Most days I only check Bluesky and Mastodon for a few minutes while I’m in between sets at the gym. When I happened to have loaded up Bluesky recently I saw a variant on those old email chains that seem to reappear on each new social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc). This one was asking people to post the first album they ever bought. Thinking back to my first ever CDs, I knew the first 3 or 4 were birthday gifts. Eventually I figured it was most likely Going Public by The Newsboys. When I had both a CD player and enough money to buy my own music I was basically only listening to oldies (thanks to my parents) or Contemporary Christian Music (thanks to my faith and the fact that it was the only rap or rock that my parents approved of). But then I thought a bit more and I realized I bought an album before that…only I bought it on cassette tape.
Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.
As I told someone the day after attending the concert, there’s a reason that humans eventually came upon the format for a church service that we currently have. There is something powerful about a room full of people all singing the same song, in one room, with one purpose. You can get a similar feeling at an arena (whether for sports or a concert), but there’s extra special connection when you’re shoulder to shoulder and jumping around together. (Not to mention the inherent trust in your fellow concert-goers when crowd surfing) This particular November has been a little hard for me. I can’t quite pinpoint the source of the general malaise, but I spent a good chunk of the month in a real funk. I was just starting to recover when I went to the concert and it just super-charged me. I think it really helps that ska, in general, is a positive force in the world. Many ska bands tend to support important causes, including participating in collaborative albums/concerts like Ska Against Racism. As I mentioned in my review of Kill Lincoln’s No Normal, the band grew on me and I enjoyed last year’s concert for their This is New Tone documentary so I definitely wanted to attend their release show.
This year I continued to get new ska music from Bad Time Records, including this album by Kill Lincoln whose frontman is the head of Bad Time Records. Modern ska has gone off in many directions. Some bands, like Calamatrix, have gone back to their reggae roots. Half Past Two, who has an album I’ll be writing about soon, has a third wave ska 1990s sound. Kill Lincoln is squarely in the ska-punk realm. It’s fast, it’s hard, and it’s loud. It took me a while to get into the sound, having discovered ska via the 1990s Christian ska bands The Orange County Supertones and Five Iron Frenzy and the secular band No Doubt. (Interestingly, FIF have gone the rock with horns route while No Doubt has gone a more reggae route)
I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle school youth group also had a CD lending library. Thus was I introduced to DC Talk, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, and MxPx via their album Teenage Politics. At the time, although my household wasn’t one of those that was against dance, alcohol, or whatever books religious folks paniced about (since Harry Potter wasn’t out yet), we weren’t allowed to listen to current secular music because it was a bad influence. We mostly didn’t really know what we were missing. We didn’t have to listen to the religious station because, again, my parents weren’t fanatical about secularism, they just didn’t think rap and modern rock was something we should listen to. So we would listen to the oldies station. To this day, I know just about any pop song from the 50s or 60s. All this is to say that I had no reference point for punk rock. Compared to the other Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists out there, this was fast and hard and loud. I was fascinated. Also, unusually for CCM artists at the time, the music was more about being a teenager than it was about God. That’s not to say that God and religion aren’t mentioned on MxPx albums, but they weren’t the majority of what the songs were about.
Another year has ended and so it’s time to take a look at the music I listened to all year. First of all, it was yet another year in which I grew my personal music collection. I’ve seen more an more artists removed from places like Spotify, Apple Music, etc, so it’s still important to me to own my music.
New albums
C. Tangana - El Madrileno.
Chill Hop Music - Essentials Winter 2022(?), Essentials Spring 2023, Essentials Summer 2023, Essentials Fall 2023, Winter essentials 2023
The Midnight - Monsters
Anberlin - Convinced
MxPx - Southbound to San Antonio, Find a Way Home
Thundercat - It is What It Is
Seeming - The Birdwatcher’s Guide to Atrocity
Lzls - discography - mostly vaporwave covers of Final Fantasy music
The Pirates of Drinax (part of a humble bundle)
Rifti Beats - Chocobo and Chill
Smooth McGroove - New Super Mario Bros Overworld Theme
The One-Ups - Secrets of the Forest (Solid Gold version)
Less Than Jake/ Kill Lincoln - Wavebreaker 1
Haircuts for men - sampler
Girl Ultra - Adios
Una Noche Con Ruben Blades
Submotion Orchestra - Kites
Gifts
Orquesta Akokan - 16 Rayos (gifted)
Prince Welcome 2 America (gifted)
Herbie Hancock - 5 original albums (gifted)
Taylor Swift - Midnights (gifted)
Gorillaz - Cracker Island (gifted)
Lana Del Rey - Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd? (gifted)
A few other things happened in 2023 to affect the trends. Early in 2023 I asked Dan for suggestions for Spanish non-dance music and he gave me a couple suggestions. The one that I really liked a lot was C. Tangana and his album El Madrileno. It’s a great album and I listened to it a few times. Continuing with Spanish music, the Alt. Latino Podcast introduced me to the band called “Daniel, Me Estas Matando”. Their music reminds me a lot of the music the older generations used to listen to when I was a kid. Finally, Alt Latino also had an interview with Karol G and I listened to her on Spotify for a few days in a row.
I like listening to NPR’s It’s Been a Minute and today’s episode was a real doozy. Here’s the descriptive paragraph from the NPR page for the episode:
Every couple of weeks there’s a new story of a fan at a concert misbehaving. One fan threw ashes at Pink, another hit Drake with a cellphone, Miranda Lambert stopped her show when fans took selfies with flash photography. Extreme instances have landed performers in the hospital, but more often attendees have noticed the audience has gotten louder and more distracting than ever. Where is all of this coming from?
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
As I mentioned during my 2022 Music Wrap-Up, I got back into modern ska via Bad Time Records. So when Bad Time Records announced their Bad Time Records Tour 2023 featuring We Are the Union, Kill Lincoln, and Catbite - it was a no-brainer to buy the tickets. As a bonus, they’re also filming a concert film/documentary during the tour called This is New Tone. The show was at Union Stage in Washington, DC. It was my first timewer seeing any of these bands live, my first concert of 2023, and my first time at Union Stage.
Another year, another look at my music trends for the year. It was another year of music acquisition (supporting the artists, ftw! - I knew Spotify wasn’t paying artists well, but Corey Doctorow’s book, Chokepoint Capitalism really brought home how much they’re screwing over artists), although I think things may slow down in 2023. Here are the albums I purchased in 2023:
The Protomen - Presents: A Night of Queen
Encantó soundtrack
Moderator - The World Within
Kognitif - Soul Food
MxPx - Horns, Plans within Plans, Let’s Rock, Left Coast Punk EP, The Rennaisance EP
Packy Lundholm - Track Sabbath Vol 1
Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
Catbite - Nice One
Macroblank - entire discography - 14 albums
Vicente Garcia - Lomas de Cayenas
Girl Ultra - Nuevos Aires
The Shape of Ska Punk to Come
Me Like Bees - Songs from The Realm
Kill Lincoln - Can’t Complain
Jokabi - Chilltendo Deluxe
Turning Red Soundtrack
We Are the Union - Ordinary Life
Chillhop Music - Essentials Spring 2022, Essentials Summer 2022, Essentials Fall 2022
The last concert I attended was Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm back in June of 2021. At the time we thought perhaps we were out of the woods with COVID. Instead, variant after variant has COVID a never ending fact life. For a while I was thinking that perhaps we’d eventually vaccinate our way out of this situation, but the vaccines haven’t proven to quite work that way. So, after passing up on a bunch of concerts this year, I decided to go see I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schaffer the Dark Lord. I just decided to wear a mask to keep myself from getting sick (especially since I’ve still got a few races and meets left this year).
After spending the last year and change filling in the holes in the MxPx discography from when I last was an active fan with 2000’s The Ever Passing Moment, I have arrived at the final full album I was missing, Plans within Plans. I still have a couple EPs to buy, but this will probably be the last MxPx album review I write until they release their next album. As we went through the discography we saw the band evolve a bit and, either under label pressure or from wanting to explore musically, seem to veer into the territory of bands like My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco. Plans Within Plans is MxPx finally coming full circle towards their original sound while also having evolved since their early albums. To me, this album sounds like MxPx just being MxPx, not sounding like any other band. They’ve learned and grown and both the music and lyrics reflect that, but they’ve come to appreciate who they really are as a band. This was one of those albums that took a few listens for me to truly appreciate. Onto the tracks.
Rap lyrics as a confession isn’t a new topic or question. I remember hearing about this a few years ago with someone who had rap lyrics on their Facebook page that was arguing it should be inadmissible in court. Just Googling “rap lyric confession” gave me these examples:
This year I was able to attend the Paul and Storm / JoCo concert that COVID stole from me last year. While there I bought the entire Paul and Storm discography, but I think because I listened to it so much on Spotify in the past, I didn’t listen to it as much as I thought I would.
This was not one of those years where I came out ahead by not paying for Spotify. I bought a lot of albums, including starting on my quest to get the entire MxPx back catalog from the time I stopped listening in high school until now. (This is reflected in this year’s numbers)
I continued to catch up with the MxPx back catalog and purchased both Panic and Secret Weapon. My initial feelings upon listening were that I liked a lot more songs on Secret Weapon. But maybe, as with Before Everything & After this would turn out to be just a first impression where when looking at each song one at time would leave me feeling differently.
Elisa is currently the “default” KDE music player, replacing Amarok. I am just taking a guess, but I think that Amarok just ended up with too large a codebase to be maintainable at a reasonable pace. I’ve been using Cantata, an mpd player for KDE that’s currently on maintenance mode. On the one hand, I know that for many folks last.fm scrobbling (logging the music you listen to) is something they left behind in the 2010s. On the other hand, I’m not the only person who has commented on the ticket to get the Elisa devs to add support for it. (And you know I love the stats for my end of year posts)
On 30 June 2021, I attended my first concert since COVID-19 started. I was masked since the Delta variant is a thing and singing indoors is definitely an activity that increases transmission. Despite that, it was awesome to get to do it again and there was a real sense of joy in the room from both the audience and the performers at once again being able to engage in the ancient human ritual of enjoying music as a crowd.
Last October I came back to MxPx, as I detailed in this post about how the lyrics for Friday Tonight led me to finally watch Friday. Over the past half year I would return to their self-titled album on Spotify. (I don’t subscribe to Spofity, but I do use the free tier to discover new artists) Eventually I decided to go ahead and buy the Deluxe version of the album directly from MxPx. It doesn’t appear they’re selling the CD anywhere else (at least it’s not on Amazon).
(the first 3 paragraphs are a slight modification of what I wrote for an Amazon review)
Album front cover
The headline kind of gives it away, but this album definitely sounds like a cross between early/late MxPx and Good Charlotte. You can see on Wikipedia and other places that this was part of a 3ish album trend where MxPx moved more towards the pop part of pop punk. Kind of interesting coming back to it now. I was listening to MxPx albums as they came out in the 90s, but fell off with The Ever Passing Moment. I even briefly joined the fan club and still have the shirt. Because of Reese’s interview on Mike Herrerra’s podcast, I recently started listenign to their self-titled album, which sounds like their early stuff except with lyrics that match grown men the grown men they now are vs kids they were when writing Teenage Politics.
Over its long tenure as a band, Five Iron Frenzy has had some really silly songs. Songs like “Arnold, Willis, and Mr. Drummond”, “Oh, Canada”, “Blue Comb ‘78”, “The Untimely Death of Brad”, “Where is Micah?”, and many others. But they’ve also always been a really political band. On their first album, Upbeats and Beatdowns, they had the song “Anthem” which spoke about politicians wrapping themselves in themes of nationalism. “Milestone” also dealt with racism and prejudice. “Beautiful America” tackled both politics and another constant theme across FIF’s albums - rampant capitalism. Over the rest of the discography there was:
Thanks to COVID I missed out on the concert where I was going to see Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton. Compared to last year, I also barely bought any music.
This year I switched from using Ampache to listen to my music at work, to using Funkwhale. The more responsive interface has led to me playing a lot more albums as well as doing “artist radio” mode which plays all of an artists’ songs at random. This may have concentrated the scrobbles rather than having them be as random as in the past. That said, I did make good use of Funkwhale’s “Less Listened” radio to keep things fresh. At home I’ve been using Cantata’s “similar artists” dynamic playlists a lot which may also have contributed to a concentration of artists this year.
One of the categories of software people often go to /r/selfhosted to ask about, is for software to host music. This has become even more important with the dissolution of Google Music and Amazon and others removing the ability to upload your own music to listen to. I’ve got some experience with both FunkWhale and Ampache, so I decided to create a video to compare and contrast the two.
Like, perhaps, many of my readers, I knew Jane Lui’s music mostly from her cover songs. But I really liked her voice and so I decided to back the Kickstarter for her new album, Surrija. By the time this review is published, I’ll have had the album for about 2 months. For this review I’ll first focus on my initial impressions and then my impressions after having listened for a while.
In 2019 I went to 5 concerts, starting with Neon Trees and Fitz & The Tantrums in May. Then I saw a bunch of my favorite smaller bands like The MiSbehavin’ Maidens, The Doubleclicks, Lionize, and The PDX Broadsides. Anberlin came out of retirement and so it was great to go see them in concert again for the first time in years.
I also got a LOT of albums in 2019. Some were Kickstarted and others were freely available. Others still were purchased for family members. Here is a mostly complete list of all the albums I added to my collection in 2019:
I would have backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter for Relatable Content no matter what because I loved Trust Issues and I enjoy nearly all of their older songs. But the thing that made me spread the word everyone and try to get more backers was that they had a goal to do an East Coast tour. When they came to the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD I was finally able to see them live for the first time. It was also my second time seeing The Misbehavin’ Maidens, who opened for The Doubleclicks earlier in the year.
Scarlett was watching Peg + Cat which has an episode called Mack the Fork. So she asked me if that was a song and I told her that Mack the Knife was a song and she asked me to play it. Then the following exchange with my 3.5 year old happened:
I have been following I Fight Dragons for almost a decade now, including their journey from self-produced to being a label band and rejecting that to going back to being self-produced. I was a backer on their last album, the ambitious concept record The Near Future. That was a seemingly long five years ago. I’ve said before that I ended up enjoying the B-side of the record a lot more, and I think that’s because the lyrics resonated a bit more with me. But for a while I thought maybe the stress of the Kickstarter (in which they ended up ditching an almost completed version of the album and starting over) had split the band.
When I backed The PDX Broadsides’ Kickstarter, they pointed out their friends, The Misbehavin’ Maidens, also had a Kickstarter campaign going on. As I mentioned in the review forRelatable Content, The PDX Broadsides started off as a pirate shanty band. The Misbehavin’ Maidens still are a pirate shanty band, or at least a few of their songs on Swearing is Caring follow sea shanty song structures and melodies. And, other than tamborines and drums, they’re an acapella band.
This year I have sponsored a lot of Kickstarter creative work, including lots of music. One that I was very excited to support was The PDX Broadsides’ latest album, Relatable Content. They started off as a pirate shanty band and have evolved into a nerd filk band whose songs range from silly to profound. I really enjoyed their last album, Trust Issues, which had some pretty timely songs like Noncompliant (superficially about the Bitch Planet comic, but actually about the Me Too era) and We Want Rey (about representation in nerd toydom). It also had some fun songs (both feature Christian as the lead) like Tiny Little Octopus and Robot vs Boy (which I want to see made into a mini-musical). Their last Kickstarter also had a dirty album called Lust Issues that continued their trend of Shakespeare music with the great Dirtbag Romeo and their dirtier songs from their pirate shanty days with It’s Just Sex.
My fourth concert of 2019 was also the first one in which I had someone else go with me as Danielle went to her first concert of 2019. It was fun to have someone to share the experience with, especially her. Anberlin was the first band I introduced her to that she also came to like. Many of their albums were bonding moments for us from dating through our married life.
This concert was at a venue that was new to me, the Oliver Brewing Company. Lots of restaurants and places call themselves a brewing company, usually to signify that they will have some of their own beer on tap. But this was literally a factory floor that had been cleared to set up a stage. I could see all the empty, unlabeled aluminum cans that would eventually hold their different brews. Perhaps because it was a factory floor and not a club or concert hall, the acoustics were pretty amplified. The venue seemed to know it was an issue because they were selling ear plugs for $1 each. (Probably from the stash they give to their factory workers during a regular day) At any rate, it was the first concert where I actually wore ear plugs because it was just too loud for me to enjoy; especially because my OSHA training kept reiterating that hearing loss is not recoverable. Surprisingly, it simply dampened the sound, but I was still able to hear the vocals everything. If anything suffered from the plugs it was a slight loss in the higher frequencies that I noticed during Lionize’s set. One other thing I noticed - of all the concerts I’ve gone to in the past few years, this is the first time I wasn’t one of the older audience members. There were a fair number of grey beards there to hear the different bands.
My second concert of 2019 was almost the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was a big outdoor concert venue (it was in Boston, but was configured like Pier VI in Baltimore) while this one was in the basement of a pizza place called Joe Squared. The first one featured pop artists that everyone has heard while this one featured niche bands that mostly nerds have heard. The first one featured full bands while the Misbehavin’ Maidens performed acapella and The Doubleclicks used an electric cello and other stringed instruments.
At the end of Red Hat Summit 2019 (post coming about that soon) there was a double-header concert with Neon Trees and Fitz & the Tantrums. Neon Trees started things off for the night. I didn’t look them up ahead of the concert, because Fitz was a huge band so I thought Neon Trees was just a local band opening for Fitz. Their section of the concert was a lot of fun even though I didn’t know any of the songs. The lead singer had lots of fun banter and seemed to really be enjoying himself.
Partway through the year Spotify broke at work and, shortly after, Youtube Music appeared along with (likely) rumors that Google Music will be nixed in favor of Youtube Music. So I finally followed through on the work necessary to get Ampache up and running. I also experimented with Funk Whale - an open source attempt to resurrect Groove Shark. Funk Whale had some issues with the version of Firefox we have at work, so I went all-in on Ampache. It’s been really awesome to have access to my entire music collection at work. Hearing my favorite music just gives me such a pick-me-up when the day is wearing at me. Also, it’s great not to have ads interrupting my music listening.
I hadn’t seen I Fight Dragons on tour since Warped Tour three or four years ago (I missed an opportunity to see them at MagFest a couple years ago), but I really enjoyed that set and I’ve been enjoying their work on their new album. They’ve been sharing the progress of songs from acoustic roughs to rhythm roughs, and so on. It’s been a lot of fun to see how the songs evolve. Tickets were only $15 and it was at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, so I figured I’d go check it out.
This year my music listening is under-counted because of a few factors. 1) Spotify scrobbling stopped working at work, 2) I listened to a lot of bandcamp at work (not scrobbled), and 3) for K-Pop I mostly just watch it on Youtube (not scrobbled). That said, I have been listening to music slightly more often. I’ve spent the last couple months listening to music that I’ve never listened to on my computer (as far as Amarok knows), so while that’s contributed to scrobbles, it’s going to mean that the scrobbles are going to be long-tail, ie they won’t make dents in the counts of top artists, songs, etc.
At the time that I’m writing this, I’ve had Trust Issues for a few days. I signed up for the Kickstarter campaign after The Doubleclicks mentioned them. I then went to the PDX Broadsides’ bandcamp page and ended up buying the entire back catalog.
After having heard the album a few times, here are my first impressions:
Favorite Song: Robot vs Boy - although it seems like it should be the first track to a concept album and leaves me wanting to know more about the story
Most beautiful song: Dolores - about HBO’s Westworld
For now, my music listening continues to be in decline relative to earlier in my life. Because the babies are often napping, I don’t have music playing throughout the day. And if I’m playing video games I’m usually not listening to music so I can stream. That said, when I do listen to Spotify at work, it usually Scrobbles and that has increased the number a bit higher than it would have otherwise been.
It’s been a long time since I last took a look at an innovative music player. Back in 2006 I explored Songbird and in 2008 I looked at some of the unique features over two posts: Taking Another Look at Songbird and Play the Web. The ability to grab MP3s off of sites, in particular seemed to be a great way to take advantage of the music blogs as a way to discover new music. Some of this has been superseded by certain browser plugins that can grab all files off a webpage based on regular expressions. In the last decade, there has been a big change in the way most people experience digital music. Most people have stopped buying music in favor of either using Youtube or a subscription service like Spotify, Rdio, Amazon Prime Music, or Google Music.
Lots of artists made their spot because I attended a concert or discovered them this year and got very enthusiastic about listening to this new artist. There are also lots of Spotify scrobbles, but not as many as there would be if work’s firewall didn’t keep scrobbles from being counted.
Artists
Anberlin (427 listens)
Fall Out boy (239 listens)
Jim Guthrie (221 listens)
I Fight Dragons (214 listens)
Paul and Storm (190 listens) - A nerdy folksy group that I really like. Their irreverence is my kind of fun.
The Beatles (136 listens)
Anamanaguchi (130 listens)
Lionize (130 listens)
Five Iron Frenzy (128 listens)
Louis Jordan (113 listens)
The Protomen (104 listens)
Beebs and Her Money Makers (104 listens)
Willy Chirino (93 listens)
Katy Perry (93 listens)
Ignacio Cervantes (92 listens)
Songs
Interestingly, only two new songs made the list this year - Talking Body and Know Yourself. Because I don’t listen to the radio, I discovered these via Spotify. The rest are all older songs that I happened to listen to a lot. And Chandelier came from Danielle getting the album and asking me to play it in the car.
This was not a big quarter for listening to music for me. That’s mostly because Sam and Stella were born and so I didn’t have much ability to listen to music as I needed to be able to hear if they were crying or if someone needed help with them. According to last.fm I went from 1,104 scrobbles in Oct to 288 in November.
Beebs and Her Money Makers (94 listens) - one of the songs came up randomly in Amarok which led me to listen through the albums a few times.
The Beatles (55 listens)
Kenny Clarke (44 listens) - A Fresh Air review of a new collection got me interested in him so I added it to my Spotify tracks. Really fun music.
Anberlin (34 listens)
DJ Cutman (33 listens) - I don’t know why, but I ended up with a lot of DJ Cutman music on my new phone and since I don’t like to use bandwidth while I’m driving, I’ve listened to it a lot in the car.
Ignacio Cervantes (32 listens)
Fall Out Boy (29 listens)
Danny Elfman (28 listens)
Katy Perry (26 listens) - all from Scarlett requests
Relent K (25 listens)
Five Iron Frenzy (24 listens)
Jonathan Geer (19 listens)
Vampire Weekend (18 listens) - heard a song so I wanted to re-explore the band. Some of the songs still hit me hard and others have faded.
Sergei Prokofiev (17 listens)
Anamanaguchi 16 listens)
Stats:Total Songs (in my collection): 16985 (Up from 16088 ) – Mostly from buying CDs with 100 tracks of various classical artists.
After getting to MGMT alphabetically, I tired of going through the list alphabetically. While I have rediscovered some music, I wanted to go back to my auto-playlists which would give me my favorites. I could always get back to going through things alphabetically in the future. One way to accomplish what I wanted was to see which songs don’t have a score - another would be to create a low score playlist I could run every once in a while to see if anything that had scored lowly was now something I wanted to hear.
Concerts are certainly a funny bit of entertainment. When you go see a movie, you are going because you like the director or the actors or the idea sounded interesting. You see that movie and that’s the end of it. The same holds true for Broadway shows or Operas. But when you attended a concert, you have a few opening acts you probably don’t know. This is somewhat alleviated nowadays for the well prepared by a quick trip to Spotify or Youtube. After finally seeing The Protomen during last year’s Warped Tour, I was excited about seeing them in concert. My ticket informed me that I’d also be seeing Cowabunga Pizza Time and Lionize. Of course, the difference between concerts and other forms of entertainment is no accident. Opening bands are limpets on the bodies of larger acts, hoping to gain exposure to the fans of the main act. This works best when the organizer has paired up bands that work well together thematically. But, this is the obvious reason why you never know the time the main act is going on stage.
1. Anberlin (171) - Almost the same number of listens as my top artist last quarter (179 for I Fight Dragons). As usual, I continue to enjoy their music and have grown to appreciate some of the ones I didn’t like before. And some of the older stuff seems trite in comparison.
2. Jim Guthrie (168) - As I’ve mentioned before, his folk song compositions are mostly really enjoyable and I like his work on video games and soundtracks.
3. Paul & Storm (138) - I discovered these guys via John Scalzi. I was hesitant to back the Kickstarter for Ball Pit, but I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it on Spotify.
4. Fall Out Boy (101) - A lot of this is from a few recent road trips in which I didn’t want to use data and happened to have Fall Out Boy already on my phone. Doesn’t mean I don’t like the music.
5. Jonathan Coulton (61) - I’ve said so much about how much I enjoy this over the years. Recently Scarlett’s been asking me to play The Princess Who Saved Herself because I got her the book from Greg Pak’s kickstarter.
6. Louis Jorda n (58) - I like to kick it to Louis Jordan on the weekends when I want something classic.
7. Anamanaguchi (56) - Some of this was from the high of seeing them live. Some of it was just from really enjoying the music no matter what, especially Endless Fantasy.
8. Jack White (54) - Another artist I’ve been listening to a lot of because of Spotify. His album Lazaretto does not do well on 30 second preview on Amazon. But because of Spotify, I want to buy the album.
9. Kanye West (42) - Most of this came from listening to my music alphabetically.
10. Lostprophets (41) - I may hate what the singer was accused of doing, but these songs still mostly rock.
10. Lana Del Rey (41) - Something I can throw on that both my wife and I like
12. Willy Chirino (34) - Most of the listens came from a greatest hits album on Spotify.
13. Buddy Rich (33) - Another album I wasn’t sure I wanted until I listened to it on Spotify. It reminds me a lot of the music in Cowboy Bebop
13. Five Iron Frenzy (33) - Perennial Favorite
15. Thelonious Monk (31) - something else I like to throw on Sunday mornings.
I’ve been a fan of Weird Al for about 17 years. I used to have the Disney special Weird Al Going Home, but unfortunately, I lent it to someone and never got it back. Yet, in all the time, I’d never seen a Weird Al concert live. Finally, Weird Al came to Baltimore as part of his Mandatory Fun Tour and I was able to experience an Al Tour. It was a pretty neat experience. It’s only something like the fourth arena concert I’ve been to (even thought it wasn’t technically in an arena). The last arena concert I went to was Rihanna. Interestingly, Weird Al had WAY more costume changes than she did. He had just about one outfit per song with few exceptions. While he was changing, clips played from nearly every video Weird Al has ever been involved in.
This may not be your thing. I’m pretty sure my wife will hate it, but I think Pogo’s work is a perfect example of why culture needs to be free and with less onerous copyright rules. I’m pretty sure all of this is within fair use, but it would take a legal fight for him (or her) to win rather than just give up to Disney’s (and other studios) army of lawyers.
Originally my first concert of 2015 was going to be a little later in the year, but with Danielle away for the weekend, the email letting me know about a concert in just a few days seemed quite fortuitous. I’d had a couple chances to see Anamanaguchi in concert, but the timing was never right. This time it was perfect - weekend and wife out of town. So I decided to go.
1. I Fight Dragons (179 plays) - Over this quarter I have continued to really enjoy the B Side to The Near Future and listened to them a lot after work. Scarlett likes quite a few of those songs as well.
2. Anberlin (74 plays) - For the concert last year I put all their albums on my phone. So when I listen to my music already on the phone, Anberlin comes up a lot.
For (hopefully) obvious reasons, we didn’t listen to Prince when I was a kid. (Which was when almost all his albums came out). After hearing about him a few times on Giant Bomb and today’s AV Club article, I hit Spotify to see what the fuss is all about.
At the end of my interview about starting the Kickstarter project, Brian Mazzaferri of I Fight Dragons opened the door to speaking with him about the process when it was all done. It was, as is the case with many Kickstarter projects, very exhausting and we only recently had time to actually do the interview. In the interview I briefly mention the delays in the vinyl album. This actually a pretty big problem in the music industry at the moment. Demand for vinyl has increased to a point where the record pressing plants can’t keep up with demand, but not yet to the point where it makes sense to open a new factory (with all the upfront costs involved). Even The Protomen’s new album The Cover Up has had its vinyl release delayed due to production delays. Of course, the new old tech is cassette tapes, so perhaps vinyl demand will fall a little. Time will tell. Without further ado, the interview:
Once again Scarlett had a hand in determining the year’s winners. However, sometime around June she stopped requesting Disney music all the time, allowing others a chance at the spotlight. Still, while other artists were able to take the top artist spots, I didn’t listen to any one song often enough to undermine the Disney songs taking the top spots there.
Artists
1. Alan Menken (450 listens) - THE Disney songwriter
2. Mandy Moore (332 listens) - 100% all of these are from the Tangled soundtrack
2. Five Iron Frenzy (332 listens) - I just enjoyed the heck out of FIF music this year.
4. The Beatles (329 listens) - As usual, this is a mix of me picking something different when the family’s together and just enjoying listening to it myself.
5. Anberlin (247 listens) - I had Google Music load all the albums to my phone in preparation for the concert. This means when I listen to music in the car, Anberlin is very likely to come up.
6 .I Fight Dragons (207 listens) - As I mentioned in the Q4 post, most of this is due to the new album coming out this year.
7. Donna Murphy (139 listens) - A great performance on the Tangled soundtrack.
8. Chance the Rapper (116 listens) - Many of these are from early in the year. I still really enjoy Acid Rap, but am also ready for something new.
9. “Weird Al” Yankovic (115 listens) - A new album produced most of these scrobbles. It’d be slightly higher if the Android app didn’t have a problem with the quotation marks in the artist name.
10. Childish Gambino (113 listens) - I went through as part of listening to my music in alphabetical order. It reinforced that I probably am done with him for now. Lyrically my wife can’t stand it and I shouldn’t listen to it in front of the toddler.
11. Celia Cruz (100 listens) - The Queen of Salsa.
12. Brad Kane (97 listens) - From the Aladdin soundtrack.
13. The Beach Boys (96 listens) - I continue to love Pet Sounds.
14. Billie Holiday (93 listens) - She’s so great it’s too bad she isn’t really played on many radio stations anymore.
15. Jonathan Coulton (92 listens) - Wow, didn’t realize I listened to so much JoCo.
1. Five Iron Frenzy (147 listens) - Many of these came from me continuing to go through my collection in alphabetical order.
2. I Fight Dragons (102 listens) - IFD’s Kickstarter album finally came out. I really like it a lot. I’ve been listening to the B side more than the song cycle, but that’s mostly because those are more easily listened to here and there while the song cycle is best heard all at once.
3. Anberlin (98 listens) - Tried to listen to a bunch of Anberlin to get ready for their farewell concert.
4. Fantastic Plastic Machine (71 listens) - Also from the alphabetical listen.
5. Fall Out Boy (63 listens) - Partly from the alphabetical listen and partly from Scrobbles from Spotify of their new singles.
6. Final Fantasy (Soundtracks) (50 listens) - from the alphabetical listens.
7. Edith Piaf (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I’d completely forgotten we had a bunch of her music. We used to listen to it more often.
7. Doctor Octoroc (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I really don’t like the albums anymore.
9. Willy Chirino (43 listens) - Mostly from listening to his great Christmas album. The only Spanish-language Christmas album I have.
10. Relient K (41 listens) - I felt nostalgic for some Relient K. Still love the earlier stuff.
11. DC Talk (40 listens) - While I still like some of the songs, others have not aged well.
12. Dj CUTMAN (39 listens) - I just love these remixes.
13. Celia Cruz (38 listens) - Put on some Celia because Scarlett really likes to dance to salsa.
14. Elvis Presley (35 listens) - Going through my collection of #1s.
15. Taylor Swift (32 listens) - Danielle got the new album and, unsurprisingly for Ms Swift, it’s quite catchy.
Technology continues to complicate the media landscape. The other day I learned on the Fedora Planet how to send Pulse Audio over the net - allowing one computer to listen to music (or other audio) from another. But, in the context of music, who cares? I have all my music on Google Music. I can just plug my phone into the sound system and listen to music (or any other speakers). This also eliminates my need to use DLNA / uPNP servers/clients to play my music. (They never worked all that well anyway)
I’ve been really loving my favorite new Florida-based Ska band, Beebs and Her Money Makers since I saw them in concert last year. I really enjoyed their new album Wurst Album Ever which I crowdfunded.
Check out the new 70s-tastic video for Death to Ego:
I continued listening to artists alphabetically on my computer and randomly on my phone.
1. Childish Gambino (92 listens) - Came across his music in my alphabetic romp. Currently conflicted. I enjoy the verbal jiu jitsu, but find a lot of it whiny (after hearing for the 15th time) and just so overly aggressively sexual I feel wrong listening to it with my daughter around.
2. Billie Holiday (64 listens) - long-time readers know that Danielle and I listen to pretty much everything from the latest music to the oldest music. Billie Holiday is awesome and more people need to listen to her.
3. Danny Baranowsky (61 listens) - Listened to the Super Meat Boy soundtrack. It was fun.
4. Chance the Rapper (47 listens) - Still really enjoy Acid Rap and don’t enjoy #10Day.
5. The Black Keys (46 listens) - I always start off happy listening to The Black Keys, but the sameness drags on me by the end.
6. Alan Menken (45 listens) - for Scarlett.
7. Celia Cruz (44 listens) - I can listen to Celia Cruz at any time. Really enjoyed revisiting these songs.
7. Brave Saint Saturn (44 listens) - Although the first album’s a tad cheesy, I really enjoy where Reese took things for the second two albums. I continue to hold out hope that he will do another one.
9. Mandy Moore (43 listens) - Scarlett wanted to listen to a lot of Tangled this quarter.
10. Anberlin (31 listens) - Maybe it’s just the quarter in which I bought it, but the last album failed to make a lasting impression. I’m sure, with time, I’ll come to enjoy it as much as I enjoy the other albums.
11. Christafari (30 listens) - The music is a great groove. I have the first two albums and I think I like more songs in the first one, but I do like a lot of the second one. Although no longer an evangelical, I still find it to be pretty uplifting.
12. Ben Shive (29 listens) - There’s a certain timelessness to the songs. Some of them remind me of a subdued Billy Joel.
13. The Chipmunks & The Chipettes (28 listens) - Playing some Chipmunks for Scarlett.
13. The Weeknd (28 listens) - I know there are issues with some of the lyrics, but I do like the sound of a few of the songs. Especially “High for This”
13. Ben Prunty Music (28 listens) - The FTL soundtrack. Quite moody. I enjoy it.
I was explaining bands to Scarlett and she wanted to see an example. The only concert movie I had was from the I Fight Dragons Chicago show. I put that on and she rocked out; And asked me to dance with her. The first video (blurry because she’s so close, I think) she is spinning on my finger. The second she’s dancing on her own. I didn’t think to record video until well into things so she’s not going as crazy with the dancing as she had been.
Suddenly Charlie XCX seems to be everywhere. In reality she’s been slowly appearing in and writing lots of pop songs for the past few years. But I had no idea who she was or anything. So I was surprised to find I had “What I Like” from her True Romance album on my computer. Must have been one of those MP3s Rolling Stone used to give away weekly.
How did we get to the point where certain singing voices are racialized? Everyone I’ve spoken to (and me too) was surprised to discover (a few years ago) that Adelle was not black. Now it’s happening all over again with Meghan Trainor and “All about that Bass”. I’d heard the song at the gym and looked for the music video, when Ms Trainor appeared I was shocked. As was my wife when she walked into the living room. I’ve polled a bunch of others in the office and they were all shocked as well.
This quarter was a mix of new music, continuing to listen to my music in alphabetical order (by artist), and whatever I happened to listen to on my phone. And that resulted in a little something like this (a lot more ties than usual):
1. The Beatles (243 listens) - For the first time in a long time the Fab Four are back on top. I continue to love their later stuff although their older stuff is played out having spent my childhood listening to oldies.
Posts like this one and others I’ve mentioned recently help explain why I’ve had an increase in hatred of pop music as my music tastes have expanded. (Although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying Bubblegum - as it was once known - most of it is garbage) The record industry, as with any established industry (and not too differently from fast food chains), hates risk. They take artists who put out amazing mix tapes and make them bland. As a corollary, when I do enjoy mainstream acts (as opposed to indie), I tend to enjoy the songs they don’t play on the radio. (Lana Del Rey and Fall Out Boy are perfect examples)
I started 2014 with a bunch of music I’d acquired in 2013, but which I still hadn’t listened to. So I created a playlist with a high weight on unplayed music from Q4 2013 to Q1 2014. I changed my Amarok settings so that instead of populating the next 11 items, it would populate the next 3. That way if I was getting bored with the new music (a lot of which is music I got for free so sometimes it’s awesome (to my tastes) and sometimes it’s just OK) I could switch to another dynamic playlist for a while and I’d just be three songs away from hearing some music I know I like. I also bought an album with 100 of the best Beethoven compositions. However, since I’m scrobbling the orchestra that played it (not the composer), I’m not sure if any of them will end up dominating the list. (They didn’t)
I was inspired to ruminate on this from this Boing Boing article featuring a Dust & Grooves interview with Sheila Burgel. The series seems to use interviews as an excuse to photograph people’s vinyl listening rooms. Many of these are quite beautiful, even if the beauty is just in the size and organization of the collection. I thought of my childhood.
Growing up, my mom always had music playing when she was cleaning the house. Ninety percent of the time she didn’t listen to the radio or tapes. Mom listened to her records. In fact, I only really remember tapes ever being played when we were in the car. Even when I was in high school and we had concert DVDs and CDs (and I was starting to get into the MP3 scene), mom would put on her records. That hiss and pop and then BOOM when the record goes from the non-audio grooves into the record mean “something’s coming” to my brain.
On 6 Nov I went to my 2013 concert. Because of time and money concerns, Danielle and I typically go to a maximum of two concerts a year, and usually just one concert. I was completely unable to resist seeing Five Iron Frenzy in their first tour since breaking up nearly a decade ago. I didn’t really care for Reel Big Fish and I hoped that Five Iron Frenzy would go first as Co-headliner so I could leave early. In fact, although being a fan of ska, the only Reel Big Fish song I’d ever heard was “Everbody’s Doin’ the Fish” because it was the Florida Marlins’ theme song for a season or two. A large part of that comes from the fact that when I got into ska, in the 1990s, I was only into Christian music to the exclusion of secular music - as was encouraged by my middle school church. (My high school church actually shied away from Christian music, which I thought was weird, considering how good it had gotten by the early 2000s) So I listed to Five Iron Frenzy, The OC Supertones, and The Skadaddles. This was going to be my first Five Iron Frenzy concert in nearly 15 years when I saw them at a festival in Florida (and actually filmed a pretty decent video bootleg)
This year I bought LOTS of albums. I don’t know if it’s the most albums I’ve purchased in one year since writing these blog posts or even since keeping track of Scrobbles. I do know that while I listened to my music randomly, in general, I did also listen to entire albums whenever I purchased one. Sometimes I’d listen to the album a few times and other times I’d take the album purchase as an opportunity to review the artist’s previous work. I know that was the case with Five Iron Frenzy (although that was also concert prep as I mentioned a few days ago), Relient K, I Fight Dragons, and Fall Out Boy. It was a very fun year for me, musically. Kacey Musgraves, for example, was a reminder that country music doesn’t have to suck. Disclosure made me realize that I could still like loop-heavy electronic music. I hope that I can continue to explore new sounds in 2014.
This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.
It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.
When I was in middle school in Oregon I was introduced to the concept of non-worship Christian music for the first time. Up until that time the only English music we listened to was Oldies and 70s music. I’d catch a pop or rap song here or there - mostly because the public school buses I rode would listen to the pop or rap stations - but that was it. I think it was like 10% shielding us from the “bad messages in pop music” and 90% my parents just listening to what they enjoyed - which was the music they grew up with. And since those stations were always on when we were growing up, that’s what we grew to like. It’s why I’m the only person in the circle of friends in my age group that knows all the Doo-Wop standards.
I’m writing this in late August - by the time this post appears I should have received all of my Kickstarter goods or they should be in the mail. Interestingly, even though the Kickstarter backer cycles were spread over about a three month period, they’re all supposed to be delivering the product at around the same time - 4th quarter of this year. As of the time of this writing, this is the status of my Kickstarters:
This article on AV Club considers how A Tribe Called Quest’s most critically acclaimed album is their worst artistically. I felt the same thing happened with GRITS - I LOVE their first two albums, but hate everything after that - which is when they started to pick up steam and be featured on MTV. It’s not some kind of hipster hate of the popular - I kept buying the albums hoping they’re return to a sound more like The Roots. Eventually I gave up. I feel like the same happened with Childish Gambino - I really don’t like his first commercial release, but I loved his mixtapes. I hear the same said of Lupe Fiasco.
This quarter was a mix of listening to the music I had at work and listening on pure random. Once again Amarok lost the first played and last played stats. Of all the stats to lose, these are the least detrimental, but it makes the “don’t play songs I’ve heard in the last x days” playlists not work. So I just went on pure random and rediscovered some music I’d forgotten about. Once again no Beatles on the top 15. We’ll see if they can rectify that next quarter. (Note: I have added Amazon affiliate links this time around. If you use them to buy the music, it helps support this site)
This article explores a side of the blues I never knew existed. Apparently there was certain degree of openness about lesbian blues singers when it was indie that I wouldn’t have expected to find in 1920s America (as well as hidden via slang and double-entendre references to lesbianism)
Saw this on Boing Boing a while ago. It saddens me that girls and women are treated as second class citizens within geekdom, but it heartens me that women like these don’t let it keep them from their geek pursuits. I hope to raise Scarlett to be just like them - self-confident enough to pursue whatever she wants, regardless of what others think.
This reveals more about my stereotypes than anything else, but I was extremely shocked to find out that the lead singer from The Offspring (yeah, the Pretty Fly for a White Guy band) is a molecular biologist. He’s working on helping to kick AIDS in the butt. Who would have thought?
A few months ago Lifehacker had people post images of their Smart Playlists. So I decided to share some of my Dynamic Playlists from Amarok so that others could see the syntax needed for various types of playlists.
Those of you who have been reading this blog long enough know that I often write my blog posts during my lunch break at work and set it to post at some point in the future. I’m writing this post almost 1 month before it is to appear on the blog. So in the middle of July I find myself in what many who have backed projects probably experience as the Kickstarter Lull. I backed a project by I Fight Dragons and interviewed them about it here and I backed a comic project by Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton. During the backing period as a way to drum up support there was a constant stream of both updates and digital goodies. IFD, in particular, gave backers 2 albums (live concert recording and a conceptual album) and a concert film. A little while after the backing period was over, the projects contacted us for the info they needed to fulfill our backer rewards. Since then I haven’t heard from either of them. On the rational side, I’m glad they’re focusing on creating what we paid them to create. But after the constant communications it just feels odd to have “radio” silence. Now we just wait for the products to be created. In the case of these two projects, the members involved are all veterans: IFD put out records before having a record company contract and Greg Pak has already done about a half dozen Kickstarters. So, outside of catastrophe, I don’t fear for my money. I could see where this silence might be more disturbing with an unproven team.
K-Pop has been making a splash in America in a big way. Although they have nearly subsumed all music in Asia and are getting big in parts of Europe and the Middle East, K-Pop in the USA seems to be about where J-Pop was during the height of the anime/manga crazy in the last 1990s and early 2000s. That is to say, huge within a niche group that’s made up of expat/second gen immigrants and Americans who love asian pop culture despite often not completely understanding all the lyrics. Of course, things were brought into mainstream attention with last year’s “Gangnam Style”. There are quite a few articles that examined why Psy emerged as the face of K-Pop. If I had to pick out the top reasons, I think it would be the easy and silly dance, the catchy beat, the fun of yelling “Oppa Gangnam Style!”, and the fact that he’s a pudgy Asian man who doesn’t threaten America’s notions of Asians. As to that last reason, Dan sent me a few articles during the height of the Gangnam craze that suggested part of the reason other artists like Rain have had a hard time penetrating is that American can only accept the goofy asian (Jackie Chan, The Donger, Kevin Jeong, etc) or the Karate Asian (Mr Miyagi, Jet Li). Even though the 1800s are long behind us, we can’t accept the pop star sex symbol Asian man. If there is interest among my dedicated readers, perhaps Dan can post links or do a followup blog post. At any rate, there’s a much higher chance of female-led K-Pop groups infiltrating the USA - given that we already have the stereotype of the sexy Asian woman coupled with the fact that there is a huge emphasis on gender, sexiness, and cuteness in the K-Pop system.
For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.
Back on 4 May I backed a Kickstarter project for the first time ever - I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma. Anyone who’s been following my last.fm posts knows that I really like the Chicago-based band. I first discovered I Fight Dragons when listening to a web comics podcast that featured “No One Likes Superman Anymore” from 2009’s Cool is Just a Number EP as the closing song. I have no idea if they had permission from I Fight Dragons, but it was quite fortuitous for the band as it led to me buying Welcome to the Breakdown and Kaboom! (and participating in this Kickstarter) As I’ve said before, the band is the inverse of Anamanaguchi. They are a rock band that uses Nintendos and Gameboys to create extra background instruments (whereas Anamanaguchi tends to have the instruments take the background to the chiptunes). Here’s one of the songs of their new album, Kaboom!
[caption id=“attachment_6093” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Fall Out Boy - Save Rock and Roll[/caption]
The new Fall Out Boy album, Save rock and Roll, came out a few weeks ago after five long years. Having listened to it about a half dozen times now, I figured I had a good enough handle on it for a review. For context, I enjoyed the last three albums. I enjoyed Folie à Deux the most - I felt it was the peak of their maturity both musically and lyrically. (According to a recent Rolling Stone article, I’m in the minority)
In light of the semi-recent news that most kids nowadays use Youtube to discover music and that leading to Youtube views being counted for music charts, I thought I’d talk about how I discover and/or acquire new music. For the record, the wife also uses Youtube to find new songs. It’s one of the first things she thinks of and I’m always left thinking “Oh yeah”. How I discover music to listen to depends on a few categories.
For this quarter I’ve gone back and forth between picking albums to listen to and having dynamic playlists determine what I listen to. For most of March I was listening to a bunch of free South by Southwest samplers with some pretty GREAT music. Not a lot of repeat among the artists there so none of them appear on this list. Some of those songs could potentially end up in the most listened song list at the end of the year.
In 2012 I accelerated my trend of listening to new music. More than ever, I experienced new music via various outlets that provided free music like Jamendo, Rolling Stone, and others. I discovered some great music that I really, really enjoyed. Since it mostly consisted of singles, a lot of the new artists I discovered aren’t really represented in the lists here, but it does contribute to lower numbers for the usual artists.
Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)
Recently I was looking at this old post and the screenshots of Amarok 1.4 reminded me of something I loved about that version of Amarok - the stats that would display when you were playing a song - like if you were playing a Five Iron Frenzy song it would tell you your three favorite (or most played) Five Iron Frenzy songs. That functionality never made it back into the Amarok 2 series. So when I was looking through the Amarok scripts in the script installer I came across Rating Statistics. It basically gave me everything I wanted other than being linked to the currently playing song. It allows you to search your favorite songs based on all kinds of criteria like number of plays, user-assigned rating, or auto-score. You can also assign some weights to it and get your best songs based on that weighting. Here are the stats about my library:
[caption id=“attachment_5661” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] last.fm top artists[/caption]
This has been the configuration of the top eight artists on last.fm for a very long time. Only Five Iron Frenzy and Weird Al have traded spots. Everyone else has been secure in their position for years. The Beatles might soon overtake Anberlin. Both of them have a long time to go to unseat Fantastic Plastic Machine. But the weird thing is how long Andrea Echeverri has been ther.e I haven’t listened to her in at least three years. There are two really close artists and a third not too far behind, but it is definitly interesting how quickly the listens fall off. The 15th position is 300 listens less than Andrea. We’ll see how things continue to evolve as the time passes and I abandon some artists that I no longer like and listen to others that I’ve newly discovered.
For the first time since I started keeping track The Beatles did NOT make the list! That’s mostly because I have been acquiring TONS of new music (over one thousand tracks) in this quarter and haven’t really been listening on random as much. Although my #1 artist doesn’t have as many listens as some other quarters, I think this is the first (or second, at most) time where my #15 artist has more than 20 listens. There are some great new artists making their debuts on my list and hopefully you can discover some new music to listen to!
I started off this quarter using a smart playlist that only played songs I hadn’t heard in the last quarter in an attempt to listen to even more great music, but Amarok lost my library which clears out the last played field and so I ended up with lots of repeats again. Oh well! It’s all great music!
1. Five Iron Frenzy (65 plays) - I continued to listen to some great music from my high school years
This quarter my listens were a bit lower than they would otherwise have been because a lot of time I would have spent in front of the computer was spent with my new daughter. But, as she grew and now spends time in her “baby gym”, I sometimes put on music for her both so that she can hear complex music and for my sanity. There are only so many times I can listen to “itsy bitsy spider”.
So here’s my top listened artists for 2011. Some of these entries are a surprise and others are expected. I can’t wait to see how many of these artists are on this list next year. Well, let’s take a look.
1. The Beatles (492) - No surprises here; the ancestors of nearly all pop and rock in America has been on top every quarter. So of course they’d top this list.
For the last fourth of the year I continued to listen to my music on random via Amarok’s dynamic playlist. I set it to only play songs that I liked, but other than that left it up to chance. For the most part, the only exceptions were when I had exams to take and wanted some non-vocal music or to listen to new songs I’d downloaded from Rolling Stone’s website. Here’s how the artists fared.
For this Quarter I continued listening to my music in order as I attempted to go through my entire catalog so that Amarok could auto-rate the songs I liked and I could switch to a dynamic, random playlist. I actually finished going through all my music A-Z (and Japanese characters) - except for songs that didn’t have the Album Artist set.
Through a quirk of the way Amarok is programmed and the sorting I’ve selected, a bunch of artists who had the Album Artist blank did not appear along with the artist. In other words, if a Kanye West track had an album artist of either Kanye or Various, it would appear under Kanye. But if that field was blank, it appeared under “various artist” at the top. It’s a strange quirk and as I go through this final category in Q4, I’m trying to remember to fix as many of those as possible.
I started off this quarter ending my random listening. I wanted to listen to certain artists I really enjoyed. I figured I could go back to random once I got bored of choosing the artists I was listening to. Additionally, in between picking certain artists if I wanted to hear a certain song, I started going through my library alphabetically by artist. Let’s see how these trends panned out over the quarter.
Monday night, as I walked to the Ram’s Head Live concert venue, I had no idea what to expect. Earlier in the year Daniel had retweeted some strange, witty tweets from some dude named Childish Gambino. Based on the name I thought it was some weird Italian joke tweet account. Then, a few months later, I joined tumblr after seeing Dan’s tumblr posts on his blog’s sidebar and determining there was some neat stuff going on there. That’s when I came across the site Hipster Childish Gambino and saw posts like these:
I wanted to take a look at my music listening habits quarterly to see how each quarter’s stats stack up against the final numbers at the end of the year. I started off the year listening to some of the new artists I’d bought, then just switched to random listens for the rest of the quarter.
1. Girl Talk (294 plays) - I discovered Girl Talk at the end of 2010. I really enjoyed the latest album. Quickly acquired the rest of his albums. I enjoy all of them other than the first one. Listened to each of the albums a few times. Then when I put my playlist on random, of course a few of them kept coming up because of how many tracks there were.
2. Doctor Octoroc (279 plays) - I got into chip tunes at the end of 2010/beginning 2011 via I Fight Dragons. That caused me to check out Anamanaguchi, who Dan had been recommending for a while. Then I came across Doctor Octoroc. Got his chiptunes version of the Dr Horrible soundtrack and his chiptunes album “After These Messages”. Enjoyed it for a while. Quickly tired of it. I don’t think I’ve listened to it once since the initial push.
3. The Beatles (132 plays) - I went through my Beatles rush in 2010 when I first got all the songs. The Beatles are in third place solely on the basis of having SO MANY songs that they’re bound to come up often why I’m listening to my entire collection on random.
4. I Fight Dragons (109 plays) - I have all three of their EPs. One was available for joining the mailing list - the other two I bought. I really enjoy this group. They’re a regular rock band that embellishes their sound with chiptunes. The topics are not as nerdy as you’d expect from a chiptunes band. They have a good sound, the singer has a good voice, and the songs are good. I wouldn’t say they’re awesome, but they’re enjoyable enough that I always get happy when their CDs come up in my rotation of CD-Rs are work.
5. Anberlin (89 plays) - I own all their CDs so I’m surprised they didn’t come up more often. I like all their albums to varying degrees. I’m partial to their earlier work, although their latest CD had me falling for them again.
6. Relient K (54 plays) - I also own all of their CDs. Although the first two CDs are awful compared to their later albums, there are still a few songs I enjoy on the first two. I’m not a big fan of their absolute latest album, it forays a bit more into a country type of sound. I’ll probably have to listen to previews of their next CD rather than blindly buying it.
7. “Weird Al” Yankovic (49 plays) - I have a ton of his songs, but I often had to skip them to keep from annoying Danielle. Perhaps now that I’m mostly listening with headphones there’ll be more listens.
8. Billy Joel (43 plays) - nearly all of these plays come from a greatest hits album of his that I bought. Around this time, I stopped listening at random in order to listen to my newly bought music.
9. Five Iron Frenzy (40 plays) - I’m a huge fan of Five Iron Frenzy, but they’ve fallen to the wayside as I’ve explored other non-ska music recently
10. MxPx (33 plays) - I hadn’t heard any MxPx music in a long time. They were one of my favorite bands from middle school through high school. But I hadn’t listened to any of the three of four albums I own in a long time. Listening to my collection on random brought them back into my radar.
11. GRITS (33 plays) - all their plays came from listening to my collection on random. After their second album, I only like selected songs from their further albums.
12. The Hangovers (29 plays) - all from their latest album Three Sails to the Wind. I really enjoy this album a lot.
13. Anamanaguchi (28 plays) - I really enjoy listening to this group. It’s weird having groups producing music without vocals nowadays. But I wonder if this is the future evolution of symphonic music.
14. Tom Lehrer (27 plays) - A great musician who rivals “Weird Al” for making me laugh.
14. ???? (Nobuo Uematsu) (27 plays) - I don’t have any of his solo work. All these are from Final Fantasy soundtracks. He is a great composer. I think some of his songs rival movie soundtracks.
I was born and raised in the USA, so I am not sure if it’s fair to call these songs racist, I think that racism requires malicious intent. And, given that the US has a different and unique relationship with its non-caucasian descendants than Latin America, I’m not sure there’s the same level of maliciousness as in the US. All I can do is view these songs through the perspective of an American. The song that sparked this article is by La Banda Gorda and is called “El Negro Pega Con Todo” which means “black matches with everything”. I’d heard it before, but I was listening a little more closely to the introduction this time around.
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page. Here it is for you to see and for Google to index. Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.
So, as I mentioned before, I wanted to try and make sure to get mostly unheard music on my random playlist so I could go through all my music. So I put in a bias to make sure that there was an 80% that the next song picked was unplayed. I started getting even more played music showing up than before! I was baffled! Then I realized it was my piss-poor understanding of statistics at fault. Telling it that there should be an 80% of the music selected having never been played is equivalent to saying there should be a 20% change that the music selected should have been played before. What the heck is going on? So, if you look at my collection - when I moved to KDE 4, it lost the previous stats. So all of my music was unplayed. Let’s say I have 10,000 songs. So when I tell it to randomly play music (with no bias), there’s, at first a 0/10,000 chance of a played song coming up. After that, there’s a 1/10,000 chance of a previously played song showing up. After a day, there’s a 26/10,000 chance of a played song coming up. So because of randomness I could end up with previously played songs. Stats only tell us what will happen in the long run. In 10 flips of a coin you could get 10 heads. But in infinite flips you should get half of them heads and half tails. 26/10,000 = 0.26% chance of a previously played song coming up. So, when I set the bias so that theres a 20% of the songs that come up will have been played, I’m greatly increasing my changes of hearing a song again vs just leaving it on random! At least for now. Once I’d listened to most of my collection, it should flip. There will be so many previously played songs that those will be random enough to satisfy me. Right now not enough of them have been played relative to my collection’s size so the same ones keep coming up.
So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle. While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt. All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym. I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano. Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod. Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.
[caption id=“attachment_3694” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“My KDE 4.4 Desktop”] [/caption]
At first I was confused because the desktop background was not carried over to my right monitor. When I went to change the background I saw that they no longer put it all into one dialog. You need to go to each screen and manually set the background. While counterintuitive at first, it actually makes more sense this way. You can see my micro-blogging widget, calculator widget, and some folder views. The taskbar is looking nice and slick now. The KDE version of the system try is looking really nice. It has a very good slickness to it; to quote Aaron Seigo, “like something that might come out of Cupertino”. My FAVORITE part of KDE 4.4 vs Gnome 2.30 is the little “i” i the right corner. If you click there you can scroll back through all the system messages. So, whereas you might miss that in Gnome if you’re looking somewhere else or away from the computer, you can easily find and review the messages in KDE. At first the desktop was really slow and I thought “here we go again. I’m going to have to once again write off KDE 4.x as useless.” But it turns out that it was just Strigi/Nepomuk indexing my home folder. It’d be a year or more since I last loaded KDE 4, so it had a lot to index. When I also had some errors with Amarok (which I’m about to get to), I gave it a reboot in case KDE was having a fight with SELinux (as has happened in the past). Anyway, when I came back, Strigi was done and KDE was much more responsive. Konqueror had also been slow during the indexing, so I’ll want to test that in Part 2. I took a look at my old friend, Kopete. It was looking nice, if a bit cartoony compared to Pidgin. I’ll also want to take a closer look in Part 2. It didn’t support Facebook chat (as is supported in Pidgin via a plugin) which isn’t a killer, but it’s not good. Perhaps there’s a plugin there too? I’ll have to investigate that. What I was most curious about was Amarok. It was one of my biggest anchors to KDE back in the day and really my favorite music player.
Dan’s not the only one that can post videos. Here’s one I really enjoyed. I heard about this guy in a podcast that covered a steam punk gathering in London.
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The BSO Warms up for the Concert”] [/caption]
Danielle and I recently went to see " Peter and the Wolf" at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Danielle and I both grew up watching the Disney animated adaption of “Peter and the Wolf” and we loved the idea of being able to listen to the music as performed by the BSO. I don’t care how amazing the speakers are in your home theater system, nothing sounds as amazing as the orchestra.
I just got Anberlin’s latest album, “New Surrender”. I was pretty lukewarm about “Cities” and Danielle just about hated it. We both loved “Blueprints for the Black Market” and “Never Take Friendship Personal”. This album is a return to the sounds and lyrics of those first two albums. I loved it upon first listen. Danielle summed it up best, “It’s like their first two albums, but more mature.” I’ve only started listening to it for the second time, so I’m still picking up the lyrics. What I’ve heard so far continues their tradition of poetic lyrics that take a few listens to fully appreciate. If you’ve been on the fence about this album after hearing “Cities”, definitely get “New Surrender”. If you liked “Cities” and hated the first two albums, you probably won’t like “New Surrender”.
One of the killer features of Songbird is that when you view web pages with MP3s, it presents a very easy way for you to download the songs. I noticed on my last.fm home page that there were a few free MP3s available for download, so I decided to test this out.
I went to the Birdhouse because that seemed to be the way to type in an address to go to.
Last.fm is getting close to relaunching their site and I was invited to participate in the beta program. I think the new design has some great new features and I wanted to share it with you so you could get excited about it too.
Here’s the main page as it appears now:
The most important thing to notice is how cluttered it is. Look at the proposed layout under beta:
It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and problems with podcasts. Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped using it. I updated to version 0.4 a while back, but it still seemed a bit unstable. With Rhythmbox and Amarok meeting my needs on Linux, and with me hating Windows Media Player so much, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to music on my Windows computer.
Back in High School I got The W’s Fourth from the Last album and one of my favorite tracks was titled “Hui”. I thought that, like some of the other songs on the album, it was just a nonsensical song and that calling the thugs on the beach “The Hui” was just because it sounded really funny. Well, I finally found out that the song was about a real-life gang of surfers called Da Hui. They get a brief mention in the Local Surfers section of the Surfing article in Wikipedia. Interestingly, The Offspring also wrote a song about “da hui”. Well, I’ll certainly think of that song differently next time I hear it!
I’ve noticed for some time now (yet, despite what I thought, have not blogged about) that when I listen to all my music on random, it doesn’t appear to really be random. It’s mostly random, but not random enough as I noticed some songs coming up more often than they should. At first I chalked this up to the fact that humans are horrible at figuring out stats and how often things should occur. But then I had somewhat concrete proof, I had some artists with lots of songs and those artists were being played less than artists with just a few songs. Recently I found the culprit - when Rhythmbox plays random songs, it weights the songs you like heavier so they appear more often.
I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the day’s Top downloads are $0.89 and the rest are $0.99. On iTunes the DRM-free songs are $1.89 or something like that. Looks like Apple’s going to need to do a price drop or there’s going the be a mass exodus to Amazon.com.
Often the biggest gripe people have about CDs is that they are two or three hit singles packaged with a bunch of crap to justify selling it to you for $12 or more. I’ve felt that way many, many times. The phenomenon is a large part of the reason behind models like iTunes. In fact, the record companies STILL don’t get it - that’s why they offer you a discount if you buy the whole album vs the singles. One day they’ll learn that artists should only release their good songs. People will buy them a la carte.
A while back (6 mo to a year ago), I tried Rhythmbox and found it too buggy for me. I absolutely hated it. I loved Amarok so I used that within KDE, but it took forever to load within Gnome. So what was I to do? Ever since Fedora started packaging Mono, I’ve been using Banshee. But I find it extremely slow, less featured than Rhythmbox, and without Podcast support. I hate iTunes, so my podcast support has been coming from Songbird. However, they have a really annoying bug that makes using it for podcasting horrible. (I’ve filed a bug report, but no fixes yet) Here’s an example of what the podcasting interface looks like: (click the image to see it full size)
(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)
My wife and I went to the Relient K concert yesterday in Baltimore. We were the oldest people there as I’ve been following them since their first album (which came out around 8-10 years ago), while many of these kids just started listening to them ever since they started getting airplay on Mtv.
The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash.
The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.
The first battle in our war against those who would wield DRM to prevent us from having fair use over our movies and music has been won. EMI, a Bristih Music label with bands like The Rolling Stones, has agreed to release songs on iTunes without DRM. Please, try and support them and show them this is a good idea. Yeah, it costs thirty cents more, but you also get 256kbps instead of just 128. Buy from them and don’t rampantly share with others so that the rest of the music labels can follow suit.
“What happened to Roper? Is it dead? - Yes. Roper was a project put together by 5minutewalk records. We had a falling out with them, and are too lazy to start over again. Everyone has real jobs now, and although we miss seeing you all, we are just going to let it die. Unless you are a record company executive that wants to give us an enormous signing bonus and not make us tour.” -Reese Roper, source: Wikipedia, Roper entry.
if anyone can tell me the name of a group and album in which one of the tracks is simply a female who keeps repeating “eight foot fiberglass penguin”, let me know. I’ve searched google and everywhere else and can’t find it. Thanks! (I heard it on NPR, if it helps….)
As I read my Linuxtoday.com RSS feed today, I discovered a new piece of software. Songbird aims to be, in their words, “the Firefox of media players.” They seem to be on the right track. First of all, it works on all majors operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux (and by extention BSD). Second, it has taken a good, intuitive interface which appears to have based on a cross between Linux’s Rhythmn Box and Mac/Window’s iTunes. I downloaded developer release 0.2 to see what the fuss was about. Frankly, it’s doing quite well for just being a developer release!
last.fm has had a facelift! It looks quite a bit more sleek! The biggest change seems to be adding artist and album pictures near all of the stats. Check out my last.fm page.
Thanks to Danny, I am now a member of the yet another addictive internet site. Last.fm, which works with the Linux music player amaroK will collect all the songs you listen to. It will then display it on a webpage such as this one. If this was all it did, it would be mildly fun, but it combines the best of the social web phenomenon involved in web 2.0. Clicking on a song will tell you how many users listened to that song from that artist. It also has a “neighbors” feature where it lists other users that have the same musical taste as you. This should be interesting given the variety of music I listen to. Also, I have added a plugin to the sidebar here so that you can see the latest songs I’ve listend to on my Linux computer. These are the invasions of privacy I don’t mind since I’m volunteering this information. It’s when programs, websites, and ISPs take this information without asking me that I get annoyed.
Christian Rock/Pop music has been around since the 1970s when Larry Norman pioneered the genre. Since then it has become a HUGE market encompassing all areas of music from rock to ska to punk to rap. There is a large popuplation of Jews in the US, so why wouldn’t there be Jewish music? Finally, our country has put enough of our prejudices aside that I heard Matisyahu’s single “King Without a Crown” on the pop radio station here in the Baltimore Area.
Ever since I heard this song on the radio in Ithaca because my computer was broken and I had to listen to the radio to get some music, I’ve wondered what the heck the lyrics were about. I finally decided to google it and here’s what the singer, himself has to say about it.
In 2001, Brian Vander Ark explained what the song means to him:
WHEN I WAS YOUNG I KNEW EVERYTHING. We all think we know everything at a young age. I thought I did. I realize I didn’t know sh*t until i was 36.AND SHE, A PUNK, WHO RARELY TOOK ADVICE. How many people do we know like that? NOW I’M GUILT STRICKEN, SOBBING, WITH MY HEAD ON THE FLOOR. Something happened, that caused this reaction, but I wouldn’t want to give that away this early in the song, so let’s through in an some ambiguity: STOP A BABY’S BREATH, AND A SHOE FULL OF RICE, NO. First of all, forget the NO. Stop a baby’s breath is just that. Abort the baby. A shoe full of rice is a result of a wedding. So - stop a baby’s breath AND then you stop a wedding. She’s pregnant, get her to abort, and then there’s no wedding. And you know what? I CAN’T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE, CAUSE SHE WAS TOUCHING HER FACE. When I wrote this song, The Divinyls had a song out called I touch myself. The TV was on, she was touching her face in the video. Very sexy. So, I can’t be held responsible because she was trying to be sexy, trying to seduce me, etc. I WON’T BE HELD RESPONSIBLE, SHE FELL IN LOVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. I didn’t tell her to fall in love. FOR THE LIFE OF ME, I CANNOT REMEMBER WHAT MADE US THINK THAT WE WERE WISE, AND WE’D NEVER COMPROMISE. What was i thinking back then. Who am I to put a girl though that? Why was I unable to compromise? Guilty feelings. FOR THE LIFE OF ME, I CANNOT BELIEVE WE’D EVER DIE FOR THESE SINS, WE WERE MERELY FRESHMEN. We were just kids, let it go, we all make mistakes, etc. MY BEST FRIEND TOOK A WEEKS VACATION TO FORGET HER. He needed to get away because of what happened. HIS GIRL TOOK A WEEK’S WORTH OF VALIUM AND SLEPT. This is why this song is not that strong literally - it’s confusing. HIS girl is MY girl. the same girl that had the abortion has now killed herself. NOW HE’S GUILT-STRICKEN SOBBING WITH HIS HEAD ON THE FLOOR, THINKS ABOUT HER NOW AND HOW HE NEVER REALLY WEPT HE SAYS. He has the same guilty feelings that I do about the abortion and death. WE TRIED TO WASH OUR HANDS OF ALL OF THIS, WE NEVER TALK OF OUR LACKING RELATIONSHIPS. We rarely spoke after the incident - we just tried to forget it. We never spoke of her or the fact that we can’t have a decent relationship with anyone since then. WE FELL THROUGH THE ICE WHEN WE TRIED NOT TO SLIP. No matter how careful you might be, there are other perils out there.
The girl is real, the abortion is real. the death is not. it’s poetic license–to make the story more interesting.
She’s got the time
says she got time on her side
Running the rule
Commanding the late boys eyes
She runs around, knows all the streets by name
So mysterious, shadows meet James Dean
She’s intoxicating, soon your favorite drink
Your black dress in disarray
Only dance floor prayers can save you
Temperatures rise and I start to move
But it’s you that’s coursing through my veins
Say she’s got hope
Took shelter to the Hollywood list, taking control
Wanted my heart but I gave her my soul
She’s like a Paige Davis with a Monroe kiss
Disappeared today, left no trace
But someday I’ll know your name
Don’t need no drugs, you’re my chemical
Now I’m dependent, swear I’m clinical
Addicted to those glances, taking chances tonight
I need a fix in those heroin eyes
Don’t need no drugs, you’re my chemical
Now I’m dependent, no not cynical
Addicted to those glances, taking chances tonight
I need a fix in those heroin eyes
She’s no saint but she’ll take you to your knees
Try her boy, but she’ll still do what she please
Do you believe in science? She prefers chemistry
She wanted my love but I gave her the rest of me
Dear Stephen Patrick:
You’ll adore me before the night is over
If London’s calling don’t you dare pick up the phone
Only you entwined
could make this orphan feel at home
Lips that need no introduction, but now waiting for your call
if picture’s worth a thousand words
Then your touch is worth them all
Galaxy Song - Monty Python
Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough.
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you’ve had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff!
Just - re-member that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
and revolving at 900 miles an hour,
It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
the sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our Galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
it’s 100,000 light-years side-to-side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick,
but out by us it’s just 3000 light-years wide.
We’re 30,000 light-years from galactic central point,
we go round every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz,
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
Just got back from a Relient K concert in Philly. My wife and I were lamenting not having ever been to a Relient K concert despite the fact that they are on our top tier of bands when I decided to check the website. I found out they were playing in Philly and wouldn’t be anywhere else near us for the foreseable future. So, after a few phone calls determined that tickets were still available, we got into the car and drove the two hours to the concert. It was Rufio, Relient K, and MxPx; we stayed for the first two. I like MxPx, but not quite as much as I like Relient K; Rufio went first so we had to see them. It was weird being the oldest people there besides parents who took their tweens to see the concert, but we had a great time.
I recently found something interesting - a record label which releases all of its music under the Creative Commons license. In particular you are allowed to copy the music as long as you don’t make money off of it. One of their strategies? If you rip a CD for a friend and they really like the artist, they will buy the music. I think this is true as I have recently bought “Mmmhmm” by Relient K, “Dichotomy A” by GRITS, and other CDs I could have easily downloaded. Below is a letter written by one of the founders/owners of the record label - Fading Ways which I loved. I will reproduce it and write comments where appropriate.
Life always good - today it was better than usual. Can’t talk about it right now because of professional reasons, but I just have to thank God for being in control and also giving me a little to chew on here and there so I don’t get too impatient.
Also, later today, the big slope day expose. Tune in for nudity, Snoop Dogg, and more drunken college students than you can shake a stick at.
There’s a very hackneyed saying, “don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today.” For a while now I had been putting off talking about the new Anberlin album and now Andrew beat me to it. I had been listening to “Ready Fuels” for almost six months before I got around to buying the first album, Blueprints for the Black Market. I almost immediately fell in love with the band’s music. I put it on my workout playlist and it was what I listened to for about a month and one half while working out. My fiancee said it was the first time she had heard an album where she liked every single song. When I found out they had come out with a new record in February, I set out to buy it.
I bought the Erace album when it first came out and I think I was just a freshman in high school if not younger. I really liked the rap put out by Gotee records courtesy of GRITS, et al especially because back then they had more of an experimental and underground sound. They’ve recently sold out, in my opinion, by sounding like every other rapper out there. But that’s not the subject of this post, so I’ll save it for another time. At the time I was unable to realize just how creative this song was. I used to play it over and over because I really liked the beat and the raps weren’t too bad.
This Roper song is my second favorite song on the album Brace Yourself for the Mediocre. Although I was quite young at the time, I still identify with a lot of the aspects from “my decade”.
“1985”
By Roper
On the back of the schoolbus singing,
“I Love Rock and Roll”
put another dime in the jukebox,
Let the Good Times Roll
Grab the back of a Buick Skylark
just like Michael J. Fox
Grind the trucks on your brand new skateboard
just like Tony Hawk
Delorean those days are gone
We could breakdance, Pop-lock our wrists kid
before your grunge rock ever existed
This song is one of my newest favorite songs and so I thought I’d share the lyrics with you. Part of what I love about this song is the fact that I was acting this way for a while at Cornell and I could have used a song to point out how ridiculous I was being. It’s about trying just hard enough to not be the worst. For a while I just wanted to get the curve. Then I realized how bad that was. I needed to strive for the absolute best and never settle with being on the curve. The lyrics are great and Reese proves once again why he has a legion of fans.
Every year we have a celebration on the final day of the school year on Cornell’s Libe Slope. It used to be a drunken orgy but it has morphed, in recent years into a concert with over-priced food and an ugly orange fence which makes getting to classes very hard. A couple of years ago Fat Joe was the lead act. Last year Kanye West was the headliner, although I didn’t get to see him because they weren’t allowing video cameras in and it was too much of a hassle to get back to the apartment. This year we’re getting Snoop Dogg along with some no name rapper. What’s interesting to me is the fact that a school as white as Cornell has had rap acts for the past three years. I’m not being naive or racist, saying that white people can’t listen to rap. I know they listen to rap.
Noticed the Catbite sticker on the wall with the others
cover of Panic by MxPx
MxPx Front Cover
Album front cover
The Misbehavin’ Maidens at the New Deal Cafe
Cover of Canon Eyes
Oliver Brewing Company Tasting Room
FIF Concert (Nov 2013)[/caption]
The Princess Who Saved Herself[/caption]
Fall Out Boy - Save Rock and Roll[/caption]
last.fm top artists[/caption]
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(all of these are pictures of Relient K, even in the sections when I’m talking about other bands)
The opening act, Sherwood, was actually really good. I like them a lot. Their style sounds pretty similar to Relient K. Pretty happy music overall. Some girls in front of us knew every word and were bootlegging the performance on tiny video cameras. I’d buy their CD if I had some extra cash.
The second group, Mae, was not so good. At least, I didn’t like them. Unlike the other two groups, they didn’t have the same type of sound and their singer, in my wife’s opinion, couldn’t sing. We took their set as an opportunity to go outside and get some fresh air. It was funny to see all the parents there.