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Category Archives: Rock Inbox

Valentines Day / Songs Named After Women A-Z


Thanks again to our entire facebook rock geek advisory panel for the assistance identifying songs that refer to other bands. This show worked out well. Scott liked it much better than he did songs that refer to their own bands.

For Valentine’s Day Cristy and I are going to dedicate a show to songs named after women, especially songs named after Judy or Caroline, as we have found enough songs about these two ladies to make a collage. We’ll be getting caught up with the Myshkins requests with “Mimi LaValley.” We’ll finally get around to Phil Ochs with “Celia.” We will not play “Cecilia.” And we will play some things by bands other than Material Issue.

We even recorded a short promo so you can try before you download.

As we hope to organize these songs in alphabetic order, we are in dire need of songs named after women whose names begin with Q, X, and Z. Rock geek scrabble, anyone?

Flawedcasts of those two shows are downloadable here: A-M /  N-Z

Next Saturday we are going to devote an hour to newly-released music. Last year saw a new album by some band called Radiohead, and this week saw me finally get my pre-ordered LP of Goodnight, Oslo, by Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3. Future Clouds and Radar, a Texas band that sounds British, completed a concept album about Peoria, Illinois, for reasons that remain obscure. And Ben Folds titled his latest after Normal, Illinois, and wrote a song about Effingham, even if he got the name wrong. Downstate Illinois is the new Tobacco Road, apparently.

Were there any new records last year (or this) that struck your fancy? As music snobs stuck in the 1990s and 1980s, respectively, Cristy and I will rely on your suggestions.

Tune in to Rock Geek F.M. Saturday mornings from 8-9 a.m. CST on http://weft.org. Or at a more reasonable hour in the Nordic countries. Or, if you’re reading this now, listen to the MP3 on the wayback machine.

These Just In

We have been received some new CDs for possible review. We only trash sickeningly famous Rolling Stone best-album-list darlings, so we can already warmly endorse these independent artists. My former ukulele teacher Alex Smith from Bloomington-Normal, IL, has released a new CD with his band Constant Velocity: Muttonhead.

The enigmatic (as in: who the hell is this?) Coco Coca (and why is she called “Coco Coca”?) has sent us a CD called Black, Black, Black. Coco Coca appears to be a solo Seattle-Champaign artist, but we are wonderfully unburdened with any preconception of who they are that might interfere with our raw experience of the music. I do know that cacao is the agricultural commodity from which cocoa is derived, and Coca-Cola is of course a popular softdrink that once featured coca and cola as key ingredients to provide that extra-special zing, but this trivia tells me very little. Does the music sound like cola, chocolate, and cocaine? Sounds like a tour bus.

Our friends at Parasol have given us a couple of new releases: Homesick by the Tractor Kings, and Love at Thirty by Beaujolais. Cristy should review the second one. I don’t suppose either of us are too homesick.

Lastly, and most intriguingly, Paul Kotheimer of the Hand-Made Record Label has released a CD called “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” which is an astonishing variety of musical settings of poems by other people. Until the copyright issues are cleared, this is only available as a hand-made CD given to people by hand.