NPR’s “All Songs Considered” Considered

As a new weekly Friday feature (which may wind up being neither weekly nor limited to Fridays) I’m going to listen to an episode of NPR’s All Songs Considered and then recommend a song from the episode. In some cases it may be the best song (or at least the song I like most) in other cases it may just be a weird or interesting song that someone might not otherwise encounter.

I think I will usually just link to the episode and then post a video of the song. Today though I’m going to go a bit off script and plug the episode itself as well as picking song from it. The episode “This guy probably recorded a song you love” interviews John Congleton who has worked with Angel Olsen, St. Vincent, Earl Sweatshirt, David Byrne, Lower Dens, Erykah Badu, The Roots, Bill Callahan, The Mountain Goats, Modest Mouse, The New Pornographers, Swans, and more as producer / recording engineer. The episode plays a bunch of songs that inspired him as well as several songs he worked on. The interview is interesting and there are a lot of good songs that get played. This is worth listening to in its entirety. Download the podcast and listen on a run or listen to it in the background on your commute or at work.

Since I’m plugging the cast in its entirety, rather than picking the “best” song, which you would hear anyway (and may have heard before), I going to go with a particularly fun and unexpected song that I haven’t thought of in years. The song is Grim Grinning Ghosts from the soundtrack to Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride. It’s actually a pretty cool song with some funky chords going on, neat vocal harmonies, and it features the voice of Thurl Ravenscroft who played the Grinch.

As a practical note, I have a lot of back episodes to get through, so I may wind up either doing this twice a week, or listening to some episodes where I don’t pick anything until I get caught up with the current episode.