MAME Playlist, May 2019, Week 2: Dreaming Big, Dreaming Weird

The fields I till....

Another week, another grab-bag of musical artists, another playlist: welcome to the second MAME May 2019 newsletter/playlist. Virtually nothing connects this week’s bands/artists beyond the fact they’re most of what I listened to over the past week (or so). I hope to start with themes one of these days – e.g., finding my favorite song by Journey – but I’ll work on finding a rhythm on posting.

Now, moving on to this week’s featured artists, and going by loose chronological order.

One Hit No More: Doris Troy, A Helluva Lot More than “Just One Look”
“When I recorded that song in a little basement studio in New York, I asked God to keep that song alive forever. And you know, he answers prayers.”

Doris Elaine Higginsen, later Doris Troy, wasn’t the first young woman raised in gospel to stealthily slip into the “wicked world” of R&B. Somehow she convinced her parents to let her work as an “usherette” at the Apollo Theater, where James Brown (! yes, the funkiest, most-sampled man alive) discovered her. She started writing songs for other artists as Doris Payne (Dee Clark’s “How About That” was her first - $100!), but she co-wrote “Just One Look,” the song that made her famous, with Gregory Carroll. But she made her career one step removed from the spotlight.

Her one hit was her last turn in the spotlight. As noted in the obituary ran by The Guardian after her death in 2004 (which makes sense; you’ll see), Troy figured out early on that she could earn steadier pay as a back-up singer/arranger for “more established artists” – a term that, in reality, translates to enormously fucking famous. The woman who would transform into “Mama Soul” left her fingerprints on some of the most famous music of the late 60s/early 70s: The Rolling Stones (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”), Pink Floyd (all of Dark Side of the Moon, apparently), Dusty Springfield, Carly Simon (“You’re So Vain”). Her connection to The Beatles’ George Harrison would give her a final shot at fame.

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.”