Sea Wolf is the project name of singer-songwriter, Alex Church, a Californian native who takes his lyrical inspiration from local authors like John Steinbeck and Jack London.
Leonard Cohen / Suzanne
One of my favorite songs of all time on one of my favorite albums of all time. This song, and others of his during that era, were a huge influence on me lyrically and instrumentally. I love the descriptiveness and feeling of the language, the words he chooses, and the sentiment and mystery behind the song. It never gets old to me.
Belle & Sebastian / This Is Just A Modern Rock Song
This song came up on my iPod the other day and was just as good as the first time I heard it. Many bands have a sense of timelessness, but few actually wind up standing the test of time.Belle & Sebastian are one of the few contemporary bands in my record collection whose music never feels dated and always feels fresh, even after a dozen years of listening to them. My favorite period was the time between their first and third records, when they released a number of ridiculously good EPs and singles, with multiple B-sides. This is just one of many of the great B-sides from that period, and one that, my fellow band mates at that time (from my first band, Irving) and I used to come home, after numerous nights carousing, and listen to on repeat.
Blitzen Trapper / Furr
My drummer is friends with this band and turned me on to them. This song in particular was what sold me on them. It’s immediately engaging and likable and has a comforting quality that feels familiar and fresh at the same time. I like the album, too. I think of it as a Pacific Northwest psychedelic space country prog-pop record. It skips around in a pleasant and always surprising way. This song is about a boy who turns into a wolf, which gave me a kind of deja vu.
Satyajit Ray / Title Music from the Film Teen Kanya
This is just one of many great Bollywood songs Wes Anderson appropriated for the soundtrack of his most recent film, The Darjeeling Limited. At the time the movie came out, I’d been listening to Madlib’s Beat Konducta, Vols three and four. And seeing Wes Anderson’s film just made me fall in love with those old Bollywood songs themselves. I love the instrumentation, the melodies, the joyfulness, and even the old scratchy audio quality of those recordings. Whenever I’m in a bad mood, I just put this music on and it always cheers me right up and leaves me feeling fresh and inspired.
Tom Waits / Singapore
Tom Waits is one of my old favorites. I see him as mythologic trickster of American musical tradition, and this is a great example of what I like about him. He loves to dance around traditional American song forms, instrumentation and lyrical sensibility. I really love his wonderfully descriptive language, it has all kinds of peripheral connotations that can often only be understood in the context of American pop culture history. And I love the playful, percussive, and always interesting nature of much of the instrumentation in his songs. I always hear something new whenever I listen to his music. And for that reason, I keep going back to him.
Cat Power / Lived In Bars
Cat Power is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and this is just one of many of her songs that I love. I love the way she dances around the vocal melody here and the simplicity of the instrumentation and the lyrics. This is from her most recent album of original songs, The Greatest. I think this album was overlooked by many critics, maybe because it’s so seemingly conventional. But to me it’s a brilliantly simple, subtle and elegantly executed album of some of her best and most mature work.
Lykke Li / Little Bit
My girlfriend turned me on to Lykke Li, who is a 22 year-old pop artist from Sweden. This album, her first, was produced by Bjorn Yttling of Peter, Bjorn and John, and is just a refreshingly simple straightforward girl-pop album, that isn’t kitsch and overdone like most American pop. It’s really grown on me, and now I find it my iPod a lot.
Johnny Cash / Danny Boy
Obviously not the quintessential Johnny Cash song, but one that I heard one day recently while driving through the grassy rolling hills of northern California and that moved me to tears. Johnny Cash is my favorite singer of all time. There is so much spirit, feeling and honesty in his voice. You can’t listen to a song he sang without also getting a sense of the fullness and complexity of his spirit and all of the struggles of his life. He recorded this classic song, of a father saying goodbye to his son for the last time, near the end of his life, and in my opinion the truthfulness of depth of the sentiment behind the song has never been more profound and clearly laid out than in this version.
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