Thanks for popping by. This is an ever-growing collection of song/track commentaries with no genre orthodoxy or “canon” agenda. These are songs that have caught my ear in a way that demand me to offer up some sort of observation. Some of them are merely tracks I think you should hear, whereas others are songs you’ve likely heard but perhaps have a less obvious dimension worth considering. I’m a lifelong song collector, so this is also a storage space for me and a means to organize my thoughts. The entries appear in random order, so the search window can help you zero in on categories and common threads. I try to avoid value judgment adjectives, but you can likely read between the lines. (I draw freely, sometimes cutting, pasting, or relocating, from my other blogs: Boneyard Media, Early ’70s Radio, and The International Folk Bazaar.) The YouTube embeds are audio only, unless the commentary demands otherwise, because music’s always better by itself.
About the title: writing about songs is like writing about stars in the sky. The more humans attempt to categorize and essentialize the musical utterances humans make and record, the more they all change and expand. I’m also of the opinion that music is the most nebulous and deepest reaching of all the arts, which is why humans are susceptible to going a bit bonkers over it and, as Joe Jackson put it in his A Cure for Gravity, inflating it to “the level of tribal warfare.”
Who I am, sorta: I’m a writer and musician (kimjsimpson.com) based in Austin, Texas, where I also host a global roots radio show called “The International Folk Bazaar” on KOOP (Wednesdays from 12 to 1 pm Central). I’ve hosted other shows on that station and also on KUTX, and I’ve been selecting songs for airplay for a few decades now, thinking about them and talking about them on air. Radio is a gloriously fluid medium, but I’ll always believe memorialization is most proper and durable through the written word. So this is me giving the written word an ongoing whirl.
I have a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas, and in 2011, I published a book called Early ’70s Radio: The American Format Revolution (Continuum). I’ve taught courses on music, media, and culture at the University of Texas and Texas State University, and I’ve turned up as a commentator on the the documentaries I Can Go For That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock (BBC) and Music’s Greatest Mysteries (AXS). You can get in touch with me at ksimpson3@gmail.com.