Episode 15 – “This Time I’m Watching from my Lover’s Bed”

Welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck, with your host, Mark Bradbourne.

Welcome to Episode 15 of Songs That Don’t Suck. My name is Mark and I am your host, executive producer, art director, and head janitor. Thanks for listening as always.

If there’s one thing you should know about me at this point, when it comes to music, you can describe me as a purist. I’ve talked about it in regards to country music, and rock music, and music in general, and apparently this goes for jazz too.

My nephew texted me last week and wanted to share a song with me after he had binge listened the podcast while he was on a college visit. He plays saxophone and he shared with me a track that I’m actually going to share with you a little bit later in the episode, because it’s cool. And it got me thinking, in the podcast, I don’t tend to review the jazz or classical new music playlists. And I do that by design, because based on the audience that I want to reach, it’s kind of a small snippet of kind of what I think you’ll enjoy.

Now I’m a fan of both genres, like if you went through my CD collection when CD collections were a thing, I had well over a thousand CDs and it ranged from, you know, Bach to Danzig to ZZ Top. I mean, basically I listened to just about anything. But when it comes to jazz, I have a very specific taste in what I want. And that includes, obviously, the things that I want included. So I tested this theory this week and I was checking out some of the new jazz playlists. And the fury that I started to feel as I was listening to these jazz entries and they have like looped rhythm sections, I can only, I can’t even describe it. It’s indescribable how kind of just furious I was. It is one sacred space that I assumed would not be infected by kind of the auto-generated kind of music.

But I think I have a theory as to why. Now granted, it is a minority of the things that I did here on the playlist. I heard some really cool jazz stuff that actually shared back with my nephew. And there was a lot of kind of easy listening soft vocal stuff, which I don’t classify as jazz in my soul, and some fusion stuff, which was cool. It’s not jazz, but it’s jazz adjacent, I suppose. I think the problem, and the crossover is happening with the kind of new lo-fi hip-hop stuff that I love in the right moments when I’m needing to focus, I love that lo-fi stuff. It’s great. But it’s bleeding into jazz a little bit. So I think for the time being, I won’t be having any jazz music on the episodes, sorry to my nephew who really, really loves jazz, but I may share some of those really cool finds on Twitter if I find something.

Now I did mention that my nephew did send me a song, and it fits beautifully into the new segment that I’m going to be doing on the podcast, which I’m lovingly calling Brain Bending Covers. So each week, I’m going to dig through the archive of stuff that I have saved and stuff that people sent me, because let me tell you, when I did this last episode, my inbox was all of a sudden flooded with entries of, oh, you’ve got to hear this cover song. And I was like, oh, apparently I’ve hit a nerve. So I’m really excited to check those out. I added them to my list. Last episode, I shared T-Pain covering Black Sabbath, and this week, I’ve got Corey Wong doing a medley of Stevie Wonder tunes that include Superstition, Isn’t She Lovely, and Sir Duke.

Now, if you’ve got a song you want me to check out, head over to the website, songsthatdon’tsuck. net, and send it in via the Song Artist submission form.

All right, let’s get into the new music for this week. If this is your first time listening, where have you been? In short, I listen to a ton of new songs on a weekly basis. Usually, I sample about 30 seconds per song. If they suck, I skip. If it’s good, I add it to a review playlist, and then over the weekend, I dig through and really kind of dive in and whittle it down to usually about five songs, and they show up here on the podcast.

This week, the first song comes from Simon Alexander, and it’s called Freeloaders. Simon is from the west coast of Sweden. He’s been making the rounds on the Scandinavian festival for a while. He made his global debut back in 2017. Freeloaders caught my ear this week for a couple of things. There’s a simplicity to it that I really appreciated. I expected the song to stay at the slower tempo with the intro, but when the drums kicked in, I really kind of perked up and started to pay attention a little more. There’s a certain sadness in the lyrics, but it doesn’t feel sad as you’re listening to it. Really cool song, and I’m definitely going to have to check out a little bit more of his music to get a real good feel for him. And he’s the first artist from Sweden to make it to the podcast. Really cool stuff. He hit a US playlist.

The second song this week comes from Nora Jones, and it’s called Killing Time. I mentioned Nora Jones a few episodes back when she did a collaboration with Logic. The song was called Paradise 2. If you haven’t heard that, go check that out. But in that moment when I was talking about it, I made mention that I thought it was really nice to hear her voice again, because quite frankly, I thought she had disappeared a little bit. And I was a big fan of her album Come Away With Me when it came out back in 2002. Now obviously I’d be lying if I said I’d been following her really closely because I thought she had disappeared. But this track caused me to kind of go back and look at her catalog. And holy cow, she’s been putting out a ton of music over the years, especially as of late. A bunch of collaborations, a Christmas album, it was really crazy as I was scrolling through it, there’s the amount of music she had put out. And again, I love her voice. It’s so distinctive, it’s moody, and it’s undeniable when you hear it. So I guess I need to go back and just kind of listen to some of her older music because I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic.

The third song this week comes from Noah Cyrus, and the track is called Everybody Need Somebody. Now, if you feel like her voice is familiar, she is the fifth child of Billy Ray Cyrus and sibling to Miley Cyrus. When I first saw the name, I was like, oh, that’s interesting. Her last name is Cyrus. And then I heard her voice and I was like, oh my, apparently I was unaware that Miley had siblings, much less four of them. But apparently, musically, I’ve been hiding under a rock because when I looked at her artist profile, she’s huge. She’s never come across my ears until this week, but she’s got 11 million listeners monthly. This song also features the vocals of Vance Joy, who had a huge hit a while back with a song called Riptide. And in listening to her catalog, I now understand why she hadn’t hit my radars because she does a lot of pop stuff and pop is not something I generally listen to. This song actually showed up on a folk playlist, which makes a lot of sense. So apparently she’s got some genre range. She can do some different things, flex some different muscles. And it was a really cool track. I really enjoyed it. She’s got a beautiful voice just like her sister, so there you go.

A little bit of housekeeping, as always, please like, follow, share, review the podcast on whatever platform you’re listening to. It’s much appreciated on Mondays. We’ve got the full version. It’s got the music in it. That is exclusively on Spotify. On Wednesdays, you get the Cliff Notes version and that is anywhere that you can hear a podcast. I mentioned the website earlier, you can send me recommendations of cover songs or artists that you think I need to check out. You can check out show transcripts and there’s links to basically everywhere you can hear the podcast that I am aware of. And you can also find links to social media. I am on Twitter. I am on Facebook. I am on Instagram. And occasionally I mess around with TikTok. All of your support is appreciated. And if you want to support the show, I do have some merch on the website. We’ve got some t-shirts and stickers.

The fourth song this week comes from Josiah and the Bonnevilles and it’s called I Am Appalachia. His fans are the Bonnevilles and there’s a Patreon group for the fans, for the Bonnevilles, to connect with Josiah on a deeper level. This is the first time that I’ve run across this from a music artist. I know there’s a couple of podcasts that have Patreons and some other creators have Patreons as well. And I thought that was really cool. It’s a really interesting way to kind of connect with your fan base and I wish him all the luck with that. He is very much a believer in the grassroots power of a fan base rather than relying on record labels and suits to make decisions about career direction. I can really, really respect that. Some of my favorite bands have been very grassroots pushed and I think that it leads to such a authentic experience with the music. Overall, this is just a beautiful heartfelt song. Love his voice, love his songwriting. So definitely take some time to check him out and if you dig it, get behind him and help him grow. I think it’s an amazing opportunity to get in on the ground level.

The fifth song, the featured song this week comes from Odie Leigh and the song is called Chutes and Ladders. Odie is from New Orleans, Louisiana and good Lord, this is good. When I’m hearing it, it reminds me of the first time that I heard Annie DeFranco. There is just something about her voice mixed with the acoustic guitar with the storytelling magic lyrics that just attached to my soul. I loved hearing this, I loved discovering her this week. There’s some really cool things happening in the orchestration, in the composition of the song. The cello, I always love a good cello in a piece of folk music. It adds such a beautiful voice to the low end and there’s a couple of really cool percussion pieces kind of sprinkled in before it gets into the end of it that are very, very tasty and as a percussionist, I really, really appreciated those. I started spending some quality time with the rest of her catalog and in the process, I discovered that she is coming to Cleveland on May 3rd and I will be there. Fantastic find this week. So happy to feature this and I hope you loved it as much as I do.

That is it for this episode as always. I want to thank you for listening. I appreciate it, I appreciate every message that I get, I appreciate every social media interaction that I have and I hope you know that it is a joy for me to do this each and every week. So until next time, have a great week.

Thanks for listening and until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.