Tag Archives: music

Thankfully, they didn’t get greedy

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Remember the case against Jammie Thomas?  The single mom of four kids who got sued by the RIAA for downloading some songs from the Internet?  The jury came back and awarded the RIAA damages to the tune of $1.9 million dollars, which works out to $80 000 per downloaded song.  I’m sure that Richard Marx and Reba McIntyre have been waiting for that $80k, which I’m sure they will be seeing very soon.  All single mothers of four keep a contingency fund of millions just in case they get caught downloading songs.

The good news is, now that the regular folks see that the RIAA means business, boy, everyone is going to stop downloading music for free for sure.

fyi, that was sarcastic…

These Are My Heartsongs

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Sometimes I get the urge to share my taste in music with others, it’s uncontrollable and it usually happens when I happen onto a particularly excellent song on the iPod as I work away at my desk.  The best moments are when the song gives me goosebumps, a rush of emotion, and a sense of the impossible awesomeness of the song.  The drive to immediately tell someone about it, and let someone else either agree completely with me, or realize that yes, I am in fact a musical genius and yes my taste is impeccable and compelling.

Before you start on me, I know I’m not a genius, and I also know that for most, artists like Bob Dylan (heard House Carpenter today, had a religious experience, and then wrote this post) and John Prine aren’t going to appear on any “Five Star” iTunes playlists like they do for me.  There’s just no arguing with that feeling, though, so sometimes I attack Nikki with this stuff.  She’s very patient with me, and seems to even enjoy some of the stuff I make her listen to.  Sometimes it’s too much even for her though, like if I push a particularly twangy or bluegrassy Steve Earle song.

Even though I have been listening to that same stuff for literally more than a decade now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen with newer stuff.  For instance I recently have become addicted to Weezer (the post title is a nod to a Weezer song) like it is crack.  You just can’t find better crafted, hookier pop rock these days.  It’s clever and sometimes funny, it’s not all the same, and it will grab you by the ears and make you listen over and over.  On the less rocky side of things, there’s Moonlight Graham (the guy from Barstool Prophets) which is excellent, thoughtful and his voice is a pleasure to listen to.  Then all the way to gravel road, whisky bottle, dusty pickup folk-country is Fred Eaglesmith (thanks Shawn), who writes and sings as raw as it gets.

I could go on, but there’s only so much music you can really process to this extent.  I mean sure I listen to the radio, but most of those songs come and go without really staying with you.  Quality is hard to come by it seems.

Are there any songs like that for you, or is it just me?

Whither Peter Fredette?

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As any Canadian of a certain age can tell you, Kim Mitchell was a key component of adolescence.  For a couple of key formative summers Kim provided the soundtrack for many many fun memories.  The paradox of having “Go For Soda” on the same album as “Lager and Ale” was mused over many times, usually while drinking one of those three beverages.  I will leave it to you to decide which one.

Anyway, it wasn’t until 1995 that I think we all realized what a critical component Peter Fredette was to Kim’s sound.  That’s when Kim released a greatest hits collection that featured a couple of new versions of his classic songs without Peter involved, and to my ears anyway, they just don’t work as well.

The only reason I’m writing this right now is this stuff just came on the iPod and for some reason I don’t have the original recordings, just the re-worked stuff.  I thought a public service announcement was in order, you know just in case you were in the market to buy a 14 year old CD and needed some advice.  In my opinion, stay away from this disc and buy the original discs, you will be happier in the long run.  Note that the market for potential buyers of this CD who are also readers of this blog is probably very very small.

This irrelevant review was brought to you by the letter “S”, Sony Betamax, and MS-DOS.

Alphabetically Canadian

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This has nothing to do with anything, I just thought I would mention that I have been listening to my entire iTunes library again so I could re-rate everything and fix up some playlists from scratch.  This is necessary sometimes, but especially when you move from Windows to Mac since the library formats are completely different for some god-forsaken reason.  The only unusual thing about it all this time was I decided to listen to all 4200 songs (give or take, I try to get rid of all of the Jonas Brothers/Hilary Duff/bland unrecognizable hip hop artist of the week that ends up in there from Jordy, but it’s a constant battle…) in alphabetical order by song title.  This means you get a rather, um, varied musical experience from one song to the next.  One thing that came to light today is that Loverboy’s Take Me to The Top (hm, one star, thank you) was followed immediately by Bob and Doug McKenzie’s Take Off (that’s about 4 stars, folks, based entirely on Geddy Lee’s fine performance).  It made me wonder how many alphabetically consecutive Canadian songs have I missed to date from A-T?

I’m not (quite) anal enough to actually find out myself, but it’s your homework for the week to find out the longest run of consecutively Canadian songs you can find in your iTunes library.

That’s all class, dismissed.

Yes, it’s exactly like Milli Vanilli

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It seems that the quartet that performed at the recent presidential inauguration was as phony as, um, a really big phony thing.  Yes, apparently the illustrious Yo-Yo Ma and the other guys (I kid, but it seems that these people are actually all huge in the classical music world, which really does not intersect with my world) decided that it was too cold to play the event live, so they actually played along to a tape, Milli Vanilli style.  The reason given was the cold would have caused their incredibly expensive instruments to go out of tune and the piece would have sounded like garbage.  Fair enough I suppose, but it really takes the class out of having those guys out there in suits, looking impossibly elite, eyes closed, bleeding the music out of their fingers, wrought with thousands of hours of painstaking practice at their art.  Instead, we heard David the IT guy click “play” on the MP3 on his laptop, or perhaps somebody put the tape into the presidential boombox and slid it a bit closer to the mic on the table.  It’s just not very presidential, and it’s certainly not genuine for those musicians to pretend to play the thing, is it?  The best part is the spokesperson insists “This isn’t Milli Vanilli” but, it really really really is.

This is just slightly better than the whole Olympic thing with the cute-but-terrible-sounding little girl lip-synching to the tape of the only-slightly-less-cute-but-great-sounding little girl.  At least these musicians were playing to a tape of their own performances (or so we were told).

A bunch of phonies