by DJ El Toro

I have notoriously flawed instincts when it comes to popular music. Before the release of Mariah Carey’s first album, I famously told a Sony executive his label was wasting time and money because the public would never go for such an obvious Whitney Houston knockoff.

Naturally, with such keen acumen, I became a professional music critic.

As Brian Eno observes in the documentary Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, many folks who write about music for a living are desperately trying to recapture the excitement of their teenage years. Which is, in part, a large part of why I remain fascinated by the enigmatic Walker. Most of the heroes in my pantheon acknowledge him as a huge influence. Eno, David Bowie, Gavin Friday, Marc Almond, and Jarvis Cocker are just a few of the talking heads who weigh in on Walker — his dramatic baritone, enigmatic lyrics, an approach to songwriting that owes more to European classical music than pop or rock — in this film (which has just been issued on DVD).

30th Century Man traces the trajectory of Walker’s career from teen idol to today. His origins as one-third of California ’60s pop trio the Walker Brothers (who became huge UK pop stars on the back of hits like “Make It Easy On Yourself” and “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)”), his sudden fall from grace with an album now regarded — even by a dolt like me — as a masterpiece (1969’s Scott 4), and the mystique that has risen up around him in the 40 years since. Mythology paints Walker as a shadowy recluse, but the man in Stephen Kijak’s film is candid and affable. Then he steps back into the control booth and talks his percussionist through punching a side of beef to create a rhythm track. Seriously.

Much of this film was shot during the making of Walker’s most recent release, The Drift. Which brings me back to my own shortcomings. When that disc was released, back in 2006, I gave it a middling review. A man spends a decade making a record, and I dismiss it with two stars. Heck, I’m still wading through Walker’s previous studio album, 1995’s Tilt. Watching 30th Century Man, I did the math and realized The Drift should start making sense to my ears right around my 50th birthday. Hopefully by then I’ll have finally accepted that my adolescence is in the rear view mirror — and Walker will be issuing another long-player that does my head in.

As a music reviewer, I have my shortcomings. But as an armchair film critic, I give Scott Walker: 30th Century Man very high marks (just look aside during those occasional musical passages where the graphics seem better suited to a TV advert for a yoga studio or some sort of new age tea beverage). I’d stake my professional reputation on that — but you should watch the DVD regardless.

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, will be going on hiatus while he is researching and writing a new book, but will resume in earnest later this year. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

I’ve been thinking about buying a new bicycle. Again. I buy a bicycle about once a decade. I’m good at buying them. I ask questions and comparison shop and take them out for a spin before slapping down my hard-earned cash. But riding? Not so much.

I grew up thinking the world was flat — not a lot of hills in Northern Virginia — so biking was an ideal way to get around as a teenager. But the real world has peaks and valleys. I get discouraged. Freshman year of college, I left my bike locked outside the dorm, untouched, for so long that I forgot my combination and had to find a bolt cutter to liberate it before my parents picked me up for summer break. My first Seattle bike sat in the basement so long I swear it became invisible; I finally gave it away to a friend.

What in God’s name has inspired me to revisit this folly? (Especially since the journey from KEXP to my home on Capitol Hill is pretty much all uphill — a gruesome prospect at any time, and even more so when my overnight shift ends at 6 AM.) Kentucky singer-songwriter Ben Sollee, who is currently on a mini-tour from his hometown of Lexington, KY, to the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, TN, this weekend. And he’s making the 330 mile journey by bike.

Now that might not sound remarkable to a seasoned cyclist or singer-songwriter. You sling your guitar over your shoulder and go, right? But here’s the catch: Sollee’s primary instrument is the cello. He is wending his way through Appalachia with the second-largest member of the stringed instrument family strapped to his extended-frame bike. Plus gear and luggage. And then he’s playing a show every day. And judging from the performance snippets online, the gigs have been swell.

He’s doing it all to raise awareness for Oxfam America, as well as make folks think a little more about sustainability and community. His whole adventure is being documented by his friends Katie and Marty Benson, and you can follow their journey on the blog Peddling Against Poverty. Even in the rain on Day #1, the scenes of the Kentucky countryside rolling by are pretty breathtaking. They really make me want to buy a new bike.

But definitely not a cello.

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

But there is a whole other subset of river songs (a tributary, if you will) that radiate joy and ecstasy: “Take Me To the River,” “Wade In the Water.” And you’ll find a slew them in the CD tucked in back of the new book Take Me To The Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890 - 1950. These vintage country and gospel sides are full of singing and shouting and sermonizing, the sound of the spirit moving through the Carter Family, the mysterious Washington Phillips, and 23 additional souls of righteousness.

Published by Dust-to-Digital, the musical archivists responsible for the Grammy-nominated Goodbye Babylon box set, Take Me To The Water showcases photographs from the collection of Jim Linderman. In the introduction, he writes of collecting these fragile artifacts with a passion that recalls roots music aficionado Joe Bussard and the documentary Desperate Man Blues. Yet that enthusiasm pales compared to the raw, unvarnished emotion that leaps out from these tattered and torn, sepia-toned images.

These are not tots being lightly drizzled with holy water from a font by some kindly parson, but rather congregations of full-grown adults — often attired in their Sunday best — washing their sins away in the depths of lakes, swimming holes and, yes, rivers. You want to talk about faith? About truly wanting salvation? In two different pictures, folks are getting dunked in bodies of water that are frozen over; the ice has been chopped through to make a baptismal pool.

As Luc Sante observes in his opening essay, “Whether you have ever actually experienced a baptism or not, where you are a believer or not, these pictures and the music that accompanies them transmit all the emotional information: The excitement and the serenity, the fellowship and the warmth, the winds and the water.” Amen, brother. Whatever your beliefs, you’d have to be made of ice yourself not to be moved by the spirit coursing through the images and music of Take Me To The Water.

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

by DJ El Toro

Last month, legendary producer and songwriter Phil Spector was convicted of second degree murder. And I’m finding it a bit difficult to listen to his records. I love those classic “Wall of Sound” oldies, Spector’s “little symphonies for the kids,” designed to sound huge even through the tiniest transistor radio speaker. Yet my Ronettes and Righteous Brothers sides sit untouched right now. Playing them seems distasteful; I felt the same way about anything affiliated with Ike Turner for years.

Where to turn for vintage pop on an epic scale, while this self-imposed embargo is in effect? Right now, when I’m hankering to hear tunes that sound and feel like more than just a bunch of ones and zeroes pinging back and forth in my ear buds, I rely on the vast repertoire of Jack Nitzsche.

Spector may get the lion’s share of the credit, but Nitzsche was one of the architects of the Wall of Sound, too. Starting with “He’s A Rebel” in the summer of 1962, he was responsible for the arrangements on most of Spector’s definitive singles: “Be My Baby,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “River Deep Mountain High.” But he worked with a ton of other artists, too, and was a gifted producer, songwriter, and conductor as well. He even scored a Top 40 hit under his own name, with a melodramatic 1963 instrumental (”The Lonely Surfer”) that sounds more like Ennio Morricone than the Beach Boys.

A couple years ago, the folks at Ace Records compiled a pair of stellar Nitzsche retrospectives, Hearing Is Believing: The Jack Nitzsche Story 1962 – 1979 and Hard Workin’ Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story Volume 2. Revisited them over the weekend, I was struck time and again by Nitzsche’s knack for inching big name artists outside of their comfort zone. He could take a vanilla act like Bobby Darin or Lesley Gore, even Doris Day, and forge a recording was just a little more dramatic, or that rocked a little harder, than what the public expected. And it was Nitzsche who helped Marianne Faithfull transition from a pop lightweight to a serious artist with his work on the original 1969 version of “Sister Morphine.”

Spector’s records inevitably sounded over the top, yet Nitzsche took a different tack. His pushed things right to the edge — then stopped. There’s an element of danger to the records he arranged and produced. A sense that one instrument out of place could make the whole venture horribly overblown. Or, worse still, one too few might reduce it to business as usual.

His resume reads just a bit cooler than Phil’s, too. Spector had the Beatles, Leonard Cohen and the Ramones, but Jack worked with the Rolling Stones, Tim Buckley, and the Germs. He enjoyed a long, successful career scoring films, too, including Performance and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Perhaps “Up Where We Belong,” which he co-write with Buffy Sainte-Marie, seems a little square today, but it won the Academy Award for Best Song in 1982. Not too shabby.

Not that Nitzsche, who died in 2000, was some kind of angel. In the detailed liner notes of Hearing Is Believing, “Queen of the Beatniks” Judy Henske recounts the prodigious amount of booze and pills she and Nitzsche ingested while working together. “I’m surprised somebody didn’t just commit us both to an asylum at the time,” she writes.

That whiff of danger I cherish on his records seems to have spilled over into his personal life, too. In 1979, Nitzsche was put on three years probation for breaking and entering. And then there’s this quote from his obituary in the New York Times: “In the late 1990’s, The Los Angeles Times reported, his arrest was shown on the television series Cops after he waved a gun at someone who had stolen his hat.”

Like I said: Right to the edge. But not over it. Not quite.

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

Ross Halfin

When Steve Earle was in the KEXP studio yesterday, playing songs and talking about the life of Townes Van Zandt, he also praised another great songwriter: Loudon Wainwright III. Mere coincidence? Probably not. Wainwright is performing in Seattle tomorrow night (at the Moore Theatre), and I’d played one of his recordings on-air while Earle was in the building. But Wainwright deserves all the attention he can get. And lately he’s been getting a fair share again.

Before he launched his career as a folk singer and songwriter in the late ’60s, Wainwright studied drama. Throughout his career, he’s continued acting; my first exposure to him came not via music, but his recurring role on M*A*S*H. More recently, he’s gotten plum roles from Judd Apatow, with featured parts in Undeclared, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Knocked Up. Working with Joe Henry, he also performed the soundtrack to the latter, exposing a younger audience to his music.

“I’m exposed to them… like a dirty old man,” says Wainwright with a chuckle. But he has noticed a drop in the median age of his concert crowds. “I will often sell my CDs after the show, and so there’s a line of people. And I’m sometimes shocked and delighted that they are younger folks.” Invariably, they mention his film and TV ventures. “The Judd Apatow connection has definitely given my career a nice little bump,” he adds.

Having three children in show business helps, too. Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and Lucy Wainwright Roche, have helped keep the family name in the public eye. Whatever the reason, Loudon is grateful for receptive listeners. “I’m delighted to have anybody there, and happy to be adored by anyone.”

Neophytes curious to learn more about Wainwright’s craft as a songwriter could do worse than to start with last year’s Recovery. At the prompting of Henry, the singer recorded updated versions of thirteen older songs. Plucked from his first four albums, originally issued between 1970 and 1973, these readings of autobiographical originals like “Be Careful There’s A Baby In The House” and “Saw Your Name in the Paper” are enhanced by new, full-band arrangements — and the benefit of several decades worth of experience.

“It was never a terrifying prospect, but it was often interesting,” says Wainwright, apropos of revisiting his back catalog. “In the passage of thirty five years, the songs have a different resonance.” The infamous “Motel Blues,” for instance, took on a whole new character. “When you’re singing ‘Come up to my motel room and save my life,’ when you’re 62, it’s different than when you’re singing it when you’re 25. It has a different resonance. More desperation, perhaps.”

“It was a bit like covering another writer… who happens to be me,” he adds. “But I like him. I think he’s a good writer. And I like the way the songs are written. I’d forgotten about a lot of them. ‘The Movies Are Mother To Me,’ or ‘Read It In the Paper,’ or ‘The Drinking Song,’ I haven’t sung those songs in decades until we covered them.”

In the process of making Recovery, Wainwright was startled by how much certain themes in his work hadn’t changed, even with the passage of time. “My concerns as a songwriter, some of them anyway, have stayed much the same,” he observes. “I was concerned about getting old even when I was young.” He rattles off lyrics from “New Paint” and “School Days,” where even in his 20’s, he was already reminiscing about youth, and dreading the onset of maturity. “I’m still writing about all that, here at the end, as I’m rounding third base. It’s interesting that I’ve always has this interest in mortality and getting older.”

For his next album, Wainwright is reaching even further back in the annals of time; he’s just finishing work a record of songs popularized by Charlie Poole, a legendary old-time country singer and banjo player who died in 1931. Who knows, maybe this time he’ll usher folks through the opposite end of the time machine. If you wind up alongside a bunch of spry octogenarians while waiting for tickets to that inevitable Judd Apatow movie marathan, thank Loudon Wainwright III.

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

Michael Yampolsky

Like all of us, the recession has forced me to make choices about how I spend my discretionary income. New books? Ha! My library card sees a lot more action than my Visa or American Express. And yet, the other day, I saw something on a remainder table — marked down from $45 to $14 — that I simply could not resist.

Live at the Masque: Nightmare In Punk Alley (Gingko Press, 2007) is 300+ pages of photos documenting the Hollywood basement and rehearsal space that was ground zero for L.A. punk in the late ‘70s. Brendan Mullen, the proprietor of the Masque, has documented this territory before, in the 2001 oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, and Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs. But this time, he lets the pictures do (most of) the talking. And screaming. And laughing.

“L.A.’s first generation of punk rockers was comprised of smart, defiantly original, truly creative people,” notes journalist Kristine McKenna, who began her career covering the L.A. punk beat, in her introduction to this tome. That’s reflected in the array of energetic oddballs housed in its pages; as a kid who went to school dressed in glad rags procured at the church thrift store, it’s reassuring to see scene icons like Exene Cervenka and Alice Bag decked out in clothes not so different from the ones my small circle of friends wore. The vivid pictures of Geza X (see above) and the Screamers conjure up that weird fusion of science fiction and Expressionism that seemed a peculiar hallmark of the L.A. scene. And the early shots of the grubby, pre-fame Go-Go’s? Who knew Belinda could be so cool?

The book also includes reproductions of show flyers, a thorough index, and biographies of all the contributing photographers (including the seminal Jenny Lens). Nor is the music forgotten: On the final pages, Mullen offers up his “L.A. Punk Hot 100+ (1977-1980),” with a list that underscores how diverse — and hilarious — the scene could be. If you can find Live At The Masque at a price that won’t force you to skip lunch for a week, or they have a copy at your local library, definitely pick it up. These photos will remind you that limited means are no match for an unchecked imagination.

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

You know what I hate about mp3 files? The color: None.

Last week, I plucked a copy of Josie Cotton’s 1982 single “He Could Be The One” out of a bargain bin for pennies. And that little 45 reminded me once more that, much as I appreciate the convenience of digital music, vinyl records will always be the #1 format in my heart.

Look at that picture sleeve! The image alone provides a ton of information. The hairdo lets the potential listener know that this was a lady who’d seen an Elizabeth Taylor film or two in her day — and, quite possibly, skipped class to watch them on the Dialing-for-Dollars midday movie. And that car. You don’t need to be a vintage automobile buff to deduce that Cotton’s retro style doesn’t end when the needle hits the groove.

And sure enough, it didn’t. Josie Cotton’s debut album, Convertible Music, from which “He Could Be The One” was plucked, brimmed over with ’60s girl group and ’70s bubblegum ebullience. Like the pre-major label Bangles, early Blondie, and Tracey Ullman’s You Broke My Heart in 17 Places, Josie Cotton delivered music that was both contemporary and nostalgic. She was definitely au courant, with a well-timed spot in Valley Girl that cemented her place in pop culture history. Yet it also seemed likely her car radio was tuned to the oldies station just as soon as KROQ. Heck, it was only a couple years after the fact that I figured out that two of her catchiest tunes, “Tell Him” and “Jimmy Loves Maryanne,” were covers (of The Exciters and Looking Glass, respectively).

And then you slide the 45 out of the sleeve… and the vinyl is gorgeous, creamy pink. The color of strawberry milkshakes, satin pillows, and the upholstery at better beauty parlors everywhere. As my colleagues at Magnet have documented thoroughly, here and here, Cotton’s career — which later crossed paths with Elliott Smith — wasn’t quite as rosy as this single. But when “He Could Be The One” hits my turntable, and the chewing gum colored wax begins to spin, I can feel the years falling way, from 2009 to 1982 to… well, whenever that convertible rolled off the assembly line. Naïve? Probably. And a hell of a lot more romantic than a bunch of zeroes and ones pinging through my earbuds.

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

Tuesday, April 7
“Delving into research for my Pop Conference presentation on Urszula Dudziak and the Papaya Dance. I’m not mad for the Papaya Dance, I’m mad at it. It should’ve made Urszula famous, at least for 15 minutes. Instead, all the attention went to the TV game show host who invented the dance, and all the people who made YouTube videos. You’re looking at the wrong target, world! Look at Urszula! And her five octave range and crazy electronics and wordless singing. She’s been hiding in plain sight for years. Why won’t you notice her? Sting noticed her, for God’s sake!”

Wednesday, April 8
“M_ is watching the documentary Lagerfeld Confidential. The theme music over the opening credits was “Pure” by the Lightning Seeds, which seems awfully sweet for a film about Lagerfeld. Future Bible Heroes’ “I’m A Vampire” would’ve been a better choice. Then again, I’m still reeling from Viktor & Rolf using what I swear was a cover of Kate Bush’s “The Red Shoes” as runway music, too. I guess they can’t all fall back on Bowie’s “Fashion,” right?

(later) By the end of the movie, I liked Lagerfeld better than I anticipated. Maybe I shouldn’t let Margaret Cho influence my opinions quite so much.”

Thursday, April 9
“The McGarrigle sisters first album is heartbreakingly gorgeous. I wish I’d known about it in high school. I can totally picture my friends and me, enthralled by these songs, and those trembling yet sure voices, the same way we responded to the Roches and Kate Bush. Where were the McGarrigles in the mid-’80s? What channel might they have reached me through? It really does my head in, how much talent runs in the Wainwright dynasty (and through all its extended, um, branches — like the Thompson clan, Antony, etc.).”

Friday, April 10
Listening to II, the new Lindstrom & Prins Thomas album. I played it yesterday and just thought it was a good album to nap to — which I did. Not that that’s a bad thing, being a nap soundtrack. It joins the ranks alongside the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Psychocandy and Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. But this morning, I want to dig into it deeper. This record’s not as immediately hooky as its predecessor, but the textures and timbres are blowing my mind — elements of it remind me of the arrangements on Robert Wyatt’s albums, and early Roxy Music, albeit more spaced-out. I wonder if they’ve been listening to a lot of old Eno? And here comes a Tangerine Dream bit…”

Saturday, April 11
“M_ and I listened to the most recent Martha Wainwright yesterday. I’d forgotten how much I cotton to the way MW sings. She sounds unhinged. She’s got that weird woman-child quality, a la Victoria Williams or the lass from Life Without Buildings. And she’s fearless about prostituting her emotions, like she deliberately wants to come off as a crazy lady. (Think a more musical version of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.) An interesting contrast with Rufus, who is just as mannered, yet in a wildly different fashion, all swooping and operatic and theatrical. He’s more West Side Story, while she’s Ubu Roi, something like that.”

Sunday, April 12
“Still not sure how to describe the Other Girls record, without referencing the Shins and Band of Horses. Do I have to form a succinct critical opinion? Isn’t it enough to just enjoy the album? Especially “White Rabbit,” which as a hook almost identical to the riff in A Flock of Seagulls’ “The More You Live The More You Love,” and the closer, “Last Day,” a piano ballad from the bottom of the ocean. The vocals have that “recorded in a tunnel” quality I get tired of, but regardless, I want to spend more time with this one.”

Monday, April 13
“The big surprise of last night’s [Junior Boys] show was Max Tundra. I wasn’t sure what his live set would look like. Then again, I couldn’t imagine what a Final Fantasy live gig would look like before I saw one either, and Owen [Pallett aka Final Fantasy] — who is a big Max Tundra booster — pulls it off. Since the show was all-ages, T_ and I watched Max’s first two songs from the balcony which we had beers. “Watched” isn’t the right word. T_ is tall enough he could see over the folks clustered around the rail, but I only caught the occasional glimpse of a dude behind a bank of keyboards. That got me thinking re/ that Laurie Anderson interview, on the Home of the Brave radio promo LP, where she talks about how important it was for her as a performer/entertainer to get out from behind the keyboard.

But when we went down on the showroom floor, my whole opinion changed. Tundra was running around like a character out of a silent slapstick comedy. He played melodica and kalimba, which meant I could be a showoff/geek and flex my vocabulary for T_ (”what’s a seven letter word for African thumb piano?”). There was a completely over-the-top, full-on early ’90s rave track, featuring toy xylophone, and he closed with “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music (which T_ caught before my colleagues from The Stranger.) Never underestimate the pervasive cultural influence of Rodgers & Hammerstein.”

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog. You can now follow DJ El Toro on Twitter!

Great Mimes of Rock: Ultravox's 'Passing Strangers'

by DJ El Toro

Tuesday, March 31:
“I didn’t get to digest as much music as I’d have liked yesterday. (Plus I have a wad of Britney Spears’ “If U Seek Amy” rotting in my colon, refusing to pass — just the chorus, repeating ad nauseam, making its tenacity known with such aggression that I find myself wishing Britney and her producers bodily harm.) E_ sent me a new compilation on Honest Jon’s, Open Strings: 1920’s Middle Eastern Records/New Responses. The latter disc of the 2-CD set includes performances by Six Organs of Admittance and Sir Richard Bishop, “in the style of” the archival material on CD1. Why Middle Eastern music? I’m just forever trying to fertilize* my ears and brain with new sounds, to keep my neurons firing, and hopefully inspired some unusual connections.”

* “Funny word choice, because so much of what makes it into my ear holes if I don’t strive for variety in my musical diet is ‘fertilizer,’ i.e. over-processed shit.”

Wednesday, April 1
“I’ve been listening to the new G-Spots collection of library music from Trunk Records pretty much non-stop for the last 2 days. I’m fascinated by the idea of original music composed to complement a variety of potential scenarios, rather than communicate clear-cut sentiments or emotions. These pieces have no agenda. They’re so much easier to appreciate on a purely sonic level — this is weird, this is pleasing — rather than making judgment calls about how successful it is at tapping into my feelings. And it fires my imagination. There is one piece for drum machine and vibrato-heavy guitar (”Moon Nightclub”) that I swear sounds like a Durutti Column demo.

Thursday, April 2
“I am grateful to John Wesley Harding for so many thing in life, but right now I’m especially thankful because a bit from one of his new songs, “A Very Sorry Saint,” has wedged itself on to the receptor where Britney had been gyrating non-stop for days, and driven the little tart out! Bye! I’m not especially thrilled to have the couplet ‘This isn’t even blood/It’s strawberry jam’ circling around in there over and over, but it is a far better tenant than the previous occupant, to be sure.”

Friday, April 3
“Yesterday, during my workout, [my trainer] remarked that he’d been listening to ‘The Morning Show’ on KEXP on the way to work, and heard three or four songs he didn’t recognize and really enjoyed. That got him thinking about the library of music the KEXP deejays have at their disposal, and how expansive our knowledge has to be to draw on that resource effectively. He then expressed a vague wish to have that kind of extensive knowledge at his disposal.

Yet [my trainer] was a football quarterback, and is about to start coaching again soon. And in that role, he has to memorize thousands (I think it’s thousands — I’m the furthest possible thing from an expert on football) of plays, specific to whatever team he’s on. And then he has to take into account a million variables as he executes any single play in real time, during a game. His goal is to combine that knowledge with the ability to make judgments and react quickly, so as to rack up the maximum number of touchdowns and field goals, for an overall winning score. Just like a KEXP DJ is trying to connect individual songs into compelling sets, which ultimately adds up to — hopefully — a satisfying show.

Definitely the first time I’ve ever been able to draw a parallel between my work/art, and football. Damn you, Jonah Lehrer!”

Saturday, April 4
“I just don’t dig Tuvan throat singing as much as I’d like to. I was listening to the Dust-to-Digital Melodii Tuva anthology — which might be too robust for first thing on a Saturday morning — and… well… it kind of annoyed me. There’s a congested quality to throat singing that I find off-putting. (Because of my allergies? My Western classical vocal training?) I don’t think I want to listen to this again, not like I do the D2D Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics disc.

Yet part of my brain, the pack rat part, envisions some weird scenario where I’ll need a CD of Tuvan throat singing RIGHT NOW! I admire that part of my brain for its imagination. But it has zero idea how cluttered this damn house gets.”

Sunday, April 5
“I had an idea yesterday for a story on ‘Great Mimes of Rock.’ That would’ve been a swell April Fool’s pitch — even though the idea is sincere. I could look at the influence of Lindsay Kemp on David Bowie and Kate Bush, and all the new wave/New Romantic mimes: Shock, Tik & Tok, that guy who performed with Howard Jones (Jed Hoile). There were mimes in the videos for Landscape’s “Einstein A Go Go” and Ultravox’s “Passing Strangers.” Shields and Yarnell did a lot of stiff and deliberate robotic movements, which is very Kraftwerk. And, of course, the requisite joke about the very real Marcel Marceau album — which is basically just the John Cage piece 4′33″.”

Monday, April 6
“I just had a scathingly brilliant idea: I want to start an intensively heavy band, a la Torche or Mastodon, and call it… Koala.”

DJ El Toro is the host of the overnight show In Between Sleep & Reason, Wednesday mornings from 1 AM to 6 AM on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle and kexp.org. His column, Weird At My School, appears every Monday on the KEXP Blog.