22 January 2026 - Superchunk - Watery Hands

I was talking to Courtney about Superchunk one night recently - recalling a post about a Kay Hanley cover of a Superchunk classic - and she told me that she didn't know who they were.  

So, given that I was lucky enough to see the lo-fi Chapel Hill, NC natives live in 1995, in Hartford CT - at Lollapalooza - I figured it was high time that I posted something they did.

I felt the best way to represent them would not be a current song - because they're still making great music - but rather an older one, from their 1997 Indoor Living album.  This was released on the Merge Records label, which has been the home of Superchunk since the late 1980s..... but also, Mac McCaughan, the vocalist for Superchunk, owns Merge Records, so that's probably a big reason why. 

The song, written by the band, is a light lo-fi pop-rock sound that is really excellent and engaging.  The video is SUPER high tech.

Yes, the band is still around and still making music.... and they still perform the songs of their early days.  Here they are in Carrboro, NC - which is literally next to Chapel Hill.  It's like they're the same town.

Anyway, I think they sound better now.   And I look forward to what comes next. 

21 January 2026 - Don Leisure ft. Carwun Ellis - Cynnau Tân

I know what you're all thinking if you don't live in Wales.

Who the hell is Don Leisure?

Don Leisure is the winner of the 2025 Welsh Music Prize, for his album Tyrchu Sain.  In English, the title literally means "sound tunnelling" and that's what he's doing - building beautiful tunnels of sound and burrowing into them - laying acoustic guitars and folk sounds with electronics and modern music.  

This song - which translates to "light a fire" - is a highlight of the album for me.  Leisure is joined by longtime Pretender Carwun Ellis on this one, as well as a couple of samples you are certain to recognize if you are huge Welsh music fans (I didn't know them).   

20 January 2026 - The Sundays - Joy

The Sundays made trippy dream-pop music and made it for a masses that wasn't ready for them. 

This song, which was never released as a single per se but was their first real video released to MTV in the United States, was my introduction to them.  Their whole Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic album, released in early 1990, was an eye-opener and changed my musical fandom forever. 

They broke up in 1998, but starting in 2014, there started to be some rumblings that there would be a return.  It has not yet materialized, but I am hopeful.

They did perform live an awful lot, and this show from 1997 - where they beautifully performed the song - is one of my favorites.  Harriet Wheeler's voice is full of a lot of passion that is far more apparent in this live setting.

19 January 2026 - Madison Beer - bad enough

Madison Beer - her REAL name - released her new album locket on Friday. Earlier in the week, she released this single.

Co-written by the artist, Leroy Clampitt and Lucy Healey, it's a pretty straight-ahead clearly Addison-Rae-inspired song. There, I said it.  

But Madison is very much a talent in her own right. And this is a really solid pop song that she sings the hell out of.

She also co-directed this video - which has a clear theme going to it. 

She literally debuted the song live, on Wednesday.

That's right.  New song and we ALREADY have live footage. 

16 January 2026 - The Art of Noise with Max Headroom - Paranoimia

This may be one of the weirdest collaborations of all time.

Max Headroom was a digital character played by Matt Frewer, meant to be some sort of a digital presenter or talk show host or something.  He's hard to explain.  However, he was everywhere at a certain point of the 1980s.He had a British talk show.  He sold New Coke after the return of Coke Classic.

Art of Noise was an avant-garde noise experimentation electronic group that got a little bit of attention from MTV and finally hit the US top 40 with this weird collaboration with a digital talk show host. 

The song, written by Art of Noise with a title that is a mashup of "paranoia" and "insomnia",  is weird early electronica.... and somehow, it just worked.   

The song was remixed in 1989 by Ben Liebrand for a greatest hits album for the band.   It lacks the Max, but doesn't leave out the electronica.

Despite being a very electronic group, they did perform live, like this performance from Tokyo in 1986. I personally find it interesting how they could create future beats live on instruments like they did. 

15 January 2026 - Sinead O'Connor - The Emperor's New Clothes

It's mid-January and I'm still struggling to write 2026 on my posts.

Anyway, I felt like going with an underappreciated follow-up single.  You see, Sinead O'Connor was best known for "Nothing Compares 2 U", her megahit Prince cover.

However, she didn't stop releasing singles.  This one, the single that followed, was not a cover at all, but rather, written and produced by Sinead O'Connor herself.  Outside of the US, this was a huge pop hit - and in the US, it made a splash on modern rock radio and made a ripple at pop radio.

It should have been a bigger hit here. It wasn't, because it was an angry song, odd for its both acoustic and electric guitar backing tracks. The song is a harder-edged pop-rock song trying to appeal to an audience who wanted another Prince ballad.

Which is a shame.   Because this song is straight fire. 

And when this song was released as a single, she was 23 and singing THIS hard. 

You can see her performing the song with an acoustic guitar with a similar hard edge in 1990.  

She's arguably coming off even angrier live.  

If you want my PERSONAL favorite performance of this song, it's this much quieter but just as angry one from 2010.

You can hear every single lyric.  I want you to listen to this one and feel every single word.

That doesn't mean she lost her edge.  In this Parkpop performance from 2013, she's back to louder and harder - and angry.

But also, happier.  And the crowd loves her.

This show is from 2020, and was one of her very last shows, as her tour would be shut down less than a week later thanks to the pandemic. She would literally only perform this song four more times before the abrupt end of the tour.

She still had every last bit of emotion and left it all on that stage. 

14 January 2026 - Sunny Sweeney - Diamonds & Divorce Decrees

You know, it's been a hot minute since I posted about Sunny Sweeney.

Well, she released a pretty fantastic album called Rhinestone Requiem in 2025, her first in three years. It's fun and POSSIBLY my favorite country album of 2025 (that Tyler Childers album was next level great but so was this one).  

Anyway, I also just find Sunny Sweeney to be delightful, so I figured I'd post this very strange song about marriage, written by Sweeney, Buddy Owens and Galen Griffin. 

Of COURSE I found a live performance of this song.  OF COURSE I did.   And like I said, I think she's delightful!

Stick around for the whole performance.