Payday Playlist: Little Red Bullets

UPDATE: Last.fm blows. Almost comically, they completely overhauled their free playlist feature on the same day I launched this blog. If you checked in Thursday morning, you were able to listen to the playlist on shuffle. By afternoon, it didn't work at all. As it turns out, this is a good thing. It caused me to find a superior service, imeem.com. The embedded imeem playlist allows sequential play instead of just shuffle. Plus, I can upload songs from my own library. The only snag is that if you want to listen to full versions of songs I've loaded, you have to be logged into imeem.com with my user information. If you're not logged in, you'll only be able to hear 30 second previews. But it's really simple to log in and worth it if you want to hear the full tracks. Here's all you have to do:

(1) Go to www.imeem.com.
(2) Log in with the e-mail: radiofreemo@gmail.com; password: dolphins.
(3) Refresh the Radio Free Mo blog page once you are logged into imeem. You should now be able to listen to full tracks in the imeem player.



The inaugural Payday Playlist features some road songs, some songs about change, and a whole lot of twang. Let me know what you think in the comments section.

1. Robbie Fulks - "Let's Kill Saturday Night" - Let's Kill Saturday Night (1998). It's the economy, stupid. Robbie Fulks' desperate weekend anthem from ten years ago rings true today. "Well a dollar I make is a buck I owe, and a 40-hour week leaves $10 to blow," our hero laments. "Something in the big frame's moved oh it never was so hard, to keep a 20-inch tube and a fenced-in yard." But fuck it, "give me one night with the moon high and the radio pounding, and brother this town's gonna go down kicking and shouting." Unfortunately for Fulks, with today's gas prices, he might not be able to afford to ride down the main drag with his engine open.
   
2. John Hiatt - "Drive South" - Slow Turning (1988). We started off ten years in the past. Now we go back two decades to revisit John Hiatt's twangy road anthem, "Drive South." It follows well after "Saturday Night," with classic lyrics like: "We could go down with a smile on, don't bother to pack your nylons, just keep them pretty legs showin', it gets hot down where we're goin'."
   
3. My Morning Jacket - "Golden" - It Still Moves (2003). Gettin' lucky in Kentucky. MMJ brings another great road song. This atmospheric joint would feel at home on the radio in 1973 between the Allman Brothers' "Blue Sky" and Skynyrd's "Free Bird."
   
4. The Avett Brothers - "Pretty Girl From Cedar Lane" - Mignonette (2004). Greenville, North Carolina's Avett Brothers combine traditional bluegrass and folk to bring another fine entry in their "Pretty Girl..." series.
5. Mary Gauthier - "I Ain't Leaving" - Between Daylight And Dark (2007). Beautiful and unflinching. If Lucinda Williams had penned and performed Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down," it probably would have sounded something like this. (Unfortunately, the title reminds me of McCain's Iraq policy).
   
6. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - "I Won't Back Down" - Full Moon Fever (1989). Now that I've mentioned it, why the hell not? Classic track, and one of the greatest driving songs ever.
   
7. Steve Earle - "Tennessee Blues" - Washington Square Serenade (2007). Steve Earle's red state blues drive him out of Tennessee, and the hardcore troubadour sets out for New York, a blue dog on his floorboard and a redhead by his side. This song serves as a book-end to Earle's signature song, "Guitar Town," which is explicitly referenced several times. Goodbye, Guitar Town.
   
8. Justin Townes Earle - "Faraway In Another Town" - The Good Life (2008). Steve's kid is good. If you're the son of Steve Earle and named in part after Townes Van Zandt, expectations are high. The younger Earle exceeds those expectations with a fine debut album.
9. Tony Lucca - "Devil Town" - Friday Night Lights [TV Soundtrack] (2007). This is a great cover of a Daniel Johnston song that most people associate with an earlier cover by Bright Eyes. Lucca's version became the definitive version for me after it was featured prominently in an episode of Friday Night Lights.
   
10. Whiskeytown - "Inn Town" - Stranger's Almanac (1997). Whiskeytown did songs about small town wasted time better than anyone.
    
11. Jason Isbell - "In A Razor Town" - Sirens Of The Ditch (2007). Former Drive-By Truckers guitarist/songwriter Isbell gives great acoustic on this mature, understated number.
    
12. Drive-By Truckers - "Two Daughters And A Beautiful Wife" - Brighter Than Creation's Dark (2008). Speaking of the Truckers, Patterson Hood and (Jason Isbell's ex-wife) Shonna Tucker sound amazing on this track.
    
13. John Fogerty - "Broken Down Cowboy" - Revival (2007). "He's bad news in a pickup truck." World-weary Fogerty does the broke-down cowboy bit better, and more convincingly, than all of the white-hat, mainstream country acts on CMT.
14. Jesse Malin - "Broken Radio" - Glitter In The Gutter (2007). Great ballad from former glam rocker and D Generation frontman Malin. This one features guest vocals from some hack named Bruce Springsteen.
    
15. Lucinda Williams - "Are You Alright?" - West (2007). This set wouldn't be complete without some Lucinda. Her voice is the sound of car wheels on a gravel road. A sexy gravel road.
    
16. Jeff Tweedy - "Simple Twist Of Fate" - I'm Not There (2007). Wilco's frontman does Dylan, from the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' unconventional biopic.
17. Jimmy Cliff - "Hard Road To Travel" - Jimmy Cliff (1969). This song kicks off a mini-set of four thematically related songs that bring this mix to a close. "It's a hard road to travel and a rough way to go, but I can't turn back, my heart is fixed, my mind's made up, I'll never stop, my faith will see me through."
    
18. Norah Jones - "The Long Way Home" - Feels Like Home (2004). This is a cover of a Tom Waits' track (oddly, Waits' is simply called "Long Way Home" -- Jones added the definite article in the title). Don't mistake my inclusion of Jones' version over Waits' as an indication of preference -- the Waits' track isn't available on Last.fm. You can find it on Waits' 2006 compilation, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Ballads (it originally appeared on the 2002 soundtrack Big Bad Love). I recently watched the Jude Law/Norah Jones flick My Blueberry Nights. The movie sucks. Avoid it. Jones can't act, but she can sing. While her voice doesn't carry the same gravitas as Waits' crusty pipes, it's easy on the ears.
    
19. Bruce Springsteen - "Long Walk Home" - Magic (2007). New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote this about Springsteen's "Long Walk Home":

    In the first verse, the speaker travels to some familiar hometown spots and experiences an alienation made especially haunting by the language in which he describes it: “I looked into their faces/They were all rank strangers to me.” That curious, archaic turn of phrase — rank strangers — evokes an eerie old mountain lament of the same title, recorded by the Stanley Brothers.

    “In that particular song a guy comes back to his town and recognizes nothing and is recognized by nothing,” Mr. Springsteen said. “The singer in ‘Long Walk Home,’ that’s his experience. His world has changed. The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers. The world that he knew feels totally alien. I think that’s what’s happened in this country in the past six years.”

    And so the song’s images of a vanished small town life (“The diner was shuttered and boarded/With a sign that just said ‘gone’ “) turn into metaphors, the last of which is delivered with the clarity and force that has distinguished Mr. Springsteen’s best writing:

    My father said “Son, we’re
    lucky in this town
    It’s a beautiful place to be born.
    It just wraps its arms around you
    Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
    You know that flag
    flying over the courthouse
    Means certain things are set in stone
    Who we are, and what we’ll do
    And what we won’t”
    It’s gonna be a long walk home.

    “That’s the end of the story we’re telling on a nightly basis,” Mr. Springsteen said. “Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And that’s not the way it is right now.”

20. Sam Cooke - "A Change Is Gonna Come" - Ain't That Good News (1964). Simply one of the best songs ever. "It's been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come." Let's hope these words prove prophetic in November '08.
21. Bonus Track: "Long Way Home" - Tom Waits - Big Bad Love [Motion Picture Soundtrack] (2002). Freed from the shackles of Last.fm, I can now share Tom Waits' weightier original version of this track.