- Ohne, 1 (feat. Tom Smith)
- Lester Knox, Put Your Face in Gwod: the 366th Revival (compiled by Tom Smith)
- Shellac, Terraform
- Shellac, At Action Park
- Shellac, Uranus 7″
- Shellac, The Rude Gesture (A Pictorial History) 7″
- MX-80 Sound, Hard Attack
- MX-80 Sound, Big Hits
- John Prine, Bruised Orange
Yes, I like Bruised Orange even better than Prine’s debut. Fight me. It’s got a couple of duds, I suppose, but it’s also got a winning pair of everything-sucks-but-what-can-you-do, life-goes-on anthems: “Fish and Whistle” and “That’s the Way That the World Goes ’Round”, both of which have been a tremendous comfort to me these last couple of years. (I didn’t start listening to John Prine until he died of COVID-19, near the start of the pandemic.) All the laughter, all the tears, all mixed up together.
Even more importantly Bruised Orange has got the devastating “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” (lyrics, song).
Wikipedia: “Prine has often stated that he believes [this] is the oddest song he ever penned. It tells the story of an Indian actor who played Sabu the elephant boy in the movies and the culture shock he experiences on a promotional tour of shopping malls in the American Midwest in the middle of winter. In the liner notes to John Prine Live the singer marvels, ‘What a strange song. Who would want to write a song like this?’”
And that makes me wonder if he had more such “strange” songs in him and felt awkward about letting them out. It makes me want to hear his albums after he gave up on trying to please major labels and mass audiences and started releasing his own records himself.
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