Welcoming Autumn

Join me tonight at 7PM Eastern as I welcome autumn with a collection of seasonal songs. Last year I had to punt this one a bit (literally) by playing an album about how to kick a football. This year there'll be nothing but singles, including tracks from The Smashing Pumpkins, XTC, Yo La Tengo, Frank Sinatra, Eva Cassidy and the John Deere Company.

You can listen live on 91.5 FM in Boston or on the Internet at WMFO.org. Our iTunes stream is currently out of whack because of a computer issue, so if you're used to listening to the stream, hop over to WMFO.org and use the links there. The station's stream is expected to be back to normal tomorrow, for you hardcore WMFO fans.

Remembering Richard Wright

Sad, somewhat unexpected news for a Pink Floyd fan like myself: Keyboardist Richard Wright, one of the founding members of the band, passed away yesterday at the age of 65 following a brief battle with cancer.

This is the sort of thing that hits me like a bolt out of the blue. Yes, we're caught amid the campaign rhetoric of a presidential election and the ongoing woes of Wall Street, but this cuts through all of that with that permanent bite that makes the political theater look as superfluous as it truly is.

We're here for a short time. We can fill our days with worry, or we can try to elevate those around us. Wright, and Pink Floyd, were a band that tried to do just that, looking beyond the surface angst to the deeper truth and sometimes suffering that are an essential part of being human. I cannot imagine my life to this point without them.

I'm putting the autumn show on hold for a week and digging through my vast Pink Floyd collection to cobble together my best attempt at a tribute. Richard ranks with Ray Manzarek in my eyes, someone who could take the monotone early electric keyboards and infuse them with soul and energy.

Forty years since "Summer '68." Thank you, Mr. Wright, for helping me make some sense of it all.

The show airs from 7-9PM Eastern on 91.5 FM in Boston, online at WMFO.org.

Awesome Songs About Autumn

This is my favorite time of year. As a native New Englander, I always look forward to the end of summer's hot, humid misery and the glorious colors that coat the trees. Autumn is an introspective season, and the music that sums it up best resonates with a thoughtful, nostalgic quality that borders on sadness.

If you're looking for autumn music to add to your playlists, there's some obvious choices. "Turn! Turn! Turn!" by The Byrds and "My Autumn Almanac" by the Kinks cover the British Invasion years, while any version of "Autumn in New York" or Vivaldi's FOUR SEASONS will satisfy the fan of softer sounds. Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" and Yo La Tengo's "September Sweater" fill in the alt-rock blanks.

But beyond these, there's a little subgenre of songs that are really about autumn, even though they seem to be about something else. Here's a few to consider:

1. The Lightning Seeds, "Pure and Simple." Ian Broudie's song of a dying love drops references to several seasons, but it's clearly set on a cool autumn night, and the fading relationship still clinging to hope suggests the transition from summer to autumn to spring. It's also got that minor key groove that conjures autumn melancholy.
2. Don Henley, "The Boys of Summer." Outstanding autumn imagery finds us driving the empty roads of a resort town recalling the lost love of a summer past. This is one of the top themes of pseudo-summer songs, also heard in
3. The Motels, "Suddenly Last Summer" and
4. Frank Sinatra, "The Summer Wind." Gotta give it to Frankie for best performance out of these three.
5. Squeeze, "Footprints." No mention of a lost love here, just a lost season of partying and excess. Although Difford and Tilbrook drop the line, "Now it's all over and winter begins," this song lives in the chilly remembrance of early autumn.
6. Sting/Eva Cassidy, "Fields of Gold." Another nostalgic song looking back at a past love from some future vantage point, the image of fully grown barley and golden colors both suggest autumn, and the somber tone of the song fits the season. Eva Cassidy's version on SONGBIRD is vastly superior to Sting's. Sorry, Sting. I like you, but that girl had some incredible soul.

I'll be playing all of these, along with some other great autmn songs, on this week's show--still on Wednesdays--from 7-9 PM Eastern. Tune in to 91.5 FM in Boston or listen to the free Web Stream at wmfo.org.

This Is the End, My Only Friend

This could be the last Wednesday that Hear It Wow airs on WMFO for two reasons:

1. It's scheduling shenanignans time at the station, when all the show names are written on index cards, tossed in the air, and reassembled in random order.

2. CERN just turned on that Large Hadron Collider, so black holes could eat us before the new WMFO schedule is assembled.

If we're going out, let's do it with a bang. A big bang. A big bang that makes black holes. Or, at least, songs about the end of the world mixed with a few more stereo demonstration albums, to remind us of a time when technology wasn't the enemy.

It all goes down for what could be the last time at 7PM Eastern on WMFO, 91.5 FM in Boston, wmfo.org on the Web (invented by CERN, before they started building their Doomsday Machine), where you can get your listen on for FREE through WMA or iTunes.

Over at WFMU's Beware of the Blog, you can download Ricky Nelson's demo of Lonesome Town, which this place will be if the black holes eat everyone. Stephen Hawking says they'll evaporate, by the way, and he was in a Pink Floyd song, so he's probably a pretty smart guy.

Another Year Older, No Wiser

Hear It Wow begins its third year of presenting music that most people in their right minds would never play on the radio. Tonight's show will be a retrospective of past finds, with the single criteria that everything I play is something from my personal collection.

If you don't listen to any other radio this year, tune in at 8:35 Eastern to hear TOMORROW RADIO. You'll be glad that you did.

The rest of the show, including MUZAK, ELO, promotional albums, and plenty of disco, starts at 7PM. Listen in Boston on 91.5 FM or tap the free Web stream at WMFO.org.