Wherein I play disc jockey, featuring a couple of randomly selected tunes for your dining and drinking  pleasure. 

Florence Welch (pictured ab0ve) and the Machine are a British band who have been around since 2007. Their debut album, Lungs, was a smash, first in the UK, then everywhere.

Since I am always the last to know anything about any song more recent than a decade ago, I totally missed the song “Dog Days Are Over,” which was apparently inspired by an art installment Florence used to see. This song reminds me of Sinead O’Connor’s “Mandinka.” Not in the sound of it but in the “belt-it-to-the-back-rows” female energy:

Jakob Dylan proved that he picked up some of his father’s songwriting gifts with the album Bringing Down the Horse. The song “One Headlight” has got a great, loping beat, a cool bottleneck that sneaks in late, and some very sad lyrics. Sometimes – on one of my Willy Loman days –  I know exactly how the narrator feels:

This place is always such a mess
Sometimes I think I’d like to watch it burn
I’m so alone and I feel just like somebody else

Man, I ain’t changed, but I know I ain’t the same
But somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin’ dreams
I think of death, it must be killin’ me

Ok, well that was depressing. Let’s pick it up a little bit here on our way out. Brian Setzer first hit the airwaves in the early ’80’s with the Stray Cats. They were a full-on rockabilly band, a real throwback to the Fifties and the days of Sun records. And Setzer is another in a long line of great guitarists.

Setzer went back and forth to the Stray Cats, did some rock stuff and then eventually formed the Brian Setzer Orchestra. That outfit played a big band jump blues style when that was a craze for about two minutes back in the late ’90’s. Personally I love this stuff and wish I had the time, initiative, etc. to learn how to swing dance.

Here’s Setzer and company doing a 1956 tune written by bandleader Louis Prima, “Jump, Jive ‘n Wail.” Setzer got a Grammy for this performance in 1999.

“A woman is a woman and a man ain’t nothin’ but a man.” One can hardly argue: