Ian Dury – Billericay Dickie
I am currently working away from home in Denmark all week, so when I am at home at weekends, I try and make the most of my time.
Last weekend we watched the Ian Dury biopic “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”, which is excellent and I urge everyone to see it. Andy Serkis is uncanny as Dury, a truly incredible performance. There is so much great music in the film that it is hardly surprising that one of the tunes has lodged in my head on a virtually permanent basis and that tune is “Billericay Dickie”. It could have been almost anything though, his music is that infectious. – caroleb

Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
My favourite from their last album by far, a surprising use of synths from them, it builds nicely with a driving beat, brimming with optimism. Makes me want to “punch the clock” and drive to it. – ejaydee

Rosana – Si Tú No Estás
In 1996 the singer-songwriter Rosana burst onto the scene with her début album Lunas Rotas. It was a breath of fresh air in a genre, that here in Spain has traditionally been dominated by over-earnest “man-with-a-guitar-with-lots-to-preach-about-but-limited-musical-imagination” types. I absolutely loved the album and listened to it non-stop. She went on to release further albums but went down the sad, dusty, repetitive road that so many of her ilk seem destined to follow. But I still love this. A deceptively angry song pleading with her lover not to even think about leaving her. – makinavaja

Fred Neil -The Dolphins
The song for which the term flangently-planging was coined.
‘You know sometimes I think about Saturday’s child’.
Fred was the king of the couplet worm and this song is both allusive and elusive in its atmosphere of yearning melancholy. – tatankayotanka

Taj Mahal – Statesboro Blues
As they used to say, when this first album came out in 1968, “the walking anachronism – Harlem to Amhurst Massachusets and a BA; a twentyfive year old electric Lemon Jefferson! ” I had a hard time buying a blues guy with a name like that but I bit the bullet and I’ve been buying ever since. A great first album with Jesse Ed Davis and Ry Cooder doing the honors on gts. James Thomas on bass and Sanford Konikoff doing the drums. The song’s by Blind Willie McTell from 1928, Allman brothers did it also. – goneforeign

Gustav Temple and the Blades – Puddings and Pies
I was listening to the excellent “Sympathetic Sounds of Toe Rag” compilation (from 2003) this morning and not surprisingly this one stuck in my head. Mmmmm…..”jam roly-poly”……..love the guitar sound on this too. – japanther

Note: I’m (thankfully) very busy work-wise at the moment and Mondays and Tuesdays are absolute killers. I have decided to program Earworms to appear at 12.00 midday on Mondays. So now you know – RR drawbidge and Earworms will go up at the same time! Hope this is OK. (If anyone is about at the time and could post a link on RR, that would be cool!)
Thank you all for your submissions and please keep ‘em coming! Remember earworm@tincanland.com

Maria Muldaur – Cool River
As I mentioned in a comment on a recent Steenbeck post, Cool River by Maria Muldaur is a current earworm. The song haunts me. I listen to it in the car driving to and from work. There is a wistfulness and sadness that just moves me. I’ve always been affected by sad songs for some reason, even though I am a cockeyed optimist by nature. – marconius


Perfume Genius – Mr Peterson
Perfume Genius’ Mr. Peterson is one of my 2010 favourite songs, a shoo-in for Unsettling songs had it been published by then. It’s a very twisted love story of sorts. There’s not a lot I want to say about this particular song, I’m a bit ambivalent about it (the song itself is ambivalent too) At any rate, party music this is not. Here, for your further delectation, is a live version. – lambretinha


Maria Teresa – Lusofonia
‘Lusophone’ relates to the music and culture of Portuguese speaking societies worldwide, Maria Teresa is from Portugal, this is the title cut of her CD on the Le Chant du Monde label. – goneforeign


Best Coast – Goodbye
One of the (many) great things about the ‘Spill is the way you can build up quite a deep impression of someone – not just the music they like, but their other preferences and personality – and so have a fair idea of whether their recommendations are likely to appeal or not. So, I know Japanther well enough to know that anything he suggests will probably be my sort of thing, even when accompanied by phrases like “buzz band” and “West Coast pop” that normally have me running for the hills, and so it proves in the case of Best Coast. I simply love the album, which takes me back to the Good Old Days of Proper Singles (under three minutes, of course), and this is my favourite track – if only for the line “I lost my job, I miss my mum, I wish my cat could talk…”- abahachi


Moby Grape – 8.05
Summer of ’67 Moby Grape came to Reno for 2 nights complete with (horrors) a light show. Convinced this invasion from San Francisco posed an existential threat to our community’s moral fiber the local Police Chief went public against it with a threat a day appearing in the local press. His attempts to halt it failed however. First concert was a Friday & the next morning’s paper ran a story complete with a full page picture on the front page. Near the center of the photo was the chief’s daughter. I still have this superb image of her swaying, eyes closed, to this song. – fintan


Codona – New Light
Codona was a “world music supergroup” featuring Collin Walcott, Don Cherry, and Nana Vasconcelos. Following Cherry’s motto “when people believe in boundaries, they become part of them”, their nomadic, multi-instrumental music weaves many strands together into shifting, finely textured sound collages.
Walcott’s sitar dominates the 1978 track New Light, featured on a recent NPR playlist. Of the many moods here perhaps the most sublime (and earwormy) moment is when Cherry’s trumpet harmonizes the melody against the sitar at about 5:00 and Vasconcelos’ percussion lifts into a restless groove. – nilpferd

Thanks, as always, for your submissions! Remember: earworm@tincanland.com