LWA Blog — blog

One of the best musical accidents of my life was searching for The Sundays' Reading Writing & Arithmetic, but I wasn't sure of the band's name at the time. I was at the Tower Records on Bay Street in North Beach. I wandered around for a bit, looking at the new releases. Then I saw it, and I was sure of it. I picked up a copy of The Innocence Mission's self-titled debut album (1989) and made my purchase. I got home and I was looking forward to hearing that song I liked from the radio (Here's Where the Story...

Had lunch with a friend yesterday in a nearby town (Albany) that I'm not very familiar with. Afterwards, she pointed out a record store that was a block away (Strictly Vinyl in Albany), so we dipped in. A teenage girl and her father walked in to exchange a Steely Dan record (Gaucho) that had a skip or something. I thought this was for the dad, but it was for the daughter! She went to the racks and was pulling out stuff like Dylan, Springsteen and The Beatles. Clearly the dad had been raising her on a classic rock diet and...

Released in 96, I found my way to this compilation, Growin' Up Too Fast: The Girl Group Anthology, in the late 90s. If one were ever looking for a primer on the girl groups of the 60s, Growin' Up Too Fast is definitely one of the best. Of course there are some I like more than others, but all 50 tracks on this compilation are solid. Some of my faves are Lesley Gore's Look of Love, The Pixies Three's 442 Glenwood Avenue, Dusty Springfield's Stay Awhile, Gigi Parker & the Lonelies' Beatles Please Come Back, and Diane Renay's Growin' Up Too...

Hi, here's your mix for August. Because Spotify sucks, it's missing a couple of superb songs (Curve's Missing Link and Morpheme's Infection). And then, the acoustic version of Julia Michael's Lie Like This isn't available on the platform, so we get the original album version, which is still a great vibe, but a different vibe. Sucks that Spotify is the easiest way to get these out there, but that's a whole other conversation. Anyways, I just made this mix in the past week and a half, so it's fresh! It started out as a shoegaze mix and just turned into...

Fever Ray just returned with a new album of old songs, The Year of the Radical Romantics. From what I've read, this is essentially a live album; these songs were reworked and recorded live to tape in a studio. So the only thing missing, really, is the sound of a live audience.  I first learned of The Knife in 2006, when Silent Shout was on top of almost every end-of-year list. I had no idea who they were, and it didn't even click right away when I first listened to the album. Eventually, though, it clicked, and I was all...