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.
Aerosmith’s I Don't Want To Miss A Thing: 1920s brass band style. [3:22]
Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself: 1929 style.
The Seekers’ I'll Never Find Another You: Scott Bradlee accompanying. I did not realize (but I bet marge did) that the writer of this song was Tom Springfield, brother of Dusty Springfield. [2:56]
Miley Cyrus’s We Can't Stop: 1950s a cappella, also featuring Von Smith, Olivia Kuper Harris, and LaVance Colley. You know this is a favorite of mine. [4:16]
Men At Work’s Who Can It Be Now?: 1940s jazz. [3:33]
Taylor Swift’s ME!: mid-80s yacht-rock style, also featuring Ryan Quinn. (Song link skips past the first 15 seconds of Taylor’s video — it’s a fun video, but that opening is not suitable for side pocket. No music is skipped.) [3:53]
Spice Girls’ Wannabe: Andrews Sisters style, also featuring Olivia Kuper Harris and Therese Curatolo. [3:10]
Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive: 1940s jazz/Latin ballroom style, featuring dancers Jose Valencia and Liora Paniz. [4:26]
Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance: 1920s “Gatsby style”, featuring the “Sole Sisters”, Sarah Reich and Melinda Sullivan. [4:54]
Outkast’s Hey Ya!: vintage 1960s soul, also featuring Matt Bloyd and Kenton Chen. This arrangement may win the prize for “stylistically most distant from the original”. [3:36]
Wham’s Last Christmas: Andrews Sisters style, also featuring Cristina Gatti and Ariana Savalas, vocals, and Melinda Sullivan, tap dance. [3:17]
Cheap Trick’s I Want You To Want Me: vintage blues style. [5:42]
David Bowie’s Heroes: this isn’t an official PMJ video, but a fan video of a live performance in Marseilles in 2019. [5:44]
I’ll close the PMJ/Niemietz performance with The Cars’ Just What I Needed: 1960s pop style, featuring Kenton Chen on backup vocals and an exuberant, not to say over the top, performance by Tim Kubart as “Tambourine Guy”. As Bradlee remarks after listing all this, “The title checks out.” [3:58]
We have a bit of political parody too. First, Bruce W. Nelson as Mangy Fetlocks offers an original tune, Good Folks Simply Don’t Back Trump. [1:37]
And we have two from The Parody Project: first is Don Caron with a sad song, Elegy for the Court, to the tune of a sad Sinatra song, A Cottage for Sale. [3:04]
And finally, Stand with Your Man, with Deborah Bowman standing in for Tammy Wynette. [2:48]