Recently in Tim Quirk Category

For nine years now, a gathering called the Pop Conference has been bringing together a wide range of people who think critically about music for a living.

Journalists, ethnomusicologists, sociologists, musicians themselves and more all gather once a year at the Experience Music Project in Seattle to hear presentations ranging from academic analyses (e.g. "High Art Discourses and White Masculine Mastery in the Music of the Dirty Projectors") to historical overviews of how electric bass innovations have mirrored similar changes in trombone design to listening sessions for the weird radio commercials Warner Brothers records made from 1968 to 1972 and raucous round-table conversations about the current state of pop or how Freddie Mercury changed the world.

I never miss it.

This year, I gave a talk about the history of the Walkman, and how it began a profound change in the way we listen to music (and what music we listen to) that the iPod and its ilk are merely continuing.

If you're interested in that sort of thing, the full presentation is after the jump.

I just enjoyed three of the best days of my life. At a band camp.

Well, technically it was an Artist Activism Retreat, which sounds a lot more lofty, but still doesn’t hint at the transcendent joy of the experience. And it took place in New Orleans, which explains some but not all of that joy.

Explaining the rest of the joy might not be possible. But I am going to try.

by Tim Quirk

As a founding member of both The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite and a producer responsible for records by The Libertines and Babyshambles, Mick Jones has had an illustrious and consistently relevant career that has spanned the course of three decades. Jones talks about these phases and stages in this Rhap Session.

By Tim Quirk

The hits keep on coming. Another round of "Drunk Dialing" from SXSW. In this episode: Eli from Throw Me the Statue on his most memorable drunk dialing disaster.

By Tim Quirk

Another installment of "Drunk Dialing" from SXSW, wherein your favorite musicians talk about their most memorable moments of regrettable telecommunication. In this episode, Tim Quirk talks to the legendary Gang of Four bassist, Dave Allen.

By Tim Quirk

Another installment of our "Drunk Dialing" series. Here's British Sea Power, talking to Tim Quirk at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, about their most memorable (or barely remembered) drunk dialing experience.

By Tim Quirk

Every night at South By Southwest is a night to remember that you will likely forget. When the bands, industry insiders and journalists descend on Austin, Texas, the beer flows like wine. And who among us has not found ourselves in the precarious position of possessing liquid courage in one hand and a telephone in the other? We are all guilty of drunk dialing, my friends. Let ye without a call history cast the first stone.

With that in mind, our intrepid reporter Tim Quirk, embedded with the bands at this year's SXSW, will be asking some of your favorite musicians about their most (un)forgettable drunk dialing trespasses. In our first installment: David Gedge of the Wedding Present and Cinerama.

Reply | Copy This

By Tim Quirk

There’s little I enjoy more than talking about music. Well, maybe drinking and talking about music. What could be better than that? How about drinking and talking about music in Rio De Janeiro? And what if the people you’re talking and sharing caipirinhas with, as you gaze down at Copacabana Beach while the giant statue of Cristo Redentor gazes down at you, are a group of gifted musicians from six continents?

By Tim Quirk

When I was a teenager, Rolling Stone ran a semi-notorious cover featuring a bare-chested Jim Morrison (did that guy ever wear a shirt?) with a caption that read, “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy and He’s Dead.” The Doors still seem to do pretty good business in T-shirts and dorm room posters. As do other admirable, sexy and dead rockers such as John Lennon, Bob Marley and Kurt Cobain. So how come vendors on random street corners don’t carry an equally impressive selection of Joe Strummer T-shirts?

By Tim Quirk

But I’m also deeply suspicious of any effort to make people feel bad about the music they like, and doubly so when such efforts cloak themselves in faux-populist clothing (hipsters declaring that the really cool kids don’t like hipster music is a lot like the Ivy League-educated scion of a wealthy family who currently runs our country dismissing his opponent in the 2004 election as elite and out of touch with middle America). And since I’m in New York right now for the CMJ Music Marathon, which is pretty much a non-stop celebration of semi-popular indie rock, this stuff can’t help but percolate in my beer-soaked noggin (relevant aside: at the last indie-rock-tastic festival I attended in Austin, some guy behind me in the bar line at a Ponys show ridiculed me for buying a $4 Tecate instead of a $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon; I try my best to love my fellow human beings, but sometimes they make it very, very difficult).

Song: (For God's Sake) Give More Power to the People
Album: The Ultimate Chi-Lites
Artist: The Chi-Lites
Selected by: Tim Quirk
Date: October 4, 2007

Though most of their hits feature sweetly crooned reminiscences of lovers past, the Chi-Lites (from Chi-cago) also did well with this funk-inflected protest tune. The vocal interplay is as inspiring as the chugging groove: the group passes lines back and forth, jumping from authoritative bass through pleading soprano (and sometimes employing all of ‘em at once). The music makes you want to dance in the street, while the lyrics suggest a riot might be more in order.

Play It Now

By Tim Quirk

OK, so Chris Brown jumping from table to table was the musical high point of this year’s VMAs. I wasn’t in the Pearl Theater itself, but friends who were insist that watching Chris and co. fly through the air was actually more impressive in the room than it looked on TV – even cooler, apparently the production lady who talked to everyone during commercials was saying stuff like, “All drinks off the tables!” and “Don’t stand up, or you will be decapitated!” just before Chris Brown blew everybody’s mind and washed the sad aftertaste of Britney thrusting her hips while surrounded by good dancers out of the nation’s collective, gaped mouth.

But my own personal high point came courtesy of Kid Rock. I have no idea if what he said was merely bleeped, or edited out of the broadcast entirely, but it was one of those priceless moments of honesty bursting through posturing that pop music specializes in.

By Tim Quirk

If you look closely at this picture, you will see that even the poor guy who has to dress up as the Moon Man in 100+ degree heat walks around drinking cocktails by the pool at the Palms. That’s a margarita glass in his left hand, though how he gets the liquid through the reflective surface of his space visor is beyond me. 

Moon Man manqué joined plenty of other people at the Palms’ pool in not-quite-rocking out to Peter, Bjorn and John this afternoon. The band did their damndest to engage the crowd: singer/guitarist Peter Moren even tried climbing up the lighting rig as though he were a deranged punker who might be willing to leap to his death at one point. Unfortunately, he did this during their whistle-tastic hit, “Young Folks,” which is eminently hummable, but not exactly the type of thing that makes you want to cut your chest open with a broken bottle.

By Tim Quirk

There’s no lack of things to do in Vegas during the VMAs. Hell, there’s a multiplex in the Palms (don’t believe the glowing reviews of 3:10 to Yuma; it’s like that Jon Lovitz “Acting!” character from SNL starring in a Pierce Brosnan-era James Bond flick, only with cowboy hats – but if you have to see it, see it in the multiplex at the Palms, where the ludicrousness of the film is at least mitigated by the total over-the-topness of everything going on outside the safe, dark, silly theater).

Things going on outside that theater include happening parties you need special wristbands or revealing dresses to get in to. Since I always travel with both, I was one of the lucky hundreds who got to enjoy the open bar at Rain while we waited for Eve to come out and show us her paw print tattoos and sing us her “new single featuring Sean Paul” even though Sean Paul wasn’t there. 

By Tim Quirk

That’s what a bunch of friends and random strangers have been asking me lately. So I figured I should explain.

As you maybe already knew, or have probably figured out by now, Rhapsody recently partnered with MTV Networks, and this year’s Video Music Awards are something like the coming out party for our new venture – we’ll be advertising Rhapsody on a scale we’ve never attempted before, starting this weekend (I’m actually typing this in Vegas, at the Palms, where the event will be taking place on Sunday, and where you can’t walk two feet without bumping into some VMA ad – both the key to my room and the Do Not Disturb sign have this year’s VMA logo emblazoned on them, as do the blackjack tables in the casino. But hey – Vegas is not about being subtle).

By Tim Quirk

Champagne corks are popping here at Rhapsody, as we’ve just announced our nuptials with the equally-obsessive music geeks at MTV Networks. Like Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, it’s a love match that also makes good business sense.

For our immediate purposes on this blog, it means three things: V, M and A. Our buddies at MTV will be bringing you all kinds of inside dirt on the run-up to the ceremony, while Rhapsody editors will be providing commentary on and music from this year’s nominees, past performers, and anyone else they make us think about. As always with Rhapsody, all you have to do is click on a track name to start hearing the songs we’re talking about, in full, for free.

Song: Needles in the Camel's Eye
Album: Here Come the Warm Jets 
Artist:  Brian Eno 
Selected by: Tim Quirk
Date: August 21, 2007

A perfect, if slightly odd, pop song that charges at you with an indelible melody and a mess of instruments that all sound like something other than what they are. Except the drums, which pretty much sound like drums. If you listen to it 10 times in a row, the “Why ask why?!” bit will get stuck in your head and you’ll find yourself invoking its advice at opportune moments in your life.

Play It Now

By Tim Quirk

I'm beyond depressed. In just a couple of days, Internet Radio will change, dramatically, for the worse.

Perhaps you’ve been following the story. If not, rather than re-cap it, I will simply point you to an excellent summary of how we got here by my new buddy, Ian Rogers, the GM of Yahoo Music.

I am here to make some proclamations about the future of the music business. I should provide a couple caveats at the outset, however. First, I will confess I’m not 100% sure whether what follows is a prediction or a just a wish. I’m pretty confident (so, like, 99%) it’s the former, but I offer that 1% of doubt as a little place of refuge anyone who disagrees with me can go try to build a city where all the citizens do their best to keep the existing, depressingly diseased music business functioning as-is indefinitely. Good luck with that.

By Tim Quirk

You never really know what music will sound good when you’re traveling (who’d have predicted, for instance, that the drug-gobbling, desert-dwelling Meat Puppets would sound so right driving through a blizzard in Maine?).

So I’ve had fun learning what works and what doesn’t on my trusty Sansa as I stroll around Beijing. Unsurprisingly, Gang of Four tunes like “Ether” make a great soundtrack for viewing Socialist Realism sculptures like this one outside the tomb where you can go gawk at the pickled corpse of Chairman Mao.

But airier stuff works well, too. Mercury Rev’s addled musings might sound like they’re all written at night, in a field, beneath a gazillion stars, but “Tonight it Shows” works just as well in the middle of a smoggy day when you’re waiting with 300 other citizens to cross one of the crazy dangerous eight lane roads that ring the city in concentric rectangles.

By Tim Quirk

For reasons that elude me, I am in Salzburg. It's where Julie Andrews danced around in the hills singing about the Sound of Music, but if you mention that to locals, they claim never to have seen the movie (most of them, anyway; if you find one who admits to having seen the thing, he will make a point of telling you that the hill on the left the pretend Von Trapps climbed to escape the Nazis actually leads straight into Germany, which is a lot like stuck up San Franciscans moaning that Dustin Hoffman is actually driving west, not east, at the end of The Graduate).

By Tim Quirk

Pete Townshend didn't just talk about music at SXSW; he actually played some.

He was the not-particularly-surprising-but-still-kinda-thrilling "special guest" at Ian MacLagen's tribute to Ronnie Lane. Pete joined Ian's band for two Ronnie Lane tunes: one from the Pete/Ronnie collaboration Rough Mix that is frustratingly not licensed in Rhapsody, and one old Small Faces tune: "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"

By Tim Quirk

Pete Townshend likes and admires journalists. But he thinks the sub-editors who take his comments our of context and turn them into salacious headlines should be shot.

He is very right.

By Tim Quirk

Pete Townshend just admitted he was a little jealous that the Sex Pistols had fans like Siouxsie Sioux who would get half naked at their shows. He says the Who "never had anything like that. Although we had mod boys who may have striped off their shirts now and again."

Best. Keynote. Ever.

By Tim Quirk

"The Method" is apparently a website Pete is launching that will write music just for you. Here's his own explanation from petetownshend.com:

"After more than 25 years of patient research Pete is launching the website he first described in the science fiction story behind the Who's legendary Who's Next album of 1971.

The Method - designed by Lawrence Ball - offers subscribers the opportunity to create their own unique musical composition by 'sitting' for the Method software composer, just as you would sit for a painter making your portrait.

The first example of this process can be heard, elaborated into a song by Pete, on Fragments the opening track of the Who's latest album Endless Wire."

I invited the jackass sitting next to me to insert another online child pornography joke here. He declined.

By Tim Quirk

Pete is saying far too many funny and interesting things to keep track of them all, but here's another one that stood out: when he's blogging or chatting online, he will sometimes turn on his microphone and play (or even write) a song for a single person.

An uncharitable person next to me asked if that single person was a confused little girl who wondered why she had to take her shirt off to hear the song.

But I love Pete, so I would never say anything like that.

By Tim Quirk

Explaining who the original Franz Ferdinand was, Pete Townshend just informed the audience that the man who shot Archduke Ferdinand "started a war that lasted for centuries."

Have I mentioned how much I love this man and his work?

By Tim Quirk

Pete Townshend just admitted he got the Who back together a while ago for no better reason than to help John Entwhistle with his money problems. But he's pretty sure John spent all the money on cocaine.

It got a sad kind of laugh.

By Tim Quirk

The thing about SXSW is that there's so damn much music, if you see the wrong 3 bands in a row you wind up incredibly depressed and wondering what it was about music that made you think you should devote your life to listening, playing and writing about it.

But if you see the *right* 3 bands in a row, there's no better feeling.

And if you see one of those bands totally by accident and wind up falling in love with them as they peel your brain layer by layer with walls of glorious noise, well, you just kind of float a couple feet off the ground for a bit.

Song: Balls
Album: The Sugar Tree
Artist: Amy Rigby
Selected by: Tim Quirk
Date: January 24, 2007

Songs with punchlines don't always age well, but Amy Rigby sounds pretty damn serious when she explains why she wishes she could grow a pair. And she sounds like she hates herself but can't help it when she confesses, "I love your nerve."

Play It Now

Song: Fistful of Love
Artist: Antony and the Johnsons
Album: I'm A Bird Now
Selected By Tim Quirk
Date: January 5, 2007

A powerful lyric + that haunting voice + soulful horns = a knockout (which is appropriate, given the subject matter). Antony Hegarty's joined by one of his heroes, Lou Reed, on this number, which makes masochism sound heroic.

Play It Now

By Tim Quirk 

Here's a playlist with a couple dozen of the songs I liked best in 2006. The first ten are from my favorite albums of the year (in rough order); I could easily have thrown two or three more songs from each of those on here. The rest are individual tracks I couldn’t get out of my head, even when the albums themselves sometime disappointed. The list looks like this (note: the Eric Bachman and Two Gallants tracks aren't live in Rhapsody yet, but are coming soon):

By Tim Quirk 

I was unexpectedly in NYC Wednesday night, and wormed my way into the dress rehearsal at St. Ann's Warehouse for Berlin, Lou Reed's mind-blowing 1973 concept album about dissolute lovers who beat and shoot each other up and then the girl kills herself and the guy gets super eloquent about it with the help of a choir. In college, my suicidal girlfriend used to listen to that and Joy Division's Closer in the dark for days, so the fact that I still adore both works should tell you something about how great they are (if amazingness-of-album minus craziness-of-traumatizing-lover-who-was-addicted-to-said-album still equals stupendousness, then one can assume said album is actually super-stupendous).

The Quirk clan spent the weekend stringing lights on and otherwise decorating our co-opted pagan holiday tree. Yes, there's a lot of crappy Christmas music in the world, but there's also a lot of Christmas music that's actually enjoyable in Rhapsody. Here's almost 10 hours of the latter -- everything from those Who's down in Whoville singing Fah-Hoo-Doh-Ray to Wilson Pickett singing "Jingle Bells." Put it on shuffle play and you should find a decent balance between people like the Andrews Sisters and the Eels. Click here to launch the playlist.

By Tim Quirk 

The same thing happened when I interviewed Dave Davies.

By Tim Quirk

CMJ ended days ago, and I haven’t had a drink (or an ill-advised second round of pizza at 3 in the morning) since, but random memories keep resurfacing, like the flashbacks to Iwo Jima in Clint Eastwood's new movie…

Mew's a band whose record I heard before seeing them play, and thought, "eh." Then I saw them live and thought, "eh!" But there's a lot going on in that exclamation mark.

By Tim Quirk 

Beer. Lines. Texting friends to see if the lines they're standing in are any shorter. More beer. Every once in a while, some actual music. Still more beer. And, every once in an even greater while, some music that is actually great and makes all that other stuff worthwhile. Which means you must buy some more beer to celebrate, and text your friends to let them know they stood in the wrong long line.

This is CMJ, something that probably sucks if you add up all the pros then subtract all the cons, but which I am nonetheless glad I attended, and not only because I wouldn’t be in love with the Whigs right now if I hadn’t.

By Tim Quirk

What a week! At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader, this year's CMJ was the best one ever. OK, maybe not, but it was the best one that I've ever attended, although the tone of my trip was set somewhat stressfully -- when I arrived at SFO my flight was delayed four hours. But the airport’s museum was coincidently showing an awesome music themed exhibit entitled, "The History of Audio: The Engineering of Sound." 

So I checked it out. There were triumphantly geeky displays of vintage recording devices that would have fogged up the glasses of Steve Albini and the guys from Tape Op magazine. In loving contrast to the invention of high fidelity, I took these lo-fi pictures on my janky, dated Motorola phone:

Day One:

After finally touching down at JFK and checking in to the historical Hotel Chelsea (yes, I am a total sucker for rock and roll cliches), I picked up my CMJ badge, scarfed down a Katz's pastrami sandwich

By Tim Quirk 

All the sordid details will be coming eventually. These include, but are not limited to, answering the question, "Who shouts out 'woo!' at a Carly Simon show?"; determining if the front dude in Mew is a T-Rex (really, just look at the way his non-mic-holding arm simply hangs there unmajestically); explaining why the Grates actually are, even though the singer comes across as Karen O as played by an oddly giggly Reese Witherspoon; counting how many times Erase Errata sing about knives; trying to figure out if the Knife actually made any music or just danced around in front of it, and if it matters either way when you have such super cool disembodied heads projected around you; and providing context for Jon Langford saying, "I would take the Dalai Lama roughly from the rear while Bono tickled my testicles with a real estate brochure."

By Tim Quirk

My last post explained some of the thinking that went into the 500 tracks we put on our new Sansa Rhapsody device, and admitted we know nobody's gonna like every last one, so we made the ones you hate easy to remove, and came up with a way to feed your device new songs you'll probably like more.

I had promised to explain exactly how we're gonna do that with this post, but it's going to sound enough like a commercial in a minute, so suffice it to say there are these things called Rhapsody Channels on there that update with new material based on what you tell us you like, and what you tell us you don't.

By Tim Quirk

Rhapsody has almost 3 million songs in its catalog, and normally on this blog we single out one or two of those for discussion at a time.

But this post is going to be about 500 songs. Specifically, the 500 or so we're preloading on the Sansa Rhapsody, the new device we recently announced we're making with SanDisk. You might think choosing several hundred such tracks would be pretty easy. But it turns out putting together a list like that is an insomnia-inducing, ulcer-generating, choice-of-career-questioning affair that leaves you feeling like Meryl Streep at the end of Sophie's Choice.

Which doesn’t mean it's not a hell of a lot of fun, too.

By Tim Quirk

I love Luna, but I was disappointed by Tell Me Do You Miss Me, the DVD that recounts the dreamy, hypnotic, Velvet-Underground-worshipping-in-a-good-way band's farewell tour. Although I continue to think they were one of those rare acts worth seeing live every chance you could get, turns out the appeal of watching them in concert gets lost in the edits of a multi-camera shoot, as you're robbed of the head-nodding joys of honing in on a single instrument for minutes at a time while the deceptively simple music, lilting melodies and fey rhymes subtly alter your brain, sparking dozens of mini-epiphanies in the process (you can watch this performance of "Bewitched" from the documentary to decide for yourself if it comes anywhere close to capturing just how transcendentally beautiful the band could be).

I left an item off my earlier list of songs that can make me cry, mostly because I only got truly choked up the first time I heard it, as it was performed live, by a bunch of kids. And my daughter was one of those kids. I think it was Christmas, to boot.

Still, I insist the song itself is what moved me, not the adorableness of the ensemble, or a dad's perfectly natural (if aesthetically suspect) pride in his daughter, or cheap holiday sentiment. So the fact that I have yet to find a recording of the tune that can match the impact of that first encounter is somewhat disturbing. Especially since there are more than 20 versions of the thing in Rhapsody.

It gets more complicated, though. The song in question was "I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel To Be Free)." It's a gospel-inflected lament whose power probably derives from its plainspoken delivery: the lyrics make you angry because they don't allow the singer any room to seem angry as he (or she -- check out this version by Nina Simone, or this one by Irma Thomas, or this a cappella stunner from Leontyne Price) wonders what it would be like to live in a land where liberty was something people actually practiced rather than just talked about. It turns out describing how nice that might be is far more affecting than railing about how unfair it is the world doesn't actually work that way. And while the song doesn't insist things will work that way someday, it does leave the possibility open, simply by existing -- by being so reasonable in the face of an unrelenting unreasonableness which the song somehow makes all the more palpable by only daring to hint at (witness such killer lines as, "I wish I could say/all the things I should say," which say everything they need to by saying this particular person can't risk saying any of it).

The song was written by jazz pianist Billy Taylor in 1954, and while the lyrics make it a wonderful civil rights anthem, you can feel how much weight the alternately mournful/joyous melody and less-simple-than-it-seems rhythm carry on their own in any of a number of instrumental versions, like this one by Junior Mance, or this one by Billy Taylor himself.

Still, it's words like, "I wish you could know what it means to be me," and their implicit narrator, that ultimately nail you, so I remain weirded out that my favorite version was performed by a bunch of kids in a private school who've presumably experienced no real oppression in their short, lucky lives.

Please don't misunderstand: I'm not suggesting a performer's age or race or station should (or simply does) matter when singing about, well, anything. But I have to admit this John Denver version of the tune makes my position harder to defend. I'm sorry, but he sounds like he's already living in the world he's supposed to be wishing into existence. (Of this rendition's many sins, pay particular attention to two: 1st, the way his voice actually goes *down* on the line, "say them loud." Canny choice, or simple stupidity? I'm voting for the latter. 2nd: the way furiously strummed acoustic guitar, oddly mixed organ, and out-of-nowhere horns are called on to supply all the emotion his warble lacks as the song attempts to crescendo.)

Folkie Glenn Yarbrough's tenor is every bit as warbly as Denver's, but his version gets much closer to convincing me there's a world we're in and a different world he wants. It still doesn't compare to a roomful of eight year-olds belting it out, though.

Solomon Burke's no folkie, but he's got his own way of adding uneeded sap to the tune. Not only does he begin the song with a spoken bit that goes, "Here's a wish that will come true" (which not only ruins my thesis that the song's majesty is rooted in its refusal to pretend things must get better, but just sounds stupid), he also cuts down the deliberately convoluted title phrase in order to squeeze in the word "yesiree" as an extra rhyme for "free."

Why do moves like that ruin the song for me? Because this isn't a song you need make your own -- it's a song that eloquently insists we're all equal, and should be treated that way. Maybe that's why hearing a bunch of kids sing it moved me so much: I heard the song, not the singer, and for once, that was enough.

(Click here to listen to 17 different versions of the song.)

Sorry to blog twice in one day, but Tim's blog inspired me yet again (for the record I was not calling him a girl in my previous post). But that's one of the rad things about working here--when my coworkers and bosses aren't turning me on to awesome music, they're reminding me of stuff I grew up with. Like when Tim referenced Terry Jacks it totally reminded me of sitting in the back of my mom's station wagon, listening to "Seasons in the Sun" while she drove me to baseball practice (it also reminded me when Nick told me that Jacks used to be a member of the Poppy Family, but I digress).

Maybe you've heard of Yacht Rock and perhaps you've even heard some Dad Rock. But have you ever heard any Mom Rock?

Hmm. I'm pretty sure Eric Shea just called me a girl. I don't mind, though, as I'm more than willing to embrace my inner lady. To prove it, I figured I'd share some songs that have actually made me cry.

Granted, this used to happen a lot more often when I was an overly sensitive prepubescent. Back in the '70s, I was a sucker for story songs, particularly ones that ended with somebody's death. Paper Lace used to do it to me with their version of "Billy Don't Be a Hero," the sad tale of an overeager soldier who ignores his girlfriend's advice to keep his head down, and gets it blown off in the process. Does she admire him for his sacrifice? No, she does not. (In something of a maudlin twofer, Paper Lace's debut album also had another killer story song, "The Night Chicago Died," which would have made me cry if it didn't end with daddy the cop coming home safely from the gang warfare, kissing momma's face, and wiping her tears away, just when my own were getting ready to come spewing forth).

My ears tell me those two are re-recordings of the originals, and though they're pretty faithful, I confess they lack the power to move me much anymore. Not so for David Geddes' "Run Joey Run," which ends with the pregnant girlfriend jumping in between the shotgun her daddy's wielding and the bad news boyfriend he was aiming at. In a brillliant production touch, poor Julie doesn't even get to finish the chorus, because, you know, she dies.

Of course, the absolute pinnacle (or nadir, if you're a cynic) of bathetic '70s pop was Terry Jacks' version of "Seasons in the Sun," which, infuriatingly, isn't yet available in Rhapsody (adding to the frustration: neither is Rod McKuen's original version, nor "Le Moribund," the Jacques Brel tune McKuen translated/reworked to create "Seasons"). Though you really have to hear McKuen's harshly strummed acoustic guitar coupled with beat-poetry-reading-vocal to truly appreciate just how horribly Jacks bowlderized the tune, you can get some sense from this Kingston Trio version, which at least retains the very French, very existential third verse, in which we learn that the dying narrator is not so much a tender soul as a bitter cuckold who threatens to haunt his wife from the grave because she cheated on him with his best friend.

Another death-and-adultery story song that still chokes me up is the Band's recording of "Long Black Veil." Yeah, Johnny Cash's version is fine, too, but I've never heard anybody quite so mournful as Rick Danko when he explains that he let a judge convict him of murder rather than offer an alibi, "because I had been in the arms/of my best friend's wife."

Lest you think I'm confusing irony with genuine emotion, I'll leave you with two semi-recent songs that actually made me cry with no hipster ratonalizations. Amy Rigby's "Don't Ever Change" is as honest a summary of loving/hating your family as I think anyone will ever write, and the bit where she lets her daughter listen to her iPod rather than try to engage her in conversation still makes me crumble, even though I've played the thing at least 100 times.

And the Flaming Lips' "Waiting for a Superman" is one of those sad songs that doesn't try to convince you life does anything but get grimmer and grimmer as you go on, but it does so with such unblinking bravey and compassion that you somehow feel better when it's over, like a sponge that's just been wrung out good.

(Click here for a playlist with all these sad songs on it.)

"Liar" popped up randomly while I was driving around with my mp3 player going the other day, and I had one of those moments when you recall a feeling you'd completely forgotten ever having. I was suddenly catapulted back to being a 13 year-old and hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time.

It was a weekend afternoon in 1977 or 1978, so I was 12 or 13, at a party with a bunch of other junior high school kids. The girl who was having the party had a copy of the album and put it on. And I remember being completely disappointed and complaining, "This is just rock and roll."

I can't remember exactly what I was expecting, but it was definitely something...more. This was before the interweb, kiddoes, so folks in my upper-middle-class New York City suburb had been reading about punk rock for months without having any real means of actually hearing any. The New York Times and Rolling Stone had both been making it sound like the most dangerous, depraved, unholy noise possible. I wanted the music to scare me. And it didn't.

Before too long I'd see them in D.O.A. and be suitably terrified. There's nothing quite like a blood splattered Sid Vicious to freak you out and make you think zombies are real. But Sid never really played his bass, did he? He just kind of wore it, and convinced you there was a decent chance he'd start using it as a weapon if you weren't careful. In 1977, I was still naive enough to think punk was about the music, not the stance.

But that's OK, because it meant as soon as I did hear a punk band whose music thrilled me, I could channel all my adolescent conviction that adolescent conviction could change the world into loving them and everything they promised. This is the song that did it, and it makes me as giddy today as "Liar" leaves me cold.

There's a very special moment in the wonderfully cheesy movie (you can't really call it a "film") Eddie and the Cruisers when tormented genius bandleader Eddie (who acts like Jim Morrison but sings like Bruce Springsteen) looks at keyboard player and lyricist Frank Ridgeway (whose shaman-like nickname is "Wordman"), crosses his fingers together, and explains the powerful bond that unites them with this immortal line: "Words and music, man."

Now, music writers, being writers and all, often get accused of focusing too much attention to the first part of that equation. A lyric isn't a song, any more than a painting of a pipe is a pipe. But a deft lyric can make a good song great, while a dopey one can make it impossible to love an otherwise beautiful tune.

Right now, I'm trying to figure out where on that spectrum Untitled Bonus Track 4 by the Spinto Band falls. It's a puffy little confection with an adorable melody I can't stop humming, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever till I started paying attention to the words, which seem to have something to do with playing Atari, runaway dogs, and life in Japan -- I can't tell you more, because I'm deliberately ignoring them from now on in order to keep liking the song, and the band. I have a sneaking suspicion trying to figure out what they're actually singing about would ruin everything.

Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against stupid lyrics. In fact, I spent a decent amount of time in my past life writing and recording that very kind. I've got a weakness for songs with words that are so dumb they actually become profound. It's hard to pinpoint the difference between songs that succeed in this regard vs. those that fail, so I'll just point you toward "Good Guys and Bad Guys" by Camper Van Beethoven, another tune about slacker bliss and life in other countries that, for whatever reason, doesn't make me embarrassed to sing along.

There's a very special moment in the wonderfully cheesy movie (you can't really call it a "film") Eddie and the Cruisers when tormented genius bandleader Eddie (who acts like Jim Morrison but sings like Bruce Springsteen) looks at keyboard player and lyricist Frank Ridgeway (whose shaman-like nickname is "Wordman"), crosses his fingers together, and explains the powerful bond that unites them with this immortal line: "Words and music, man."

Now, music writers, being writers and all, often get accused of focusing too much attention to the first part of that equation. A lyric isn't a song, any more than a painting of a pipe is a pipe. But a deft lyric can make a good song great, while a dopey one can make it impossible to love an otherwise beautiful tune.

Right now, I'm trying to figure out where on that spectrum Untitled Bonus Track 4 by the Spinto Band falls. It's a puffy little confection with an adorable melody I can't stop humming, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever till I started paying attention to the words, which seem to have something to do with playing Atari, runaway dogs, and life in Japan -- I can't tell you more, because I'm deliberately ignoring them from now on in order to keep liking the song, and the band. I have a sneaking suspicion trying to figure out what they're actually singing about would ruin everything.

Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against stupid lyrics. In fact, I spent a decent amount of time in my past life writing and recording that very kind. I've got a weakness for songs with words that are so dumb they actually become profound. It's hard to pinpoint the difference between songs that succeed in this regard vs. those that fail, so I'll just point you toward "Good Guys and Bad Guys" by Camper Van Beethoven, another tune about slacker bliss and life in other countries that, for whatever reason, doesn't make me embarrassed to sing along.

Raise your hand if the sight of a lone sax player in a rock band tends to scare you off. Unless he's Clarence Clemmons (and sometimes, even if he is), the saxophonist tends to be a big, honking warning that you're in for some by-the-numbers rock and roll. The only thing worse than watching him clap awkwardly while he waits for his big moment is knowing that once he stops clapping, there's going to be an overwrought sax solo.

Of course, overwrought sax solos can be things of beauty. Supposedly, Bruce Springsteen spent 16 hours or something conducting poor Mr. Clemmons in the studio until Jungleland had its definitive sax break, and listening back I have to admit it was probably worth it, since for once the sax actually tempers the bombast rather than ratcheting it up even further.

But sometimes the sax doesn't have to wait around for its turn to shine. Sometimes the sax can actually drive a tune. Check out the chorus on the Raybeats' "Searching" to get an idea of what I mean. The horn's doing all the talking. These guys were a surf-leaning instrumental combo that kept jumping back and forth across the fence that separated new wave and no wave in the early-1980s. I must have seen them 10 times or more, since they seemed to open up for just about every major British or U.S. post-punk group that came through NYC when I was in high school. This is easily my favorite song they ever did.

My favoritist instrumental ever, though, is "Teenie's Dream," by the mighty Willie Mitchell, who led the Hi Records house band, eventually ran the label, and produced all the best Al Green records. This tune might be named after guitarist Teenie Hodges, but the horn's the star. It arrives 59 seconds in and completely owns the song from that point out. One day a savvy music consultant will make this the theme song to some lame sitcom, and it will be ruined forever, but for now we can all listen association-free. I can't not be happy for the 2 minutes this thing lasts.

By Tim Quirk

Name: Tim Quirk

Job: Executive Editor, Rhapsody

What I did before Rhapsody: I was in a band called Too Much Joy.

Welcome to Pop-Ed, the Rhapsody Staff Blog. If you don't know what Rhapsody is, you can learn more here, and hopefully that will be the one and only commercial for the service, as this blog isn’t designed to sell you anything.

The purpose of this blog is to obsess about music: music we love, music we hate, music we've changed our minds about, music we don’t feel strongly about one way or the other but that was on our minds this morning because of something we read, or saw on TV, or overheard somebody talking about.

(Note: The following is a presentation I gave at the 2006 Pop Conference)

Like, I assume, most of the people at this conference, I have what average citizens, upon entering my home or office, almost always declare to be a frighteningly large music collection: LPs, CDs, cassettes, hundreds of gigabytes of mp3s scattered across an array of hard drives and portable devices -- it all gathers in piles both physical and virtual wherever I spend serious time. When these average citizens are new or casual acquaintances, they often move from commenting on the vast and tottering nature of the stacks of discs to making deductions along the lines of, "You must really like music, huh?"

I almost always reply with a semi-embarrassed, "Kind of," which is the most honest answer I can give. Though my collection is indeed larger than the average citizen's, it's far smaller than that of most of my music geek friends, and the reality is I hate far more music than I like.