#365songs (100 / 365)

Follow-up to yesterday's post about a song from Big Boi's first post-Outkast album; like in another recent post, the relatively lesser-known album from someone in the defunct more-famous act got me to go back and see what I'd missed.

Of course, I hadn't entirely missed Outkast. What I remember them most for was "Ms. Jackson," which the team captain would play in his car when he drove to math team meets. (And I must have known "Hey Ya," because how could I not have.) But I definitely only remembered the chorus, not the verses. "Ms. Jackson" definitely fits the stereotype/popular conception of André as the sensitive dreamer and Big Boi as brash traditionalist. Big Boi's verses are fine, but they're kind of aggressive; André's tender, mature, regretful verse, on the other hand, impressed me as one of his finest even though I'd listened to all of Aquemini before I came back around to Stankonia.

Aquemini is the better album, I maintain. But "Ms. Jackson" fully earned its status as world-conquering single that managed to penetrate even my blinkered high school white boy awareness. When I returned to it as a somewhat more mature adult, well... sometimes I fancy myself the kind of person who likes deep cuts, but this song was and is undeniable. Also André is wearing a dress on the cover of the single. Icon. Legend.

#365songs (99 / 365)

I spent a summer with the preposterously titled Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty and I still kind of regard it as an inflection point in my relationship with hip-hop. Previously, it was a "sometimes food" but after the immensely likeable Lucious it started to make its way into the regular rotation.

I don't know if I burned out on this album or if my tastes in rap just shifted — probably some of both — but I don't listen to Lucious much anymore; playing it while writing this, I'm struck by how Big Boi's cadences and delivery remind me of Deltron 3030, which is maybe why I had such a soft landing with Lucious.

I got into this album when I was in my 20s, working at Trader Joe's and doing some math tutoring, and so my most concrete memories of it are listening to it on the bike ride to and from where I did my tutoring, and putting "Shutterbugg" in a mix that I'd sometimes get to play at Trader Joe's before the store opened.

I had a co-worker there who was astonished that an egghead like me would be into Sir Lucious Left Foot and started calling me "Lucious" in a way that I think was about 70% affectionate and 30% making fun of me. Over time I got kind of surly about feeling stuck working at a grocery store and this co-worker started antagonizing me a little more, but for a while it was like: Finally. The appreciation for my eclectic music taste that I've always wanted and, frankly, deserve.

#365songs (98 / 365)

Had to follow up my previous entry with my favorite song from the band that song is about.

The Unicorns released one album of very catchy, very ramshackle, very twee indie rock and then dissolved acrimoniously, and "I Was Born (A Unicorn)" is arguably the song with the most of all of that (catchy, ramshackle, twee and acrimonious). It's ridiculous start to finish but maybe the most ridiculous part — more ridiculous than one of the singers gasping out "If you stop believing in me!" like he's on the brink of death, more ridiculous than "I write the songs!" "I write the songs!" "You say I'm doing it wrong!" "You are doing it wrong!!" — is the po-faced spoken word part in the... what do you even call that, the bridge? The structure of this thing is like: ABCDEF. Nothing is repeated. There is so much song in this two-and-a-half-minute song.

#365songs (97 / 365)

Islands had a lot of good songs on their first album Return to the Sea but this first track was both a gutsy way to start the album and one of the best. It's also an elegy of sorts for singer Nick Diamonds' previous band the Unicorns (well-beloved in their own right); though I didn't know anything about them when I first heard this album, a 9-minute track is a good way to pique my curiosity. It's the myth-making thing I love so much.

Compared to the Unicorns, "Swans" sounds clean and slickly produced, but by any other standard it's charmingly rough-edged. It's got a very classic long song build-to-a-guitar-solo arc to it, but the double-tracked vocals are scrappy and uneven, and it's got enough hooks start-to-finish that those 9 minutes fly by. And the drums and bass are great. And I only now, in 2026, read that it has Spencer Krug on piano? Seriously?

#365songs (96 / 365)

Probably the song that woke me up to the possibility of hip hop / indie-rock crossovers, featuring John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, with whom I was absolutely obsessed at the time. Aesop Rock has since become one of my favorites, and a rapper whose projects I'll check out more often than not, but this was absolutely my gateway drug and still one of my favorite songs of his.

Despite that I deeply appreciate Aes on his own considerable merits now, I admit I still think Darnielle steals the show here. Great melody, his voice has rarely sounded better, he's belting it out with the kind of paranoid misanthropy he does really well when he leans into it. What a cool feature. I wonder how many other Mountain Goats fans became Aesop Rock fans when they found out about this track.

There's an edited version on Bandcamp that omits the bonus track "Pigs," but that's part of it for me since I'm used to the album version, and I do think the bonus track is a lot of fun too.

#365songs (95 / 365)

Hard to put an Arcade Fire song up here after the allegations against the main lead singer Win Butler, but this one's sung by his apparently now-ex-wife Régine Chassagne and... well, I want to acknowledge all that stuff but not get bogged down by it too much, because this is still a really good song.

I'm fond of Arcade Fire's breakout album Funeral but The Suburbs is probably the one that sticks with me more: I did, in fact, grow up in the suburbs, and so the deep ambivalence about them in this album does just hit different than the very young-feeling Funeral. "Sprawl II," one of a few two-part songs, is by far the most ecstatic five minutes of music on The Suburbs and feels like a well-earned culmination of its themes: sprawl and alienation, authority and escape, darkness and light. Despite the exuberant synths, there's a plaintiveness to Chassagne's voice that really brings everything home... plus, I always love it when a band really nails a climactic penultimate track as long as they don't totally whiff it on the last one. The Suburbs's last track is really just a brief reprise of the title track, more a coda than a song. It works as a gentle comedown that leaves "Sprawl II" the spotlight it deserves.

#365songs (94 / 365)

Heard many times as a kid, rediscovered as an adult. So is a classic for a reason, but despite what you may have heard, "Big Time" is the best song on it. Don't @ me!!! It's obviously in the same lane as "Sledgehammer," but the melody's better and more daring (I tried to do this song at karaoke once. Big mistake!), the lyrics funnier, and most importantly it's almost entirely not about Peter Gabriel's dick.

Hey did you know Peter Gabriel is on Bandcamp?

#365songs (93 / 365)

Despite that music is a pretty personal thing, I'm aware most of my #365songs writeups have focused on the music qua music rather than what it's meant to me personally: some of this is because I'm genuinely interested in music for its own sake and so I'm often drawn to music for how it's constructed, but some of it's just a tendency to hold my cards close to my chest in public.

In August 2024 one of my cats suddenly started exhibiting distressing litterbox behavior. Urinary tract issues have been common among every male cat I've ever had, and they can be deadly in a shockingly short period of time; one incident with a previous cat, back when we still had a car, resulted in an overnight ER stay and surgery.

We brought him to the feline ER, on foot in the August heat, with him crying in distress directly into my ear from a pet backpack for the entire half-hour walk. Ultimately we caught it in time and he didn't need surgery, but we had to change his diet and closely monitor him for an indeterminate amount of time afterwards. Constantly being on high alert took a toll on my mental health and I got intensely anxious, and my partner gently pushed me to consider looking for some countermeasures.

One of those countermeasures was listening to Shearwater's cover of "This Year" and shaking my limbs until I was able to cry out some of the accumulated tension and stress of the time. It's an interesting cover, coming between the two most immediate and glossily-produced albums of Shearwater's career to date, Animal Joy and Jet Plane and Oxbow, and it definitely sounds like them. Everything about it is more polished and less scrappy than the iconic Mountain Goats original, but that original was so burned into my brain in 2024 that this new version still helped me really feel that chorus again when I most needed it.

#365songs (92 / 365)

Another "respect more than enjoy" band for me, Frog Eyes nonetheless has some songs that I think are absolutely transcendent, "Bushels" foremost among them. Carey Mercer's voice has always been the most out-there part of Frog Eyes, and this song is a fine showcase for everything he could do with it (maybe not quite so much anymore) — like many of my #365songs I have no idea what he's singing about but he sings like he fucking means it. The repeated six-note descending piano line really lends the deranged storytelling some grandeur, and then there are a series of moments that feel like a straightforward payoff for all the wordiness of the first half.

The first ones let the instrumentation fall back for some more straightforward lines from Mercer: London, you're cold, but the wheat's got to last. When am I ever going to feel the sting of your sun? I was a singer and I sang in your home. After all the tumult and opaque verbosity about commerce and pulling the flies off of their wings and motorcades, those simpler lines fucking hit! And when the song picks back up into a yelpy, carnivalesque outro, I'm like: You know what? Go off, Carey, you earned it.

#365songs (91 / 365)

NOTE: I do not recognize "April Fool's Day" and this entry is not a joke.

I was a late arrival to Fiona Apple fandom — I heard "Criminal," of course, and probably "Paper Bag," and liked them but not enough to pique my curiosity further — but I fell hard for The Idler Wheel..., my #1 album of 2012. There are no skips on this album, but while its opener "Every Single Night" is pleasant and off-kilter enough to be intriguing, it was track 2, "Daredevil," where I started to realize it's really something special. It's all sparse but not bare-bones: "Daredevil" is just pattering percussion, barroom piano, a splash of acoustic guitar and Apple's inimitable voice, double-tracked in the chorus. But every one of those pieces nestles perfectly into the rocky soundscape, and they all fade into backdrop when Fiona Apple pushes her voice to its limit in the absolutely thrilling bridge. And the thing is that pretty much every song on the album is this good.