Instead, here are some selections from Mrs S's iPhone which formed the soundtrack to our driving around the UK last week following the cancellation of our Portugal holiday. I have no control over the contents of her iPhone, just for the record, and, as you will see, increasingly neither does she.
Noah And The Whale The First Days Of Spring
'What's this?' I barked, on the way down the M1 to London, frustrated at the plodding, quiet songs I was hearing and which were affecting my concentration at the wheel. Three dreary songs in, with the added sound of two toddlers hollering at one another in the back, it had been turned off. I hope that's all I get to hear of it.
Devendra Banhart What Will We Be
More than anything else – apart from the collection of downloaded odds and ends in the playlist called The A List – this was the soundtrack to the second leg of our staycation. A breezy collection of whimsical folksy / oddball songs with Latin embellishments, this album continues in the vein of earlier Banhart albums, bound together by his unique vocal style. Paul Rees, Q's editor, says this is the first album where you don't want to punch Banhart in the face; I find this amusing, as, despite being a pacifist, I'd be quite up for punching Paul Rees in the chops.
Lawrence Arabia Chant Darling
When I saw this getting purchased from iTunes, I figured it would be some turgid indie garbage on the name of the band alone. It smacked of barrel-scraping in the 'what shall we call ourselves?' stakes, and of course I was proven wrong. We didn't listen to it often enough for it to leave a lasting impression on me, but the track 'Apple Pie Bed' could well become my personal soundtrack to the summer of '10. Judging by how my almost-four-year old eldest daughter would spontaneously burst into a rendition of the unbelievably chipper chorus ('Apple pie bed / When my body's made of lead') during quiet points on the holiday, it passes the toddler test for catchiness too.
Mrs S's A-List
Listening to albums in the car is something we rarely do apart from on holidays or long journeys. Usually we'll listen to whatever odd tracks Mrs S has read about or heard on 6 Music, usually until she buys something new or just goes off the songs. The A-List, as she named it years ago, at least this time around, included the aforementioned Lawrence Arabia song, some stuff by The Cars, Chew Lips, The Knife, The Crookes, Sunshine Underground (too Killers for me), MGMT's sublime 'Flash Delirium', a newly-discovered Hendrix track and others.
Whilst I find listening to a bunch of songs I don't know by artists I've never heard of pretty enjoyable, I usually don't have much of a say over what goes into the playlist (The Knife's 'Heartbeats' and the two Cars songs were squirrelled in by me), and as I alluded at the start of this, neither does Mrs S these days.
The reason is that almost-four-year-old Daughter#1 who has developed an early passion for upbeat, electronic-y poppy tracks which would never have graced Mrs S's iPhone in a million years. Thus we found ourselves smiling to ourselves as she and her little sister sang along to the likes of 'Just Dance' and 'Poker Face' by Lady Gaga and 'The Boy Does Nothing' by Alesha Dixon. Parentally heart-melting stuff indeed, but from this seed of compromise will grow a tree that can only lead to that A-List getting more and more poptastic over the next few years.
Vinyl Corner
'Daddy, what are records?'
Nuff said.
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