Red Letter Year :: Ani DiFranco

Red Letter Year - a title that plays on the phrase 'red letter day,' which means a day of special significance - is truly a great album. With Todd Sickafoose, Allison Miller and Mike Dillon (among some other pretty fabulous string players) in her newly formed band, DiFranco has really never sounded better. Her voice and her guitar sound clearer than ever before, while maintaining the rawness and attitude she is most known for. The general flow of the album takes you back and forth and around the bend - by the end of it, you feel as though you've been on a road trip with DiFranco and Friends!

What makes Red Letter Year so impressive, to me, is that this is the 35th officially released album that DiFranco has put out (not including collaborative work) in less than 20 years - and she manages to make each album not only unique, but musically/artistically sound. Regardless of whether or not you dig her musical stylings, all of DiFranco's albums are raw, true, and have the ability to pull you in (if you let them) and speak to the plethora of experiences we go through in our daily lives. Be it love, loss, frustration, anger, joy, heartache, despair, or hope - DiFranco can bend your heart strings just as well as she can her guitar.

(Can you tell I am a fan?)

So, back to the topic at hand - Red Letter Year. This album brings back all the sides of DiFranco that I love most - but with a touch of happy/hopefullness in all the songs! What a great album to go with the upcoming inauguration of President Obama in less than a month! I really love this album and all that it speaks to, so I hope that you have a decent chunk of uninterrupted time to devote to letting this music pour over/around/in you like a faucet on a sponge.

Here's a list of my top 5 favorite tracks (although I truly do love the ENTIRE album!):

1. Red Letter Year
2. Present Infant
3. Smiling Underneath
4. Way Tight
5. Round a Pole
   

Here's to a Red Letter Year...

The end.
Love,
Meggo.

P.S. The portrait of DiFranco came from HERE.

Red Letter Year

So Jealous :: Tegan & Sara

this past weekend, i had the pleasure of hanging out with some pretty fantastic people at a pub called the blue door (which is flanked by several antique stores, so if you've got a hankering for antiques, a good beer selection, and some pretty stellar variations of a Juicy Lucy, you should check this place out!!). somewhere during our conversations, we ended up talking about working out - which was subsequently followed by music that you work out to. while i have a hard time running to music when running outdoors, i have found it is easier for me to bear running on treadmills during the arctic months of Minnesota winter while having my ipod plugged into my ears. while we were going over various genres of music that help one's workout routine, tegan and sara's album "So Jealous" came to mind.


i have found this album to be soooo good for a variety of reasons, but here's my work out tailored list:

1. i'm a slow runner and the overall laid back pace of this album allows me to run to it without feeling like i can't keep up
2. the songs are catchy enough for me to forget that i'm running, so i can just jam out my work out
3. if played from start to finish, each song provides a more 'natural' random setting for your workout, instead of having to pay attention to a treadmill/olyptical machine's 'random' setting
4. if played from start to finish during your workout, you can guarantee yourself a 45 minute workout!
5. by the end, i feel like a rockstar.

what's your workout jams?
the end.
love,
meggo.


So Jealous

Despite Our Differences :: Indigo Girls

i can't believe we've never posted anything on the Indigo Girls and we've been going strong on this blog for a year now! the Indigo Girls have been one of those bands that not only added to my daily soundtrack, but really added meaning to my daily life. sure, they are iconic. sure, they have their stereotypical groupies. but, the Indigo Girls have stayed true to their roots, to their fans, and to themselves in writing their music and engaging in musical communion for so long.

when i miss the FAM (my family of choice), all i have to do is find an Indigo Girl song, hit play, sit back and reminisce about times where we all lived within 10 mins walking distance from one another and could go to the apartment to watch a movie, make dinner, and just have crazy fun. there are a plethora of indigo girls albums i could choose to talk about that reflect that time of my life, but today, i will write about the first album that was released after we all parted ways.

Despite Our Differences, released in 2006, is not just any old Indigo Girls album. I would classify this one as one of their most defining albums because they have managed to stay together for over 20 years and still create such magical music.
i think what i have come to appreciate and value the most about the Indigo Girls is their ability to be individually unique as artists, but also to complement each other so well together. this particular album exemplifies their musicianship very well, so hopefully you all will enjoy it as much as i have over these past couple of years.

some of my personal favorites from this album are: Pendulum Swinger, I Believe in Love, Rock and Roll Heaven's Gate, and Last Tears, but overall, i really do love the whole thing.

the end.
love,
meggo.


Despite Our Differences

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill :: Lauryn Hill

My album of the day is The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill. Like many other teens at the time, I found out about Lauryn Hill via MTV (back when they actually played music videos most of the time) when she was still a part of The Fugees. Also, like many others, I became immediately obsessed with The Fugees and was really devastated when they split up. However, as soon as Lauryn Hill put forward her first solo album in 1998, it became a part of my daily routine...until I went to college. So, for a solid 4 years, I listened to this album pretty much every day of my life. It literally became the soundtrack to my high school career. But the weird thing is that I only remember sharing my love for this album with one friend, and that wasn't until my senior year of high school.



Some of my favorite tracks include Superstar; Every Ghetto, Every City; and Everything is Everything. I liked Doo Wop (That Thing), but that was also everyone else's favorite track when the album became popular...

Anyway, I'm sharing it with y'all now and I hope that it brings back some happy memories and you can think about what you were doing 10 years ago...before you had your ipod and macbook.

"You know it's hot, don't forget what you've got. Lookin' back, lookin' back, lookin' back..." - Every Ghetto, Every City by Lauryn Hill

The end.
Love,
Meggo.

I am including this youtube video for Can't Take My Eyes Off of You because I couldn't get it on the playlist player, but also because it was one of my favorite songs from the album! Enjoy :)

Pretty Hate Machine :: Nine Inch Nails (1989)

I think we decided to dedicate December to talking about our favorite albums, right? Well, I dug deep to find one of my all-time (still) favorite albums. I don't listen to it all the time anymore, but I still get a lot of pleasure out of "Pretty Hate Machine" by Nine Inch Nails. Sometime around 1995, Nine Inch Nails got very popular and almost mainstream, but before that, they projected this amazing edginess, that I think influenced a lot of people that came after them.

1989 was a little early for me (I was nine), but I benefited a lot from having an edgy older brother. My brother was into all kinds of cool music. I still can't figure out how he knew all these cool bands- we lived way out in the sticks and this was wayyy before Al Gore invented the internet for us all to enjoy. But anyway, when he made his big switchover to CDs (circa 1993) I was the lucky recipient of his wonderful cassette collection (Cure, NIN, Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, everything).

I think a good test for an album's quality is if it sounds as good to you now as it did when you were an angsty fourteen year-old. This one passes! Listening to it now, it still seems amazing. If anything, my added years only make me see how good and pure the music actually was. Like, when Trent Reznor sings, "Seems like salvation comes only my dreams / Can this world really be as sad as it fucking seems?" those lines seem really good and pure and honest to me still today.

The tracks:

1. Head Like a Hole
2. Terrible Lie
3. Down in It
4. Sanctified
5. Something I Can Never Have
6. Kinda I Want to
7. Sin
8. That's What I Get
9. The Only Time
10. Ringfinger

The video for "Head Like a Hole" (from MTV, there might be an ad for a couple seconds before it starts):

Nine Inch Nails - New Music - More Music Videos