Dinner Music 108: The weekly lineup
deep crate groove, soul jazz, cathartic cowboy
This week we’re listening to soulful grooves with a touch of melancholy. We’re listening pan-genre, across jazz, country, neo-soul, funk and folk. The doldrums of the day know no musical bounds, so we’re not binding them here.
We begin with the debut album from Thee Heart Tones, a very good neo-chicano soul album with a sweet vocals and luster-y backing instrumentation, with smooth percussion and grainy organ. The maturity of the sound doesn’t reflect their age, they’re all young Californians (teenagers, according to their Spotify bio), and pays a dividends to the sunshine-ladden low-rider sounds of Southern California. We move into the existential cowboy waltz of Dean Johnson, though you “wouldn’t know by looking” at him that his Pacific Northwest exterior contains an a wild west interior. Do you like Townes Van Zandt? You’ll probably like this. It’s softer, like the rain, but he’s got a hell of a voice, let me tell you. Next, we have genre-bending pop-soul-funk group Motherlode and their organ-heavy, soul dripping album When I Die. This is a late-night album, with sipping drinks on the patio sounds, moving through ballads and groovy numbers while the night rolls on. They’re known as a one-hit wonder group and, just know, it’s undeserved. We come back to an album made by young musicians, The Equatics recorded Doin It!!!! while they were in high-school, and are again reminded that age does not equal capacity for feeling or talent, the grooves in these tracks are heavy and I mean that in the highest sense of the word. This is listening bar music, from top to bottom. We end with a classic, upbeat jazz album from George Benson, soul moves through and through.
Enjoy.
*Going forward, the link for the Apple Music playlist will be the same. Basically, I’ll update the same playlist every week with the new songs for the week, so you can save the playlist once and, wham, updated weekly. In the next month, I’ll also have the Dinner Music Archive up and running on Apple Music, so paying subscribers can keep on listening to previous playlists. Thanks for your patience as I get comfortable with the platform, Apple Music subs!
Paid subscribers have access to the full Dinner Music archive (via Spotify, Apple Music coming soon!), an after hours playlist, a “New York Grooves” playlist and more — hundreds of hours of groove, soul, jazz, folk, samba, hi-life, disco, electro, post-punk, funk and more, thoughtfully selected.