New music from all over the spectrum this week, including Benjamin Russel with Greg Fraser, Motorists, New Age Healers, Cory Wong, Bess Atwell, Nada Surf, The Besnard Lakes, Scenic Route to Alaska, Kid Moon and much more. Enjoy!
ROTATING OUT: SONGS LEAVING RADIO FREE CALIFORNIA
This means the music that is aging out is from Radio Free California Episode 2322. This includes music from Sparks, The Damned, Steve Lukather, Foo Fighters, Comet Gain, Panic Pocket, Hugh Lee, Baby Rose, Bayonne and much more.
We celebrate these songs with a new show that will play on Saturdays at 11am and again at 5pm PST. We will say goodbye to the songs that are now a year on the playlist with one last broadcast, which will be repeated a couple of times during the day.
You can of course still listen to this music - my playlists are still on spotify and you can find them here. They're all searchable as well.
ALBUM SHOW NOTES
I have been adding singles by Bess Atwell as she has been releasing them for much of 2024, so now that the album she's been teasing has dropped of course I'm going to feature it. That new album is called "Light Sleeper". This new album by the English songstress was produced by Aaron Dessner of The National and those touches show, but the album is quite introspective and personal for Ms. Atwell, dwelling on her own life as diagnosis with ASD and her decision to "wake up and feel everything", as noted on the title track. To me, she sounds like I wish Lana Del Rey or someone like her actually sounded like. The songwriting is fantastic and like I said, I've been adding songs from the album for months now.
The Album Show will runs on Thursdays at 9am and 9pm Pacific Standard Time.
RFC 2422
For those of you who stay away from Spotify the current week's playlist will be played on Wednesdays at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm and 6pm PST. All of the songs I feature on Radio Free California are played as part of the regular rotation. .If you want to hear the songs we've added to the station this week you can use the Spotify playlist above or you can listen to this show.
10 at 10
One last programming note: Every Saturday at 10pm and again on Sunday at 10am and 10pm we will feature our show "10 at 10", where we play 10 (and sometimes 11 or even 12!) songs from a year we pick at random. Again, all times are PST. Last week we featured a selection of songs from 1997 and for next Sunday's show we're going to feature a small selection of songs from.. well you'll have to tune in to find out! We also run the show at a "secret" time on Saturdays.
As always, you can go to https://global.citrus3.com:2020/public/radiofreecalifornia to listen to the station, and there is an imbed below. And did you know the station is available as an app? It's only for Google Play (sorry iphone users - Apples terms and conditions were too restrictive for me) but you can listen on your phone at your convenience too.
No cheap shots today, but I am going to talk about a veteran in my family for Memorial day - my father.
He didn't want to be in the army. He hated the entire experience in fact. He had a young wife, pregnant with their first child, when he failed a class in Law school. The man who raised him (he was adopted) was so angry he arranged to have him drafted. They were all sent to Camp LeJuene. That probably shortened the lives of my father and my sister. You've heard the tales of the conditions there.
He had war stories of course, just about everyone who serves does. I have a nephew who served in Afghanistan and he has stories too. My father's service is a whole lot of top secret - George Bush the First in fact tried to stop-loss him back into active service during the first gulf war, despite the fact that he was already dying from several types of cancer and his hands were so gnarled up that he couldn't hold a coffee mug. He never went back to law school.
He's been gone a long time now. I don't miss him very often - he was kind of a broken man towards the end and he didn't live long enough to meet any of his grandchildren - but he's been on my mind lately, for what I have to admit are selfish reasons. You see, in the past couple of weeks I hit a milestone: I've lived longer than my father did.
He and I had very little in common. He smoked and drank even when in poor health and I've never smoked and don't drink so much any more. One thing he had was a commanding presence. He had a deep, overpowering voice that could engender awe in men bigger and taller than him. I didn't realize that I was 4 inches taller than him until I was nearly 20. Even though my parents divorced in 1971 and he remarried twice, he tried his best to be a father to me. I think looking back on it now I was as much a reminder of what he lost as what he still had. He never connected with my younger brother, so our experiences with the man are quite different.
Anyway, I've reached a point in my life where I have run out of role models. We didn't find out who my father's birth parents were until long after he died, and the less said about the people who raised him the better. The reason my father didn't know how to love his family in the face of hardship is all their fault. The death of my sister at a young age broke him and I don't think he ever understood that. Hell, I was only 4, and my younger brother hadn't yet been born. I didn't figure it out either until long after he was gone.
I'm rambling.
I don't know really how to feel about all of this. I may be one of the first of my group of friends to hit this strange milestone and it's a strange conversation to have. No one really knows how to feel about it, not even me.
But my dad would have said, "Get your shit together son, you're not done." I know that becuase he said it all the time, even when I did have my shit together. So just keep going. I imagine that this milestone will pass into memory like all the others have, like the first anniversary of his death, and the tenth, and the twentieth.
So thanks dad. I don't know if you're a cautionary tale or a celebratory one and the truth is probably somewhere in between, but I've been thinking about you today.
And because I love you, here's the live performance of the Cory Wong track added to the station this week. Enjoy!
