MAME Playlist, May 2019, Week 1: A Multi-Genre Mellow Collection

Thanks for the detour, y'all!

After a bit of a (creative/organizational) hangover from the last post/playlist, I struggled for a few (too many) days of getting this next playlist going. While spinning my wheels, a tweet from NME fed me to an article about “10 great-but-forgotten-indie-tracks” out of England in the 1990s, which, full disclosure, I pillaged for ideas, but didn’t read (and I still don’t know who Steve Lamacq is, but I hope to one day). The idea of building the playlist around that lasted only until a few of the artists celebrated in the article didn’t come up on Spotify (which, sadly, is too much like not finding them at all), and there went one concept.

The investigation wasn’t a total loss. I liked what I heard by Salad (and kept a pair of songs,“Cut and Cover” and “Poor Peach” – and I like both, but the second song better) and another mellower act called Drugstore; with them, I even took to the song Lamacq suggested (“Solitary Party Groover”) and lifted it onto the playlist. The actual story I’m telling started when I started looking for Daisy Chainsaw. First, and ironically, their song, “Love Your Money,” was the only one of the 10 that rang a bell. Second, I spotted the name “Daisy the Great” on my way in and, because there was something about that name, I listened to “Dips” and “Record Player Song.”

I went back to Daisy Chainsaw after that, listened to a couple more songs I forgot after listening to them…and then I went straight back to Daisy the Great, and that’s how they became the first featured artist of this May 2019, Week 1’s playlist.

Daisy the Great, Mamas, Papas, and Indie Pop
“We love harmony and storytelling, so we play with different layering and vibes until it fits the story of the song best.”

If you did the reverse-recipe trick with Daisy the Great’s music, the odds feel pretty good that you’d arrive somewhere around that production process. If you listen to their brand-spanking new release, I’m Not Getting Any Taller, it becomes clear in just a song or two that Mina Walker and Kelley Nicole Dugan, the creative centers of the band, build their sound around, for lack of a better word, dead-pan harmonies (are those harmonies in a minor key? is that how it works?). That doesn’t, however, do justice to the music that rises from that foundation. It’s not stuff to rock the socks off, but, as they used to say over and over again on American Bandstand (apparently), “it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.”

Walker and Dugan’s band/project is so damn new, that it’s hard to find material on them. If you google “Daisy the Great interview” you get a lot of interviews about anyone but them with the word “daisy” anywhere near it – though, who knows how long that holds up? Between that slim web presence and their sound – about which, this feels accurate: “an inviting blend of folk, baroque pop, and indie rock” – it could hold up a while. I know nothing about the size of the market for what they do, they deserve indie-queen status for doing something so simultaneously unique and easy on the ears.

After meeting at acting school and writing “a pop-rock musical” (about this possibly, “two folk musician buskers who assume the identity of a superstar pop duo”), they shelved that clearly worthy project to build Daisy the Great. By the time they submitted their demo to NPR’s 2017 Tiny Desk competition (“The Record Player Song”), they’d already assembled (most? a part of?) the back-up band they use for live shows. For those wanting to see them play live, if to an empty room, Wild Honeypie! posted a barely-legible blurb with videos of really solid live performances of “Seasoned” (which made the playlist, and big fan over here!) and “Last Kisses.” Thanks to (no doubt) careful preparation, that NPR audition shows off how naturally and easily they produce their sound.

Nearly all the tracks on I’m Not Getting Any Taller play between the poles staked out by all the songs above. If you’re into harmonic singing and analog instrumentation with a decent amount of “thump” in the rhythm, you should like Daisy the Great. After “Seasoned” and “The Record Player Song,” I also added the mellow/clever “Dips,” the song they described as the “closest to the core of what the album is about,” “Company,” and, after some wrestling/remembering, “IDKW,” yet another track where their comic/absurdist sensibility battles for the spotlight against their musical sensibilities. When it comes to describing them, nothing I could write would improve on their response to the question about the inspiration behind their name:

“We were walking around in Brooklyn making a huge list of ideas and just kept coming back to Daisy the Great because it represents a power behind joy and vulnerability, which we try to investigate in our music.”

And now, to pass the baton before the other guy’s even running…

Rayland Baxter, A Project of Earnest Growth
I plugged Rayland Baxter’s Wide Awake on the predecessor site to this one, and I’ve carried “Strange American Dream” and “Casanova” on my 2018 Top 100 Playlist since midway through that year (and with no choosing between them). I also remembered that I’d read stray comments about Baxter’s conscious decision to add more layering and musicality when he made that album, and that tiny cliff-hanger always made me want to go back to hear his earlier material.

Baxter’s a fairly slow singer-songwriter on the output side – and that’s definitely the school he comes from, if with other clear influences (more below) – which means he’s only put out three studio albums since debuting with Feathers & Fishhooks back in 2012. He’s been traveling, touring and, no more significantly writing that entire time – particularly on the tour to support his second album, Imaginary Man - which, per a fairly rich article from an outlet called Flaunt, provided the material for Wide Awake. He fleshed his notes into demos in a rubber-band factory turned musicians’ studio in Kentucky (surrounded by corn and coyotes, apparently), and dropped them in front of some talent that, per a Rolling Stone article on Baxter, come from, at worst, the lower nobility of American musical aristocracy “(e.g., “Nick Bockrath (Cage the Elephant), Erick Slick (Dr. Dog), Aaron Embry (Elliot Smith), and Butch Walker, who produced the album).”

It’s probably of some significance that Baxter comes from that world. His father, William “Bucky” Baxter, has played with major acts across the decades – e.g., Leonard Cohen to The Beastie Boys – and Baxter is very frank about how both of parents’ influences guided him to his current musical path in an interview at the 2016 SXSW. For what it’s worth, Wikipedia’s(fairly spare) entry on Rayland Baxter (once rayLand Baxter, btw) labels him “Alternative Country” or “Americana,” and I don’t think either of those work for him, though Americana comes closer.

One segment of that SXSW interview does more justice to where Baxter has been and where he’s going – and that’s the segment about growing as a musician and a person. I can’t speak to the latter (but you get a sense of him in that video), but, after a week of going from Feathers & Fishhooks through Imaginary Man to Wide Awake, there’s no mistaking the progression. At least one path runs from “Tell Me Lover” through “Yellow Eyes” to, in the interest of naming a song I haven’t already and another one that made the playlist, and arguably, Baxter’s heaviest song ever (doesn't take much), “Amelia Baker.” While there’s nothing “wrong” with the more basic, folksy sound of Feathers & Fishhooks, the improvement comes less from the bare fact that he’s churning out progressively richer music than his ever-improving sense of how and where to fill out and/or accent his songs. For me, he’s gone nowhere but up.

That Rolling Stone article notes a Beatles influence at the very top of the album – which I suspect had something to do with how I (abortively) got onto The Beatles this past week – and, if I had to name a genre-match for Rayland Baxter, I’d go late-stage Beatles, whatever you think of that time. I like just about everything he’s put out, musically, conceptually, tone, etc. – even the folk stuff, which is how “Willy’s Song” stuck to the playlist. The later stuff works better, though, and he’s close to embracing full pop (or, as Rolling Stone puts it, “an R&B pocket”) by the time he’s on Wide Awake – which you can hear on “Angeline.” The scope of the stories he tells have expanded with his sound. Good stuff.

And, now, for a bigger segue…

Open Mike Eagle, On the Indie Grind
"At its root, though, Eagle and Vaughn’s The New Negroes aims to achieve the same goals as its namesake: to prove that black art isn’t a singular concept…”

The New Negroes references a show that Comedy Central has under contract, one built on an act that Mike Eagle II (aka, Open Mike Eagle) and stand-up, Baron Vaughn have played live for the past couple years. It also feels like something like the underlying ethos for Open Mike Eagle’s career. After growing up in Chicago (a very relevant detail), Eagle had his eyes opened by his contact with Los Angeles’ DIY-music scene and, as he explained in a short interview at 2016’s Pickathon, he’s always approached his music – and now his podcast and his TV show – as a combination of a business and the only job he wants to have. It’s a bit of a miracle that he’s been able to make ends meet as an “indie/art” rapper, but…he’s real damn good.

I first heard Open Mike Eagle around the time 2016’s Hella Personal Film Festival came out (and I’m finally accepting that your personal choices aren’t the only inputs Spotify uses in populating your Discover Weekly). I wrote on long, laudatory post for that album for A Project of Self-Indulgence (sorry, this site’s now-erased predecessor site), which I’ll post to this site soon (if only to show why I deleted that site). Personal triumphs and failing aside, four tracks from that album – “Admitting the Endorphin Addiction,” “Drunk Dreaming,” “Smiling (A Quirky Race Doc),” and, personal favorite, “Dive Bar Support Group” - form the backbone of my shallow appreciation for the mighty, shining works of Mike Eagle II, son of Chicago and, significantly, a frequent visitor to the Robert Taylor Homes of the same city.

Between how much I both liked and got out of that album and how much more material he had out there (a full decade, which is surprising on two levels), I knew I’d always circle back to Open Mike Eagle. Unfortunately, I attempted a bigger step than I should have when I attempted to tackle his 2017 release, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream. The opening track, “Legendary Iron Hood,” should have announced that album’s ambition, but, full disclosure, even as the gravity came through, I never paid attention to the album as an artistic whole, and missed a couple boats as a result. Fortunately, a Vice article (very capably) walks the readers through the inspiration behind the album – e.g., the history of Robert Taylor Homes and their destruction - and Eagle’s creative/coping response to it. That whole Vice article is worth reading for the details, but Eagle provides the sharp end of the gist with this:

“This was a system of buildings built by federal money that were supposed to improve people's lives, and did for a little while, but went to shit and got torn down. And there's so much un-dealt-with trauma in just that destruction.”

Because I missed the conceptual boat, I won’t even attempt to claim I pulled the best or most representative songs from Brick Body Kids Still Daydream to the playlist – for instance, “(How Could Anybody) Feel at Home” felt like a thematic call-back at least to the vibe on Hella Personal (e.g,. the refrain, "O'Doyle's was closed"). “Happy Wasteland Day” and “Legendary Iron Hood” (both of which made the playlist) feel more connected to the ambitious project Eagle laid out for himself, as does “Brick Body Complex” (which did not; fwiw, Vice gives you the video for “Legendary Iron Hood” and the “nostalgic” “95 Radios” (another good track)). On a deeper level, my late style of smash-and-grab listening/pillaging and moving onto the next thing works against the intent/ambition of Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, an album meant to be both absorbed, digested and appreciated, again, as a whole.

Eagle’s a deeply interesting man, all in all, an incredible writer/lyricist/arranger/artist. He’s sharp enough to produce a handful of “oh, damn” moments on a lot of what he does, he’s hella original, insightful and, obviously, personal in subject matter and, with the obvious exceptions, relatable. (By that I mean, I simply can’t walk in the same shoes he wears on “Smiling (A Quirky Race Doc)”; I can, however, find it compelling, even personally and elucidating (which is why it’s another favorite).

I want to close with an interesting contrast between that Pickathon interview and a later interview with Billboard that talks about, among other things, an EP he put out in 2017 titled, When I Try to Relax. Eagle talks about feeling successful at Pickathon (in the sense he can live off what he’s doing), while, just a year later, he evinces some pretty evident bitterness about trying to make it working in the same, broad medium as J. Cole and Kendrick Lamarr (which he gets of his chest in “Southside Eagle”). He’s still determined to do it – which, for an indie/art rapper – even when it means hustling across multiple mediums. He’s very much out there, still putting out music (I dabbled in his very latest, Welcome to Beatdown City), he’s also running a podcast (Secret Skin) and, more recently, his comedy/music short series with Vaughn…so…has the internet figured out a way for me to hand my money to Mike Eagle II directly?

And that’s the post, I think I linked to all the songs somewhere above (crap, except “Dang Is Invincible,” “The Curse of Hyper-Vigilance,” (etc.), and “A Story About a Guy That Dies Every Night,” all Open Mike Eagle, all from Hella Personal; by way of a quick addendum, Paul White handled the production on that album, and it’s notably different (brighter, lighter, more musical) than the rest of what he’s put out). It should just be odds and ends from here, so here’s that.

There’s an abundance of Doris Troy material, which I loaded onto the playlist when the next One-Hit No More post was part of Plan A for this post. I’ll give Troy her due in a stand-alone post next Tuesday (and she’s a pretty good story), but I included “What’cha Gonna Do About It,” “Ain’t That Cute,” “Give Me Back My Dynamite,” and “So Far” in the playlist, all from her eponymous 1970 release on Apple Records (yes, that one). Because the rest are, more or less, totally random, and there aren’t that many of them, I’ll just list the rest. Just real quick, the first two came to me during an excursion into (I think) Indianapolis 70s funk that I can’t remember how I started on, while the other two are hip hop, indie rock, and a solid live folk performance, respectively.

Ebony Rhythm Band – “Soul Heart Transplant”

Amnesty – “Mr. President”

Deca – “Breadcrumbs”

Pile – “The Jones”

Medicine Head – “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”

And that’s it. In the latest attempt to get on a regular production schedule, I’m going to dial back the featured artists/bands on these posts to two artists next week. Hopefully, that’ll free some time to at least glance at, say, Pile or Deca. Because those are two damned solid songs.