Category — Music

Dude, I am totally partying. While I do some work on my laptop I am watching Lollapalooza streaming onto the iMac in my basement. Right now it’s Interpol, they’re okay.

Yesterday, I actually went for an 18 mile bike ride along Lake Michigan and circled the perimeter of Lollapalooza and watched partial sets of STS9 and the Roots over the fence. That’s right, I partied yesterday too!

I am honestly mostly done with festivals of this type, I guess I am just getting older … if I want to see a band I’d rather just see just them at a smaller joint like Shubas or the Metro or the Vic or the Aragon or the Riv … that and my aging body isn’t too keen on 95 degrees and high humidity and being trapped with 40 minute lines for $5 bottles of water.

Bike ride photo from yesterday:

When I did RPM Challenge back in February, I stumbled upon fellow Chicagoan Jessica Emelia and her project “My Imaginary Life”. Man, what a good set of tunes! Her project is really inspirational for what one person can do in their living room with just a computer, guitar and midi keyboard (a little talent and creativity cannot hurt either ).

Check out her stuff at http://www.virb.com/myimaginarylife and also, she just published My Imaginary Life on iTunes, so go get it so that you can listen to it on your iPod or burn a CD!

The whole record is great and it flows nicely. “Desert”, “Goodbye”, “Insomnia”, “Train” and “Saturday Night” are all standout tracks for me. And what a great album cover!

So support her and buy My Imaginary Life on iTunes!

Guns N’ Roses’ debut Appetite for Destruction was released on July 21, 1987 (with modest immediate success and MASSIVE success a year later). It was the summer between my 7th and 8th grade years. It was the height of the hair metal days. Bon Jovi, Poison, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Motley Crue and a handful of lesser bands ruled the airwaves and MTV. I won’t try to be cool and pretend that I didn’t love all of that stuff. But then Appetite came out and whoa!

Look at this list of tunes:

• Welcome to the Jungle
• It’s So Easy
• Mr. Brownstone
• Paradise City
• My Michelle
• Sweet Child O’ Mine
• You’re Crazy
• Nightrain
• Out to Get Me
• Rocket Queen

Whoa. Classic. The only two that I left off that list are “Think About You” and “Anything Goes”. And those aren’t horrible.

What a creative period 85/86/87 must have been for those guys. I just read that Axl also brought “November Rain” and “Don’t Cry” to the Appetite sessions. “You Could Be Mine” and “Patience” were also already written and up for consideration. A majority of the well known songs that Guns N’ Roses would ever be know for were written during this period.

Man I loved this record. I remember the first time someone popped in the Appetite cassette and I heard “Welcome to the Jungle”. Wow. I remember side one finishing and just knowing that Paradise City was going to be a hit.

This record was the first punch in the face for the Poison-type bands toward their falling out of favor. Of course, the death knell would be delivered four years later with Nevermind.

I just can’t believe that Appetite for Destruction is twenty years old. That means that I’ve lived twenty years since that day that someone played that cassette for me … whoa.

Sometimes I feel like I am somewhat negative here, with all my “annoyances” and whatnot. And while those are usually fun-spirited, today it is time to talk with zero negativity about something that is truly great: Saturday morning public radio programming. Specifically the Saturday morning programming of WBEZ - Chicago Public Radio.

I’ve been getting up earlier than is normal for me lately (I tend to sleep in super late if I can). This Saturday I was up at 8, drank some tea, did this and that around the house and then turned on the radio at 9. I was listening to WBEZ almost continuously in the house or in my car from 9am to 1pm. The programming just gets better and better during those four hours.

Car Talk

www.cartalk.com

“Intelligent car advice mixed with hilarious stories of automobile mayhem.” A light-hearted way to start the day.

Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me

www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/

“A fast-paced, irreverent quiz show of the week’s news.” Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it.

Sound Opinions

www.soundopinions.org

I just love this show. Music is everything to me and I just love Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis talking about rock and roll. I don’t always agree with them, but it is always great. If you look at going to a record store as a fun outing and an adventure … you’ll love this show. If you look forward to Tuesdays because new records come out or if you’ve ever gone to a record store at midnight on a Monday to buy a new release … you’ll love the show.

Sometimes, being many years out of college and working in the corporate world, it is easy to feel out of touch with the music scene. These guys are not necessarily the most cutting edge guys, but, I guess, I don’t want to be on the cutting edge anymore. I just want to learn about and be enlightened about great new and old music. And that is what I get out of Sound Opinions.

This past week they had a great interview with a couple of members from Arcade Fire (who created the best album so far of the 2000’s, Funeral). Real cool.

If they don’t play Sound Opinions on your station, you can still check out the Sound Opinions podcasts (for free!).

This American Life

www.thislife.org

What’s there to say about This American Life? Probably the best radio show to come out since the dawn of the VCR and cable TV.

Listen!

The end

While listening to the new Smashing Pumpkins record for the first time, I asked former guest blogger, Mary, “Are we rocking yet?”. She replied, “If you have to ask, you know what the answer is.”

I am withholding judgment on Billy Corgan’s newest dish until a complete two listens.

I admittedly often don’t “listen” to the lyrics when I listen to songs. I hear the words, but often don’t pay attention to what the writer was talking about. Sometimes I’ll find myself listening to a song that I have heard a hundred times and for the first time listening to what the lyrics are saying and then the song takes on another dimension.

Yesterday, I had the iPod on shuffle and “Evangeline” by Matthew Sweet came on. [listen to Evangeline on iTunes] Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend album is just a super pop-rock album. So simple, yet so good. I remember buying that CD in 1992 in the summer before I went away to college. That album always brings back that excitement and big opportunity feeling that I experienced when going away to a big university coming from a small town.

Anyway, I remember that song just being a semi-hit when I was in college. Never a big favorite of mine and probably not one of the better tunes on the album. It’s good, but not super memorable for me. But listening to the words, I never realized that he was talking about the love/lust that he had for this evangelical Christian girl. It’s right there in the title for God’s sake! “Evangeline”. I just had never paid attention. It’s not like the lyrics are at all obscure. There’s nothing to figure out. It’s all right there. I just never had paid attention. I guess that I was too distracted by the 1001 exciting things to do your freshman year at college. Here’s some of the lyrics:

She’s on another planet, She’s in my dream
She’s some kind of angel, If you know what I mean
Try her on, She fits like a glove (Sweet cheesy line!)
Too bad she only thinks about, The Lord above

Evangeline, Evangeline, I think I love you
But Evangeline Evangeline, I want you

Now if I called you up, Do you think you, Could deliver my soul?
Won’t you take a drink, Little darlin’, The cup is full

And every night I bow to pray, But I’ll feel a whole lot better
Once you’re coming my way
…
Just tell me how you want it, We won’t be seen
You can tell your father, It was all a dream
Too bad the only man you trust, Is God above

The “I have heard these lyrics before but I have never listened” phenomenon has happened to me quite often. I think that I will try to make a conscious effort to listen to lyrics from now on…

We saw the Police at Wrigley Field tonight. Despite many negative reviews for the shows up until this point, it was pretty good.

A few disappointments:

• They play the EXACT same setlist every show
• Sting shied away from the high notes sometimes making some songs just sound wrong (for example the line “when their eloquence escapes me…” in “De do do do De da da da” was sung an octave lower, lessening the dramatic lead up to the chorus at that point)
• Sting tried a little too hard to “jazz-ize” some of the tunes
• Man, Andy Summers is looking old, and he needs a style consultant.

But overall, it was still pretty good. They actually rocked out on some of them. They can make a hell of lot a sound for only being a trio. And Stewart Copeland is just the best.[see Mary’s full review]

Anyway, the one thing that I had never realized was that Sting utters: “eeeeeeee ooooohhhhhhhhh” in various incarnations in SO many of the Police songs. He even added “eee oooo’s” to several songs for which the “eeee ohhhh’s” don’t appear on the studio versions. I guess that “eeeeee ohhhhhhhh” is Sting’s “signature” thing.

Here are a few other signature things that I thought of that various singers do:

• Steven Tyler of Aerosmith: that “k-k-k-k-k-ow kow kow kow” thing
• Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses: “aye eeeeee eye” (as in “Sweet Ch-aye-eeeee-eye-LD of M-aye-eeeee-eye-N”, “You Could Be M-aye-eeeeee-eye-n”, “Don’t You Cr-aye-eeeeeee-eye Tonight”, etc.)
• Michael Jackson: “yowww!” and that breathy, grunty thing that he does between lines sometimes.

Can you think of any more singer signatures? I can’t at the moment, but I’ll add ‘em here when I think of ‘em. In the meantime, I’ll get to work on inventing my signature syllables.

For those of you not fortunate enough to have been to Wrigley Field or for those who happen to not be males, here are the world famous Wrigley Field urinal troughs! :

So I’ve published four tracks from the “Day by Day” project here. I haven’t worked on this much since I announced it a couple weeks ago. So far I’ve got the four tracks that I’ve currently got published, plus an additional four tracks that are less done. Who knows, maybe this project will remain a four song, ten minute EP. Anyway, you can find the songs on the Day by Day page, or listen to them at my new Virb site (Virb is similar to MySpace but way less lame and has a really nice music player).

I setup the Virb site for a more user friendly place to listen to and download my stuff (and when you listen there it doesn’t use up my bandwidth!). To listen to just the new “Day by Day” tracks, go here: Day by Day at Virb.

Finally, both here and on the Virb site, I have published a track SQL Song that I started about four years ago.

Probably the geekiest song I’ve ever done. For non-geeks, SQL is “Structured Query Language” which is the language used to work directly with relational databases. This song is written in psuedo-SQL: the words approximate the standard statements that you might issue to a database, but I am talking about a night of drinking.

This is just a demo. I never really finished it. I intended to add lines about other geeky database things like “ascending” and “descending” and then make the song change key up and down. I intended to add transactional things like “commit” and wishing that I could “rollback” the transaction after I didn’t feel so good….

Enjoy. Let me know what you think.

So I am making a new record. I really never made much of a public announcement for the Zabada record (other than this fine blog which is read by three or seven people ), and didn’t plan on immediately making another one, but in noodling around with my new guitar (my dad hooked me up with an awesome Gibson J-185 EC a few months ago) I’ve come up with a set of instrumentals that I rather like. I named most of the songs after the time and day that I wrote and recorded each track (for example “Friday Evening” and “Tuesday Morning”) and thus the title of the collection is going to be “Day by Day”. Most songs are instrumentals, listening to them I think that they are about monotony and depression with pockets of sunshine and hope. Not that I am heavily depressed or anything, the tracks just sound mostly melancholy. Good rainy day music!

Here’s the tentative cover art (click it for the big picture):

This my first musical project that doesn’t have a single joke on it (yet). That’s kind of weird to me . . .

Anyway, stay tuned for new songs here sometime over the next week or six

It’s easy to forget how damn great the Beatles were. We’ve heard those songs so many times, all of the big ones seem trite. But I recently listened to Love (music compiled and remixed for the Cirque du Soleil show of the same name) and it hearing these tunes in a different light helps me rediscover how great the songwriting and performances are on these songs.

The Beatles put out records in the years 1962-1970, a mere eight years. The quantity and quality of their output is incredible. Take a look at this list: Beatles songs by singer. There are over 350 tunes. In just 8 or 9 years. And a majority of those are great. A ton of them are groundbreaking. Their recording output was produced in the same amount of time as 1999 to now (2007). I don’t know any bands that put out more than two or three great albums in that time frame. A good output these days for that kind of time frame is like 40 or 50 original tunes, the Beatles cranked out 350+. And they are Beatles songs, not any ol’ run of the mill regurgitated 12-bar blues or plain jane folk songs.

So if you think that you are burned-out-for-life on the Beatles, check out Love; You’ll probably love it.

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Rob’s Essential Beatles (I prefer proper albums over compilations, so no collections here, only original LPs):

1. Revolver. It is the best album of all time. If you don’t have it, buy it today.
2. Rubber Soul
3. Abbey Road
4. Sgt. Pepper
5. The White Album