“You must own so many records,” a new friend of mine remarked the other day as we were having a discussion about whether she should buy a turntable. (Shouldn’t everyone?) It was a logical assumption on her part, for even though we’ve only known each other a relatively short time, she’s already learned what those near and dear to me have known forever: Music is my thing. My passion. The flame was lit when I fell head over heels for rock ‘n’ roll at the tender age of 13 and in the decades since I’ve remained a voracious consumer of recorded music in all its forms. I feel like I’ve bought enough LPs, singles, cassettes, CDs, and yes, 8-tracks in my time to fill the Hollywood Bowl twice over. So you’d think by now, at the gruff-and-grizzled age of [REDACTED], I’d have a collection worthy of that Guinness book of other records. Yet it pains me to admit that the quantity of albums currently on display in our guest room/media den, where the hubby and I keep the stereo and other man-cave essentials, is a tiny fraction of what it should be, given all that I’ve spent on physical music over the years. What the devil happened? Aye, ‘tis an epic saga of voyages to new lands, fickle fortunes, and reckless raids on the treasure followed inevitably by crashing waves of regret. So sit back, wee buccaneers, whiles I tells me tale of woe. (I don’t know why I’m suddenly channeling Geoffrey Rush from The Pirates of the Caribbean, but there ye go.)
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Disclaimer: The brief recollection you’re about to read is an assortment of dusty memory shards pieced together in an old pickled noggin. Events described may skew toward the true-ish rather than the dead-on accurate.
Joe Pernice is another one of those songwriters, like
We’ve had prettiest, saddest, and grooviest song selections on our journey from the ‘90s through the 2000s, but we haven’t had a cutest pick until now. Call and Response, an obscure West Coast fivesome—the group doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry—released its self-titled debut in 2001 and it’s so sugary sweet it should come with a dentist’s warning. A Pitchfork review at the time deemed the record “a brief flash of enjoyable fluff.” I like to think of it as Stereolab meets the Teletubbies. And 
The other day I was rebuking myself—if you’ll pardon the expression—for not posting a song from Annie Lennox’s “Medusa” when I was doing 
Terry Callier is one of those artists who deserved massive success but never quite achieved it. Perhaps because his sound, which draws from rock, soul, folk and jazz, is hard to pigeonhole, he couldn’t parlay his cult status into mega-stardom and after releasing several brilliant, under-heard albums in the ‘70s, he quit the music business in the ‘80s to become a computer programmer. Callier experienced a mini-resurgence in the 2000s, becoming a go-to guest singer for such electronic acts as Massive Attack, Grand Tourism, and the Swedish duo Koop, who featured his sublime vocals on the 2001 album, “Waltz for Koop.” I was lucky enough to see Callier perform a few years before his death in 2012 and he was wonderful. Here he is on Koop’s “In a Heartbeat,” and check out some of his ‘70s solo stuff. You won’t be sorry!
dugoutdiscs 