All Over Albany

My Exit: Brian McElhiney

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 Brian McElhiney. I'm the full-time music writer at the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, a job I came to by way of Bennington, Vt.; Keene, NH; Okinawa, Japan; and Pismo Beach, California, among others. I also play guitar and write songs on occasion.

How would you describe your musical taste?
Everything. I have a serious heavy metal streak that I will probably never get rid of. But I'm a sucker for a catchy, three minute pop song.

If you name a band and I don't know it, I will probably spend the next hour searching the
Internet for the band's Web site, MySpace, YouTube videos and All Music Guide biography. That's what I do for much of my job; the sad thing is, I spend most of my free time away from work doing that of my own volition.

5 Songs from Brian's show:
I featured songs by bands or artists with the most underrated guitar players, in my opinion -- kind of an underground guitar gods thing.

Frank Zappa-- "Who are the Brain Police?" -- This is one of my favorite Zappa songs from my favorite album of his, the Mothers of Invention's 1966 debut "Freak Out!" His creativity on the instrument shines through in a more understated way on this song.

Black Flag -- "Jealous Again" -- This song made me completely re-think my way of listening to, and playing, the guitar. I spent many hours in my room as a teenager attempting to make my guitar sound like Flag guitarist Greg Ginn's.

I really like the band Dinosaur Jr. A lot. I like them so much that I included three songs by them -- "Little Fury Things," "Kracked" and "Sludgefeast," all off the band's 1987 classic "You're Living All Over Me."

You can hear Brian'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.