Dinner Music 100: The weekly lineup
plus, three hours of the best of Dinner Music
This week we’re looking back at the archive and listening to defining Dinner Music artists. Over the last 100 weeks, I’ve curated and crafted this newsletter to share music from nearly every genre, era and region. The newsletter would be nothing without the ongoing support from this community — music lovers like myself that are searching for albums and tracks that change something. It doesn’t have to change a life, changing the course of a day, or an evening, is enough. There is no better feeling than the right song in the right moment. Dinner Music has been a labor of love for the last two and a half years and I am grateful and privileged to be writing this today. Luckily, there are always more genres, eras and regions when it comes to art, especially music, so here’s to the next hundred.
We begin with Nancy Sinatra, the inspiration for this entire project. In early 2022, I launched Dinner Music with her album with Lee Hazelwood, Nancy & Lee. For years before that, I had an ongoing playlist titled “Nancy Sinatra mood,” where I collected tracks that had that sultry, atmospheric quality, like a dream on a summer’s day. Then I met the brains behind Flow State, who graciously encouraged this project from the beginning. Funny how life works, right? We move into Afternooners, a compilation of instrumental, astral disco tracks by Patrick Cowley, pioneer of early electronic music and father of hi-NRG. This album appeared in Dinner Music in mid-2023, also alongside a Nancy Sinatra album. There must be something about the pair that goes together in my mind. You may recognize Taeko Onuki as a recent highlight, I featured her album Copine in early July. Her album Sunshower is a city pop classic and, truthfully, I’m a bit shocked I haven’t included it before. “Toaki” is one of my favorite songs of all time, don’t miss it. In an edition about “co-existing and intermingling,” I featured afro-disco group Pigeon, “whose sound layers sequencers, synths, rollicking drums, heavy guitar riffs and Highlife-esque vocals to build something that is at once funk, cosmic, afro and electro.” We end (kind of) with Sade, whose been featured in Dinner Music countless times. I put one of her tracks in early versions of nearly every weekly playlist. Do I have to talk about what makes Sade so good? Her smooth vocals? The quiet luxury of the instrumentation? The sophisticated blend of jazz, R&B and funk? The lush sensuality? She’s timeless. Utterly timeless. We end, for real, with a bonus, sixth album this week from Aymoréco, a Brazilian group that I can find very little information about, except for a defunct instagram with the description “sexy music.”
Enjoy 3+ hours of my favorite DM tracks.