Wake Up Song: The Stone Roses - She Bangs the Drums

It's just about impossible to not feel energized when this song comes on. One of the all-time great kiss-off lines ever: "kiss me where the sun don't shine. The past was yours but the future's mine." was he talking to John Major? Phil Collins? Pop music of the time? Either way, this helped kicked the door in for Britpop to explode. Must have been an exciting time.

Cover Songs Worth Examining: Stevie Ray Vaughan - Voodoo Chile

God, there are times I really miss Stevie Ray. I hesitate to call this a "cover," since it's a nearly note-for-note rendition, but man, that dude could play.

Stereophonics - Check My Eyelids for Holes

Must wash off the 80s metal. No soap to cleanse the shame.

Blue Murder - Jelly Roll

Mentioning John Sykes below made me remember his spinoff Blue Murder. Apparently they put out several albums, but the only one I remember was this one. The first two thirds of this song almost make up for the pudding ending.

This is an impossibly awful video, too.

Whitesnake - Slow An' Easy

You know, before they became a punchline, and while John Sykes was a major part of the band's songwriting, Whitesnake actually put out some really cool tunes.

Wake Up Song: Duran Duran - A View To A Kill

Some days I hate my brain more than others.

Eels - Mr. E's Beautiful Blues

Audio only. AKA "Goddamn right it's a beautiful day."

Wake Up Song: The Format - First Single

Homemade video of a folky-acousticy song that came out a few years ago. I always liked the hook to this one.

Wake Up song: Beethoven - 7th Symphony, Second Movement

Absolutely, positively, indisputably the most powerful piece of music ever written. Performances of this in the 1800s were banned due to its power and majesty.

Big Audio Dynamite - Rush

Embedding the video is prohibited, but click on it to view it on youtube.

Blame Hilary for this one, she brought it up during the Cowboy Junkies show tonight.

Wake Up Song: REM - Don't Go Back to Rockville

Homemade video, with bonus Nightingale Song at the end.

Soundgarden - Rusty Cage

A lot of grunge music is starting to sound dated these days, but these guys and their music never age. Sometimes it's easy to forget what a tremendous band Soundgarden was.

Wake Up Song: Mika - Grace Kelly

Bouncy fun from a serious Freddie Mercury wannabe.

Wake Up Song: The Fixx - Saved by Zero

Blame Roach for this one, we were discussing the awful Toyota ads from this fall and I idly wondered if this Fixx song by the same title was its inspiration. It's not their fault that this turned into the most irritating ad campaign of the football season!

Mike Doughty - 27 Jennifers

This is a new version of a song he did in 2005, and I like it a lot. One of my favorite lyrics ever is "16 Jens, 10 Jennys, and then there was her." This version's quite different from the original, and its video was shot with 27 girls actually named Jennifer. Pretty cool. Is it better than the original? Well, I just happen to have that one here as well in a homemade thing a fan made...

Envelopes - Sister In Love

This is one of those songs I like more and more every new time I hear it. Underground indie stuff makes me smile these days. DIY is not dead yet.

Foo Fighters - My Poor Brain

Audio only. This one hit me when I complained about my brain in the last post.

Dirty Pretty Things - You ... Love It

THREE CHORDS AND A CLOUD OF DUST.

I thought of this song when I dropped a pizza tray and it sounded just like the clatter at the beginning of this song. Somebody save me from my brain!

Fine Examples of Instrumental Rock

An underrated genre, this. I think every guitar wizard I grew up with dreamed of being Joe Satriani. Me, I wanted to be Stu Hamm. Hope you like these.

Joe Satriani - Friends

Stu Hamm - Linus and Lucy

Eric Johnson - Cliffs of Dover

Steve Vai - Bad Horsie

Mike Doughty - Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well

I don't know if I could find for you any single song that's come out in the last four years that I like more than this one.

Stereophonics - Too Many Sandwiches

Thanks to Tom making me set my iPod on shuffle, I got this one stuck deep in my head early this morning. This is the kind of song that takes me 20 minutes to listen to because I'm constantly backing up to re-listen to bits and hooks and chord progressions.

Wake Up Song: On - Soluble Words

Homemade video, audio only. Ken Andrews, of Failure and Year of the Rabbit, had a side project called On in his early career that spawned some pretty cool minor-chord electronic music. This was always my favorite song from the first album, and thankfully someone has made a home video with it as the background music.

Dead Milkmen - RC's Mom

If the Dead Milkmen themselves hired consultants and paid $1 million in production costs, they couldn't have dreamed up a better video for this song.

Apologies

Note to self: be careful when posting Yahoo videos. The Pretenders video from a couple of days ago was causing the script error you were seeing if you tried to close this site. Pretty sure the problem is fixed now, but I had to kill off a couple of posts to get the problem fixed. We should be all good now.

Wake Up Song: People in Planes - Pretty Buildings

Another good one by a tremendous band. The more I dig into their collection, the more I like these guys.