We'll edit for the moment that I think Jimmy Buffett's real missed business opportunity could have been something called Jimmy's Buffet (just trays, warmers, cheeseburgers, presumably. Margarita machines). Admittedly, some of these episodes are excuses for us to take a ball peen hammer to the material, and there's some of that exercise here, but th…

Let's just get something incredibly obvious out of the way up top about this episode - there was a hiatus in between the time Ryan selected this LP and the time we were actually able to convene and record it, and by contrast, Fontaines DC are actually hyper prolific, meaning, by the time we laid this bad boy down, they had turned out an additional …

So, to be obvious about it, we talk about Canada here, like a LOT. Entirely too much. The Guess Who will do that to you. All of the usual and a few unusual bits are trotted out. We are aware, and we are fond of Canadians. But the deep dive in this case is kind of unavoidable. Apologies to all the Gords north of the border. Maple! For all my friends…

Marc Bolan went out like a Roman candle or a speed bump or in some such way an incandescent rock star dies at twenty-nine, and left in his wake a glitterbomb of glam stardust and swagger a mile wide and a few albums deep. It's hard to overstate his impact: T Rex enjoyed a run from 1970-73 where they charted like the Fab Four. Eleven singles in the …

I'm not sure what that has to do with the band 10 cc exactly, what with their high highs and low lows, the same band capable of trotting out a perfect all time classic like 'I'm Not In Love' along side some sort of song about Minestrone (which somehow actually charted). 'I'm Not In Love' alone could have made for a solid hour of chatter, what with …

Let's say you have a band. It's mostly you, though you bring in a rotating cast of characters to help you fill it out. You don't love touring, but do love snapping together pop punk ditties with a surgical top-down-in-the-summertime sonic aesthetic. You tend to pair these with dada-esque videos, and somehow it makes sense. Though it's your act, you…

A quick search online provides many examples of the extreme torture, pain, and suffering inflicted by the heavy metal device known as the Iron Maiden. It's legendary status puts fear into the eyes of even the strongest of humans and caused the slow, excruciating death of thousands. You will also find pictures of a large 19th century iron coffin dev…

At this point it feels almost antithetical to what we're worrying about in 2022 to talk about the pandemic, like we’ve come to regard it as some sort of distant, fuzzy memory. The scourge wasn't that long ago, and if you judge by my last trip to the supermarket, some folks are still sweating the outcome. A few months back Ryan and Mark and I put to…

It is tempting with Marvin Gaye to start with the last chapter. To skip ahead to the tragic end, dog ear the page, and work backwards. But that robs us of a certain sense of who he was at his epiphany, a competitive and deeply original talent who shone in the spotlight, bucked the trends that made Motown buckets of cash, and crafted what Ryan terme…

Given time, pressure, and the varied perspective that arrives with age, we can be forgiven for re-imagining the opinions we formed in our halcyon days. But as long as music bears the burden of snapping us back to the moment when we first made its acquaintance, it feels, if only for a brief time, like we haven't aged a day. Ryan's friend Daniel Rich…

Charlie Martin's pandemic experience has been much like the rest of ours, until it wasn't. Martin, one half of the having-an-indie-moment act Hovvdy, spent much of the first two COVID years huddled up with his Mrs, tethered to extended family from afar, until they deemed such time safe (or safe enough) to venture out. Imaginary People, Martin's sol…

So let's just start with the obvious: we don't know where the scarf is. We don't know if the legends about said scarf are real, nor do we have insight from various Gyllenhaals as to the status of the aforementioned scarf, and we don't know with certainty that Taylor Swift, when you break up with her, is contractually obligated or otherwise driven t…

It's pretty common in our collective rear view to gaze upon the halcyon days of early March 2020 and chuckle about our earnest belief that this COVID thing? We'll be past it in a couple of weeks. Of course now, in a story that's been beaten into a fine mist, we know the pandemic had other plans. It is with tongue planted firmly in cheek that I sugg…

By Mark Couvillion

It can be difficult to recall on occasion that Willie Nelson is more than just the proverbial Kevin Bacon of country music: true, he's recorded with everyone, true, he's become revered beyond his wildest dreams among a large swath of the American music loving public, and true, he once managed to wrangle his way out of trouble with the IRS, in part,…

It's a weird byproduct of doing this podcast that occasionally —and I realize that this idea is counterintuitive—finding a record square in the midst of all of our collective sweetspot may affect our banter when we lay down the show. It's rare when it happens, but it happens. We ran into an interesting set of circumstances with Barrie and their ini…

Mixtape shows are funny (beyond whatever shenanigans actually happen during the taping itself): you tend to think about the songs you're going to add to the show via the unique prism of that song's application to a given theme. For our Labor Day Mixtape Show, we decided (cleverly? You decide-) that we'd bring to bear songs specifically about Work, …

At some point during the week before we laid down this episode, one of us circulated a Honda scooter ad starring Miles Davis from the 1980s. If you've ever seen it, it's more or less...terrifying, which is a helluva thing to accuse of a Honda scooter commercial from the 1980s. Miles could be well and truly ominous when he wanted to be, even when (s…

I don't really know how to explain this other than the way that I'm about to, but the first time I heard In The Meantime, I had a pretty good idea that this track was pretty much the best that Spacehog had to offer. And I don't mean that it's because the song is a transcendent masterpiece, a triumph to eclipse all of their others. It sounded, for l…

So to be completely fair (and you'll notice this straightaway), there's an elephant in the room in this episode. We ran into a weird situation - Mark actually left his usual recording array at home accidentally, and we decided to soldier on rather than go home and get it. The result is a sort of weird "conference call" quality to the broadcast (a f…

It's hard to escape your own predispositions, and come to think of it, that's probably why we call them that. We each bring the tapestry of our unique experience into the ear we lend to a record, and it's as important as the record is itself in determining our ability to fall for it. Music can be a complicated bundle, but falling in love with an ac…

Long before he found himself wandering around emitting, out loud, sounds associated with brain cell loss, Ozzy Osbourne leapt into a solo career that, one might competitively say, is more responsible for his legacy than his work in Black Sabbath. Oh sure, some things remain constant - he still doesn't linger in the recording studio - and he’s surro…

By now the Jenny Lewis story has been told far and wide: child actress becomes indie darling, and is anyone really surprised when she assembles an allstar team to pull together her latest record (helmed by Beck)? Probably not. But behind the polished veneer of her most recent release, a few of us wonder if she's been comfortable too long. Too many …

Adam and the Ants, perhaps the birthplace of the of the Sexy Revolutionary War Guy costume, is our focus as we welcome back our full complement of goofballs back into the fray. There's lots to discuss - Malcolm McLaren, dream journals, Jerry Reed comes up for some reason, and a girl who is reviewing all of the LPs in her husband's "Stupid Record Co…

Pinning down the Roots' legacy isn't quite as simple as acknowledging their current role slow jamming the news on The Tonight Show: in fact, before they were invited into our daily national households, The Roots had to first shake folks up. Things Fall Apart became the ascendant touchstone for a band that always had chops but never felt dangerous -…

Generally speaking, most super groups aren’t that Super. They tend to trend toward a collective of famous parts that almost never eclipse the sum of the whole. As a result, most of these efforts come off looking like what they are, vanity projects that draft off of the disparate fog of fame. Not so with boygenius, the clever by way of earnest monik…

After a time there is a conventional wisdom that Bands become Brands, and all too often (we'd wager most of the time), if you think critically about what a band is called, it's typically a total disconnect against the name (no one really expects, for example, Arcade Fire to canvass precisely that). Which brings us to Superorganism, an originally fa…

All three members of Flasher grew up in the Washington, DC area, a metro recently referenced in one review as both 'beautiful' and a 'clattering hellscape' pretty much in the same paragraph. It's safe to say that it's a complicated place to come of age, and as of recently, they still hadn't actually quit their day jobs, all three of them continuing…

In this episode, we discuss one of several eponymous albums by the Velvet Underground. This is the one with them sitting on a dingy couch. There's some solid tunes on here and then, there's not. Definitely a departure from 1968's White Light/White Heat with John Cale being replaced by Doug Yule and several songs that could use further editing. The …

After a 2 month hiatus from the show, we decided to kick things back into gear with another mixtape. This go around, Kevin suggested we select songs that we love from motion picture or theatre soundtracks. It's always fun to share songs that we're familiar with and hold a special place in our catalog. ##In This Episode:## Survivor - Eye of the Tige…

Being the grandson of the progenitor of 20th Century Country doesn't give you a free pass to the music hall of fame–unless we're talking about the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum in Nashville, it probably gets you a couple of free tickets there–but one thing it apparently give you is an incredible genetic tendency toward extreme musical talent. W…

It's difficult to really compare Ariana Grande to other female pop and R&B starlets of recent history; part Mariah, part Brittney, part Christina, part Pete Davidson, but none of these at the same time. It's safe to say the past couple of years haven't been necessarily smooth sailing for the 25 year old. Still, she sings. And walks and breathes lik…

We had limited purview. Bandwagonesque was the record we knew, framed by the apparently unforgivable historical fact that any band with any album might edge Nirvana's Nevermind for an Album of the Year designation. That happened. Some still haven't gotten past it. Voting on things brings controversy. But this isn't that album. It's not even that ar…

If enigmatic, sprite-like-delivered vocals, with a layered, hypnotic musical bed is your bag, then we've we over here at Somebody Likes It have got you hooked up this week. We took a turn at Beach House's 2015 release Thank Your Lucky Stars, a kinda-easy shot for all of us over at podcast-central. Without giving away too much, I'll just add that na…

Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding may have written some of the best songs of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that most people have never heard. They teetered on commercial superstardom for years and potentially could have gotten there had it not been for Partridge's crippling stage fright that caused the band to stop touring in the early 80s. Heading to the …

"She's my...Vertical Smile!...oh, wait let's change that to Cherry Pie". Yeah, that's right. Because of stupid Corporate Overlords not respecting the free speech rights of Warrant, we will never get to hear the genius they originally had in mind when they set music to tape back in 1989. They originally wanted this album to be called "Vertical Smile…

Oh Matador Records, you of your indie darlings and slack ingenues and legends scrawled upon the walls of rancid LA apartments...Matador, you're at it again. Welcome to the Hype Machine. With the release of Snail Mail's Lush, we teeter headfirst into the prodigious mind of Lindsay Jordan, who writes dually about love as social triviality and distant…

This episode, while Producer Mark was away in Barcelona, we tackled Parliament's Watership Down Mothership Connection. Parliament - Mothership Connection A Few Minutes With [Journey - Separate Ways][2] A Current Affair [George Clinton - I'm Gon Make U Sick O'Me][3]By Shane Bartell, Kevin Newsum, Ryan Newsum, Mark Couvillion

It's difficult to gaze back upon Elliot Smith's career and not see all of it, even the highlights, through a lens tinted with melancholy. Such may be the way that it goes with turbulent exits from this mortal coil, but Smith always let rays of sunshine filter through his musical tumult, and so goes From A Basement On The Hill, one of those great al…

All too often the influences passed down from one musician to another are apparent only as distant melodies, those shadows of nostalgia that revive against the dying of some musical light. A distilled fraction of what made the original influence so notable. But what do we make of two mammoth personalities, massive musical evangelists in their day, …

Before Ozzy Osbourne was a stammering reality show punchline, he really underwhelmed Lester Bangs, and there's something to be said for that, historically speaking. Black Sabbath's eponymous initial record was recorded almost in one sitting on its way to defining a new genre, one minted, in part, by the fact that one of the members' metal shop acci…

It's been noted that perhaps Willis Alan Ramsey was Lyle Lovett...before Lyle Lovett was Lyle Lovett, mostly, come to think of it, by Lyle Lovett. That's what happens when your debut album mines the intricate details of the emotional barriers we often erect to stave off matters of the heart, and when you do so from stages where a young future troub…

As far as it goes with hand claps and cowbells, the majority of people are 2/3 of the way there. With Shane rejoining the podcast after a brief sabbatical, we felt it was a good time for another mixtape episode. But don't fear the reaper, we've collected 12 great tunes that showcase (or don't) the percussive beauty of skin on skin and wood on metal…

As monikers go, Starcrawler might be more a more literal band name than you think: this act, punctuated by art school kids and fronted by the daughter of one of LA's premier rock shutterbugs, slinks and shrieks through their initial release. It seems they were destined for stardom, well, since they were crawling. Yes, that's Beck's daughter on the …

Dear listeners-- If you've been waiting patiently, all your waking life, to immerse yourself in Aussie-bred hard rock featuring a grown-ass-man wearing a Catholic schoolboy uniform with an astonishing level of longevity, well, this is your week. We tackled AC/DC's 1979 record "Highway to Hell" this week, and I'll be damned if I didn't find this rec…

Working on this podcast as I have for a couple of years, I am often taken aback at albums that completely flew under my radar and yet still had enough buzz around them as to create a massive following. This parallel project for Grizzly Bear's Daniel Rossen is a fine example of a creative endeavor straight up my alley and yet I would not come to hea…

We all know the country music songwriter's recipe: start with a stretch of hardscrabble backstory, mix in some bad luck with the ladies, stir the bottom of the bottle around, maybe sprinkle in a stint in the pokey for good measure. Rinse. Repeat. Your typical country artist could sing the blues, but somehow this feels heavier. More wrought with sha…

Years after crafting a sound so unique that a fledgling movement spun up around it, Portishead walked away from notoriety and their Trip hop roots that influenced so many. Away from the dark corners and come hither beats, punctuated by Beth Gibbons' pained yarns of yearning and regret, away from all of it. Until they didn't. Borne to some degree ou…

It's a safe to say that if you have been pushing out music for the past 51 years, you've probably got a little something for everyone. It's also a pretty good chance that not everything in your catalog is going to elicit the same enthusiasm from all audiences. For those of you who appreciate early Prog Rock, you probably like Genesis 1972 release F…

It's hard not to wax a certain amount of nostalgic about the year you're born: it is, after all, what lights the candle of your days. That's not lost on Josh Rouse, who reminds us that much is revealed by the concept albums an artist releases. Rouse has long revealed a wandering attention span, but when it comes to the AM gold of the early 1970s, h…