Every Little Thing She Does is Magic - The Police

My original favorite song. I was a piano player and drummer and this song has both. I loved the image of these guys.  I loved (and still do) Copeland's drumming. Still one of the greatest pop and rock bands ever. A trio of three differnt guys synthesizing a sound that nobody else had before or after.  And after five masterpieces they decided that was it and broke up instead of turning out crap for $ for the next two decades.

Gardening at Night - R.E.M.

[link] A classic from their early days when R.E.M. was inventing a new sound that they would later abandon and an army of Southeast bands would simultaneously spend a decade trying to replicate. I wonder if the early guitar driven songs like this began as Peter Buck guitar riffs that everything crystallized around.

'The Invisible Lighthouse'

[link] This looks interesting, if a little self-indulgent, which is sort of Dolby's modus these days. Kind of a new form: interactive, partially live performed, film.  He would be the one to do it.  Gotta research that keyboard instrument he has slung over his shoulder on a couple of the tunes in the trailer.

Romanticide - Combo Audio

[link] A classic, synth driven one hit wonder song from the 80s.  The central keyboard theme in the intro and chorus really defines it and is the hook of the song.  The sound is essentially the same as Ultravox, which probably arrived at this kind of sound first and inspired a lot of others.

Lovin' You is So Easy - Journey

[link] When it comes to hard/power rock, I've always loved Journey.  Their songs are tight, well constructed with lots of hooks, and powerfully played (and powerfully sung by Steve Perry).  This stuff is by now an acquired taste; you had to be growing up male and white in certain places to get this stuff.  But that Venn diagram includes me and the spacetime I was in and in some ways will always be located in.

Kiss on My List - Hall and Oates

[link] From 1981.  These guys were pop geniuses spanning the 1970s and 80s. And the songs have lost nothing between then and now.  This was probably the first song of theirs that I really notice and appreciated but there were several before this and a whole string of them in the 80s. This was a great time to be doing pop, because it wasn't that hard to cross over between pop (top 40) and rock stations, and these guys were one of the acts that did that.  Less than a decade later rock would ossify into a harder genre, in which "classic rock" sometimes didn't include the more poppy sounds like this.

2 great Howard Jones B-sides

Learning How to Love and Why Look for the Key were both B-sides to Howard Jones singles that I bought the 45s for.  In those days, I recorded everything onto cassettes on my stereo and listened to the tapes.  These two songs became part of the soundtrack to my introverted existence during freshman and sophomore years of college.  Howard Jones is a great pop song writer and has some similarities to Thomas Dolby being a keyboardist with a certain synthesizer aesthetic.

New soprano uke

[link] My "Little Theme" on my new Lanikai LU 21P sporano ukulele.  I like this instrument a lot.

Clipped - Curve

[link] This is on the more over-produced end of SG, in terms of the rhythm track.  The drum tracks from stuff like this could be (and probably are in some cases) done by machine and if they are not, it is kind of sad that they sound like machine tracks. In my opinion it creates too rigid a structure for the rest of the instrumentation to fit into and takes away from the dynamics of the song.  But nevertheless this is pretty good stuff; the vocal track is definitely in the mainstream of atmospheric SG.

Overkill - Men At Work

Just one of the quite a few pop masterpieces by these guys. In the early 80s, you could get sounds like this with themes like this going very high on the Top 40.

Misled - Kool & the Gang

[link] Since we're in 1985, here's a pop effort by Kool & the Gang, which were one of the most successful acts of the earlier funk era and fully crossed over into pop by this time. I like the chord progression in the chorus.  They used this progression in a couple of their other big hits as well.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG0_BNlWGc0

King of Pain - The Police

Heard this today listening to Underground 80s on Soma FM. Took me back to 1985.  So many great tunes on that album.  I remember reading that when they were recording and mixing it, they kept taking away stuff and it kept sounding better and better.  Less is more.

Rip in Heaven - Til Tuesday

[link] The quality of this Letterman clip could be better, but this is a really good song off their 3rd (and last) album, 1988's Everything's Different Now, that I really like.  I listened to this album a lot in the Winter of '88-89 and spring of '89.  The chorus is the genius hook of this song.

Thinking about getting a real soprano uke

I have been having a good time playing around with Ru-Jun's toy $20 soprano uke, since I was able to get it into the BEAD tuning that I'm used to on my other ukes.  That uke does not stay in good tuning and doesn't sound very good overall. So I want to get a real soprano uke.  For the heck of it, I'm thinking about getting this pineapple uke.  It should be fun...

merging folk and electronica

I've been thinking a lot about strange hybridizations and juxtapositions that might be possible with acoustic instruments.  Here is a uke guy who does some amazing electronica sounds with his (pretty high end acoustic electric) uke. It's quite amazing. The acoustic pickup can be used in essentially infinite ways to make sounds that are the same as analog synths. So this is one angle on the idea of producing modern sounds with roots instruments.  There are other angles, such as doing covers of electronica music on all acoustic instruments, which would appropriate the song into a different sound genre.

Sugar Hiccup - Cocteau Twins

From 1988. This is very early in the SG era and arguable a precursor.  I've seen it argued that CT invented the instrumental, "ethereal" sound of SG and 4AD records became known for this sound. Pale Saints and Lush followed at 4AD and became two of the central bands of the SG sound.

Rave Down - Swervedriver

[link]  Among other things, these guys have one of my favorite band names.  They have a pretty tight, polished sound among those on the hard rock end of SG. There is definitely some overlap with more mainstream hard rock of the time.

Train whistle sounds

Here is a great explanation and some samples of various train whistle sounds.

Stella Harmony

A close friend of my parents, who sung folk songs in our church back in the day, was cleaning out her house and my parents got this guitar from her to give to me. The Stella Harmony was a very popular folk guitar in the 60s.  It's still in great shape and sounds good.  I absolutely cannot play chords in standard tuning, so I decided to tune it in Taro Patch slack-key (DGDGBD) and am able to make music with it now.  It will be fun to mess around with.

train whistles

I grew up about 1/2 mile from a major railroad line.  Just visited there this week. The chord of a train whilstle, which is something like a minor 7th chord, has a huge amount of narrative quality.  My predilection toward this type of chord is probably explained by this influence during my childhood.

Pitch the Baby - Cocteau Twins

[link] The first song on 1990's amazing album Heaven or Las Vegas. Did a lot of driving to this album back in the early 90s. Really great set of songs all around.

Soprano uke

[link] I bought this uke as a toy for Ru-Jun; it cost $20 new.  It doesn't sound like much but I finally got it into the tuning that I play (the gears are really crappy on it) and have been messing around with it. Off to Palmyra for a few days.  Will catch up on blogging when we get back.

Rev it Up - Jerry Harrison

From 1988.  I've always like the basic groove of this song. Was pretty popular on college radio in the day.

Sweet Water Pools - Screaming Blue Messiahs

[link] I've always liked these guys' rather nonsensical lack of control.  They have some really good, sweet songs, and can clearly write and play.  But they also seem really nonchalant about it.  It's cool.

House - the Psychedelic Furs

[link] One of the better of their later body of work.  The chorus is very hooky.  Good to see them still rocking.

Lights Go Out - the March Violets

[link] One of my favorite of the 80s goth bands. They still kept the lighter poppy side of the sound, unlike the better known Sisters of Mercy and most of the other well known goth acts.

Porcelain - Pretenders

[link] Great to see live footage of the Pretenders from 1980. They were great with very simple, but sophisticated, guitar and bass licks.  They could turn them into incredible hooks. Less than two years after this, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon were both dead from drug-related causes.  The two LPs with this original lineup were their best (as well as stuff that was on EPs).  Their first album with their post-1982 lineup, Learning to Crawl, was also amazing.

Weightless - Thomas Dolby

[link] An epic classic.  The conventional parts of this song are bouncy pop, sort of, at first.  Then it builds through a B-ish part. Then there is a break. Atmosphere through out.  Then back to the bouncy little verse. Then the cycle repeats.  The whole effect puts me in a late-tech/retro world, existential, lonely.  The little song near the end completes the loneliness and nostaligia.  I've never heard pop like this by anyone else.  Ending on the bouncy little verse provides the abruptness that finishes the thought and the feel.

Miss Drugstore - Medicine

[link] From 1992.  Hard edged SG from its early high period.  Pretty conventional in the song structure.  The SG comes from the guitar sound and the vocal and production.

One Simple Thing - the Stabilizers

Remembered because of the similarity of the band names (not the sounds). [link] From 1986.  A great pop/rock song.  The video is more over-wrought than the song.  The mid-late 80s were full of really image conscious stuff, most of the time trying to cover up the vapidity of the music.  But in this case, the song is worth listening to.  Even if these guys put every good musical idea they'll ever have into it and didn't do anything else after that (as may be the case here).

I See Red - the Silencers

[link] Great mid-80s alternative pop hit. I think these guys were mainstream pop in the UK and elsewhere but I only heard them on college/alternative stations here.  This song brings back some memories...

Bigfoot

Love bigfoot/yeti/sasquatch/skunkape stories and the classic (now pretty much known to be faked) footage form the Pacific NW footage from the 70s scared the crap out of me as a kid.  Of course, there is no way bigfoot can be real.  There would be physical evidence all over the place.  But here's they way I would write bigfoot in a SF story: they are the remnant of a civilization that predated Homo sapiens. Thousands of years ago, aliens arrived, made contact with them, and befriended them.  The aliens left behind a cloaked space station to watch over them and protect them.  These aliens had the power to eliminate all signs of the bigfoot species existence to H. sapiens. The plot of the story would be that the alien civilization is in decline and has not visited or provisioned the space station for hundreds of years.  There is only one alien left on the station and it is his/her job to continue to protect the bigfoots.  Something like that.

Shirley Temple Tidal Wave - Airiel

[link] From 2005.  Latter day SG that really gets the sound down and even enhances it was a smoothness and a melding of the layers.