Song of the Day: 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody"

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Wasn't she the cutest? I think the word for early Whitney Houston is effervescent.

She had a soaring voice covering more octaves than a 10-mile piano, flexing it in lonely-hearted torch songs and musical philosophical treatises like "The Greatest Love of All."

It was the '80s, though, and everyone, girls and boys alike, just wanted to have fun. Whitney Houston knew when to apply a light skipping touch to anupbeat pop number. In her happiest songs and videos, she exudes the most joyous and infectious charisma.

—Sarah Torribio

Bite-Sized Autobiography: Straight outta West Covina

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Random Musing: This is your brain on ADHD

 

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Song of the Day: "The Last Time I Saw You (O Christmas)"

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"The Last Time I Saw You (O Christmas)" by Porridge Radio—an indie-rock outfit from Brighton, England—is is a splendid, keening, rocking darkwave Christmas tune. It may be a doomed couples' holiday swan song, but it's more cheerful than Judy Garland or Karen Carpenter's heartbreak-beat rendition of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."

—Sarah Torribio

Random Musing: Triangulation

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Song of the Day: "Jane Says" by Jane's Addiction

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I can't help it. I'm Gen X, graduated from high school 1992 and attended, as a teen, the first Lollapalooza with headliners Jane's Addiction. I love their tribal, spacey, drugged-out, Dionysian sound.

The sound is complex, quiet and keening and yet elbowing for ever-more space via reverb and a percussive wall of sound, notably the hypnotic use of steel drums.

Perry Farrel —who I had the peak-experience honor of

interviewing a few years back for the Reno Gazette Journal—surfs the aural wave with ease and eccentricity.

"Jane Says," about a drug-addled girl with her feet on the most sordid of streets and her head in the clouds, is not just a song. Forgive my hyperbole, but to my music-addled brain, it's a prayer meeting of the church of rock 'n roll, set in the ancient Greek temple of the Oracle of Delphi.

—Sarah Torribio

Color Palette: Not your mother's track and field

 

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Color Palette: Creamy and Dreamy

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Epigram of the Day: The Conversation Pit"

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Color Palette: Cold AND BOLD

 

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Color Palette: Pippi at Villa Villekulla

 

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Random Musing: As inspired by the original "Karate Kid"

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Song of the Day: "Dance Yrself Clean" by LCD Soundsystem

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This 2017 song I just stumbled across by LCD Soundsystem, "Dance Yrself Clean," is very cool. Give it a moment for the build, an unexpectedly vigorous beat-drop and growing vocal angst on the part of frontman James Murphy.

I'm pretty bad at pegging a genre for most music. Perhaps, like Billy Joel, "It's all rock 'n roll to me." According to the inter webs, however, the band—which has been rattling around with various membership permutations since 2002—can be called indie rock, electro-pop or dance-punk.

—Sarah Torribio

Song of the Day: "Romeo" by the Basement Jaxx

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"Romeo" by the Basement Jaxx, off the British electro-pop's eminently danceable 2001 album Rooty, is song of the day on Battlestar Eclectica. It's one of the more upbeat, energetic hits of the early 2000s. The video is a ful and appealing take on those colorful Bollywood Indian movies. 

I also recommend the Basement Jaxx's preternaturally catchy "Where's Your Head At?" from the same record. Just don't watch the video for that one if you're easily unsettled, because there are some things you can't unsee.

—Sarah Torribio

Song of the Day: "You're Still the One" by Okay Kaya

 

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I like this bluesy cover of Shania Twain's "You're Still the One" by Okay Kaya. The song grows, becoming more classic, universal and intimate in the alt-pop translation. In this jaded, plastic, pre-post-apocalyptic time, we need love songs both sweet and silly.

Okay Kaya, I've learned, is a Norwegian-American model, actress and singer/songwriter from New Jersey. She also does a Fiona Apple-esque cover of Cher's "Believe" that's likewise moody and pretty, making for a quiet coffee house torch song.

—Sarah Torribio