Brandon's Buzz

Patti LaBelle & Kristine W — “Land of the Living”
(from Classic Moments) —

A pair of peerless, powerfully piped gay icons from entirely different decades combine their exquisitely titanic talents and do what they do so brilliantly well: using song to celebrate and affirm life.

Santana featuring Chris Daughtry — “Photograph”
(from Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time) —

I was never a Def Leppard fan back in the day — pop fans in the late ’80s were pretty uniformly divided into two categories: George Michael acolytes and hair-metalheads (and I bet you can tell from regularly reading this blog which camp I fell headlong into) — and even though I’ll grudgingly admit that, for what they were, these guys wrote some pretty decent tunes, I don’t think you’ll find five people who would willingly call their guilty pleasure smash “Photograph” one of the great guitar classics of all time. (Certainly not on a par with Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” or Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” at any rate!) Nonetheless, Daughtry gamely steps in for Leppard’s leader Joe Elliott and, lushly enveloped by Santana’s typically deft strumming, owns this one from the opening note.

Chris Wall — “Three Across” (from Tainted Angel) —

The Buzz is in a small-town Texas mood this morning, and with good reason: the hands-down finest series currently airing on prime-time television — NBC and DirecTV’s magnificent masterpiece Friday Night Lights, an intense, all-heart, profoundly powerful study in societal and emotional contrasts within a football-obsessed burg in the Lone Star state — returns for its fifth (and, sniff, final) season tomorrow night on DirecTV’s the 101 channel (ahead of an NBC run in spring 2011), and as though my iPod magically knew all of this was taking place, it sent up toward my ears yesterday in a shuffle this tune, a sweetly superb dissection of life in the sticks. The story writes itself: boy loves girl, girl loves boy’s best friend, Bo and Luke comfort boy from TV land, and boy finds it difficult to decide which side of the fork — left (leaving behind the comforts of home for the old, cold real world) or right (staying put while the old, cold real world slowly invades anyhow) — to traverse.

Stevie Nicks & Lindsay Buckingham — “Twisted”
(from Twister [Music from the Motion Picture]) —

Ostensibly, rock’s premier tortured couple are simply setting to music the story of the film’s storm-chasing, thrill-seeking duo. But just like parallel meteors ripping through the fabric of an eternal night sky, any time Nicks and Buckingham fuse their senses and sensibilities together — whether within the familiar confines of Fleetwood Mac, or out on the open range unencumbered — all the esoterica and extraneity falls away, and all that matters is the consuming fire of their own vicious chemistry.

If you missed any of last week’s tunes, below is a quick recap:

MONDAY: Chantal Kreviazuk — “M (Next Train to the Moon)”
(from Colour Moving and Still) —

TUESDAY: Matisyahu — “One Day” (from Light) —

WEDNESDAY: Sugarland — “Incredible Machine”
(from The Incredible Machine) —

THURSDAY: Scala & Kolacny Brothers — “Creep”
(from Creep [Single]) —

FRIDAY: Nanci Griffith (with Darius Rucker) —
“Love at the Five and Dime” (from The Dust Bowl Symphony) —

SATURDAY: T’Pau — “Heart and Soul”
(from Heart and Soul: The Best of T’Pau) —

SUNDAY: Danielle Brisebois — “Five Friends”
(from Portable Life) —

Danielle Brisebois — “Five Friends” (from Portable Life) —

Cute li’l Stephanie Bunker from All in the Family became a bad-ass rocker chick with a sensitive soul when she grew up, and — wouldn’t you know — America yawned. Brisebois has achieved substantial success as an in-demand songwriter and producer, having landed hits with the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Natasha Bedingfield, and Leona Lewis, but her own magnificent work — the best chunk of which had the fabulously ill-timed bad fortune to fall into that deep dearth between the end of Courtney Love’s reign at the top of the heap and the start of Pink’s — has woefully fallen by the wayside. With a dazzling, dynamic performance here, Miss Danielle reminds us that even though we can ultimately only count on ourselves in this world, the ability to take that hand that you’ve been counting with, interlock it with someone else’s, and hold on for dear life, is still pretty damned essential.

T’Pau — “Heart and Soul”
(from Heart and Soul: The Best of T’Pau) —

In an attempt to test out the much-fussed-over Shazam app — which purports to identify any song via the five or ten-second snippet to which you expose it — on my new iPhone, I cued up VH1 Classic’s horrifyingly ill-researched series One Hit Wonders on the DVR, and A — who has yapped ad nauseam about this application since he first learned of its existence, and who desperately needs technology such as this, because no fewer than ten times a day , he hears a song (on the car radio, at the gym, in the supermarket line!) that he fails yet desires to recognize — was duly impressed as Shazam correctly identified each tune it heard. And while we were having a nice laugh about the wonders of the modern world in which we happily and blessedly live, T’Pau — a British band named for a Star Trek character and fronted by the crazy-brilliant Carol Decker, whose ferocious pipes should have become feted the world over — came onto the television screen with their one and only American hit, and I knew at once that I had just heard my next song of the day candidate. An unstoppable smash during the unforgettably spectacular summer of 1987, this one — surely one of its decade’s twenty-five best tracks — still brings me to my feet whenever I hear it, and I still know how to blow out my voice singin’ it at full blaring blast. Absolutely a classic.

Nanci Griffith (with Darius Rucker) — “Love at the Five and Dime”
(from The Dust Bowl Symphony) —

Those who are now stunned that Hootie and the Blowfish’s lead singer Darius Rucker is now a celebrated country singer weren’t paying attention when they should have been: just before the turn of the century, Rucker teamed up with that elegantly homespun enchantress Nanci Griffith for a series of combustibly brilliant musical collaborations, most notably this lovely, strings-drenched reinvention of one of Griffith’s early classics, which was recorded with the famed London Symphony Orchestra. Sherry Ann always says that Dave Matthews and Emmylou Harris neither one should never leave home without the other, but if you ask me, it’s these two who should always and forever come as a packaged deal.

Scala & Kolacny Brothers — “Creep” (from Creep [Single]) —

By now you’ve no doubt heard this bizarro rendition of Radiohead’s classic 1993 breakthrough smash playing throughout the trailer and television spots for this fall’s must-see film The Social Network, and it has finally been made commercially available stateside (presumably after phenomenally high demand). Having previously given this divinely dreamy treatment to such classics as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Coldplay’s “Yellow,” and even the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself” (!), Scala — a globally renowned choir consisting of two hundred-plus girls and led by brothers Stijn and Steven Kolacny — dig below the surface here and unearth an unexpected (albeit slightly spooky), almost flippantly charming slant from beneath the icy veneer of Thom Yorke’s chilling words.

Sugarland — “Incredible Machine” (from The Incredible Machine) —

Not since Faith Hill took a big, bold, boxbusting swing with Cry eight years ago has a superstar country act had the guts and gall to gamble with their good fortunes (read: risk, uh, crapping in their nests, and please forgive the inelegant imagery!) in pursuit of creating something more than a hollow-hearted paint-by-numbers exercise. I’ll yield the road for people who are smarter than I to debate the wisdom of that decision, but I will say that stodgy ol’ Nashville could use a few more like Jen and Kris, who have the courage to stick to their artistic guns and, evidently, the clout to convince their record company to play along. We’ll see if the industry follows suit: while no fewer than four of these songs are flat-out fabulous, there’s only one track on the album — the sweet-turn-soaring “Little Miss,” which, if I had to guess, I would say will be the second single — that even sounds remotely like something that radio will co-sign no questions asked. Meanwhile, I listened twice straight through yesterday, and I’ll tell you that, if I were forced to pick just one tune to listen to a third time, it would be the tremendous title track, a lyrical deconstruction of the human heart which I flagrantly found myself whiling away most of Tuesday afternoon and evening humming. However this particular cookie crumbles, I fully expect the commercial fate of this record to be the most fascinating music-related story of early 2011.

Matisyahu — “One Day” (from Light) —

I’m either watching the wrong channels or else I’m just incredibly unlucky, because I swear every time I flip on the tube lately, I see a commercial for Waiting for Superman, the new documentary which apparently bemoans the current state of America’s educational system, and every one of those ads is scored by this (admittedly quite catchy) tune, the latest single from the world’s uncontested favorite Hasidic Jew reggae rock god. (And because I’m a total sucker for goofy gems like this, I’m generally singing along, giddily, no more than four words in.)

Chantal Kreviazuk — “M (Next Train to the Moon)”
(from Colour Moving and Still) —

A baby girl loses her life, and a family fractures from grief, and it’s hard to fathom anyone beyond the utterly captivating Kreviazuk who would have the temerity to reach down into such a scenario and at least try to yank from it a handful of hope.

If you missed any of last week’s tunes — and, looking at this list in full, this might just be the strongest seven-day stretch I’ve programmed since I started this experiment three months ago (if I do say so myself!) — below is a quick recap:

MONDAY: Chris Botti — “Nessun Dorma” (from Italia) —

TUESDAY: Ryan Adams — “New York, New York” (from Gold) —

WEDNESDAY: Ben’s Brother — “Time”
(from Beta Male Fairytales) —

THURSDAY: Emmylou Harris — “Goin’ Back to Harlan [live]”
(from Lilith Fair: A Celebration of Women in Music) —

FRIDAY: Santana featuring India.Arie & Yo-Yo Ma —
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps”
(from Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time) —

SATURDAY: The National — “Start a War” (from Boxer) —

SUNDAY: Patty Griffin — “Let Him Fly” (from Living With Ghosts) —