Good evening, Kibitzers!
Warm days always get warmer than the forecast claims, and I am pretty sure that now, Tuesday morning, it’s already more than 79° out there. Also, tree pollen is off the charts, and according to The Weather Channel, only supposed to be worse tomorrow. (Good news: zero ragweed pollen. I’m not allergic to that, but still.) Yes, I am still wearing a mask in the house. I’m supposed to go out and return some stuff, but I really don’t want to go out there. I’m the one who waited till the last minute, though, so either I go or I keep these awful sweatshirts forever. [Later: sweatshirts away!]
I always recommend the daily diaries of our friend Brainwrap, where he does great work fundraising for Democrats up and down the ticket by painstakingly constructing ActBlue lists representing a gazillion different perspectives on donating. Today, however, deserves special mention because he’s offering suggestions of the most effective places to put your donations to work if you have only a little bit to spare.
Anyway! I’ve covered Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox (motto: “Today’s Hits Yesterday”) in this space before, most notably in 2019, when we heard from two of my favorite singers who work with them, and then they provided the annual winter-holiday songs. But I had not done a diary with an assortment of their vocalists, so I set out to do that.
This is what usually happens: I wander through YouTube, randomly bookmarking things that interest me, and sometimes I collect an assorted bunch and slap them in a diary. But sometimes (this is feeling like the intro to a Colbert segment), I collect enough of just one category of things to fill a diary. That’s where I had gotten with Postmodern Jukebox until, as I extracted the list of videos, I noticed that about a third of those were of just one singer.
So, another time we will have assorted PMJ (much better than TMJ), but today, we will have songs featuring Sara Niemietz [her website]. She’s a not-quite-32-year-old artist who has already made quite a splash, and I think you’ll see why.
Links on the song titles throughout are to the original versions, which will generally have been in quite a different style. And, since PMJ functions as a collective, the individual artists are always credited, with their links, on the videos’ YouTube pages, in case you see someone that interests you.
Read More