I’ve always secretly made fun of those folks who get all emotional when a public figure dies. No matter what effect their work had on your life, I didn’t understand how an actor or singer or whoever dying would cause you to show public grief. I think I understand those people a little more today. Yesterday sadness for Prince’s death…
Damn It All
I was minutes away from posting an album review when the news about Prince dying hit. What a terrible day. I admired Bowie, but he was hardly vital to me growing up. When he died I wondered what aging rocker death would have the biggest impact on me. It would be sad when McCartney and Ringo died. Plant and Page,…
Friday Playlist
https://open.spotify.com/user/224aiwksicafjldlua6nnpo4y/playlist/6x2aonwNQhz7CaXy2s9qr0 “The Boy In the Bubble” – Paul Simon. I acknowledge Simon’s place in music history, but his songs never really connected with me. They were my parents’ generation’s songs, not mine. This is the one exception. I’ve always loved it and crank it up any time I hear it, as I did earlier this week on SiriusXM’s The…
Friday Vid
“God’s Eyes” – Spookyland Digging this song a lot right now. There’s a certain mid–90s vibe to it, from that final blast of the alt rock revolution before everything became derivative and poppy. From the first word, you can tell these lads are Aussies.
Musical Interlude
Some words about music. I’m wrapping up my first week of a rather grand experiment: avoiding iTunes/Apple Music and using Spotify in their place. I cancelled my subscription to the now defunct Rdio streaming service and went all-in with Apple Music as soon as it went live back in June. While Apple Music wasn’t perfect, I liked how it was…
Friday Vid(s)
Touching on some of my favorite music of the new year today. “Quiet Americans” – Shearwater First, from my favorite album of the year so far, this very mid–80s Bowie-like track from Shearwater. Shearwater is a band that has slowly grown on me over their career. They began as a side project for two members of Okkervil River, another band…
Friday Vid
“Black Metallic” – Catherine Wheel Catherine Wheel is one of those great, lost bands that seem to both define a certain time and still hold up well. Being British, with droney guitars as their dominant sound, they are generally considered part pf the shoegaze movement. But their sound transcended that genre. Of their five studio albums, two are fantastic (Ferment…
Friday Vid
https://youtu.be/i7nXvOTqyCY “Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas” – Beach Slang This is the first great New Music Friday of 2016. The first two Fridays of the month were rather slow, lacking both a large number of new releases and a bunch of eagerly awaited albums. But this week there are three new albums I’ve been looking forward to. And based on…
Monday Vid
Among the various Breaking News bulletins on my phone when I woke this morning was the notification of David Bowie’s death. I think I’m like a lot of people of my generation: not a huge Bowie fan – I really didn’t know who he was until his 1983 album Let’s Dance, which was the poppiest, most mainstream of his career…
Friday Vid
“Listen Like Thieves” – INXS Already Friday of the first full week of 2016. Hard to believe we have just 51 weeks left before 2017. Which means only 50 weeks of shopping until Christmas. Better get a move on! If my records are accurate, I’ve never shared an INXS track in the Friday Vids series. Which seems like a terrible…