Relevant History

Awesomest song ever

I don't wanna tell you how to do your job, but... could you make the logo bigger?

[thanks to Jess and Mike]

[To the tune of Steve Bassett, "No Good for Her," from the album "Unreleased".]

Technorati Tags: advertising, music

Italian Steely Dan cover band

While doing... actually, I don't remember what I was doing... I came across a slightly mind-blowing Italian Steely Dan cover band, Lucrezio de Seta and his Scurvy Brothers. Their cover of "Kid Charlemagne" is pretty interesting.

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "Kid Charlemagne (Live)," from the album "Alive in America".]

Look out Amy Winehouse

This Japanese McDonalds commercial, featuring what looks like a Japanese girls' do-wop group that watched Memoirs of a Geisha once too many times, seems weird in so many ways....

This kind of thing is pretty much all my brain is good for tonight.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Shhh / Peaceful," from the album "The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: Japan

Lady Blue

This evening, while browsing the iTunes store, I rediscovered a song I once loved and probably haven't heard in about 30 years: Leon Russell's "Lady Blue."

There are some songs from that period that I've pretty much had access to constantly, either because they've never gone out of circulation or fashion (you can always find Elton John, the Beatles, Doobie Brothers, Yes, Billy Joel, and David Bowie), or because for some strange reason I always managed to have their albums (Sea Level's "Cats on the Coast" isn't exactly a household name, nor is the 3-disc ELP live album, but I don't think I've ever been without either of them since I was 13). But the long tail of my musical adolescence, the songs that I never owned and which didn't become fixtures on the radio, eventually disappeared.

Forgetting these songs is tough because the most powerful memories of my childhood aren't of places or people: they're of music. I can only vaguely recall  several of the houses (or apartments or trailers) I lived in, and only a few more of the people I went to school with. But I can vividly recall a lot of the music from my adolescent years, and I find that I listen to those songs with the same intensity that I did when I was a kid. So rediscovering a song that I haven't heard is like getting back a little bit of memory.

For me, that's been the brilliant thing about iTunes: the catalog and pricing scheme (and the search functionality) have let me reconnect with a lot of those songs, in a way that would have been otherwise inconceivable.

And Leon Russell's work in the 1970s was pretty amazing, by the way.

[To the tune of Leon Russell, "Lady Blue," from the album "Will o' the Wisp".]

Technorati Tags: itunes, memory, music

Quote of the day

Imagine a world in which most of the intelligent and well-educated people are unable to read. When it comes to music, that's the world we live in. (Andrew Ford, writing on Beethoven's late quartets, in the Sydney Morning Herald)

[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Strykkwartet no.14 op.131 in cis kl.t., ," from the album "Quartet No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, Opus 131".]

iTunes pricing strangeness

I was listening to "Not Now John" from Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, and wondered how much the rest of the album cost. So I clicked on the album name, and the CD came up on iTunes: $7.99.

Wow! Pretty good, even though I already bought one of the songs.

A few minutes later, I went back and looked at it again, only this time I did a search for "pink floyd final cut." This time, it was $11.99. Same album.

Naturally, I retraced my steps that first led me to the $7.99 version. There it was again. I haven't listened to the whole thing in years-- I bought a copy in Japan in the summer of 1983, and haven't had a turntable since 1994 at the latest-- but I bought it.

Technorati Tags: itunes

Dance of the 19th-century American baked goods/health fads

Today in the car, we were listening to Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies. About a minute into it, my son said, "Hey! I recognize this! It's from the Graham Cracker!"

My daughter, who's been an angel, gingerbread, and soldier in the ballet in question, corrected him. "No! It's the Nutcracker."

"Well, I knew it was something with crackers," my son said.

Christgau goes to Graceland

The other night I came across a phenomenal review that Robert Christgau wrote of Paul Simon's classic album Graceland in 1986.

Though it's giving in to the album's most suspect tendencies to begin this way, I'm here to tell you that Paul Simon's Graceland is a tremendously engaging and inspired piece of work. If you like him thorny it's his best record since Paul Simon in 1972, if you like him smooth you can go back to There Goes Rhymin' Simon in 1973, and either way you may end up preferring the new one. Simon-haters won't be won over--his singing has lost none of its studied wimpiness, and he still writes like an English major. But at least Graceland gets you past these usages, because it boasts (Artie will never believe this) a bottom.  For Simon, this is unprecedented. Graceland is the first album he's ever recorded rhythm tracks first, and it gives up a groove so buoyant it could float a loan to Zimbabwe.

Alas, that last line is still all too timely....

Amy Winehouse

I've recently been listening a lot to Amy Winehouse. I heard one of her songs-- the unapologetically ribald "You Know I'm No Good"-- on the flight to Singapore, and recently found a note about the song in the margins of my notebook. Some of her songs are just okay, but the best ones are jaw-dropping: like Oleta Adams or Jessica Andrews, she has a capacity to deliver astonishing performances, embedded in a sonic mix of soul, reggae, mbaqanga, and electronic (a combination that reminds me, of all unexpected things, of some of Bruce Cockburn's work). Really something.

[To the tune of Amy Winehouse, "You Sent Me Flying," from the album "Frank".]

As the father of a Star Wars fanatic, I appreciate this

U2 singer Bono was knighted yesterday. He told reporters that his youngest son "was disappointed that his dad was not presented with a Star Wars light saber."

"He thought I was becoming a Jedi," Bono said.

[To the tune of Hermeto Pascoal, "Intocável," from the album "Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer".]

Technorati Tags: music