Left to my own devices...

We attended the Unity Tour at Chase Center in San Francisco last night. I've lost count of how many Pet Shop Boys shows I've been to; suffice to say this may be the fourth decade in which I've seen them live. (The Nightlife tour was my first; my memory is fuzzy on whether that was 1999 or 2000, but either way, I'm considering it to be a 1990's show.)

First things first: PSB put on a fantastic show. If anything, their visual and sonic presentation only gets better with age.

Second things second: This was easily the largest venue I'd ever seen them in, and the sound mixing did not disappoint. (I'm looking at you, Chromatica Ball.)

This is a post about the setlist.

Being part of a co-headlining tour, the list was more constrained for time than it would be if it were a PSB-only show. They were limited to 90 minutes, which kept the song count at 19. Having such a vast and rich catalog, choosing those 19 songs was doubtless a difficult task. At our show, the songs in the order performed were:

1. Suburbia
2. Can You Forgive Her?
3. Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)
4. Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes Off You)
5. Rent
6. I Don't Know What You Want but I Can't Give It Any More
7. So Hard
8. Left to My Own Devices
9. Domino Dancing
10. Love Comes Quickly
11. Losing My Mind
12. Always on My Mind
13. Dreamland
14. Heart
15. It's Alright
16. Vocal
17. It's a Sin
18. West End Girls
19. Being Boring

As a longtime fan of the Pet Shop Boys, I must admit to being a bit baffled at the set of chosen songs. With only one recent title (Dreamland), one could label this a greatest-hits setlist. (This would make sense, as PSB completed a greatest-hits tour of Europe earlier this year.) And yet, some songs stand out like sore thumbs in that context: Love Comes Quickly and Losing My Mind, in particular. (This may also be my American experience showing through.) It's not that these songs are bad; it's that I don't see them as especially popular among PSB's catalog. And Losing My Mind is a b-side!

So, what's a list-obsessed PSB superfan to do? Why, come up with my own setlist, of course! I imagined myself in charge of determining the setlist: what do I consider essentials? What other singles do I include? How about album or b-side deep cuts? How many cover versions? Do I dare imagine they'd play the cover of Let The Music Play they produced that was included on the soundtrack to The Crying Game?

First up: song categories

Any concert setlist by an established artist is going to require a mix of songs that satisfies the audience: the big hits, the signature songs, songs that fit the venue, and maybe some new stuff. Considering the context (quasi-nostalgia tour, which means quasi-greatest hits) and the venue (large capacity, expect a mix of casual and longtime fans), I defined the following buckets:

• Essentials
• Single Highlights
• Recent-ish
• Album Highlights
• B-sides
• Covers

And because this is my dream setlist, I added another category: Personal Picks. I also created a category for songs I wanted to purposefully exclude from the setlist; these are songs that would likely made it into any setlist (and have), but which I decided to exclude simply as a matter of personal preference. Suffice to say, if you see a song surprisingly missing from the lists that follow, it's probably on the exclusions list.

With those categories defined, it's time to fill up each bucket with my dream setlist. Then, I'll need to whittle that down to one that could reasonably serve as the setlist for another go-round of the Unity Tour. Here goes!

Round 1: No Restrictions

Each category's songs, in alphabetical order:

Essentials

• Being Boring
• Can You Forgive Her?
• Heart
• It's a Sin
• Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)
• West End Girls
• What Have I Done to Deserve This?

Single Highlights

• Home and Dry
• I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore
• I'm With Stupid
• Integral
• Jealousy
• Liberation
• Love, etc.
• More Than a Dream
• The Pop Kids
• Red Letter Day
• Rent
• So Hard
• Suburbia
• Vocal

Recent-ish

Heavy on the -ish, since these go back as far as 2019.

• Monkey Business
• On Social Media

Album Tracks

• Discoteca
• For Your Own Good
• How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?
• My October Symphony
• The Night I Fell In Love
• Pandemonium
• The Sodom and Gomorrah Show

B-sides

• Friendly Fire
• I Get Excited (You Get Excited Too)
• Shameless
• We All Feel Better In the Dark

Covers

• Always On My Mind (arguably, this is also essential)
• Go West
• The Last to Die
• Where the Streets Have No Name / I Can't Take My Eyes Off You

Personal Picks

These are personal favorites, and are unlikely to be included on any setlist that I don't create.

• It Always Comes as a Surprise
• Love is a Bourgeois Construct
• Paninaro 95
• This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave
• The Truck Driver and His Mate
• The View From Your Balcony

Total: 44 songs

Truly an excellent collection, but obviously too much to fit into a 90-minute set. So, how do we narrow it down? Let's lay out some rules first:

• The setlist must fit into 90 minutes, so it should be limited to 20 songs.
• It must include at least one current or recent-ish title.
• It may exclude at most one song from the Essentials category.
• It must include at least one cover version.

Round 2: the first cut

In this round, we'll reduce the number of ballads, remove songs that may just not work in a large venue, and eliminate songs that are, for lack of a better term, "sonic duplicates." By this, I mean songs that sound more than a little similar to each other.

With that in mind, our first round of cuts, in alphabetical order:

• Friendly Fire
• Jealousy
• Monkey Business
• Shameless
• The View From Your Balcony
• Vocal
• We All Feel Better In the Dark

Ok, down to 37 songs. Still a long way to go...

Round 3: when small differences matter

This is when the cutting gets tough. The choices are more nuanced, including the removal of dated topical references, reducing overrepresentation of a particular album, and deciding which other tracks are just that much more deserving. The resulting cuts:

• Discoteca
• I'm With Stupid
• Integral
• It Always Comes as a Surprise
• The Last to Die
• More Than a Dream
• My October Symphony
• Paninaro 95
• Red Letter Day
• The Truck Driver and His Mate

Ouch, there go some great songs! But, we're not done. We're still at 27 songs, which means we have some hard choices to make now...

Round 4: Killing my darlings

Oh man, this is where I bristle at the 90-minute time limit. As a fan, I long to hear some of these songs live for the first time. Others, I've heard them live before and know they sound great. But, rules are rules. So here goes...

• For Your Own Good
• Home and Dry
• How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?
• I Get Excited (You Get Excited Too)
• Liberation
• The Night I Fell In Love
• Where the Streets Have No Name / I Can't Take My Eyes Off You

The Final Setlist

This leaves us with the following 20 songs, in alphabetical order:

• Always On My Mind
• Being Boring
• Can You Forgive Her?
• Go West
• Heart
• I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore
• It's a Sin
• Love, etc.
• Love is a Bourgeois Construct
• On Social Media
• Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)
• Pandemonium
• The Pop Kids
• Rent
• So Hard
• The Sodom and Gomorrah Show
• Suburbia
• This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave
• West End Girls
• What Have I Done to Deserve This?

This list meets the requirements laid out up front, without needing to eliminate one of the essential songs. Plus, it includes two songs from my Personal Picks, which makes it that much more lovely to me.

Coming up with this list was a fun and satisfying mental exercise. What would your dream setlist look like?

Summer 2014 playlist

Every few months, I send my parents a CD of music I'm enjoying. This is the CD for summer 2014. Thanks to rights limitations, it's missing "This Year" by Andreas Moe, which I've embedded below the playlist. Enjoy!

Electronic heartstrings

Bright Light Bright Light and Rowsy Bosch. I've written about both artists before, but given that they've both just released outstanding new songs, I feel compelled to write about them again in the hopes that my little blog might help spread the word about artists who deserve greater exposure.

A year ago, I called the debut album from Bright Light Bright Light a contender for album of the year. I will amend that slightly to remove "a contender for" and just call it my favorite album of 2012. I can still listen to it from start to finish and hear new details, enjoy it fully as if it were my first listen, and be sad when it seems to be over too soon. (Happily for me, Bright Light Bright Light are performing a few shows around the US, including a stop in San Francisco with Slow Knights later this month. I cannot wait!)

June 3 saw the release of the final single from Make Me Believe In Hope, the melancholic and melodic "Moves". The release includes a lovely video, along with a remix and two bonus tracks, "Blueprint" and "This Is Me Without You", the latter of which is the standout track.

With a tinkling piano to start, the song features a lovely build to cathartic rhythms with lyrics detailing with no small amount of sadness and acceptance the end of a relationship and the need to heal. "On your breath, even simple words / Felt much louder than the streets around me" goes one verse; "But I made my peace with what you couldn't say / Now I move on without you / And hope that you are doing the same" comes the refrain.

It is achingly beautiful, a fitting companion to the A-side, and the perfect conclusion to the Make Me Believe In Hope period. Buy the Moves EP on Amazon MP3.

---

Now let us turn our attention to the stellar track dropped this week from Rowsy Bosch featuring Jeb Havens. I wrote about their debut EP last October, and in the meantime they've been hard at work on new material.

"Turn Me On" is a suitable companion to "This Is Me Without You" in several ways: it's an uptempo electronic track, it features a male vocalist, and its lyrics are far more melancholy than the arrangement might lead you to expect. (This will come as no surprise to fans of Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Robyn, ... ). Where "This Is Me Without You" seeks to move past a failed relationship, however, "Turn Me On" seeks to make peace with a world that cannot or will not give everyone the room they need to breathe and realize their full potential.

"There are days / I just get home and it's on to the next beat / I can't shake this autopilot seeping into my life"

"There are wars being waged on the airwaves / Who am I supposed to be?"

This song marks an evolution in the band's sound, upping the tempo but holding on to the elements that give a song its heart: melody and lyricism. I am very eager to see what comes next for them!

Buy "Turn Me On" on Amazon MP3, and catch Rowsy Bosch featuring Jeb Havens at San Francisco Pride.

Concert Season!

April is upon us already, which can mean only one thing: concerts galore!

In a pattern in keeping with previous years, the spring thaw means a flurry of touring activity. With the abundance of riches the San Francisco Bay Area provides, it is not unheard of to forego one show in favor of seeing another, to have two artists I admire playing at different venues on the same night. This month's calendar is chock-full already:

• Lindsey Stirling at the Warfield. A fun, entertaining show! It's been great seeing Lindsey rise to fame thanks to that 21st-century invention, YouTube. April 3.
• Sparks at The Chapel. The day I discovered this show, I lost my shit. It's the first of two nights, and the second had already sold out. Even though it's a stripped-down format—not for nothing is the tour called Two Hands, One Mouth—Sparks is one of the bands I feared I'd never get to see live, despite having been a fan for nearly twenty years. So when I managed to regain my shit after reading the SonicLiving email, I promptly snagged a pair of tickets. April 9.
• Jessie Ware at The Independent. She's about to blitz North America with a re-release of her debut album, and I am very excited to hear what she's like in person. April 11.
• Purity Ring at The Independent. A recent discovery, they're not my usual cup of tea, but I'm warming up to them. April 16.
• Metric at the Fox Theatre. I need not say much about Metric; their most recent album is a delightful listen. I fell in love with them thanks to Black Sheep, which features to great effect in one of my favorite films of all time, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. April 18.

Phew! All that, and still nearly two weeks left to fill. It's not just a blip, though; the next month has shows from Little Boots, Marina and the Diamonds, and the xx...

As a bonus, give a listen to Sparks' 1995 album Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins, the album that made me fall in love with them. (Little did I know they'd already been around for over twenty years!) Can you guess who Russell is imagining a relationship with in "I Thought I Told You to Wait In the Car"?

New Hotness: April 2013

Apologies, Dear Reader. It's been a busy few months for me, leaving me precious little time to listen to music, much less write about it. And I'm not going to write about it right now; instead, I give you an Rdio playlist with ten recent releases that I am thoroughly enjoying right now. Yes, there's a guilty pleasure or two–hello, Jonas Brothers–but just because it's a guilty pleasure doesn't make it bad! Enjoy.

Favorite Tracks of 2012

2012 was a pretty great year for pop music, at least in terms of singles if not for entire albums. It was a year that saw a resurgence of male-led pop music (Bright Light Bright Light, Alex Clare), some strong sophomore efforts (Ellie Goulding, Sam Sparro, Adam Lambert, Bruno Mars), and some outstanding live shows in support of great new music (Dragonette, Beats Antique, The Ting Tings).

This year's best-of list includes several acts local to San Francisco, as I've had more opportunities to catch local bands than in prior years. The list includes quite a bit of music not available on Rdio; they are, of course, all worth checking out.

Tracks not available on Rdio:

• Clean Bandit – "UK Shanty" – listen – Buy on Amazon
• Disclosure & Sam Smith – "Latch" – listen – Buy on Amazon
• Foxes – "Youth" – listen
• Holy Ghost! – "It Gets Dark" – listen – Buy on Amazon
• Jessie Ware – "Wildest Moments" – video – Buy on Amazon
• Lindsey Stirling – "Elements" – video – Buy on iTunes
• Midi Matilda – "Day Dreams" – listen – Buy on BandCamp
• Noisettes – "Winner" – video
• Paradis – "Hémisphère" – listen – Buy on Beatport
• Rowsy Bosch feat. Jeb Havens – "We Are" – listen – Buy on Amazon
• Röyksopp feat. Susanne Sundfør – "Running to the Sea" – watch live performance – Buy on Röyksopp's site

Check out the rest in the embedded player:

2012: The year in gigs

January

• 6 – Return to Mono, Stripmall Architecture – Rickshaw Stop
• 19 – Katy B, The Good Natured – Rickshaw Stop

February

• 18 – Pomplamoose, A B and The Sea – Great American Music Hall

March

• 22 – 2:54, Stripmall Architecture – Rickshaw Stop
• 25 – The Ting Tings – The Fillmore
• 27 – Midi Matilda, Peck the Town Cryer, Beam – Cafe du Nord
• 30 – Beats Antique – The Fox Theatre

April

• 4 – Sam Sparro, Polaris at Noon – The Independent
• 5 – K-Flay – Rickshaw Stop
• 9 – Oh Land, Midi Matilda – The Independent
• 12 – Miike Snow, Penguin Prison – The Fox Theatre
• 27 – Tanlines – Rickshaw Stop

May

No shows, life demanded more attention than usual.

June

• 17 – Scissor Sisters – The Fox Theatre

July

• 11 – Marina and the Diamonds – The Fillmore

August

• 23 – Alex Clare – Mezzanine

September

• 11 – Hot Chip – The Fox Theatre
• 26 – Dragonette, The Knocks – Mezzanine

October

• 12 – The Presets – The Independent
• 19 – Major Lazer – The Fox Theatre
• 20 – Stars, Diamond Rings – The Fillmore
• 23 – Two Door Cinema Club, St. Lucia – The Fox Theatre
• 26 – Lights – Great American Music Hall

November

• 4 – Justice, Girls & Boomboxes – The Warfield
• 8 – Diamond Rings, Sky Ferreira – Rickshaw Stop

December

No shows, ERMAGERD HERLERDERS!

Fresh: Rowsy Bosch

Male-fronted synth-pop has been in short supply since the glory days of the 1980's. With rock's resurgence and hip-hop's rise to prominence, pop music seemed to be a "no boys allowed" club, at least when it came to lead vocal duty. And maybe there's something to that. Maybe women are more naturally given to lead a fabulous show, maybe audiences are more willing to accept a big show if there's a woman out front. Maybe synth-driven pop music is just a naturally better fit for a woman's voice. Who knows?

All I know is, the times, they are a-changin' – and that's a good thing! Already this year, we've seen the astonishing love letter to 1990's dance-pop that is Bright Light Bright Light's debut album, Make Me Believe In Hope. There's 9AM to 5PM, 5PM to Whenever by The Young Professionals, in which they take up the dance-pop baton from Information Society. And let us not forget Adam Lambert, Alex Clare, Pengiun Prison, perennial pop princes the Pet Shop Boys, and the next wave of boy bands including The Wanted and One Direction.

Now there's a new collaboration that should help put to bed the notion that synth-pop projects are better served with female vocalists. San Francisco's Rowsy Bosch is a partnership of singer/songwriter Jeb Havens and electronic music producer Oliver Voigt. They showed their intent and made waves with an excellent, heartfelt cover of "Shake the Disease" – a Depeche Mode original:

Their debut EP, Corralitos, is now available, and features five original songs, each with a different mood. They eschew driving 4/4 beats in favor of moody arrangements that give Havens's outstanding voice room to breathe. In fact, with the exception of "Space In Between," the template seems to be mid-career Depeche Mode: slower tempos, atmospheric electronics, a dark mood. The gritty "We Are" is a standout among quality songs.

The result is a strong collection of songs, each of which has its own identity but also feels a vital part of the whole. The emotions are raw and potent, the production crisp but restrained, the vocals beautiful.

Catch Rowsy Bosch live on 13 November at Beatbox in San Francisco, with Darling Gunsel and Adonisaurus.

• Buy Corralitos on Amazon or iTunes
• Rowsy Bosch Website
• Rowsy Bosch on Facebook

Autumn listening

I recognize I've been neglecting this blog recently; I chalk it up to a mixture of new job, busy social life, and simple laziness. But never fear! I continue to soak up as much new music as I can, and my concert calendar is looking pretty busy this month. In the next few weeks, I'll be seeing The Presets, Major Lazer, Stars, Diamond Rings, Two Door Cinema Club, and Lights.

In the coming days I'll have some posts about recent shows and albums that have stuck with me (I'm looking at you, Dragonette!), but in the meantime, please enjoy the latest mix CD I made for my parents. (See the summer mix CD I sent them.) It is missing one song, which is not in Rdio's catalog (yet): "Save Our Souls" by Garçon Garçon, which I strongly recommend buying.

Young Professionals : "9AM to 5PM, 5PM to Whenever"

I'm still really enjoying (and evangelizing, whenever possible) Bright Light Bright Light's debut album, which readers in North America can get for just $5 at 7Digital. But more great music has been released recently, and it merits some exposure.

The debut album from The Young Professionals is consistently interesting, often quirky, and thoroughly enjoyable. It's what I imagine Information Society might sound like if they'd gotten started 25 years later. Even the cover of Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" is good—in fact, it's vastly superior to the original. Check it out.