Category: Music

  • Happy Pi Day!

  • 2024 Concert #1: MxPx & The Ataris

    2024 Concert #1: MxPx & The Ataris

    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…

  • 2023 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    2023 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    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…

  • Another Reason to be Glad I attend small concerts?

    Another Reason to be Glad I attend small concerts?

    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…

  • Bad Time Records 2023 Concert: We Are the Union, Catbite, and Kill Lincoln

    Bad Time Records 2023 Concert: We Are the Union, Catbite, and Kill Lincoln

    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…

  • 2022 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    2022 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    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…

  • Concert: I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schafer the Dark Lord (Nov 2022)

    Concert: I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schafer the Dark Lord (Nov 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…

  • MxPx – Plans within Plans

    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…

  • Are Rap Lyrics a Confession?

    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: The Controversial Use of Rap Lyrics as…

  • 2021 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    2021 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    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…

  • MxPx – Panic and Secret Weapon (Special Edition)

    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…

  • How to get around Elisa’s lack of last.fm scrobbling

    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…

  • Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm at Ram’s Head in Annapolis

    Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm at Ram’s Head in Annapolis

    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…

  • MxPx – MxPx: You’re Never Too Old to Rock

    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…

  • MxPx – Before Everything & After: What if MxPx made a Good Charlotte album?

    (the first 3 paragraphs are a slight modification of what I wrote for an Amazon review) 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…