Instrumental Invasion, 2/22/23 February 23, 2023

The February 22 Instrumental Invasion on WCWP was recorded the first show recorded in 2023: four segments on January 3 and two on the 4th, along with pickups. I applied a 10-band equalizer effect to my hour 1 talk breaks in an attempt to match the audio quality when recording at my secondary location. It isn’t the first time I’ve done this, but is the first on such a large scale; not just for pickups.

The playlist was created on December 28, 2022, with annotations on the last three days of the year, and the talk break script drafted on New Year’s Eve and Day.

It’s become a habit to program three-song sets in most segments, so I stopped acknowledging the feat in talk breaks.

After two theme weeks, this week had an unofficial theme with eight cover songs.

The Chick Corea Trio’s Trilogy duology were two Christmas presents from my sister Lauren. Playing their cover of “Pastime Paradise” by Stevie Wonder (from Trilogy 2) allowed me to reference “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio and “Weird Al” Yankovic‘s parody, “Amish Paradise.” And since I also played “Who Should I Pay,” Jay Rowe‘s homage to “Blurred Lines,” I got to reference “Word Crimes.” (Read my Mandatory Fun synopsis here.)

The show led off with the adjective-less “Paradise” by Grover Washington, Jr., exactly 365 days after I last played a cut from Paradise the album. It’s also been 51 weeks since playing something from The Test of Time by Ken Navarro, and exactly eight months have passed between songs from Chuck Loeb‘s Between 2 Worlds.

To change things up, I had an extra 2007-16 segment after going to the 1985-95 and 1996-2006 wells in previous weeks.

Click here to download this week’s scoped aircheck or listen below:

As a bonus, here are the music videos for “Amish Paradise”…:

…and “Word Crimes”:

Plus, Al’s breakdown for GQ of his most iconic tracks:

Plus plus, the “pivot!” scene on Friends (from “The One with the Cop“), since I referenced it after Randal Clark‘s “Pivot“: