Welcome back to RAPP Radio Presents Timesesh! I'm DJ Cassanova, and today I'm going to present a hornsy set of songs [insert standard DJ air-horn noise here].
If you read that last sentence a little too quickly or were distracted by the imaginary air horn, please note that I said hornsy, not something else—it's perfectly understandable, of course, for you to expect a Cassanova to have a one-track mind—but I'll adjust the spelling just to be safe: horns-y.
Better? Good.
Not every song in this set will feature horns, but I love how brass adds a touch of class or a burst of sunshine to almost any song. (Warning: Even though this set will be horns-y, it won't include any tracks by Bruce Hornsby. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.)
Now let's kick this week's Timesesh off with "Time Sheet Shuffle."
(written and produced by Art Intelligence and Lewis Mercer*)
"Time Sheet Shuffle" was created on Suno.com, which, with a simple prompt, allows users to "make a song about anything." Earlier this month the AI-generated tune won a RAPP LABB contest to become Timesesh's new theme song. Give it up for DJ L Train, a.k.a. Lewis Mercer, everybody, and don't forget to fill out those time sheets!
Here are the lyrics:
Pencil in hand
It's Friday time
Creatives gather
They all align
Through numbers and spreadsheets
They must wade
Filling out those time sheets
They can't evade
Gotta track those hours
Make it quick
All the projects
They're making 'em stick
Tick-tock
The clock is counting loud
Creatives hustlin'
They join the crowd
Numbers and deadlines
They don't play
But creatives got the moves
They don't sway
Hitting the keyboard
Typing with flair
Filling out the time sheets
They don't care
(written by Harold Hudson, Shirley King, and William King; produced by James Anthony Carmichael, William King, Ronald LaPread, Thomas McClary, Walter Orange, Lionel Richie, and Milan Williams)
"Now I believe in what you're sayin' / I'm ten feet tall / This love don't need no explainin' / We've got it all …"
After my previous Timesesh set in February, I was chastised by both Hallie Hamilton* and Timesesh ringleader Martha Peces* for only giving "thumbs up" as a reaction on Teams, which apparently brings no one up.
Well, I'd like everyone to know that I've learned my lesson, and now I react with love, laughter, and, on occasion, a cloud if that's the way the wind is blowing here on Teams. If I previously gave a "thumbs up" to any of you, I promise from the bottom of my heart emoji that I was actually loving and/or laughing.
Or I've been dead inside all along and now I'm just faking being alive—your call.
"Lady (You Bring Me Up)," the sonic equivalent of a summer breeze, in my opinion, comes from the Commodores' final album with singer-pianist-saxophonist Lionel Richie, who left in 1982 for a superstar solo career. He wrote many of the band's best-known songs, including "Three Times a Lady"—he also wrote 1980's "Lady" for Kenny Rogers—but "Lady (You Bring Me Up)" was composed by the Commodores' trumpeter, William King; his wife, Shirley King; and trumpeter Harold Hudson, a member of the band's auxiliary horn section, the Mean Machine.
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P.S. Music can simultaneously lift your spirits and transport you back in time, and the same is true of photography. Which is another way of saying that I can't match the on-camera moves of former RAPP New York all-star Jony Bensadon or current all-stars Kathy Meehan* and Marc Pepper*, but since no one is able to resist still photos of dancing—all of the ocean (of sweat, in my case) but none of the motion!—I'd like to share a few with you. First up, a couple from my early years, when I let my mom, Lynn Cass, lead because (1) DJ Cassanova has always been a gentleman and (2) she was a lot taller than me at the time.
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(written by Darryl Gibson, et al.; produced by Shawn Thomas)
"You want lovin'? You don't have to ask when / Your man's a headache, I'll be your aspirin …"
For decades now, whenever I've been annoyed by something, MC Lyte's voice has popped into my head with the refrain "No, I'm not havin' it." Even so, I'd completely forgotten that her 1988 song "I'm Not Havin' It" is a duet with Positive K, who borrowed its battle-of-the-sexes premise and back-and-forth male-female vocal structure four years later for "I Got a Man." But—spoiler alert!—the female vocals on this track are also provided by Positive K; they're just pitch-shifted to sound like a woman's. You bet Positive K's got a man—himself!
I'll never get tired of "I Got a Man," in which the horns are mainly sampled from A Taste of Honey's 1980 single "Rescue Me" (portions of Crash Crew's "High Power Rap" and Junior's "Mama Used to Say" also make their way into Shawn Thomas's energetic production). In fact it's my favorite hip-hop song of all time. Actually, I'll go one step further: it's the greatest hip-hop song of all time.
Yeah, I said it! But because, as previously stated, DJ Cassanova is a gentleman who pretentiously refers to himself in the third person, he'll indulge you: what's your pick for the greatest hip-hop song of all time?
(written by George Hewitt and Benjamin Plant; produced by Plant and Aaron Shanahan)
"Under the stars I'm thinkin' over / All the ways to get you off my mind / I just can't get enough / Can't take it any longer / We're runnin' out of time …"
During the March 22 installment of Timesesh, Amanda Birmingham* played Miami Sound Machine's "Conga." Beautiful people of RAPP, if that song and Michael McDonald's "Sweet Freedom" had made a baby in the summer of '86, would it have grown up to be the That's Nice remix of Miami Horror's "Love Like Mine"? The question is admittedly nonsense, but the answer is undeniably yes.
Unlike Miami Sound Machine, Miami Horror formed 9,686 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, while producer Mario "That's Nice" Rodríguez hails from Mexico. His remix of "Love Like Mine" contains a jubilant "Woo!" repeated throughout the song, and not only do I like songs featuring horns, I like songs with "Woo!" and sometimes "Woo-hoo!" but also "Whoa-oh-oh!" from time to time and—shout-out to Jeffrey Osborne circa the summer of '86, but in this case, to paraphrase Maury Povich, he is not the father—"Woo-woo-woo!"
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In my kindergarten class photo from 1982—you can find me in the front row, third from left—I'm wearing a Miami Dolphins jacket. I have no idea why since I was born and raised in Macon, Georgia, and therefore I was born into an Atlanta Falcons family, but I do know that I could be a real Miami horror if I had to eat something I didn't like for dinner.
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It's time to pay the bills at RAPP Radio!
Friday Foster, based on the first nationally syndicated comic strip with a Black female as its main character, isn't as fondly remembered as other Pam Grier vehicles of the '70s, like Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), but I give this radio ad for the movie five stars. For one thing, it's the only time in recorded history that Jim Backus, who played Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island, has been described as part of "a heavy crowd"—unless you consider Mary Ann and the Professor to be particularly weighty—and it contains swaggering rhymes like "When some big-money dudes in the capital got too hungry for power, Friday made their plans turn sour," delivered by Adolph Caesar. (I particularly love how Thalmus Rasulala's name rolls off his tongue.)
Caesar narrated many other movie trailers and ads in the '70s and early '80s, but he also happened to be a veteran stage actor, and he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for 1984's A Soldier's Story, adapted from Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier's Play, which debuted off-Broadway in '81 with a cast that included Caesar, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Friedman (Frank Vernon on Succession), and Denzel Washington, who also reprised his role in the film version.
(written by Nathaniel Irvin III, Charles Joseph II, Janelle Monáe, and Antwan Patton; produced by Irvin, Joseph, and Monáe)
"When you get elevated / They love it or they hate it / You dance up on them haters / Keep gettin' funky on the scene …"
Pam Grier, one of the stars of 1971's The Big Doll House, sang "Long Time Woman" in that women-in-prison exploitation film. Twenty-six years later Quentin Tarantino included the song in Jackie Brown, his Grier-headlining homage to "blaxploitation" movies like Friday Foster.
Janelle Monáe (whose 2018 single "Make Me Feel" was played in Emily Lichtenstein's* Timesesh on April 5) hasn't appeared in one of Tarantino's movies yet, but for someone who was primarily known as a musician just a decade ago, she's already had an impressive acting career, with credits like 2016 Best Picture winner Moonlight, Hidden Figures (2016), the second season of Amazon Prime's Homecoming (2020), and Glass Onion (2022). (Monáe is nonbinary but goes by both she/her and they/them pronouns. However, she's told reporters that her preferred pronoun is "freeassmuthaf**ka.") Monáe's music caught the attention of Antwan "Big Boi" Patton in the mid-2000s; he subsequently featured her on the soundtrack album of Idlewild, the 2006 movie starring Patton and his then-partner in Outkast, André Benjamin.
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"This ain't no acrobatics," Monáe sings in "Tightrope," adding, "You either follow or you lead." But when you're dancing with both a six-year-old and a four-year-old, as I did in July 2011 with my nieces Olivia and Sophie, respectively, you lead until you follow because, as the T-shirts proclaim, girls run the world.
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(written by Jason Kay; produced by Kay and Al Stone)
"Dance / Nothin' left for me to do but dance / Off these bad times I'm goin' through / Just dance / Got canned heat in my heels tonight, baby …"
Speaking of the silver screen, how many of you first heard Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat" during the climax of 2004's Napoleon Dynamite? I was surprised to find it there, but I was also glad to see the song finally getting some attention here in the U.S., because it definitely didn't make waves upon release in the summer of '99 like "Virtual Insanity" did two years earlier, dooming the English group to one-hit-wonder status stateside. But don't cry for Jamiroquai: They've been huge everywhere else. They sleep juuuuust fine at night on their piles of cash.
Like "Lady (You Bring Me Up)" and "Tightrope," "Canned Heat" has strings attached: the strings attached to violins, cellos, etc., to be specific. And, just as I like songs with horns and, as mentioned, songs with a "Woo!" or two, I like songs with strings. No horns in "Canned Heat," but, luckily for me, Jamiroquai frontman Jason Kay lets loose a bonus "Woo!" in this dance-floor-scorching disco throwback.
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My parents (my dad's name is Mike, for those keeping score at home) have also enjoyed dancing with my nieces, shown here in 2013. Grade schoolers' canned heat can only be contained for so long.
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(written by Mark Holding, Robbie Nevil, and Duncan Pain; produced by Alex Sadkin and Phil Thornalley)
"Say, J.J., don't you know / When you're down / There's just one way to go …"
Who here loves French music? Well, then you're bound to be disappointed by "C'est la Vie," but if you like blue-eyed soul with a cha-cha rhythm, you might enjoy this number as much as I have since it blanketed Top 40 radio and MTV in early '87, eventually peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100.
I didn't know until I started researching this set of songs for Timesesh that "C'est la Vie" was originally recorded in 1984 by Beau Williams, a gospel singer from Houston who went secular during the Reagan years, for an album titled Bodacious! Am I the only one who has a problem with that title? It obviously should've been Beaudacious! Alas, a missed opportunity.
Before Robbie Nevil reclaimed "C'est la Vie" for himself (he reportedly had Kool & the Gang in mind when he composed it with Mark Holding and Duncan Pain), he wrote for artists ranging from El DeBarge, the Pointer Sisters, Al Jarreau, and Sheena Easton to The A-Team's Mr. T and future Emmy Award-winning Abbott Elementary costar Sheryl Lee Ralph.
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A picture's worth a thousand words. But after my parents paid for this one at Sears Portrait Studio in 1978, it was only worth two: "No refunds."
As Robbie Nevil would say, c'est la vie.
By the way, if you find my dead toddler eyes to be unsettling, rest assured I didn't grow up to be a sociopath … but isn't that just the sort of thing a sociopath would say?
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(written by Ben Darwish, Mandy Lee, Frans Mernick, and Cal Shapiro; produced by Etienne Bowler, Darwish, Mernick, and Dylan William)
"I deserve congratulations / 'Cause I came out the other side / I've been havin' revelations / And I'm gon' let them shine …"
The name of the Big Apple-based MisterWives is a play on the polygamist term "sister wives" (or maybe just a goof on the TLC reality show of the same name?). The band's bass player is William Hehir, which probably means he's a distant cousin of Charlotte O'Hehir*, and that probably means he can help me make my dream of making Charlotte a JoJo Siwa-style pop star who goes by the name Charlotte OH! a reality. Thanks in advance for doing all the necessary legwork to track down your cousin, Charlotte, but if you tell him, "Honestly, I'm just interested in singing Irish sea shanties," I'm going to be very upset. Stick to the simple 28-step career plan we discussed, woman.
According to my phone, I Shazam'd "Superbloom," the title track of MisterWives's third album, on June 9, 2021. I'm pretty sure I heard it at Target, where I Shazam most songs that catch my ear, but where do you Shazam most songs? I'm curious—but if you only Shazam the Irish sea shanties you hear in retail stores, never mind.
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"Superbloom" is a cathartic song. We've all had our low points in life, but it ain't over 'til it's over, so we should celebrate our victories.
I don't think anyone feels like puberty is a time of superbloomin', but once you're on the other side of it, great things can happen. I mean, look at me—I had zero confidence at age 13, but one year later I was costarring with RAPP Radio favorite Britney Spears on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club. When you wish upon a star your dreams come true, y'all.
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In 1963 Bill Backer, an ad executive with McCann-Erickson, came up with the tagline "Things go better with Coke," and two years later the soft-drink giant began enlisting the top musical acts of the day to record 60-second ads that referenced their own hit songs. One such artist was Fontella Bass, whose "Rescue Me" was a smash in '65 (despite its title, that's all it shares with A Taste of Honey's aforementioned song of the same name).
The number-one R&B hit—and top-five pop hit—was recorded at the studios of Chess Records, located at 2120 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago, and featured Minnie Riperton, later famous for 1975's "Lovin' You" (she's also Maya Rudolph's mother), on backing vocals and, five years before he formed Earth, Wind & Fire, Maurice White on drums. As for Bill Backer, he created other successful ad campaigns for Coca-Cola, including one that shows up in the final scene of Mad Men's 2015 series finale.
(written by Nic Dalton; produced by Evan Dando, Bruce Robb, Dee Robb, and Joe Robb)
"I'm thrilled to be in the same post code as you / I'll come and visit, maybe never go …"
I love handclaps in songs almost as much as I love horns, strings, and a "Woo!" or two dozen. That's right, DJ Cassanova is giving you the claps [insert standard DJ air-horn noise here]! No, not the clap, singular—please stop making me put words in my mouth—so let me go ahead and trademark it: The Claps®.
Since their formation in Boston in '86 while still in high school, the Lemonheads have had a different lineup on each album, with singer-guitarist Evan Dando being the only constant. For the recording of their breakthrough LP, 1992's It's a Shame About Ray, the band consisted of Dando, Juliana Hatfield on bass and backing vocals, and David Ryan on drums. (Dando had played bass on 1989's Earwig, the second album by Hatfield's band, Blake Babies.)
I think Dando was a hell of a songwriter in his prime, but "Kitchen" was written by Australian bassist Nic Dalton, who joined the Lemonheads for the It's a Shame About Ray tour and stuck around to play on 1993's Come On Feel the Lemonheads, at which point (the) Lemonheads officially became the Lemonheads, something (the) Commodores never officially did, as far as I know.
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I haven't seen the Lemonheads in concert, but I've seen Dando (with Hatfield on bass, at Chicago's Taste of Randolph festival in 2003 two months after I moved here), and since he essentially is the Lemonheads, good enough for me. I've never been to a Jamiroquai concert, though, and despite my mild agoraphobia and claustrophobia, I wish I'd made an attempt in the late '90s—I bet they put on a good show.
I took the following photo of a pencil case at the tchotchkes-galore store Foursided in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood last summer when my younger niece, now 16, was visiting. Once again, I'm curious:
(1) who put on the best concert you've ever attended, and
(2) who do you wish you'd seen in concert?
(I answered the latter, but, again, for those keeping score, my answer for the former is Daryl Hall & John Oates, before they'd lost that lovin' feeling altogether, in August 2002 at Chastain Park Amphitheater in Atlanta, with Todd Rundgren as the opener.)
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(written by William Shelby, Rickey Smith, and Kevin Spencer; produced by Leon Sylvers III)
"With love nothing is certain / You've got to go for it / When you feel it / Everybody, everybody needs somebody to love / And I choose you, baby …"
Shalamar, like the Lemonheads, had numerous members from 1977 to '90, but the "classic" lineup of Jeffrey Daniel, Howard Hewett, and Jody Watley, which held steady from '79 to '83, is the one fans remember most fondly. With Leon Sylvers III as their producer—with his family's group, the Sylvers, he'd already topped the charts with "Boogie Fever" in '76—the trio generated hit singles like "The Second Time Around," "A Night to Remember," "Dead Giveaway," and "Make That Move," which, like the Lemonheads' "Kitchen," has The Claps® [insert standard DJ air-horn noise here, and now that we've followed the rule of threes to its natural conclusion, that's enough of that].
Daniel and Watley got their start as dancers on Soul Train, which began in Chicago in 1970 on WCIU Channel 26—it was broadcast from the 43rd floor of the Board of Trade building in the Loop—before entering first-run syndication, from Los Angeles, in '71. (The local, black-and-white version of the show continued to air until '76, yet no footage of it exists, unfortunately, presumably because VCRs weren't commonplace in American homes until the '80s.)
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I made moves in college, but only the most nonthreatening of dance moves. As a member of the University of Georgia's Ballroom Performance Group, I got to lightly touch young women who never would've let me do so otherwise and travel in 1998 to Canada, where my dance partner and I came in seventh in an international west-coast swing competition. Impressive, huh? Thank you so much, and not just for not asking me, "There were only seven couples competing, weren't there?"
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(written and produced by Dann Hume and Laura Mvula)
"Take all of me / I wanna fall into a synergy / Give in to the feeling / You know there's nowhere else you'd rather be …"
In an interview with the UK's DIY magazine about her album Pink Noise, Laura Mvula, who was born in 1986 in Birmingham, England, said, "I decided that I was going to draw on my childhood—which I spent constantly raiding my mum's wardrobe—and all the pop icons that I grew up listening to: Prince, Michael and Janet Jackson, Earth, Wind & Fire, Peter Gabriel, Whitney [Houston]." And if Houston had teamed up in '87 with the Phenix Horns, the former horn section for Earth, Wind & Fire, after they'd nearly upstaged Phil Collins on 1985's "Sussudio"—trombonist Louis Satterfield played bass on Fontella Bass's "Rescue Me" 20 years earlier—the result might've sounded like the album's irrepressible title track.
In case you're wondering, pink noise has more bass than white noise. White noise, according to Joy Chevalier* in response to my previous Timesesh, is "what I call your writing, Robert."
(written by Elizabeth Ziman; produced by Tony Berg, Dan Molad, and Ziman)
"Don't have to wonder what they're laughin' about / Only matters if you swallow it down / I don't care about what anyone believes / I only care about you and me …"
If a radio station has "Lite" in its name, you can be pretty sure it plays soft rock (a.k.a. adult contemporary, a.k.a. easy listening) the first 10 months of every year, with the final 2, of course, being reserved for nonstop Christmas music. Soft rock doesn't always get the respect it deserves, if you ask me, but when it works it really works, as is the case with this single by Elizabeth & the Catapult. It reminds me a bit of Sara Bareilles's "Love Song," which all of the Lite FM stations understandably went bananas for in 2007 and '08.
Speaking of Sara(h), Sarah Fry* asked me earlier this week if I could use AI to create a virtual dancer in order to distract listeners from all this verbiage. And if Charlotte OH! sabotages the 28-step career plan I so carefully crafted for her, I may need Sarah Nozick* to take on the assignment of becoming a semi-nihilistic, Billie Eilish-style pop star named Sarah NO!
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And speaking of 2007, because I spent a lot of time as a kid listening to soft rock on EZ Hits 108 with my mom as she drove me to and from Sears Portrait Studio, for Mother's Day that year I bought her Time-Life's Classic Soft Rock collection—168 soft-rock classics of the '70s and '80s on 10 CDs, plus a bonus CD of hits from 1977, all for a low, low price!—after I saw a half-hour infomercial on TV hosted by the two members of Air Supply and a woman named Angela they didn't seem to like very much. When your band's name is Air Supply, you're apparently allowed to deny oxygen to everyone else in the room.
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(written by Ray Barretto; produced by Jerry Masucci)
"If you would take my hand / If you would dare to see / The beauty in this land / That love can set free / A force to lift us all / It's called humanity / And it's there for you and me …"
Conga king Ray Barretto, a New Yorker with Puerto Rican roots, helped popularize Latin soul, or boogaloo, in the 1960s after playing with legends like Tito Puente. In 1967 he signed with salsa label Fania Records, where he recorded the album Together. Is the title track the hornsiest song in this installment of Timesesh? Why yes it is, thanks to the sensational trumpet blasts of Roberto Rodriguez and Papy Roman.
You can't spell "humanity" without "unity," but there isn't always harmony between those two words, historically speaking. With another presidential election approaching, however, let's heed the words of Ray Barretto and "get together before it's too late, everybody."
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Eight years earlier Hamilton Holmes and she broke barriers and made headlines across the country by becoming the first Black students to enroll at the University of Georgia, where she met my uncle, Walter Stovall; they were married two years later but had to do so in Detroit due to interracial marriages being outlawed in the south at the time. In a statement to the press Walter wrote, "Our understanding is that the institution of marriage is one which is blessed from above, and we feel that race can play no part in that sanction, though some areas of our country seem to try to make it so."
Charlayne and Walter's daughter, Suesan, was born in November of '63. Here's a photo of my cousin around the time of her third birthday, with Charlayne on her left and my grandmother, Martha McKay Stovall, on her right. (Charlayne and Walter divorced in '71, but both remarried.)
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(written by Victor Carstarphen, Gene McFadden, and John Whitehead; produced by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff)
"There's no reason for a few of us to demonstrate / When we need everybody to participate …"
Back to Ray Barretto and "Together" for a second: How do we get together before it's too late? With people power.
Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, the founders of Philadelphia International Records, the nexus of Philly soul in the '70s, weren't afraid to make music with a message. Philadelphia International was home to artists like the O'Jays, Teddy Pendergrass, and Billy Paul, whose song "Me and Mrs. Jones," a number-one R&B and pop hit in 1972, explored the still-taboo subject of adultery, at least as far as Top 40 radio was concerned.
Paul shines on "People Power," but the MVPs of the track, in my opinion, are, from left to right in the PowerPoint deck on your screen, Carla Benson, Barbara Ingram, and Evette Benton, dubbed the Sweethearts of Sigma because they added backing vocals to countless songs at Philadelphia's Sigma Sound Studios, including the Spinners' "Could It Be I'm Falling in Love" (1972), a staple of EZ Hits 108's rotation in the '80s.
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Have I bragged before about how I made leisure suits all the rage in the late '70s? Soon enough adults were wearing them too, including Don Knotts on the sitcom Three's Company. (Like I said before, I'm not a sociopath. My wife, who's a therapist, diagnosed me as just a garden-variety raging narcissist. What a relief.)
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This public service announcement won a Clio Award in recognition of its voice-over and copywriting. Public libraries, like many other democratic institutions, are under attack these days, so let's do what we can to keep them healthy! (It'll make me less preachy, for one thing.)
I have a master's degree in library and information science, but because I only put it to use in the working world for a total of 10 months a decade ago—working for an actual raging narcissist at a local museum, no less, but since he's only 79 years old, he has a good chance of being elected president one day—you have to suffer along as I justify my remaining student loans by digging up various archival facts about musicians and their songs.
You're suffering beautifully, for what it's worth.
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Attention, all you fashionistas with binoculars listening to Timesesh right now, no doubt you noticed earlier in the set that I wore a Star Wars belt in my kindergarten class photo—all class photos at Alexander II were taken in the library, or "media center"—but in my first-grade class photo—I owned that front-row, third-from-left spot—you'll appreciate that I followed then-current trends and switched to a Pac-Man belt.
Sashay! Shantay!
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(written by David Foster, Kenny Loggins, and Michael McDonald; produced by Bruce Botnick and Loggins)
"Does anything last forever? / I don't know / Baby, we're near the end …"
Yes, Mr. Loggins, we are near the end of this Timesesh. But my first name ain't "Baby." It's Janet—"Ms. Jackson" if you're nasty!
You may be more of a fan of Kenny Loggins's movie-soundtrack classics "Footloose," "Danger Zone," or "I'm Alright," or possibly "This Is It" or "What a Fool Believes," both of which he cowrote with Michael McDonald and the latter of which he recorded before McDonald and the Doobie Brothers made it a hit, but for me his masterpiece is another cowrite with McDonald (and superproducer David Foster), "Heart to Heart." It came out around the time I was sporting that Pac-Man belt, so the lyrics didn't mean much to me, but I knew in my milk-drenched bones it was an emotional roller coaster, and, as with a lot of songs I liked as a child, it made me think, Being an adult must be so cool!
Yes, I was naive.
The song's sax solo is performed by David Sanborn, who died on May 12 at age 78. (R.I.P., sir!) You might recognize his distinctive alto-sax sound from tunes like David Bowie's "Young Americans" (recorded at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia), Stevie Wonder's "Tuesday Heartbreak," and James Taylor's cover of Marvin Gaye's "How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)."
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I'm going to go full Casey Kasem now and make a special American Top 40 dedication to my wife, Tamara, the therapist who does not endorse yet fully accepts my raging narcissism. We got married on July 1 last year, but before that we had many heart-to-hearts over the years, with topics ranging from "Robert, why do you like soft rock?" to "Tamara, how can you not like soft rock?" We still don't see eye to eye on that topic, but I think we can manage heart to heart for the long run.
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(written and produced by O'Kelly Isley, Ronald Isley, and Rudolph Isley)
"Don't wanna make you feel / I'm neglecting you / I'd love to spend more time / Oh, but I got so many things to do …"
For the final song of this set, here's a gentle reminder that we still have work to do: we all have to submit our time sheets by the end of the day.
Sometimes I think Ronald Isley might be the greatest male singer of all time. His performance on "Work to Do" is a little shout-ier than a compliment like that might lead you to expect, but the Isleys were the first group, after all, to score a hit with "Twist and Shout" (1962) in addition to writing and recording "Shout" (1959). "Work to Do" was covered by Average White Band in 1974 and by Vanessa Williams in '91, who wisely changed the lyric "Keep your love lights burning / And a little food hot in my plate" to "Keep your love lights burning / You gotta have a little faith." Keep your own food hot, gentlemen!
"Work to Do" was the Isley Brothers' last single as a trio: in 1973 they moved from Buddah Records to CBS/Epic and made younger brothers Ernie (guitar) and Marvin (bass) official members along with brother-in-law Chris Jasper (keyboards), although all three had been playing on the older Isleys' records for years at that point, including "Work to Do."
Thank you for listening. Your host next Friday will be DJ Fabuloso, a.k.a. Fabricio Thomas*! And since I'll be on vacation that day—Fabricio, please don't take it personally that I'm out of town whenever you're in charge—I'll go ahead and promote June 14's Timesesh as well, when your host will be DJ Jazzy Yazzy, a.k.a. two-time RAPP Radio 2022 veteran Yasmire Wiley*!
(Click here for a Spotify playlist, minus the radio ads and PSA I played, of today's Timesesh.)
* Names of RAPPers have been changed to protect the innocent just in case the innocent don't want to find their names on a random blog during a random Google search.
