Abba Zaba to About This Love

"Abba Zaba"  Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band  Safe As Milk
"Abducted"  Cults  Cults
"Abernant 84/87"  The Mekons  New York: On The Road 1986-1987
"Abigail, Belle of Kilronan"  Magnetic Fields  69 Love Songs, Disc 2
"Able Mable"  Mable John  The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968
"Abominable Snowman in the Market"  Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers  The Best of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
"About Face"  Grizzly Bear  Veckatamist
"About Her"  Malcolm McLaren  Kill Bill, Vol. 2 OST
"About Noon"  The Mar-Keys  The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968
"About This Love"  Alejandro Escovedo  A Man Under The Influence


So I am going to try to pick this up again.  I don't really have a good excuse for not maintaining it.  I broke my shoulder and that took me down for a while, and then it just seemed hard to get back into the flow of it all.  Mostly it has just seemed like a hard thing to get back to somehow.  I am trying to figure out how to do it better so it seems a little more interesting to me and maybe to you (if any of you ever come back).  We will see - I was just having trouble staying engaged both with the writing and with the conceit.  So that said, I am going to try to get back into this, and hopefully get through the alphabet once more before the new year - which is only about 1/4 to 1/6 of where I had hoped to be.

I like this set because almost everyone on it is kind of off the beaten path.  Cults got a record deal based on songs they put together in their home and slapped up on Bandcamp.  The Mar-Keys were kids kicking around Satellite Records in Memphis and grew to be the house band for Stax-Volt.  Jonathan made a life choice to turn his back on the best set of Velvet Underground songs since Loaded in favor of a long and healthy career of ridiculous, slight, and ultimately very satisfying songs about Boston, baseball, snowmen and dancing in lesbian bars.

Really, everyone on this set ranges from "working musician" to "musical genius."  All right - not everyone.  Malcolm is somewhere between "huckster" and "visionary" (with some measure of "creepy old man/pedophile/monster," but we can wait to talk about Bow Wow Wow).  That said, he is at least partly responsible for the punk and post-punk revolutions, which provide a lasting mythology for all independent minded artists to this day.  And the song mashes up Bessie Smith and The Zombies so there can be only minimal hate.  Unless you are a French musician called Lancelot - you may have more hate - of course, I can't seem to find anything else about you, so you must rage without further linkage.

Distractions aside, the point is that this is a really great set - Stephen Merritt, Jon Langford, Alejandro . . . I guess this is as good a way as any to dive back into this.