of groups like The Pharcyde, and Jurassic 5 (but rawer) over Death Row. Brew isn’t moving tons of cocaine in their music, nor are they buying out the bar. Instead, they prefer to chill out with a 40 oz. of Billy D. Williams and Swishers. In fact, one of the ways the group came up with their namesake is c/o group member Serk Spliff, who used to have a habit of swiping 30-packs of beer.

But don’t be fooled. The Brew crew doesn’t just rely on their Mary Jane and alcohol habits to make music. They offer a wide range of styles and subject matter. Listening to Warm Brew’s latest album Ghetto Beach Boyz, which was released on Jan. 13, gives you that comfortable feeling of finally being home after a shitty day at work. Also, WB’s effortless flow and style comes as second nature.

Have a track to recommend? Email [email protected].

From my colleague Spencer’s review of Prince’s new album HITNRUN Phase One:

Perhaps the least Prince-like but most straightforwardly fun thing here is “FALLINLOVE2NITE,” a electronic-dance whirlwind that he originally recorded with Zooey Deschanel in connection with a New Girl cameo. Zooey’s gone and Prince’s voice sounds pitch-shifted up; the lyrics about dance-floor abandon are generic enough to have been given to any pop star in the past 10 years. But there’s a sense of increasing acceleration, of giddiness, as woodwinds and synth melodies enter the mix and Prince asks, over and over, if you want to fall in love tonight.

Have a new track you wanna recommend? Email [email protected].

A reader recommends the title track from a new-ish album by Ed Dupas:

I don’t love country music, but this guy listens to my podcast and sent me an mp3 of this song cause he thought I might dig it. He was right. It’s got the twangy guitars and whiskey voice, but listen to the words. It’s verging on Springsteen. Plus, there’s something very poignant about a critical look at American foreign policy with a country twang.

Do you have a new, off-the-beaten track to recommend? Email [email protected].

This morning was the first day of school for my youngest child. After I watched her disappear through the door, I drove to work listening to this song from Matthew Sweet. It’s a track I listened to on my first day of college, in my new dorm room, as I got dressed in a wrap skirt and bodysuit (because it was 1993).

That was before “being mindful” was all the rage, but it’s really what this song is about: “Nothing more, nothing less / Than the place that we are in.”

I remember standing in that dorm room and feeling vividly alive. I wasn’t thinking about anything except how it felt to be me, right then, starting that particular chapter in my life. One of the best things about having kids is that we get to experience those ultra-saturated first-time moments all over again.

Nothing like a good banjo for Labor Day weekend:

Andrew deValpine, a reader in Anchorage, flagged it for us:

It’s new to me, anyway. Not edgy or new musically, but it has sublime harmonies. (BTW, congratulations on Notes. I love it—whispers of the Dish, which I sorely miss.)

From the trio’s press release for their “I’m With Her Tour”:

[Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins, and Aoife O’Donovan] have each begun working on their next solo records after spending the bulk of 2014 on the road. Watkins toured to support her release, Sun Midnight Sun, as well as A Dotted Line, the new Nickel Creek release. Jarosz just completed a year of touring for her latest release Build Me Up From Bones; and Aoife wrapped up touring for her album Fossils as well as special appearances surrounding The Goat Rodeo Sessions.

Only one scheduled date left for the “I’m With Her Tour” —September 19, in North Adams, Massachusetts. Have a brand new track you’d like to recommend for our daily feature? Email [email protected]. Update from a reader:

Just wanted to note that it’s also great when the songwriters are credited; this was from a CD by the same name and written by the excellent John Hiatt.

Above is the premiere of the music video for Sean Croft’s latest EP, You Said, which is available for free download on SoundCloud. From The Daily South:

[Sean Croft’s] specific fusion of folk and synth rock blends past and present, much like his lyrics. Says Croft, “Like the other songs on the EP, ‘You Said’ centers on themes of nostalgia, forgetfulness, and the passage of time. It’s about someone—the narrator—who is approached by a stranger claiming to be a childhood friend. The narrator isn’t sure whether the stranger is telling the truth or not, but can almost imagine the moments they might have shared, but which have now been lost. The narrator starts thinking about the past and tries to avoid becoming overwhelmed by nostalgia, but since every day seems to pass more and more quickly, s/he realizes that it’s difficult to hold onto a concrete present.”

Sean’s next show is at Gypsy Sally’s Vinyl Lounge in Washington, DC, on September 11. ​Have a new track to recommend for our daily feature? Email [email protected].

A plug from the Track of the Day archives, where this one from Phantogram was an exclusive back in February 2014. (Since then, a fan made the music video seen above.) From Ryan Burleson’s writeup at the time:

“We named it Bill Murray because we always pictured a sad Bill Murray for the visuals of that song,” Phantogram’s Josh Carter writes via email. “We want him to be in the music video.” Whether Mr. Suntory Time will appear in said video remains to be seen, but listeners should have no problem catching a Murryian vibe between the lines of the song, premiering here at The Atlantic today.

“Bill Murray” lopes along gently, its side-chained synth buzz, breezy slide guitar, and xylophone clinks making a soft bed for Sarah Barthel’s airy vocals, which ache with a loneliness that many of the actor’s characters could relate to.

Have a brand new track to recommend, or even one to premiere, if you’re an independent musician? Email [email protected].

More than anything, the music of Beach House, the Baltimore dream-pop duo, is consistent—some would say to a fault. On its just released fifth album Depression Cherry, Beach House conjures up the same ethereal vibes and feelings of love and loss that it did on its previous records, often by recycling beats or chord progressions from other songs.  

“Space Song” is no different.

The snare is clearly borrowed from a song on the band’s 2010 album, but it’s also a gorgeous example of Beach House’s knack for reimagining familiar elements into something fresh.

The glassy whine of the guitars lends a wistful earnestness. Frontwoman Victoria Legrand’s soft, androgynous vocals carry the lyrics from admiration (“You wide-eyed girls, you get it right”) to resignation (“Fall...back...in...to...place.”)

The dancing synths keep things playful. And the drumbeat that kicks in over the organs at the start and continues throughout the track feels like a necessary grounding for a song that, aptly, wants to escape the earth’s gravitational pull. And if you let it, it’ll take you with.

“Space Song” doesn’t have the dirtier, shoegaze bent of Depression Cherry’s standout track “Sparks” (for lovers of My Bloody Valentine’s “To Here Knows When”). But it, along with the rest of the album, makes for a terrific late-summer listen.

Imagine a boardwalk on Venice Beach. A handsome man with a salt-and-pepper beard, perhaps a bit more weathered than his years alone would suggest, is strumming the closing notes of a tune on his guitar. Imagine he finishes the song, shifts a bit in his seat, and moments later, lets loose with this:

The Daily Country recounts what usually happened next:

Boardwalk passersby always noticed the singular singer belting his songs. They stopped cold. Listened. Amazed. “A lot of street musicians are really good, but there was something about him that was just pure presence,” says Jon Dee Graham, who witnessed Hawkins on the beachfront while recording in Los Angeles three decades ago. “Also, his songs aren’t like anybody else’s. He’s singing in this huge, soulful voice, ‘What do you want from the liquor store? Something sweet? Something sour?’ What? So wholly original.” Imagine blues and country and folk having no dividing lines.

There have been a lot of excellent covers of “There Stands the Glass” since Webb Pierce popularized the song in the ‘50s—Jerry Lee Lewis, Loretta Lynn, Van Morrison, George Strait. But for my money, no one’s captured the pull and the peril of that glass as heartbreakingly as the late Ted Hawkins, dubbed “the greatest singer you’ve never heard” by the L.A. Times upon his death 20 years ago last January.

A tribute album to the singer is scheduled to be released on October 23.

My old Dish colleague Doug Allen emails this new track from Tunde Olaniran:

I defer to Cut from Steel, a music blog I just found in Hamilton, Ontario:

Well, this is the best thing I’ve come across in a long time. Tunde Olaniran is an artist living and working in Flint Michigan who has a day job at Planned Parenthood. Tunde is a performance artist, an amazing rapper, a great singer, and an engaged social activist. Check out this article here for the whole amazing story about Tunde Olaniran.

This song is amazing because it works on so many levels. It’s got a bangin’ beat and really cool choreography. ... This is the kind of music that makes me want to clear my entire schedule and just tell everyone who will listen to LISTEN NOW. This works on so many levels and I can’t wait to see what Tunde throws at us next!

Want to throw a brand new track at Notes? Email [email protected].

If you weren’t living in Minneapolis in 2007, chances are good you never heard this song, from the local band Vicious Vicious. I was lucky enough to be an arts-and-entertainment editor in the Twin Cities at the time, and this song (along with the album that featured it) was a favorite of our local indie radio station The Current at the time. For good reason, too. To my ears, it’s a nearly perfect late-summer confection.

The song would be good even if it could only boast the fun melody, the groovy bass line and that super-danceable chirping synthesizer that kicks in under “C-c-c-come on” around 1:15. But the cinematic production elements take it over the top. As the tune begins, a car door closes and a cassette tape pops into the deck. Midway through the song, during the breakdown, you hear the putative footsteps of Jenny and the lead singer, rustling through leaves as they duck into the forest to avoid the police, guilty of too much summer-evening fun. (If you’ve got headphones nearby, put them on to hear lead singer Erik Appelwick’s seductive little whisper in your right ear at 2:15, “I can hear them getting closer.”) This is a storytelling song, through and through. That it’s also a top-down, hip-shaking summer jam is just frosting.

On Saturday, I wrote up a different Carly Rae Jepsen track. I promise that not every track of every day will be from “E•MO•TION,” her new album. But right now I’m helpless, adrift in a post-“E•MO•TION” world, agog at a sky full of gumdrops and ’80s neon. And I am agog, too, at the moment 20 seconds into that album’s title track, when a felicitous vocal hook (“10 feet, 10 feet tall”) lands on top of a Haim-inspired guitar groove. May all our timing be so good.