Aaron Keck’s Live & Local Top 100 Countdown continues! You can check out the complete series here, only on Chapelboro.com!
Now that we’re approaching the top of our list, we’re going to see more and more of the best known, most influential artists in Chapel Hill music history, including a couple with multiple songs in the top 30. If you’ve been waiting for Superchunk or Squirrel Nut Zippers or Southern Culture on the Skids, your wait is over – and we’re just getting warmed up.
Reminder of the ground rules: Orange, Durham, and Chatham-based artists only; no more than three songs per artist; covers are allowed but originals are preferred; and the songs have to be radio-friendly.
And away we go!
30. Django Haskins, “World Inside” (2018)
“Now that I am home, there’s a world to see…”
I did promise you a happier Django Haskins a few weeks ago, right? Here he is. With the Old Ceremony, Haskins was always in his glory when he got a little dark and twisted, but he mellowed for his 2018 solo album Shadowlawn – and he’s at his best right here, with a simple toe-tapping acoustic guitar and sweet lyrics about a once-incorrigible rover who finally finds peace after starting a family and settling down. It’s Haskins’ own version of “Watching the Wheels,” and it’s every bit that song’s equal.
29. The Beast, “Movement” (2008)
“Long as some of us suffer, there is freedom for none of us…”
Scion of a famous artistic family, founder of Durham’s Blackspace and the (Emmy-winning) Beat Making Lab, and now a Durham City Council member just for good measure, Pierce Freelon has also been a local hip-hop icon for over a decade. Lots to choose from his body of work, but I’ll go back to The Beast’s very first release in 2008 and this ode to intersectional social-justice movements – with lyrics that are timelier now than ever.
“Movement” is a fine song from the start, but it doesn’t really take off until two minutes in, when a gospel choir kicks in with a neat bit of wordplay that adds a profound extra layer. We may call it a ‘movement,’ but it’s not about moving, it’s about claiming agency; it’s not about action, it’s about acting. Important distinction.
28. Trailer Bride, “Hope Is A Thing With Feathers” (2003)
“And never stops at all…”
Trailer Bride had gone through several lineup changes by the time they got around to their fifth and final album – but their creepy Gothic vibe remained the same throughout, and here they honed it to perfection with their take on Emily Dickinson, the creepy Gothic poet par excellence. “Hope” kicks off with a wonderfully apocalyptic little guitar riff, Daryl White (who wrote the music) joins in with some killer bass – and then in comes the great Melissa Swingle, knocking it out of the park with a spectral, transcendent voice and an absolutely shivers-down-your-spine saw solo. (The best saw solo in music history, I’m pretty sure.)
And I mean, of course Trailer Bride would mesh perfectly with Emily Dickinson, right? There have been a few iconic take-a-great-poem-and-set-it-to-music songs, but “Hope” may well top them all. Eat your heart out, Sheryl Crow.
27. Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, “Dwight Yoakam” (2015)
“Drank the whiskey this morning ‘cause my baby, she ain’t coming home…”
There are several valid contenders for this crown, but Sarah Shook might be the best local female vocalist of all time. With a quavering voice that’s “part punk sneer and part haunting vibrato” and both “vulnerable and menacing,” she always lands in that perfect midpoint between classic punk and old-school country, a hardened I-don’t-care attitude that somehow coexists in harmony with a huge, aching heart that’s forever being broken. “Dwight Yoakam” is Shook at her best, a devastating, gut-wrenching, booze-drenched, nonchalantly queer masterpiece of a breakup song about a woman who “took every last one of my good years” and then abruptly dumps her for “some big country star.”
A country star who’s “like” Dwight Yoakam, but – not actually Dwight Yoakam. Come to think of it, we never do find out who he really is. Shook says this song is based on a true story, so it’s got to be somebody. (George Strait? Five bucks says it’s George Strait.)
26. Superchunk, “Driveway to Driveway” (1994)
“And the names were all we knew, and the names were all erased…”
Whatever you say about the Chapel Hill music scene, it always comes back to Superchunk. Any number of songs belong on this list – “Hyper Enough,” “Detroit Has A Skyline,” you can add your own personal favorites – but “Driveway to Driveway” is the apex, the best work of a great band at its mid-90s peak. Slightly off kilter but always precise, sardonic and tongue-in-cheek and youthfully nihilistic but also sincere and sentimental and strangely nostalgic, “Driveway” encapsulates everything Mac and Laura and Jim and Jon were and were capable of being. Is it a thinly-veiled ode to Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance’s breakup? Or is it more than that? Yes, and no, and every answer in between: like much of Superchunk’s greatest work, “Driveway” is about nothing and everything, all at once. All together now: “da-da-da da da da da, da-da-da da da da da…”
For an extra bonus, check out the Two Dollar Pistols’ countrified version of “Driveway,” recorded for John Plymale’s benefit album Songs for Sixty-Five Roses – the best local cover of a local song ever recorded.
25. Southern Culture on the Skids, “Camel Walk” (1995)
“Baby, will you eat that there snack cracker in that special outfit for me, please?”
To put together this list, I’ve listened and re-listened to all these songs and sat here at this computer, sometimes for an hour, really trying to dissect what it is about each one that makes them special and great. Sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint That Thing that sets a song apart.
And then there’s “Camel Walk,” which is just total, wild, crazy-ass fun. What’s your favorite part? The guitar riff? The cracking whip? Rick Miller’s howling? Take your pick. What’s your favorite lyric? That opening line? The shout-out to Little Debbie? “The way you eat that oatmeal pie makes me just wanna die”? This song is two and a half minutes of pure, grease-drenched, maniacal Southern psychobilly trailer park joy, and I love every second of it. Miller and Dave Hartman and Mary Huff are legends, and this is SCOTS at its absolute best.
“Camel Walk” has an extra-special place in the local scene too, for one very, very big reason: in 2014 it got its own Weird Al parody. There is literally no higher honor in music.
24. The Moaners, “Too Many People” (2005)
“Antisocial’s what they say, but more keep coming every day…”
So it’s Melissa Swingle Week here on the countdown? Okay, I’m cool with that. Trailer Bride split after 2003, but Swingle didn’t skip a beat, forming the Moaners with drummer Laura King and picking up right where she left off. “Too Many People,” off their debut album Dark Snack, isn’t just a perfect anthem for our age of social distancing (though yes, it’s 100 percent that too) – it’s also a damn near perfect rock song, with brilliant guitar licks and King’s spectacular drums backing Swingle’s distinctive, deadpan voice and memorable, wickedly funny lyrics.
It’s also Rick Miller Week here on the countdown, by the way: SCOTS’ frontman was this song’s producer. (Which makes sense: the fewer the people, the more oatmeal pie.)
23. Bat Fangs, “Wolfbite” (2018)
“You turn my day to night…”
Is this Melissa Swingle Week? Rick Miller Week? How about Laura King Week? Technically Bat Fangs is only half-local – singer/guitarist Betsy Wright is from DC – but that’s our friend King again behind the kit, and if you thought she was great on “Too Many People” (NARRATOR: She was.), wait till you hear her blow you away on “Wolfbite,” a wild, gleeful, supernatural headbanger about obsessive love that’s perfect for Halloween or any other day of the year. Wright’s fantastic too, disappearing into her possessed protagonist while ripping the air to shreds on guitar.
Bat Fangs was an 80s rock revivalist project, but “Wolfbite” far surpasses just about every song and artist King and Wright were trying to honor. This is how it’s done, y’all.
22. Loamlands, “What Kind of Love” (2016)
“What kind of love doesn’t treat you kind?”
There’s a concept in political theory called ‘rooted cosmopolitanism,’ the idea that someone can be a citizen of the world, identify with all of humanity and embrace the purely universal, while also staying aware of and being true to their own particular roots, knowing and accepting and loving the fact that each of our own unique backgrounds makes us who we are. Likewise, Kym Register’s music is firmly rooted in a particular time and place and personal history – American, Southern, unapologetically queer – and yet somehow, simultaneously, timeless and transcendent. Just like the great women who’ve inspired them: Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Loretta Lynn. (Register doesn’t mention Melissa Etheridge, but I’d put her in that same group too.)
“What Kind of Love” was not the biggest hit off Loamlands’ first album Sweet High Rise – that’d be “Little River,” also terrific – but this is the one that always breaks me. Co-written with Will Hackney (and featuring Brad and Phil Cook of Megafaun in the band), “What Kind of Love” begins with a simple country melody and builds a powerful story about a person urging their friend to escape an abusive relationship – and get some justice for good measure. The timelessness of it is what gets me, though: I’ve double-checked and triple-checked to make sure it’s not some oft-covered 70s standard I’d somehow missed. It’s not – this is a Register/Hackney original – but once you hear it, you’ll swear you’ve known it all your life. “What Kind of Love” is a stone-cold classic. May it live forever.
21. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Hell” (1996)
“In the afterlife, you could be headed for the serious strife…”
What’s left to say about this one? Back in my day, every weeknight at 6:00, MTV would show an hour of 90s videos, and for 16-year-old Aaron it was always a treat when “Hell” came on. The video was fine and all (though the Lawrence Welk reference went right over my head), but the music was the star: the song was so damn catchy and the band was clearly having so much fun. From a national perspective, the Zippers arrived at exactly the right time to catch the wave of the mid-90s swing revival, but the local scene had been building up to this for years, ever since the Pressure Boys brought in the horns for “Where the Cowboys Went.” This might be the biggest hit Chapel Hill has ever produced; if so, it’s a well-deserved, well-earned honor.
Next week: Sylvan Esso plays the body game, the dB’s break up with you…and we finally allow some covers in.
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