February Playlist: Pray for the Rain

As I mentioned on Wednesday, I've had a bit of an odd month, musically speaking. Here, for illustrative purposes, is a ten-track digest of what I've been listening to this February...

Click here for January's playlist.

1. A Song for the Dead - Queens of the Stone Age
(from Songs for the Deaf)
If you actually decide to play the Songs for the Deaf drinking game that I devised last week, this is probably the song that will kill you. Kind of appropriate, given the title.

Water, Earth, Fire, Air

So I've been watching Avatar (the TV show with the bald child, not the movie with the blue people) a lot recently, and...well, if you've never seen it, here's a quick primer:

Another thing I've been addicted to recently is Okkervil River's second album, Down the River of Golden Dreams (you may remember it as 'that album that took fricking ages to show up'). I could show you another YouTube video at this point, but instead, here's an excerpt from Okkervil River mainman Will Sheff's account of making the album:

"By the end of our stay in that city [San Francisco] from which so many long-haul travelers first cast out onto the water, I felt like nothing so much as a sailor. The last week of mixing I had even slept every night in the back of our 150 Ford, throwing open the back doors every morning to gaze on a deep, wide pool of water left by a week-long series of torrential downpours. 

"I guess that’s part of the reason we decided to call the record Down the River of Golden Dreams. It’s the title of the piece Seth’s octogenarian great aunt Nila plays at the beginning of the record, but it’s also because - to be appropriately California - I think that, if Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See [Okkervil River's first album] was an earth record, this is a water record. Sailing away never to return, washing clean to start over, fishing and swimming and drowning and all that stuff is floating around in there somewhere.

"At least, that’s what I hear when I hear these songs." 

Jenny Lewis and Her Rainbow Suit

I'm no style maven - in fact, I don't care much for fashion at all, as my prodigious collection of tatty old band T-shirts will testify. And yet here I am, on the cusp of writing an entire blog post about a multi-coloured suit.

The Voyager is the new album from Jenny Lewis, and as much as I've been enjoying the music, it's the cover that's really captured my imagination. Where did this snazzy suit come from? What is it supposed to represent? Surely it must be somewhat meaningful - artists don't just slap any old pictures on their music, do they?

Oh.

It's worth pointing out that The Rainbow Suit is more than just an album cover - Lewis is wearing it (or one just like it) in all of the promotional photography for The Voyager as well. It's quite clearly a very big part of these songs, but pinpointing the significance of that multi-hued ensemble is kind of difficult to do.

How I Plan to Spend My Birthday Money

Yesterday was my 23rd birthday. I received a whole bunch of nice presents, but for the purposes of today's blog, this was the big one:

That is a £40 gift voucher for Spillers Records (thanks mum and dad!) All I need to do now is decide what to spend it on. It's been a while since I went for a SpillerBinge, and so my New Music wishlist has started to look a little bloated:

Pictured: 9 of 28