How one chooses to celebrate Easter is a personal decision. Some people will surround themselves with Easter Lilies, load up on candy, go on Easter Egg Hunts (sounds unnecessarily violent, if you ask me), get together with family for a traditional ham dinner, and many will go to religious services. There are countless options. Naturally, this music geek needs a playlist.
Patti Smith’s Easter in its entirety? Too easy.
While I will always love Kate Bush’s Lily and some tracks from Natalie Merchant’s Tigerlily are great but an entire playlist about flowers is just too…floral, I guess you might say.
How about candy? Staying on the Natalie Merchant train of thought, we could play Candy Everybody Wants. Or better yet, the Iggy Pop/Kate Pierson duet titled Candy. “Candy, Candy, I can’t let you go!” crooned Iggy. I think after a song or two, I’d need a trip to the dentist though.
Easter Egg Hunts? I’m sure there’s a Roxy Music video of Bryan Ferry on some fox hunt and then returning to the lodge donning his smoking jacket and sipping Courvoisier but that doesn’t scream Easter to me.
Ham dinner? Didn’t Miss Piggy sing with REM once? No?
Religious services? If this were a classical music blog we could certainly fill it with Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Easter Oratorio, or Hayden’s The Last Seven Words of Our Savior On the Cross. All are wonderful pieces, but I’m not feeling classical.
I need something with a jangly, pop sensibility. Something that’s at times a little obscure but still fills that sugar-craving sweet tooth. Something I can softly bop my head along with that won’t put me in the chiropractor’s office on Monday (getting old is overrated!). I need something that screams EASTER!
I need…Mitch Easter! YES! Mitch Easter is the phenomenal producer who brought us the first EP and two REM albums and has worked with dozens of other renowned artists ranging from Game Theory to Marshall Crenshaw to Pavement to Ben Folds Five. He was in an early band with Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple who went on to form the The dB’s. His stamp on music has been exceptional. He even fronted the outstanding Let’s Active.
This will work. Here are my top five Mitch Easter tunes, either produced or performed, to celebrate Easter!
5. REM – Radio Free Europe introduced us to REM and, for many of us, the music of the 80s and 90s would never be the same.
4. The Connells – Scotty’s Lament off 1987’s Boylan Heights was a staple of my college radio show in the late 80s.
3. Velvet Crush – Hold Me Up comes from the Providence band’s second album, Teenage Symphonies to God (1994), and was the first of two albums produced by Easter. Crunchy guitars. Sweet harmonies. These guys screamed mid 90s Alternative rock at its peak!
2. Helium – Leon’s Space Song is the second track off the 1997 album, The Magic City, from the Boston band. Mary Timony’s vocals are all at once powerful, haunting, beautiful, and vulnerable. I love this song!
1. Let’s Active – Every Dog Has His Day is the perfect culmination of a playlist properly celebrating Easter by embracing the work of Mitch Easter. That signature guitar sound runs through all of his work. I could listen to it all day, preferably surrounded by Easter Lilies while gorging on chocolate and blowing off Easter Egg Hunts after a tasty ham dinner.
Happy Easter!
Duke of Dead Air 