This is the edited version of the Magnetic Fields in-studio I hosted in the KEXP men’s room a few weeks ago. LOVE the Yoko Ono “Flush Piece” cover.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Frenzy”
Sonny Richard’s Panics w/ Cindy and Misty, “The Voo Doo Walk”
Björk, “Play Dead”
M83, “Graveyard Girl”
Ladytron, “Ghosts”
Book of Love, “Tubular Bells”
Sisters of Mercy, “Gimme Shelter”
The Head and the Heart, “Ghost”
Neko Case, “Things That Scare Me”
Johnny Cash, “Delia’s Gone”
The Louvin Brothers, “Knoxville Girl”
Mogwai, “How To Be A Werewolf”
Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”
John Wesley Harding, “Goth Girl”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Up Jumped the Devil”
The Decemberists, “Shankill Butches”
Johnny Dowd, “Murder”
Robert Johnson, “Hell Hound on My Trail”
Devo, “Peek-A-Boo”
Virgin Prunes, “Baby Turns Blue”
Replicants, “Destination Unknown”
Marc Almond & The Willing Sinners, “The House Is Haunted”
Austra, “Spellwork”
Craft Spells, “Your Tomb”
The Cure, “The Funeral Party”
The Soft Moon, “Total Decay”
Bush Tetras, “Things That Go Boom in the Night”
Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, “Rare As The Yeti”
The Sonics, “The Witch”
David Bowie, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”
R. Dean Taylor, “There’s A Ghost in My House”
Dusty Springfield, “Haunted”
Ben E. King, “Supernatural Thing, Pt. 1”
Otis Redding, “Trick Or Treat”
The Psychedelic Furs, “The Ghost in You”
Human League, “Darkness”
Broadcast, “Black Cat,”
Antony & The Johnsons, “Ghost”
Kate Bush, “Hammer Horror”
The Five Blobs, “The Blob”
Allan Sherman, “My Son, the Vampire”
Stephin Merritt, “Scream (Till You Make the Scene)”
Quiet Village, “Circus of Horror”
Gil Scott-Heron, “Me and the Devil”
The Damned, “Grimly Fiendish”
Spell, “Stone Is Very, Very Cold”
The Poppy Family, “There’s No Blood in Bone”
Public Image Ltd., “Death Disco”
Anika, “No One’s There”
Tom Waits, “What’s He Building?”
Altered Images, “Insects”
Jerry Dallman & the Knightcaps, “The Bug”
Blondie, “Attack of the Giant Ants”
The Muppets, “There’s A New Sound”
Tegan & Sara, “Walking With a Ghost”
Fred Schneider & The Shake Society, “Monster”
Noddy, “Demon Skull”
Future Bible Heroes, “I’m A Vampire”
Tullycraft, “If You Take Away the Make-up (Then the Vampires They Will Die)”
Oingo Boingo, “Weird Science”
Lou Reed, “Halloween Parade”

A few (but certainly not all) of my thoughts on the new Wanda Jackson album, from the KEXP blog.

One of the downsides to writing a book is that sometimes worthwhile material has to be excised in the interest of page count. Such is the case of The Low Anthem and United States of Americana. I specifically asked the trio to drop by KEXP and tape an in-studio session of songs from Oh My God, Charlie Darwin in 2009 (you can listen to that performance here), and then interviewed them about their music, and in particular their vintage instruments.

Ben plays a collapsible pump organ built in 1915, and originally used by an army chaplain in World War I. “It’s just a joy to open up a box like that,” he says, marveling at its simplicity. “There’s nothing about it you can’t fix. You don’t run into a computer chip that you don’t understand, and that’s the end of it. Every little sound that you hear, that’s a little piece that moves in just such a way, and you can figure it out.

But this guy who fixes them, he lives out in Western Mass, his name is Nelson Pease. And he really is the last line of knowledge. Historian, repairman. I don’t know how old he is, 80 or 85. But he’s not going to be around forever. Nelson looked at the inside of our organ, which we had been home repairing for a year and a half, and he just…” Ben cradles his head in his hands, imitating a man distraught. “‘What have you been doing to this beautiful instrument?’ We’re not craftsmen. We know how to hack it together. We’re all about the sound. But Nelson wanted to work on it properly, and build new pieces that we didn’t think needed replacing.”

They might not have made my little book, but that hasn’t stopped the Rhode Island trio from forging ahead. The Low Anthem is releasing its new album, Smart Flesh, on February 22. You can pre-order it here now (first 250 orders comes with a letterpress poster signed by the band!), and when you do, get a free download of the lead track (featured above), “Ghost Woman Blues.”

Chris Estey’s excruciatingly detailed Q&A about my book for his “Scribes Sounding Off” feature is now live on the KEXP blog.