All Over Albany

My Exit: Shay Harrison

Every Monday night our friends at WEXT do this thing called My Exit -- local listeners get to come into the station and program an hour of music. So we thought it'd be fun to find out a little bit about these people and why they picked the songs on their play list.

Here's tonight's person:

Who:

I'm Shay Harrison. I live in East Schodack and I'm the director of operational development at a ceramics manufacturing company and a youth basketball coach.

Musical Taste:

My musical tastes are fairly eclectic. I grew up a big classic rock fan (Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix), became a rap fan in college (Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, De La Soul), moved towards jazz (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Minghus) and classical music, and have now come to the realization that most of my classic rock favorites are really blues and folk influenced, so I'm getting into those now.

Five Songs from Shay's show:

Stevie Wonder --"I Was Made to Love Her"--first heard this song on an episode of Moonlighting back when I was a teenager and was blown away. Love Stevie's organ and James Jamerson's bass.

Ray Lamontagne -- "Forever My Friend"--first heard of Ray from the Rescue Me soundtrack and didn't particularly like his song on it, "All the wild horses". Then I heard his tune "Trouble" on WDST, Radio Woodstock, a couple of years ago and was hooked. Each of his albums have 3 or 4 songs that I can't listen to enough.

Chris Whitley -- "Big Sky Country"--first heard this song one morning in the shower when I was an undergraduate at Rice University in the early 90's. I always get an image of rough hewn Montana landscape when I hear the opening of the song.

Nina Simone -- "Feelin' Good"--first heard this in the promo for one of the seasons of Six Feet Under on HBO. It took me 2 years to find out what the name of the song was. Nina Simone always makes you feel the pain she endures, plus the orchestral arrangement of the song is outstanding.

Jeff Buckley -- "Last Goodbye"--the album this is from, Grace, is one of the most unique albums I've encountered. Jeff Buckley had his own vision and certainly his own style, and Last Goodbye is my favorite tune from this album.

You can hear Shay's My Exit show tonight at 8 at 97.7 or at exit977.org. Here's how to schedule your own My Exit show on WEXT.