On The iPod 7/8/9

Yesterday I downloaded Wilco (The Album) & I am going to be listening to it off & on all day today along with other Wilco recordings so I can give you a good fair review of this new record. While I listen I will drop my listening list from yesterday...Remember all pictures have links! Check out the music.

Mudcrutch - Mudcruth









My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges












The National - Boxer










Neko Case - Middle Cyclone








Nouvelle Vague - Bande A Part









Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain








Pink Floyd - Dark Side of The Moon









Plastikman - Musik














Until later,

-n

The column...

Hey all you people out there. I've got a list of songs from Friday & one from Monday. I've got people close to me that are saying I need to make the blog more of a column with amusing anecdotes about family & life mixed in with the music. I don't know about all that. I get it, they want me to get more personal with my writing. I don't know if I really want to get more personal. Maybe I'll start throwing a personal story in here or there; I actually thought that I was already doing that. Now if you want me to start adding pictures of my kids or me cutting the grass, that just ain't happening. My life is what I live. I'm there every day, cutting the grass, changing diapers, buying/cooking dinner, unpacking boxes, playing catch, etc. etc. What I don't get to do is go out on stage & play. I've always loved to write music, play music, listen to music, go to clubs & listen to music. Nowadays with a job & a house full of kids my wife & I are pretty content to enjoy what we have with each other. The blog is time for me a few days a week to grab for the stars and talk about music. It can be new music, live shows, classic albums, local music, etc. etc. It is the time I get to feel like I still have a creative spark in me. Hopefully you who check in with the blog occasionally will get it and enjoy me trying to get you to think outside of your box and try something that you may never have tried. Anyways that's my column of the week, just a small slice of me.


On The iPod 7/3/9

U2 - No Line On The Horizon••••
U2 - War••••½
The Verve - Forth•••½
The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers••••
Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous •••
Dogs Die In Hot Cars - Please Describe Yourself ••½
Damien Jurado - Where Shall You Take Me? •••
Counting Crows - Recovering The Satellites ••••½

On The iPod 7/6/9

CSNY - Deja Vu
Crowded House - Woodface
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
The Cure - The Head On The Door
Depeche Mode - Music For The Masses
The Doves - The Last Broadcast
Dusty Springfield - Dusty In Memphis
Elvis Costello - This Years Model
Stevie Ray Vaughn - In Step
Sloan - One Chord To Another
Simon & Garfunkel - Old Friends

Seeya Soon!

-n

New eMusic credits!

Whenever the 28th of the month arrives I get a fresh batch of credits from eMusic. Within a few days they are usually gone (as is the case this month) but for a few days I feel as if I have handfuls of money to spend on new releases, or some artist that I have never listened to before, or a classic album. This month, a new release by Mark Curry, Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs, last years excellent John Mellencamp release (produced by T Bone Burnett), the rest of Luke Temple's CD, and *new* to eMusic is BOB DYLAN, so I downloaded Self Portrait, the often maligned release from Dylan to begin the seventies. After the dust cleared I had 3 songs left over from my 50. The problem is what do I do with 3 songs? I'm an album guy, I don't pick & choose very often as I like to know what the whole product looks like. I guess I'll take the first 3 songs from an album & download the rest next month. Or there's always booster packs. Hmmm...

ontheiPod 7/2/9

John Mellencamp - Life, Death, Love, & Freedom
Andrew Bird - & The Mysterious Production of Eggs
Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
Andrew Bird - Noble Beast
Bob Dylan - Self Portrait
Bob Dylan - World Gone Wrong
The Boxer Rebellion - Union
Mark Curry - Front Street
Mark Curry - Let The Wretched Come Home

All but the last album are available on eMusic.

There is more than one oasis that allowed me to get by the few days that my iPod was out of service. The first is the aforementioned eMusic. Every album, every song that I have ever downloaded from eMusic is available for me to download AGAIN. So while I was at work I could go to eMusic.com & download a few recordings to listen to throughout the day. This to me is an invaluable service! Just try to go to iTunes and redownload a recording 6 months after you downloaded it and your computer crashed. It ain't gonna happen.
The library is another option if you either don't have money, or or you are starving for music. I don't know about your local library but the two libraries that I frequent both have an extensive collection of rock, jazz, blues, country, vocals, and even books on tape if that is what you fancy. Grab a few CD's and wear them out, then go back and grab a few more. They are always getting new releases and may surprise you with their collection.
These two are the only options I needed as Best Buy only made me wait about 4 days before getting me a replacement iPod. It's black rather than silver, but it still holds 160g of music, and that is the important thing. On more than one occasion in the past few years I brought my iPod to the big Best Buy in Chelsea only to have to wait up to 6 weeks to get it back. It seems like they have gotten their...act together as far as their extended warranties.
Hey I hope you all listen to some good American Music this weekend! Grab the new Wilco (The Album) or Electric Dirt, Levon Helms new studio recording and don't blow yourself up.

-n

Jazz on the iPod

Hey all,

Spent a day listening to mostly jazz, the great American music. Honestly I still can't say I get it entirely but I know that the more I listen, the more I look back on the history, the more I learn about the artists, the more I will "get it". Last year I gave my son John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Maybe by the time he's my age he'll "get it".

7/1/9

Duke Ellington Orchestra - Duke Ellington Meets Count Basie

Thelonious Alone in San Fransisco

Thelonious Monk - Underground

Stanley Jordan - Cornucopia

Roy Eldridge & Dizzy Gillespie - Roy & Diz

The Essential Louis Armstrong

Jaco Pastorius - Word of Mouth

Louis Prima - V Disc Recordings

Weather Report - Heavy Weather

Until tomorrow...

-n

Been a week

Here is what's on the iPod so far this week. I promise to get you an entry about all the hair that I have been pulling out since the iPod went into the shop last week.

6/29/9

Earl "Fatha" Hines - Plays Duke Ellington
Ella & Louis
The Beatles - The Beatles Second Album
The Beatles - Beatles For Sale
The Beatles - Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles - Rubber Soul
The Beatles - Abbey Rd

6/30/9

Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
Miles Davis - Birth of The Cool
John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman
John Coltrane - My Favorite Things
Ben Folds Five - The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
Ben Folds - Songs For Silverman
Counting Crows - This Desert Life
Counting Crows - Hard Candy
Ryan Adams - Rock N Roll
Timeless: A Hank Williams Tribute
Pearl Jam - Ten Redux

That's it, still moving in...promise I will get back on a better schedule by next week.

-n

listening & woes.

So Monday I listened to Led Zeppelin for the first ½ of the day. It's the Led Zeppelin boxed set from 91 or 92 that Jimmy Page remastered. Then I listened to Keane's new record Perfect Symmetry. What a pop record. It brings me back to the eighties...In a good way. I like Keane a lot. Their first two records are good listening as well. After that I threw Lenny Kravitz' Circus on & that was pretty much my day. Monday night I came home, threw my iPod on the mac to update & throw some new songs on to tell you all about. Problem is the iPod wouldn't update. I tried to restore it and that didn't work either. So Tuesday I come in and listened to Travis The Invisible Band. What a great start to a morning. Then the problems started. I put on TV On The Radio's Dear Science and it just flipped through the tracks without playing them. So I switched over to an old faithful, Whiskeytown's Pneumonia AND THE SAME THING! I never thought that one day I could carry around my whole music collection in one playing-card sized box, but now that I can, I am quite attached to it. I recently got a new set of Skull Candy headphones and have been really digging the sound quality (considering of course that most of the music that I get is online, I try to make the most of the poor-ish audio quality HA!). So I brought my iPod to Best Buy last night (Thank good ideas for the 3 year iPod warranty) and dropped it off. It will be 7 days until I get it back so expect me to be generally in a disagreeable mood until then. But maybe there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow here. Not everyone has an iPod, and not everyone can buy music at will. I will be mining the internet for free underground radio where I can find it and will tell you all about it so you can also enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Until we meet again,

-n

Friday's Random Musings

Has anyone ever heard of Luke Temple? I downloaded 8 tracks (all I had left on emusic for June) from his Hold A Match For A Gasoline World CD which was released in 2005 just last week. Before that I had not heard a thing from him. I've heard a couple people say that he has a Jeff Buckley thing going....ehhhh I can hear Jeff Buckley in Temples own voice but the music is upbeat & acoustic, & I'm wondering why I didn't buy a bonus pack from emusic to finish downloading this CD. OH YEA I'm buying a house. Ah well, there's always next month.
You remember Pearl Jam, right? Some of my friends have said to me in recent years that they really dug Eddie & the boys back in the nineties. Well some of you may not realize that since 1994's Vitalogy Pearl Jam has released 5 studio albums, the latest a self-titled 2006 release. They played a new song on Conan O'Brian's new gig, The Tonight Show & should have a new studio disc out before the end of this year. If you have not heard much of Pearl Jam after the mid nineties start with the 2006 release. For you audiophiles out there the re-release of Ten which was released in March of this year is amazing. It was remixed by Brendan O'Brien & the sound is crisp.
Sam Beam has a new disc out. I haven't bought the new disc Around The Well but I dig Iron & Wine's music enough to just put this one on the grocery list. This band is lo-fi in all it's cassette recorder glory. The music is acoustic guitars, sparse drums, varied instrumentation, some harmonies & a lot of hippie. Truth be told I haven't read much about the guy, I just know that The Creek Drank The Cradle was amazing, the work he did with Calexico made me like that band a lot more than I had in the past, and The Shepherds Dog is a very groovy piece of work. Check it out if you are feeling daring.

Have a good weekend, & give your father some love if he was around.

On The iPod 6/19/9

Luke Temple - Hold A Match For A Gasoline World
AC/DC - High Voltage
Smashing Pumpkins - Pisces Iscariot
System Of A Down - Toxicity
Stone Temple Pilots - Core
Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend
Kings X - XV
The White Stripes - Icky Thump
Iron & Wine - The Shepherds Dog

-n