Category: music

I just bought Fooled by April’s new album from CD Baby and got this email.

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

That’s friggin hilarious.

So everybody knows John Waite’s ballad “Missing You”, #1 on the pop charts in 1985 and covered by Tina Turner in her Leggs pantyhose campaign. A few of you might know that Mr. Waite became the lead singer of the 80s arena rock super group Bad English (they who gave us the wedding ballad staple “When I See You Smile”). But only a few other sad souls like myself have been with JW since his early days as the lead singer of the British proto-boy band The Babys, own not only The Essential John Waite but a few of the long-out-of-print studio albums from his solo career and may even check up on The John Waite Worldwide Consortium from time to time.

If you aren’t in group #3, count your blessings. But if you’ve ever thought “Hey that I-Ain’t-Missing-You-At-All song was pretty dang good. What happened to that guy?” I offer up “Dark Side of the Sun”, the song immediately following Missing You on Waite’s 1985 album No Brakes. It has the same pleading vocals and heavy-handed metaphors jambed into a conventional pop framework. But lay over a nice sing-songy keyboard/guitar combo, an addictive little chorus and a handful of “whoah whoahs” taking you home and you’ve got my favorite John Waite song.

Have a download. You’ll be goofily pleased when it pops up on your iPod.

This article thinks its time, arguing that the club has existed on its legend, rather than what got it that legend for too long. I don’t agree but he makes a convincing argument.

Fans of the club have created SaveCBGB.org as a central resource.

So the web is all atwitter about Pandora, a new music service based right here in the Bay Area. Pandora asks you to type in some artists you like and then measures descriptors of those artists against others in the Music Genome Project then creates a playlist for you based on both. The interface is a neat little flash window featuring the album cover art, name of song and band. In a pull down men, you can say you the love the song, you don’t like it, or ask why Pandora selected it for you. I heard about from my friend Lucia who correctly describes it to me as “relentlessly addictive.”

Until now, I’ve used Last.fm and been fairly satisfied. I describe both of them as No-nonsense Launch. Launch.com is Yahoo’s music program that has a similar rating-then-suggesting set up. Except it only works on a Windows system. Which is just stupid. But Last.fm and Pandora don’t care what you’re using. Which is the opposite of stupid.

Last.fm just redesigned their site which is pretty snazzy yet doesn’t quite solve the difficulties I’ve had with it. You still need to download a plug-in for iTunes or whatever your music player is so that what you play gets added to your Last.fm playlists. And since Last.fm works on a stream through your computer’s music player, it’s only as good as the strength of your Internet connection. In a wireless cafe, for example, it’s pretty haphazzard.

Pandora has eliminated many of these problems but lacks the community features of Last.fm. You can’t create friend networks or listen to their radio stations (well, unless they send it to you specifically). But Pandora is only a few weeks old and is most likely planning for this sort of thing in the future.

Last.fm is 3 Euros a month (about $3.75) v. Pandora’s planned $8 a month. Both serve up great music but at this point, Pandora wins on ease of use. I need to see more to decide entirely though. I’m just glad this kinds of thing is around, which I consider one of the great gifts of the digital age. I’m quite sure now that I will never run out of good music to discover.

Pandora is in very new Beta right now and is invitation only. But if you’d like to try it, email me, and I’ll invite you.

CBGB’s, the legendary New York music club, is facing eviction. Credited with birthing much of American punk rock and 80s new wave, the club owes a pile of back rent. Benefits are planned this enitre month.

Hey has anyone played around with the new version of iTunes yet? Big deal with it is that it supports podcast downloads and adds them right to iTunes. I’m more than happy with PlayPod but since they are a piece of software and not a database of audio, they are at the mercy of however the podcast provider chhoses to label their podcasts. So you can spend several frustratng searching around for that episode of On The Media you just downloaded because, this week, they elected to tag the show “New York Public Radio” or “OTM Rocks!” or “Bob Garfield has big ears” instead of “On The Media.”

My guess is Apple would clean all this labelling chaos up but I couldn’t say for sure. Anyone tried it out?

When I was growing up, my friends and I used to argue for hours about meaningless trivia like what was the biggest selling album of all time and whether it sucked or not. We didn’t have the internet back then which would have ended the discussion in a flash. But we probably would have some equally stupid to fuss about.

Well now that we do have the internet I’m a little surprised I never bothered looking for the answer to that question. But I checked in on the Long Tail blog this morning and there it was: The 100 Best Selling Albums of All Time.

I feel better now.

I haven’t done a SOTW in a while but last week, Suzan and I rented 1984’s The Neverending Story which I highly recommend. I’m past the age when I scoff at “family films” as sanitized treacle for the little ones. At their best, they stir our childlike desires and melt away our adult inhibitions. They give us permission to wonder, to dream and fear irresponsible for doing so.

The Neverending Story does all of that. It begins and ends with a lovely whisp of an 80s pop tunes named simply “The Neverending Story.” The singer calls himself Limahl (aka Chris Hamill, former lead singer of Kajagoogoo) but that hardly matters. Focus on how the vocals match the hypnotic mist that opens the film and how the keyboard lines roll on just ahead of the beat. They ask you to look ahead, past the song, to stories that haven’t been told but can be imagined. And since it ends all too soon, it asks you to imagine afterward.

And try to listen without going “ahhh-ahhh-ahhh-ahh-ahhhh-ahhhh-ahhh-ahhhh-ahhh.” I dare you.

I’m normally not this law abiding but my friend Alex Wellen, author and recovering IP attorney, has put together this guide as to precisely what is legal or not-so about copying and moving around your digital music.

Well not really. But acoording to this article, Christian rock acts routinely skip over the Bay Area, the country’s 4th largest music market, when planning tours. No surprise there, we say, donning our Cultural Fascist berets. San Francisco, the bluest of the blue cities certainly would have room in its music scene for Three Chords for the Lord? But as they piece points out, no one visits New York City to hear country music and yet country music acts still play in Gotham.

That’s not the meat of it. Read this article for thoughtful, deft analysis of the concert business. Touring for a band in any city requires a precarious lining up of radio, outside media, ticket sales, venue and retail availability, each with their own interests and stake in the game. It’s amazing that this industry only became consolidated within the last ten years and is still this interwined, this dependent on outside factors. Facinating stuff.