It's the season of giving and being thankful, and we here at WDIY are thankful for our amazing listeners and our on-air hosts. Check out the albums that were playing the most on WDIY in November.
Want to hear something specific? Feel free to call WDIY's studio line with a request at 610-694-8100 x1 or leave your picks on our Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, or Threads pages.
#10
Nellie McKay
Hey Guys, Watch This
Hungry Mouse Records
August 28, 2023
Nellie McKay has been graced with a reasonable amount of success in her lifetime; since her debut record ‘Get Away from Me,’ she has released a number of well-received albums and collaborated with a long list of other famous singers and performers. Her music has been used on radio, in TV shows, movies, and even on Broadway. And she’s even something of a hometown hero, splitting her childhood and teenage years between Harlem and the Pocono mountains (while having dual citizenship here and in London). Keeping that in mind, this is her first release in a whopping 13 years and shows her history and life experience better than any biography can. The album was recorded with a parade of musical comrades in Charleston, West Virginia and with some credits of being recorded in Saylorsburg and East Stroudsburg here in Pennsylvania.
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#9
Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives
Altitude
Snakefarm
May 19, 2023
Between re-opening the Ellis Theater in his hometown of Philadelphia, collecting pieces of country music history and raising funds for a museum to house them, and being inducted into seemingly every music hall of fame that exists, it’s been over six years since Stuart released a new record. This Country Music Hall of Famer, five-time Grammy-winner, and AMA Lifetime Achievement honoree returns to his professional roots with a new record. exploring a cosmic country cowboy landscape populated by the iconic tropes from the Western movies we all love. Marty Stuart captures the sound of the desert landscape with a sweeping, spacious, wide-open sound that truly puts it in close proximity to just downright mystical. The songs on Altitude were inspired by and mostly written during Stuart’s 2018 tour in support of Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman of the Byrds.
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#8
Cat Power
Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert
Domino Recording Company
November 10, 2023
In May of 1966, Bob Dylan played a concert in England that went down in history. In November of 2022, Cat Power recreated his performance.She took the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. And now we can have it in our hands. Bob Dylan’s performance held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (AKA the Royal Albert Hall Concert due to a mislabeled bootleg) involved him switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show. Folk purists were not fans, but the performance is beloved and has gone down in history regardless. In her own interpretation of that historic night, Cat Power (otherwise known as Chan Marshall) gave a spellbinding and authentic performance that honors her personal hero’s legend and impact on history while still bringing her own sound and vibrancy to his music.
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#7
Eilen Jewell
Get Behind the Wheel
Signature Sounds
May 5, 2023
Sometimes, it really does get worse before it gets better. Eilen Jewell had a rougher pandemic than most of us; her marriage to her partner, drummer, and co-manager fell apart and she was left with a small portion of a music career and a small child to care for while the world seemingly fell apart around her as well. She dealt with this by doing what a lot of us wish we could do and ran off to a cabin in the woods to deliberate on what her next step in life would be, debating if she even wanted to create music anymore. After four years and lots of hikes in Idaho, she decided to come back with something to prove. Her most recent studio album produced by Will Kimbrough is eleven tracks of what she calls “roots-noir” blended with more psychedelic, spacious arrangements. And to top it all off, despite the divorce, the band is still together and trying to make it work.
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#6
The Beatles
Now and Then
Capitol Music Group
November 2, 2023
Don’t let your eyes deceive you; we do have a (sort-of) new Beatles song in our top 10 ranks. Dubbed, “the last Beatles song,” it was originally written in the 1970s by John Lennon and has sat unfinished ever since. He dabbled with alternative song titles like, “I Don’t Want to Lose You” and “Miss You,” refusing to give up on the song. In 1994, Yoko Ono passed on some of her late husband’s home recordings containing incomplete and unreleased songs to Paul McCartney, and that’s when the magic started.
In March of 1995, the three surviving Beatles began crafting a backing track to be added to Lennon’s demo. Technical difficulties and writing disagreements made them abandon the song yet again. There was speculation for years after that that they would still revisit the song and release it one day, and the prayers of the fans were answered when technology advanced enough to salvage Lennon’s demo enough to use for the official track. For the last time, the band gets back together for a historical final reunion. It’s featured on a double-a side with “Love Me Do,” the band’s very single from 1962, to truly bring it all full circle in the end.
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#5
The Parkington Sisters
Collide
Parkington Sisters/Sissy Fit Music
September 18, 2023
Five decades after their parents met over music, these unironically musically-inclined sisters give us their third full-length album. As if they were literally put on earth to make more music, the youngest sister out of three recently joined on board to help add to their ageless transcendent sound. Now, anyone out there with sisters is most likely blown away at the ability of three sisters to work together in such close quarters without quarrels; no matter how much you love them, sisters still have a particular fashion of fighting. While they admit they aren’t perfect, they also relish in being able to make music under such a unique dynamic. But Collide is truly a celebration of sibling unity. It’s different from the sisters’ previous albums, on the premise of their compositions simply being less collaborative than this one. For Collide, Rose, Sarah, and Ariel wrote songs together every step of the way. They all wrote from their different viewpoints about similar things so sonically and lyrically, everything is in harmony.
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#4
The Nude Party
Rides On
New West Records
March 10, 2023
In the past decade, this New York-native band has released a pair of well-received albums, an EP, and played numerous shows. But the thing that makes this record stand out amongst the rest is that they have dubbed it their best one yet. And they really mean it. The band has historically worked with a producer to craft an album, but with their latest effort in ‘Rides On,’ the band decided to be a little more hands on than usual and chose to handle production duties completely by themselves. This allowed the band to have even more freedom and fun when creating than they have ever had in their career. They recorded over 20 songs this way, jumping around genres to whatever their hearts desired, including electro-pop and stripped-down country, before settling on the final fantastic 14 songs containing simply the best elements of ‘70s-driven blues rock. The relaxed vibe of the recording sessions also unleashed a diverse sound beyond genres that embody the spirit of what The Nude Party are going for and display their growth as a band. It’s fondly the most homegrown and organic record The Nude Party has created to date.
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#3
Eli “Paperboy” Reed
Hits and Misses
Yep Roc Records
October 20, 2023
Eight albums deep in a nearly two-decade career, the earliest tracks on Reed’s Hits And Misses were made as early as 2009, following Reed’s career-launching album, ‘Roll With You.’ The latest recordings were one in 2020, just before the release of his critically acclaimed album of Merle Haggard songs, ‘Down Every Road.’ Now, after all this time, we have a remastered collection of originals and covers from a variety of decades and genres. Due to how spread out the production was, the 11-track album even has features previously only available as 45 rpm singles at the merch table during Reed’s international tours. It all kicks off with Eli’s spin on Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,’ and continues with covers of Steely Dan's "Do It Again," Bob Dylan's, "To Be Alone with You," Merle Haggard’s “I’m Gonna Break Every Heart I Can” and more.
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#2
The Kennedys
Headwinds
The Kennedys LLC
August 25, 2023
Americana songwriting duo Pete and Maura Kennedy have made a strong return to the studio and stage after three years of live-streamed lockdown-era concerts and five years of no new music. They used their pandemic days as the perfect opportunity to explore classic songwriting in depth, performing over a thousand songs during the pandemic in the comfort of their home. They also fully recognized the impact the pandemic had, emerging into a new world that simply was not the same as it was before. That extra long practice period coupled with heavy self-reflection not only refined their own writing style, but it laid the foundation for this new collection of original, socially-conscious songs. Pete Kennedy’s vast , masterful array of guitars, mandolin, ukulele, bass, keyboards, drums & vocals drive the record, but it truly is Maura’s striking and warm voice that is their signature still to this day. The 13-track album was recorded in Tarrytown, New York and produced independently by The Kennedys.
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#1
The Fruit Bats
A River Running to Your Heart
Merge Records
April 14, 2023
The Fruit Bats’ legacy when it comes to love songs, the thing that makes them stand out amongst the rest, is what frontman Eric D. Johnson has coined “the geography of the heart.” The band writes and sings about a love so profound and transcendent that the people in the songs become one with the land and the landscape. So a new record titled as a body of water running into a loved one’s vital organs shouldn’t be much of a surprise to long-term fans. Self-produced by Johnson, which is a first for the Fruit Bats, with Jeremy Harris at Panoramic House in San Francisco, it’s the Fruit Bats’ tenth full-length release. After two decades of making music together, let alone five full albums since 2019, the group has truly pinned down a sound that is warm, comforting, and nostalgic and a lyricism style that has kept them on an upward success ramp since their formation.
