I thought Pandora was cool. And it is. But Slacker...

The only drawback is the volume thing. It varies from artist/album to artist/album. Small price to pay. So give Thingy Radio a try.

You likee.

Labels: neat-o, tunes

It has been a while, so a little rewind: Pandora is a great site. Create your own "radio station" of new and old music based on your personal tastes, and provide feedback as you go as to what songs you like and don't like, thus educating Pandora about your aesthetic. Brilliant. I've done this a couple times before, but I'd like to keep it going, because I'm constantly astounded by the amount of great tunes out there from artists I've never heard of before.

Again, I'll only post bands/artists that I've never heard of, but am glad to have found. And in some cases, bands that I've long forgotten. You can't hear the whole song by following these links, but if you like what you hear, you can start a new station based on the song. Then you can hear the whole thing, and Pandora will then play songs that it thinks are complimentary. "Grade" the songs as they come to train Pandora.

Etc.

So here are my latest gems:

• Sixty Second Interval, by The Vapors (I'm a sucker for great bass lines.)
• Simplify, by The Kingsbury Manx
• Unsatisfied, by Nine Black Alps
• Along the Way, by PT Walkley
• My Own Good, by Luis
• Everything'll Be Alright, by Joshua Radin
• Dark As Days, by Army Navy
• My Love, by The Czars
• Pinback, by Syracuse

Labels: tunes

YouTube is great. Especially if you're like me and you can never get enough of vintage Beatles footage. Even if they're just sitting around the studio picking their noses, I'm engrossed. But there's never any Beatle thingies on TV anymore, so a quick search pulled up gems I'd never seen before. I guess I never realized that they had done videos for their songs.

The Beatles were asked to do many things they weren't thrilled about, movies in particular. But they were generally good sports. Sitting in chairs and mouthing their latest hit, "Ticket to Ride", with unplugged electric guitars in their hands, must have felt ridiculous. They nearly busted out laughing a few times in this one:

Here's another for "We Can Work it Out", again John trying his best to keep cool.

And this one for "Hey Bulldog" is interesting because it was a one-off they hadn't even rehearsed. And yet it's this good.

Labels: tunes

I think this song is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, and although my basket of 'most beautiful songs' is Mariana Trench deep, this one comes to mind an awful lot. You've probably heard it, but enjoy anyway. It's a hopeful song.

Labels: tunes

Labels: tunes

One of the most fascinating aspects of music, for me, is its relationship to memory. Listening to certain albums takes me back to particular points in my life, and in some intangible way you can feel what you felt back then.

When I hear anything from Janes Addiction's Ritual De Lo Habitual, I'm suddenly in Tampa with my friend Tyler and his college buddies, driving around looking for Ybor City. Other albums remind me less of specific episodes and more about specific people. If I hear anything from Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom, I'll think of my (unfortunately) estranged friend Jason, who introduced me to it. Same with the Foo Fighter's first album.

If I hear something from U2's Under a Blood Red Sky, I'm on the bus to high school hockey practice, where that album was a team staple. R.E.M.'s Reckoning reminds me of being in the cafeteria in 10th grade, where I introduced "Pretty Persuasion" to a table of eager ears, one at a time via my yellow walkman. Much later, R.E.M.'s New Adventures in Hi Fi reminds me of a trip to Cali with my cousin Jeff. We rented a convertible and had only the local radio and the brand new cassette, so we absolutely killed that album, playing it over and over and over again. We both liked it, but we didn't really love it compared to other R.E.M. records. It'll always remind me of being lost in the desert mountains with Jeff in the Sebring, wondering if we'd find our way back to civilization before running out of gas, which we just barely managed to do. RadioHead's OK Computer is like a mental time machine back to the waning days of 91 Argyle Street.

They Might Be Giants' album Flood takes me right to my senior year in college, when my friend Pete Siletti gave us an impromptu act to Particle Man that had us on the floor clutching our stomachs. Certain Queen songs make me think of my brother, in particular the night he came home from a Queen concert, still fired up by the electricity of the show. I was ten years old, but I'm still reminded of that time whenever We Are The Champions is on the radio.

And so on. These images, these people, ALWAYS come back to me when I hear these songs. It's not every now and then, they are actually a component of the songs. They appear in my minds eye as I listen. Please tell me that this happens to you, so that I don't think I have some kind of synaptic crossfiring syndrome or something.

Labels: ponderage, tunes

More great songs from people/bands that I've never heard of (or that I've long forgotten): Yea, you can't hear the whole song by following these links, but if you like the taste they provide, you can go to Pandora and start a new station based on the song. It's cake.

• "How The Story Goes", by The Red Walls
  
  I was really struck by how much this singer sounds like John Lennon. You might consider it a blatant Lennon ripoff, and I'm sure they'd nod "yes, of course it is." But it's good, and that's what matters.
• "Packing Blankets", by Eels
  
  I had completely forgotten about this incredibly underrated group.
• "Fin", by Supergrass
  
  I vaguely recall seeing a Supergrass video in the mid-90's and liking it but not enough to investigate further. I then forgot they existed until Todd knocked me over the head with a series of songs from their latest album. This band's song craft and sense of melody is astonishing. Meanwhile, the radio continues to feed the masses shit.
• "Go Now April", by 63 Crayons
• "Mantra", by The Lovetones
• "Rifles", by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Labels: tunes

Just had a friend point me in the direction of a new band he thought I'd like. He was right. Not only are the songs of Ok Go really good in a poppy rock urban-suburban paisley artpunk sort of way, but their video for "Here It Goes Again" is a rare piece of originality and cleverness amidst a heap of cookie cutter bullshit and acts that take themselves far too seriously to be interesting. But I wouldn't really know, because that very heap is why I don't watch any music videos anymore. But hey.

Labels: neat-o, tunes

I've been using Pandora for a year now, and it didn't occur to me until just now to share my faves. I'll only post songs from people/bands that I've never heard of. Figure that's in keeping with the spirit of the site. Check 'em out. I can't promise you'll like these songs, but I can promise that they're good, or very good, or better still. This is a suck-free zone, baby. Oh, you betcha.

• "Alpha", by The Monolith
• "Your Skull is Red", by Team Sleep
• "Pool Song", by Longwave
• "Somewhere Down the River", by Elf Power
• "April & May", by David Fridlund

Labels: tunes

I'm going to pick on Ashlee Simpson again. Or more accurately, her agent(s), the clueless marketers working for her record company, and the artless money machine that built this no-talent hack into the "superstar" that she was announced as. Did you catch the Orange Bowl halftime show?

While USC took a break from their destruction of the hapless Oklahoma Sooners, Simpson...headlined...the halftime show. Not long ago, she was exposed for the fraud that she is on Saturday Night Live. This time, she figured she had better go live or else. So, the world got to hear just how bad her live voice really is. We were privileged enough to gag on her juvenile, off-tune ramblings, such as "you make me wanna...uh uh uh uh....you make me wanna...ooo ooo ooo ooo...you make me wanna...uh uh uh uh...you make me wanna...SCREAM!"

Why does this machine keep stuffing these people down our throats? Ashlee Simpson is a boardroom creation, and it says a lot about their lack of awareness that a stadium full of college students booed her right out of Florida. Listen to it...it's bloody awful. The only people that listen to Ashlee Simpson are middle school girls. Passing her off as the headliner in the superbowl of college football, you have ask, is there ANYONE out there who understands demographics? Is there anyone out there who understands what music is supposed to be? You can say you like this or hate that, and it's a matter of taste. But you can't say that Ashlee Simpson is talented, just like you can't say that you own a Tyrannosaurus Rex. She is the product of suits in a boardroom. Her "songs" are written by ghost writers who have been spitting out minor revisions of the same song heard all over top 40 radio stations for the past decade or more. Most people either don't realize this or don't care. They just want to know what's popular, and listen to it. So they tune into top 40 stations, sort of listen, and over time they become numb to the very concept of song.

This has to end somewhere. Who knows, maybe Ashlee Simpson is a savior. Maybe her constant public sucking will wake up the music masses. She received the loudest, most universal boo I've ever heard on live television.

Ashlee will be counseled to prance around the truth when asked about her performance and the crowd's unanimous disapproval. Her publicist(s) will say she had a sore throat (again), or that she burned her mouth on hot pizza.

Wake up, music industry. Stop diminishing the concept of music by feeding middle school kids this manufactured bilge. Wake up, entertainment coordinators...learn about what your audience might actually like and respect, and hire accordingly.

How can this shit keep happening?

Labels: tunes

Saturday Night Live, which hasn't been much good in a long while, had a rare injection of quality music last night. Years upon years of mediocrity on the SNL stage culminated in the ultimate exposure last month, when Ashlee Simpson's lip synch debacle lifted the veil on her card-carrying membership to Club Fraud. U2 was precisely what SNL needed. And maybe U2 is what "the people" needed.

My U2-indifferent friends consider me a U2 apologist, and I guess that's true, except that I don't believe they need one. You either get them or you don't, I suppose. I always did, way back in 7th grade when I first heard "I Will Follow". MTV was brand new then. You know, back when it was a music channel. Back when it was watchable. I remember the moment the same way older folks remember where they were when JFK was assassinated.

I pulled the dial of the old RCA, gave it a good turn to the right, picked up the big brown box with the beige numbers, and pressed 32. I think it was 32 then, wasn't it? Rings a bell. They were in between videos and I went into the kitchen to fetch some after-school eats. As I struggled with the stubborn wrapper of my graham crackers, those one-of-a-kind chords started chiming. I turned to the set and thought, "what's this?" I couldn't take my ears off of it.

It's 22 years later (!), and they just played I Will Follow again as an encore for SNL. The quality and performance of most SNL musical guests usually range from bad to utterly horrid. (I can't count the number of flash-in-the-pan hip hop acts they've hosted that all produce the same uncomfortable tension as the audience tactfully complies with the flashing APPLAUSE sign...if you ever find the re-run of Cypress Hill playing "Insane in the Membrane", you'll know what I'm talking about.)

Last night, U2 had everyone in the crowd ecstatic like I've never seen an SNL crowd. The SNL staff was, too...which I know I've never seen before. Some of them appeared to be in tears. Simply put, U2 impacts people the way few bands can, or ever have. It's Beatles-level minus the hysteria. In short, it was just really, really good to see.

Their new record is an instant classic. Or at least it sounds like it to me. There are some absolutely beautiful songs on this record. And it's one of those albums that's solid from start to finish—no lulls, no disappointments. And it grows on you like...like...a better simile than this. Really. It does and then it does some more. (It's not out yet, but you can listen to it free at u2.com.)

These guys are in their forties now, and they're still out-writing the music world. You might not dig 'em, but my ears feel awfully lucky.

Labels: tunes

Note: I found this in a folder I almost deleted, dated 12/5/01, the day George Harrison died. Thought I'd wedge it into ye olde archive.

George. Today I did something I never would have believed yesterday. I bought an issue of People Magazine, the same starfucker rag I've been lambasting for years. I pardoned myself on account of you being on the cover and all. I recall you once said, "How can I keep up around the genius of John and Paul?" Maybe you viewed them on a plateau for being as prolific as they were, but you're eye to eye in genius.

And I shudder at the word "genius" because shitheads everywhere have thrown it around so loosely it has devolved into something tantamount to "successful".

I could tell you that While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Something, and Long Long Long are among the best songs ever written, this according to me. But I bet not even you would give a damn about that. What's more important is the intangible reason that I deliberately left your picture, cut out from the White Album's poster insert, on the back of my college dorm door the day I left. I Thought I'd leave something for the next guy to leave for the next guy—if the summer cleaning staff had any vision.

I've never read that this is the case, but I've always wondered if While My Guitar Gently Weeps is related to your aforementioned reference to John and Paul. It doesn't seem particularly encrypted. I understand you were reading the I-Ching at the time and the first words you saw when you opened it were "gently weeps", or so the story goes. But it's hard not to see the "I look at you all, see the love there that's sleeping, while my guitar gently weeps" as a reference to John, Paul, Ringo, and George Martin overlooking your songs amidst the eclipsing John/Paul thing. I could be wrong, but that song always makes me sad for that reason.

Taking nothing from John, Paul and the others (how could I?), it makes me wonder if your ideas were discouraged at the outset, much like While My Guitar Gently Weeps itself was ignored, until you brought in Eric Clapton and replayed it.

I admit I never bought any of your solo CDs. Your later influences got past me a bit. I admit I didn't like the Wilburys much, and your 80's solo tunes went in one ear and out the other...but it's hard to compare all that to what you did with the Beatles. Those songs are all that was necessary to lift you into the canon. Sorry death came so soon, though I'm glad you were unafraid. You were always invisible to me, so it would be a hollow phrase to say that I'll miss you. But if I did, I'm sure you'd know what I mean. Bye, George.

Labels: tunes

Last Sunday, in the middle of the song "Angeles" by Elliott Smith, a sad, ambiguously creepy feeling came over me. I was listening to my generation's lost Lennon. Yesterday, I brought this up to a friend of mine in a casual conversation over a few beers at Quimby's. The idea was dismissed as hyperbole and talk quickly shifted to golf. Or football—whichever.

If you're familiar with Elliott Smith's music, you might think a comparison to Nick Drake would be more fitting, and you might be right. They both wrote gorgeous, sadly sweet melodies and were true artists with the guitar. And of course, they both committed suicide.

But I'm thinking of something else. Lennon and McCartney both had extraordinary Pop instincts, and while Lennon seemed to willfully abandon his in the 70s, his songs always connected a bit more deeply than McCartney's—I think most Beatle fans would agree.

Elliott had what Lennon had, and if his songs had been written in the sixties, his name would be as Household as anyone in music. Elliott Smith's songs were poems fortunate enough to be paired with the right music. Upon first listen, they produce a feeling that you've heard them before. Elliott was plucking fruit off the tree of inevitability—and few people, living or dead, have the genius to reach those branches.

Labels: tunes