Mitch Jameson

DANCING IN THE RUINS — 5.29.26. Pre-save: distrokid.com/hyperfollow/mi… #FolkPunk #CelticPunk #DebutSingle #NewMusic

John McGeoch's guitar on "A Kiss in the Dreamhouse" is one of the great underrecognized contributions in post-punk. Marr has openly cited him as a direct influence ("Spellbound" specifically), and "Regal Zone" is McGeoch in his peak harmonic-atmosphere mode. The Banshees' best era was the McGeoch era.

Siouxsie And The Banshees - Regal Zone

"Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" is one of the great comic performances in indie rock. The opening line is a joke ("I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour"), the Caligula line is comic exaggeration, the title itself is funnier than tragic. Marr's bright jangle plays the straight man while Morrissey delivers his complaints. The Smiths' best songs were always wry, not just sad.

The Smiths - Heaven Knows I_m Miserable Now

By 2004 "There Is a Light" didn't really belong to The Smiths anymore, it had become a communal anthem. Audiences sing every word, especially "to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die." Some songs are written by their authors and finished by their audiences. This is one of them.

Revisiting a beloved classic at the Move Festival in 2004, Morrissey delivered “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”, a song originally recorded with The Smiths and featured on The Queen Is Dead from 1986 that became one of his most enduring tracks.

Right on the proximate cause. The deeper point still holds- most bands have the lead vocalist sing everything. The Clash gave their bassist the lead vocal on his own song. The instrument swap was the practical follow-through of that prior structural choice, let the songwriter sing it, even if it means rearranging the band.

@itsmitchjameson @NewWaveAndPunk the reason they switched instruments was because Paul Simonon was unable to sing while playing bass

Joe Strummer of #TheClash by Masayoshi Sukita. *Guns of Brixton is the song being played.

MacGowan's voice already sounded worn when he was 25.... that's the feature, not the bug. The songs he wrote needed a singer whose voice had already lived through them. Most singers reach for ruin; MacGowan started there. That's why no one else can sing "A Pair of Brown Eyes" the way he could.

Shane MacGowan is an Irish musician and singer-songwriter, most famous as the lead singer and songwriter of the Celtic punk band The Pogues. He's known for his distinctive voice and his contributions to Irish folk and punk music.

Woody Guthrie's lyrics from the 1940s, sitting unpublished. Nora Guthrie hands them to Dropkick Murphys in 2005. The song becomes a Boston Celtic-punk anthem, then a Scorsese needle drop, then a Red Sox stadium chant. Folk to Celtic-punk to mainstream working-class anthem, that's an inheritance traveling exactly the route Woody would've wanted.

The story of the Celtic punk classic inspired by Woody Guthrie loudersound.com/music/tracks-s…

Almost every great band eventually faces the "what are we without our most famous member" question. American Psycho answered it by leaning harder into the horror identity Danzig built....track list as horror-movie syllabus (Phibes, Mars Attacks, Doomsday, From Hell They Came), Graves's operatic vocal instead of trying to imitate Danzig's growl. Different band, same canon. The album made being post-Danzig the actual subject.

29 years ago today American Psycho is the fourth studio album by the American punk rock band Misfits, release on this day in 1997. This is the first release without the band's founder and former leader Glenn Danzig #punkrock #horrorpunk #misfits #americanpsycho #punkrockhistory #otd

@spiderstacy The Pogues + Dubliners on "The Irish Rover" is one of the great intergenerational moments in modern Irish music, the keys handed in public. That you're placing this new lineup in that same lineage is the whole argument. Honored to have read it the way you intended.

This reply encapsulates perfectly the whole idea behind what we’re doing. Not unlike ourselves and the Dubliners back in the day

@JoshuaJens75167 @NewWaveAndPunk Right, Strummer and Simonon were AT the Notting Hill Carnival riots in '76. "White Riot" was their first single because of it. So "Guns of Brixton" wasn't prophecy from outside, it was extrapolation from a riot Simonon had already been in. The prediction was field research.

@itsmitchjameson @NewWaveAndPunk They were no strangers to riots

'Renegades' was RATM's final album before they broke up, and instead of going out with a new statement, they made a covers record that explicitly named their lineage. Bambaataa, Dylan, Springsteen, MC5, Minor Threat. Most bands make covers albums to cash in. RATM made theirs to say 'this is the tradition we come from, remember us with these.' Inheritance as final word.

Rage Against The Machine - Renegades Of Funk

@JoeStrummer "Don't call me Elvis" lands different coming from Strummer three years after the Clash broke up. A man playing a man refusing the label everyone already has for him. Jarmusch was casting the philosophy, not the look.

“Don’t call me Elvis!” ‘Mystery Train’, starring Joe Strummer, & directed by Jim Jarmusch was released on this day, May 13th, 1989. 📸 by Josh Cheuse

The Undertones writing about chocolate bars and teenage jealousy from Derry in '79 was its own kind of resistance. Stiff Little Fingers and most of their contemporaries wrote about the Troubles; the Undertones wrote about being young anyway. John Peel had "Teenage dreams, so hard to beat" engraved on his gravestone, that's how much the refusal to be defined by context meant.

On this day in 1979 #TheUndertones released their debut self titled album.

Most love songs miss someone who's absent. 'Ghost in You' mourns someone who's still there but not present, which is the harder grief. Butler turns 'ghost' from a loss-word into a presence-word, and the mirror video performs the inversion visually. One of the great underrecognized song designs of the '80s.

The Psychedelic Furs - The Ghost in You

A man stepping off the gangplank with a heart like a rusted valve. Penny whistles over dub bass, Pogues rowdiness, Celtic fiddle over rub-a-dub reggae. The Caesar's in the penthouse and the old guard's coming for you. Dancing in the Ruins — May 29. Pre-save: distrokid.com/hyperfollow/mi… #DancingInTheRuins #FolkPunk

Earthling is the most divisive Bowie album because it's so specifically of its moment....'97 UK drum'n'bass, all the way down. Purists hated it for the same reason it's interesting: most rock veterans at 50 don't risk being temporarily dated. Bowie made being current more important than being timeless. Which is the move that made him timeless anyway.

David Bowie - Little Wonder

What made the Zappa book a real diploma — Bozzio, Colaiuta, Wackerman, Humphrey, is that he demanded virtuoso reading AND personal voice at once. Most bandleaders pick one. Zappa demanded both. His drummers all sound like themselves on his records, and all became first-call in their respective scenes after.

In part two of our discussion of the drummers of FZ, drummers Joe and Bill school non-drummer Scott about the finer points of Frank's drumming royalty, replete with super-exciting insights and high-level geeking out. It's a good time, don't ya know!

Rubin's last line is the honest one, 'diary entries' is exactly what American Recordings is. Cash at the end of his life, Rubin asking him to sing the songs that meant something, made as if no one would hear them. That refusal to chase is why those records became Cash's most beloved late work. Trusting the audience to meet you in honesty is the harder thing.

The man who produced Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Adele explains why Hollywood keeps making soulless movies: "The audience comes last. I'm not making it for them, I'm making it for me." "When you make something truly for yourself, you're doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience." "So many big movies are just not good because they're being made by people trying to make something they think someone else is going to like. That's not how art works. That's commerce." "Everything we make as artists are essentially diary entries."

@crockpics 'Who'll Stop the Rain.' Vietnam disguised as weather, devastating disguised as gentle. CCR's biggest songs were always their angriest....Fogerty just knew how to smuggle the politics past AM radio.

There was arguably no band working harder in 1970 than CCR. Here is a great shot of John Fogerty, Doug Clifford, Stu Cook, and Tom Fogerty on their motorcycles, sourced from the Michael Ochs Archives. They dropped Cosmo's Factory and Pendulum in this exact same year. What is your go-to track from the Cosmo's Factory album?

The Daily Mirror tried to ban this song for promoting drugs. Cocker wrote it as a comedown report.... 'is this the way they say the future's meant to feel / or just twenty thousand people standing in a field' is the most quietly devastating line he ever wrote. The tabloids couldn't see that it was already the critique they wanted to write.

Pulp - Sorted For E's And Wizz (Live in Munich 1996) ▶️