Andyland, USA

Here it is universe, the 100 songs I feel everyone should hear before they die. I went with my gut, and only allowed myself one song per artist. Not always going with the obvious choices either. I'll be explaining why these songs over the next few months in my column. To make everyone happy, and for those who wish to follow along, I've made the list as a Spotify playlist. The only caveat is the Spotify list is missing two songs, due to the limitations of their catalog (Sledgehammer & Ticket to Ride). Link to it is below the list. Enjoy! Note: this list is in no particular order, even though it is numbered. Walk On By - Dionne Warwick My World Fell Down — Sagittarius  God Only Knows — The Beach Boys The Boulevard of Broken Dreams— Tony Bennett One for my Baby — Frank Sinatra Lush Life — John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman Good Golly Miss Molly — Little Richard Johnny B. Goode — Chuck Berry Bo Diddley — Bo Diddley Rave On — Buddy Holly Rumble — Link Wray I’m ...

Record Store Day is this Saturday, and I’m really excited about it.  Even more than usual, I’m really looking forward to this year’s event. It has nothing to do with the exclusives, there’s only a handful of those I’m really want anyway. Considering all that has been going on in my life over the past two weeks, I’m just looking forward to a fun day of hitting up a whole bunch of record stores in Knoxville, which is where I’m going to spending RSD this year.  I know the whole limited runs thing has been a little wishy washy for people. I get that. A bunch of people show up to only get the limited editions, then mark them up on eBay. To me, those exclusives are not the reason I go out record shopping on Record Store Day. I go because I love record stores. I go because I love music. I don’t just like music, I don’t just have a small number of songs I like because they’re catchy and everyone else likes them. I love music in a way that is overwhelmingly deep. My love f...

     Robert Osborne was on Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast. Yes, Mr. USA Up All Night has a podcast, and it’s quite good. Towards the end of the podcast, Gottfried asked the king of TCM what three movies would be his desert island films. One of the films Osborne chose is a longtime favorite of mine,  a film that I tend to watch when the snow appears en mass as it has lately. The movie is 1963’s “The Pink Panther.” The whole series of “Pink Panther” films were staples of my childhood, thanks to when I was handed a VHS tape that my mother bought from Avon—back when you could get movies from Avon—of “Return of The Pink Panther.”      In those pre-internet, pre-netflix days, movies sometimes just appeared out of no where. Maybe chalk it up to being a child with an overactive imagination (I know, shocking, right?) but there was something kind of strange and mysterious about these films that would just sometimes appear. “Willy Wonka and The Chocolate ...

Thanks to my numerous speaking engagements across the country, the organization that is AndyCo has become a mighty beast. As such, I have reached the stage in which a rider is now required. A rider is a list of requests and demands that an important artist like myself needs in order to perform at optimal quality. Since my booking office has been overwhelmed with requests, I've decided to make my rider public so everyone can know what they're getting in to. Personally, I don't think my requests are all too strange or out of the ordinary. All together, they make a very simple list of requirements that anyone who is running around the country would ask for. The following is copied verbatim from my rider. Mr. Ross requests that fresh towels, color of blue, are on hand for every performance. No more than five, no less than three. Mr. Ross REQUIRES that Evian bottled water be on hand, chilled to an exact 45 degrees fahrenheit. It is also required that this wa...

Orchestrated or not, the most brilliant fake out to come in music in a long time occurred last October. With a month of build up, Sub Pop records was releasing on October 21 st a seven record box set that would be an all encompassing career retrospective of the beloved indie punk band Sleater-Kinney. Tweets came flying from Sleater-Kinney band member Carrie Brownstein, who today is best known from the Peabody award winning comedy series “Portlandia,” discussing how proud she was of the set, and how this box set would be as a “definitive document” of the group. This was exciting news for yours truly. For you see, Sleater-Kinney happens to be one of my all time favorite bands. The box set, titled “Start Together,” was the first bit of activity related to Sleater-Kinney in nearly a decade. After their 2005 album “The Woods” the band went on “indefinite hiatus.” However, the universe is a strange and wonderful place. After all the hype on the box set being the definitive p...

In a nasal monotone voice, the four year old walked up to me and said “Anmy, will you put together my Frozen Elsa Play Set Castle?” It was during the clean up of said child's birthday party at my aunt's house. Ripped shreds of Frozen wrapping paper littered the floor. Disney had made a profit. I, being the kind and lovely human person I am, agreed to put together the play set. I had no choice, as all of my family were glaring over at me with a warm look, but a look that also said “You're the only one you can put this crap together, we did our time when you were a kid.” The box the play set came in stood about three and a half feet tall, and around half a foot wide. Easily it was the largest gift the party, I picked the box up and took it to the four year old's bedroom before I began to unbox all the stuffs inside it. Carefully cutting through all the tape and glue used to seal the box with a pocket knife, I looked inside to see its contents. Glancing it ove...

I like records. I like records a lot. This is not a shock to anyone who knows me, nor is it a shock to anyone who has been a longtime reader of this column. It's been fascinating to me that over the past two years records are becoming more and more commonplace, again. I love it, personally. You can tell too that the music business has embraced the return of vinyl whole heartedly. Last year, for the first time since iTunes launched, the sale of digital music slipped. CDs sales were, not surprising, down too. What didn't slip? Vinyl records. Not only did vinyl records not slide in sales, they reached an all time high not seen in nearly two decades. In 2014 the sale of new vinyl records increased 49% from 2013. Nearly eight million records were sold last year. I've been a—and I don't particularly like this term—serious collector for a good decade or so. I've seen the growth first hand. I've seen record shops expand and grow. I've seen the demographi...