So…as you might have noticed I’ve been away for most of the month of August, both here and on the air at KPFK. KPFK was planned, this was not and it has to do with the blur that has been this month of August with tons of personal things going on and the fact that my laptop basically gave up on me part way through the month. Now that summer is almost over, another school year has just begun and I’m about to return to the KPFK airwaves, it should be back to business as usual here on the blog (strangely though August has been the most visited month in the blog’s history…perhaps I should go away more often?).
I return here with a track that I first heard when Morgan Rhodes filled in for me a few weeks ago. Driving around LA (a bit surreal listening to your own show when you’re not on it) I became increasingly enamored with the song she was playing. At first I thought it might have been some obscure track from the Soulqarians with Badu on vocals, but the singer did things that Badu doesn’t and perhaps can’t. The phrasing was a bit more left of center than I’d expect from her and so I knew that I had a real mystery on my hands. At the break Morgan solved it for me saying the band was Hiatus Kaiyote, they were from Australia and they’d just played a show in LA at the Bootleg Theater. While I was kicking myself for missing the show (and for being pretty late on this train, since AntVala and other KCRW’ers had been up on it since last year!) I was happy to learn that the record from the group had been released by Salaam Remi’s label Flying Buddah earlier in the summer. Since that first moment I’ve been crushing pretty hard on this song, a late challenger for the song of the summer for me. If you haven’t heard it yet, welcome to your latest musical crush as well and look for big things from this group in the near future.