June 2015

Song of the Day #176: Under Neon Lights

The Chemical Brothers – Under Neon Lights

The Chemical Brothers released this single from their upcoming album entitled Born in the Echoes just two days ago. I haven’t listened to The Chemical Brothers in a very long time, in fact their last album (Further) was released five years ago, which is the longest hiatus that they’ve taken since their first album release in 1995.

In 1999 The Chemical Brothers released an album titled Surrender, which included a song on it called Hey Boy, Hey Girl which had a profound affect on me. I saw them perform at the HFStival in 1999 at RFK Stadium in Anacostia among a mind-blowing lineup which included:

311
Blink 182
Dieselboy
Everclear
Limp Bizkit
Live
Moby
The Offspring
Powerman 5000
The Red Hot Chili Peppers
Run D.M.C.
Silverchair
Sugar Ray
Thievery Corporation
Josh Wink

HFStival was the best. Chemical Brothers are great, too.

Song of the Day #175: Like a River

My Morning Jacket – Like a River

My Morning Jacket is a Louisville-based psychedelic rock band which recently released their seventh studio album, The Waterfall.

Recently I’ve come upon a great new way to discover music: watch the musical guests on Conan every night. This has recently become a thing for me because each new episode of Conan is automatically downloaded to a server in my house, making it easy to watch new episodes daily. Recently I’ve been skipping through much of the actual show just to see the musical guests at the end of each day’s episode. Here’s what I’ve found with checking out musical artists on Conan:

Guest performers are top-notch. Each band or singer brings their A-game and plays their best song. In this kind of one-off performance, the stakes are enormously high. This makes it easy to check out the best of a wide range of artists in just a single song, without listening to entire albums, which can be time consuming.

Everything is new. Artists only perform on Conan when they have new releases to promote. It’s a good way to stay current on what’s trending in music and to discover new artist that you might not otherwise check out. My Morning Jacket is certainly one of those, for me.

The production values are remarkably high. Episodes are filmed the historic Warner Brothers Lot 15 in Burbank, California. In a lot of cases, performances filmed on Conan are better than artists’ actual music videos.