Whirlpool - Chapterhouse

[link] From 1991, still early on in the shoegaze era.  Tempo is upbeat.  The overall sound is smooth-noisy and streamlined at the same time.  The vocals have a really soft tone; there is a bit of that effect where they are used as another instrumental line (a la the Cocteau Twins). The central break kind of strips is apart a bit and then of course reassembles it. A really great feeling sound is achieved in this song.

New Town Velocity - Johnny Marr

Brand new song from Johnny Marr.  It's a really nice song.  Can definitely hear his latter work with Electronic in it.  The video has him walking through all kinds of European Modernist and some Brutalist architecture, which is really cool.  This kind of architecture, because of its abstractness and rectangularity and rectilinearity, makes for great visuals.

Kaleidoscope - Ride

[link] On the far more upbeat sound is this one by Ride. There are more clear harkenings to the 60s inspirations of SG in the vocal harmonies.  The sound here seems almost not to be pure SG.  The broader sound associted with "Indy Pop" in the 80s and 90s would seem to encompass this type of sound.  But the guitar lines are SG.  The tone of the vocal is still the downishness of SG as well.

Alison - Slowdive

From 1993.  This album (Souvlaki) is rated the 2nd greatest slowdive album in that list I posted previously. The bottom end here is slow and thick with the SG atmosphere.  The vocal line is depressoid, with a male lead (Neil Halstead) but at least some of the vocal is female (Rachel Goswell). This kind of vocal combination is fairly common and SG (e.g. My Bloody Valentine and the Pale Saints, to name just a couple other examples). The vocals definitely feed into the "ethereal" atmosphere. I really liked listening to this sound on college radio in the 90s.

Cinnamon - Airiel

[link] These guys are a Chicago shoegaze band that did a lot of stuff in the early oughts. One of many bands FB shoegaze group alerted me to.  Airiel definitely gets the sound and mood right.  Like the other bands, there will be songs I like more or less depending on the chord progression.  It's fun going through new-to-me material.

Shoegaze on Facebook

The Shoegaze group on Facebook is really active and is a many times daily source of new and old Shoegaze songs and info. For example, here is a page on the top 100 shoegaze albums of all time.  Great for exploring and revisiting favorites in this amazing genre...

Don't Watch Me Bleed - Til Tuesday

[link] This has become one of my very favorite of their songs. Their first album, even without Voices Carry, is just trenchant.  Some of the best rockish pop ever made.

All You Zombies - Hooters

[link] 1985 was a real mishmash for pop and rock in the US. This was one of the songs on the rock side that I liked (although it did get old after a lot of overplay). These guys were a Philly band that made it big with this hit and performed at Liveaid and then I guess sort of burned out, in terms of limelight, after that.  But interesting things like that were happening all over mainstream music in the mid 80s.

You Know the Rest - Til Tuesday

[link] Really good live version of one of my favorites from them. Pretty close rendition to the studio version, which is hard to do.

Desire (Come and Get it) - Gene Loves Jezebel

[link] There is a lot of greatness in this 1985 song.  The blazing guitar.  Jay Aston's goth-tinged vocals.  The danceability and rockability in one package. There's even cowbell.

TiK ToK - Ke$ha

[link] Every once in a while something good comes out of current pop.  Of course it's the chord progression here, but the video is funny and the whole thing is really fun.  So I like it.

Late in the Day

[link] This was one of the core Megachild songs.  Adam's vocal was the main defining character with the chord progression coming out of one of our early jams.  The good key for me on the uke is not a good vocal key for me in either the higher or lower  octave but I sang it in the higher octave. I could never find the original lyrics so I made up new lyrics, some of which reflected some of the words I could discern from the original.  Hopefully it captures the tone and atmosphere of the original version.

PR Australia

Just discovered that seasons 3 and 4 of Project Runway Australia are now on youtube.  Cool.

President Gas - Psychedelic Furs

[link] On one of my favorite albums of all time, 1982's Forever Now.  Still very appropriate lyrics for today. The furs had a very edgy but at the same time melodic method for narrating the post-punk darkness.

Docklands - Stevie Nicks

[link] From her 1994 album Street Angel.  Co-written with Trevor Horn. Interesting.  B-part is a bit generic.  I hadn't heard much from this album before. Her voice is great with just about anything behind it though.

The Message - Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

[link] Summer of 1984, I went to a Critical Issues conference at St. Lawrence University with high school students from both the US and Canada.  One of the guys was from Montreal and played this incessantly.  One of the first rap songs and still pretty relevant.

Subdivisions - Rush

[link] Some great Canadian rock for Canada Day.  This one was a bit of an anthem for guys of my generation and background.  Rush was absolutely huge in Rochester and my friends in college were way way way into them.  I was just into them, by comparison.  Great instrumentalists and some pretty damn good songs.  And the stuff has aged well, I have to say...

Black Metallic - Catherine Wheel

[link] There really is no substitute for some excellent shoegaze. This song is a big, good-feeling throb.

Beethoven (I Love to Listen to) - Eurythmics

[link] Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were amazing. They did more innovative pop than just about anybody and Lennox really played with image and gender and roles.  The video for this song is a great example.  This is one of their hits that I only hear on college radio.  I don't think it did much on the pop charts in the US.  It's a really good dance song.  The use of the narrated audio samples is terrific.

805

[link to some of their recent live stuff] Sorry I never saw these guys during my formative years back in the 80s.  But one of my bandmates was then into them and I would occasionally hear them and about them on album rock radio, since they were relatively local.  Looks like they have been active in recent years. This 80s proggy sound is so "of its time". The first of these songs in in 7.  Takes some skill to pull that off but in many ways it limits the narrative ability of the song, in my opinion. All 7/4 rock songs kind of say the same thing to me.  Still, when you hear it with the synth heavy treatment like it is here, it can only be from that time. And it's a sound I'm a bit nostalgic about...

Night Shift - Quarterflash

From 1982. Came out in between their splasn "Harden My Heart" and their later hits, including "Take Me to Heart".  Kind of clean and low key. Still has their swingy beat of HMH. The instrumentation and production are definitely early 80s US mainstream Pop pieces.  A smooth little pop jaunt.

One Piece Manga

I got the first three volumes of the English language manga of One Piece in order to help me translate the Taiwanese versions that I have.  It's been a fun read so far, but it is a bit of a mystery how it got so popular because, at least for me, a lot of the attraction to the series is the quite literally the color art, which the manga does not have (except for the cover art and various posters). The manga was hugely popular in Japan before the anime.

Actually

Fields of Gold was pretty easy to pick up.  I may not have the chords exactly but since his chords are funky to begin with, my fudging of a few of the chords is just an eclectic take on an already eclectically scored song.  Memorizing the lyrics, as always, will be the hard part...

Sight of You - Pale Saints

From 1990. One of the original Shoegaze bands.  This one evokes Jesus and Mary Chain a bit in the chord changes. There are sort of two phases of the Shoegaze sound.  One is the noisy guitar sound itself and the next phase is the wall of sound made by one or several guitars playing that way.

Fields of Gold - Sting

[link] This was the last song at my brother's wedding reception.  I might try to learn it.  Has a simple-sounding melody but the actual underlying chords are more complex, which is not surprising given Sting's jazz background.

CHiPs

Another of the shows we watched every week.  This was in the later 70s during the disco era.  The intro credits are very memorable.  There were a lot of car chases and the music became sort of definitive for that type of scene.

Emergency!

This was one of the TV shows that we watched every week when I was a kid.  I remember the characters and settings, but the music in the intro credits is no longer familiar.  Maybe because it's too generic.

Gu Qin

[link] Listened to gu qin music while studying Chinese in my office today.  This music is really great.  It's great to watch the players. It would be really fun to play this instrument.  The cheap ones (probably not well made and hard to tune and keep in tun) are over $1000.  So I may never be able to get my hands on one...

One Piece Opening 5

[link] I'm just past the point of this one.  The music is getting a bit more polished. This is not a bad song.  The bass line moving against the melody in the 2nd line of the verse is a nice touch.

One Piece Opening 4

[link] This one's not bad.  I'm almost at episode 300 of about 600 (and it is still being produced in Japan) and am just past the time when this was used.

Turn Me Loose - Loverboy

[link] Loverboy, like Journey, gets slammed as clichish, but they could play their instruments, Mike Reno could sing.  They are a great example of mainstream hard rock that integrates guitar and keyboards.  This was one of their hits and is a very simple song.  It still sounds great. 1981 was a great year for vanguard hard rock that crossed over into the pop charts (Foreigner, Journey, and quite a few others were also right there at this time). Songs like this were great anthems for teen high school angst, driving around, summer, ...

One Piece Opening 3

[link] Didn't like this one at first but it grew on me like a lot of things do.  They always sound good when I've watched 50 or so episides with the next iteration of the intro.

One Piece Opening 2 (English)

[link] I've never seen the English versions of this theme song before.  It's not half bad.  Would be fun to learn.  It's a little fast.  A folk version would be slower.

It's really a mystery

why I have fatty liver.  I am not obese and don't have type II diabetes, which are the two factors most associated with this disorder.  Both times I was diagnosed with it, my diet was horrible. The first time I cleaned things up and the biomarkers righted themselves (that may have happened this time; the next set will tell) but the condition was worse this time, according to the ultrasound.  It's a form of inflammation and it predated my ankle tendon inflammation and kidney/lung involvement that led to the Wegners diagnosis.  It kind of makes me wonder if fatty liver might have been the first manifestation of the disease.  I'll have to look around the web to see what I can find.

Dream Girl - Pierres Pfantasy Club

[link] An iconic acid house track from the late 80s (couldn't find the specific date). This genre of house is defined by the sequenced bass sound produced by the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. It becomes very abstract and mesmerizing (trancy, but trance is a different subgenre).  Very different from the original house music.

One Piece - English Opening

[link] This is the English language opening for the short-lived, highly edited, and highly unpopular 4Kids version of One Piece that ran on Cartoon Network's Toonami, late Saturday night set of anime shows.  I really grew to like this opening although the real aficionados hate it. Since then I've gotten into the Funimation English subtitled version which closely tracks the original Japanese TV episodes.  I'm still less then half way through the >500 episode run (which is still ongoing).  This is a great series and I'm enjoying it hugely (first four seasons on hulu and now in season 5 on a web site).

Duel - Swervedriver

[link] One of the great shoegaze songs of all time. Multiple hooks, yet these are not pop hooks.  They are achieved within the instrumental miasma. The mood progression that this song goes through is remarkable.  It starts very intense and then goes in to a mostly major, slightly sing songy section, gets lost in that for a while (in a good way), then quiets down and then launches back into the first part, redrawing all of the blood a second time around.  Very intense instrumentals both times through.  Then back into the B part and then the quiet part, I guess the C part, heads out to a fade. Almost two different songs except that the transitions between them really meld them together

Slit Skirts - Pete Townshend

[link] I never really understood this song but it doesn't matter.  It's a genius piece of rock music.  And the live video really shows how good Townshend is on stage.  Great songwriting and really good at pulling off a difficult song (although he skipped a line in the 2nd verse section).  Townshend is serious about getting across complex messages with rock songs.

Gemini Dream - The Moody Blues

[link] Always liked this 1981 song, even though I am not a fan of their work as a whole.  It has a good late disco-ish beat.  It's very similar to E.L.O. of the same time period, a little of which goes a long way. But I really like the verse and the transitions, which do some pretty cool things, especially the one back into the verse from the bridge.  The chorus has that classical pop/rock songwriting that goes back through Meatloaf and glam back to the Beatles. The very end rally (there are two of them in the linked version) is also pretty cool.  Just puts a lot of interesting things into one song.

Fat and diet

The state of knowledge on the various types of fatty acids and health is a bit of a mess, even though some things appear to have been established.  Here is my understanding of the current knowledge/conventional wisdom. Saturated fat = good. Unsaturated fat = bad.  HDL cholesterol = good, LDL = bad. However, within unsaturated fat, there's still a lot of uncertainty.  Omega-3 = good because it's anti-inflammatory (I won't get into the pathway here because I don't yet fully understand it) and Omega 6 = bad because it's pro-inflammatory.  So the ratio of Omega-6/Omega-3 is important because if it gets too high then one is at risk for all kinds of inflammation throughout the body (and many disorders are inflammatory). There is a now pretty widely accepted hypothesis (I don't know if I would call it a theory) that the ancestral human diet was rich in omega-3 and that is what we are adapted to and the modern grain-based diet is more rich in omega-6 (from most vegetable oils).  Processed food is of course usually rich in omega-6 even if it is not rich (any more) in saturated fat.  Within omega-3, there are three main kinds: ALA from plant sources and DHA and EPA from animal sources (primarily fish oil and krill oil).  DHA and EPA can be immediately used by the human body (i.e. incorporated into cell membranes) wherease ALA needs to be processed by several enzymes into usable sources.  These enzyme reactions are slow and not very efficient.  So it is currently unclear whether ALA is as beneficial as DHA and EPA.  A lot of foods that have been enriched omega-3 (e.g. eggs, margarine) are enriched with ALA, not the other two.  ALA is probably better than either saturated fat or omega-6, but it's not clear how actually beneficial it is.  More science is needed...

Pictures of Bernadette - Talk Talk

[link] The Colour of Spring (1986) era of Talk Talk saw them reach the prime of their merging of their early pop work and their more atmospheric and textural "post rock" sound that they came to mine later on.  This is one of the songs right at the interface between the two concepts.  A lot of the rhythm and solo section instrumentation is from the atmospheric vein but the song itself has a conventional pop structure and is a very melodic pop song.  The overall feeling is rich but, not dark, but I would say maudlin, given a bit of intensity by the vocal.

I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll - Nick Lowe

[link] Don't know why I'm thinking of this just now except that Ru-Jun and I will be flying out to my brother's wedding in Cali in a few weeks.  This is a really fun wedding reception song.

Master of Crime - Colin James Hay

[link] This is a really great (but strange and awkward in a lot of ways) song off Hay's first solo album, which apparently did not sell well and has been out of print for a long time.  It definitely harks back lyrically and in other ways to the later Men at Work material. I loved M@W and a lot of the songs off this album (Looking for Jacks) and I listened to it a lot back in the late 80s. The bridge part really makes the song.  Haven't heard it in a very long time.  Great to find it on youtube.  Still sounds good.

Pump up the Jam - Technotronic

From 1989. This is from the rap house genre.  I went for the song in a big way.  The literal pumping of the drum machine line and the chord sequence really work.  I always thought the vocal was by a male, but it turns out is a woman (Manuela "Ya Kid K" Kamosi). These guys are from Belgium and this sound took over the dance floors of the world for a while.  This was always a money song when I was DJing.

Away - The Bolshoi

[link] Really great song. From 1987 (I think; it was also called A Way in some versions).  Trevor Tanner's vocal (and its production) are goth-pop.  The simple chord progression really sounds like it should be more complicated (I just learned it on the uke) but what makes it complex is the shifting bass line which hits unconventional on-root notes (this is a great technique of a lot of post-punk).  We have here most of the goth of say The Sisters of Mercy but in a cleaner, more poppy package.

Freedom of Choice - Devo

[link] Devo making a serious point about conformity but also with a great musical statement.  A deceptively simple chord structure underlies a driving bass line.  The intensity of the vocal burns above the whole thing, especially in the B part.  The chorus is simple and contains the take home message.  The instrumental brings a very beautiful high synth voice in.  These guys knew how to craft a message into the building blocks of pop/rock.  Great stuff.

inchworms

It's a pretty good year for (what I think are) spring cankerworm (Paleacrata vernata) inchworms.  Ru-Jun has collected some into a couple of containers and we have been feeding them leaves. One appears to have pupated.  Problem is I think they need to go through winter to emerge and the pupae are probably vulnerable to viruses.  But it's been really fun for Ru-Jun.

The Rhythm of the NIght - Corona

[link] This brings in a new dance subgenre: Eurocance/High NRG.  From 1993, this comes after the house stuff that I've been talking about.  The tempo is faster.  It's synth/sequencer driven.  Really really good, this one.  The big hook is everything.

Finally - CeCe Peniston

[link] This is one of the mixes of this song that falls under the Piano House subgenre.  I really like the organ progression that drive the B part,which is later picked up in piano. A nice complement to the strong vocal.  As a keyboardist it's really attractive to have songs that are driven by the keyboard chords, which the whole tempo is here.

Italo-House and Hip House

I listened to some examples of both of these genres today trying to figure out a difference.  From what I heard there isn't much of one, except for perhaps where the artists are from.  They both have piano and synth hook chords and both can have rap elements.  Both have diva singing (or samples) and sort of gender-neutral soul-ish vocals.  I like and dislike examples of both.  Italo- does seem more upbeat and anthemic, whereas Hip House tends to be more edgy.  But there seem to be huge overlaps.
Here is a Chicago Hip House mix

(Hip House is most associated with Chicago DJs in the late 80s)

Here is an Italo-House mix (also called Piano House)

Italo-house is associated with the producer Gianfranco Bortolotti

In these particular examples, the latter is more atmospheric and instrumental.  There are a lot of mixes on Youtube and they vary all over the place.

Everybody Everybody - Black Box

[link] Love this song, from 1990.  It was a staple in my 80s mix when I was an informal, amateur DJ. I'm not an expert on the genre, but the sub-genre that Black Box is described as is Italo-house or Italian.  The defining characteristic is the specific electric piano chords.  That sound, and the particular chords and chord progressions are really what make it.  Also, the tempo is slightly below the faster rave music of that same era.  Everybody Everybody has an infectiousness and accessibility that is really noticeable.  When it goes on, people dance.

The Sorceress Amy

[link] Finally got a decent recording of this (decent enough for now; I screwed up the ending). I've been working on playing standing up.  The strap I'm using is a Mobiusstrap.  Works really well.

Alison - Slowdive

[link] A more canonical shoegaze sound from these guys.  This way of making music defies the melodic convention, although there are usually melody elements present in the vocals.  The instrumental sound is sort of a color faucet that is pointed outward and manipulated.  The effects on the guitars and sustains and reverb in the other audio elements set up a background, which is then manipulated and sculpted by the performers. I think the narrative content of the music can be huge, such that the vocals themselves are often free to go abstract.  In the case of the Cocteau Twins, one of the founders of this sound, the vocals typically went into experimental and conceptual (if not sonic per se) spaces that musical composition usually reserves for the instruments.  The era of shoegaze was pretty short. But it never really ended, either.  There is still huge potential for the genre.

Crazy for You - Slowdive

From 1995. The dream pop side of shoe gaze.  The atmosphere almost goes into ambient, thanks to the samples and repetition.  Very dreamy.  Almost cold.  But also warm.  I like the miasma...

Drive, She Said - Stan Ridgeway

[link] Stan also fits in the New Wave idiom I discussed below.  His voice was made for storytelling - especially with a background of kitsch/Americana, which was a major focus of American New Wave (e.g. the B-52s, most famously).  He structures his songwriting and production around this storytelling aspect.

Interesting Dream

I often have interesting dreams but I seldom remember much. In the one I just woke up from, I was one of hundreds of workers being transported large distances by plane, train, and bus working on building a pipeline. We were going ever further south to eventually finish in Antarctica. We would hear the pipeline humming at each stop and I was tringvto figure out if the humming was getting higher as we got closer to the pipeline's source in the south. We were laying down plastic tubing or hose in an underground facility and one guy asked me if I could hear the D note of the humming. I replied that I don't have perfect pitch so I couldn't tell. At one point we got out of buses at night and we were trying to figure out where we were. It was warm and the stars were bright. We concluded we were in southern Africa. There were several buses of other crews there. I think we were supposed to have a meal there in a large cafeteria but I got separated from the group and missed the meal. The team I was in had men and women of various ages, none were known or recognizable people from real life. But in the dream I thought I recognized one or a few of them as character actors from movies or TV and I was going to talk to them about that. The person I was invthe dream had also played minor parts in a few movies. Toward the end when we were outside just before I lost the group i remember that I had put down a oair of fingerless gloves that were mine on the ground. A third glove was found, maybe by me, that was identical but I concluded that it wasn't mine.

World Party - The Waterboys

[link] From 1989.  I really like Mike Scott's vocals and the use of fiddle in these guys' songs.  Songs like this one and We Will Not Be Lovers are intense.  A lot of soul here.

Boheme - Deep Forest

[link] Listened to these guys (specifically this album, from 1995; this is the title track) a lot ca. 1996. They do a good job with most of the samples.  Extremely atmospheric, which is kind of the whole modus here.

Devo, the Talking Heads, and American new wave

At Ru-Jun's dance recital over the weekend, one of the classes danced to Whip It by Devo (in red futuristic dresses).  This is the only Devo song 99% of people know and it's a really good song.  It got me thinking what Devo actually did to music.  Like the Talking Heads, Devo had its roots in the punk movement of the mid-late 70s and many of their songs had rootsy origins (e.g. Working in a Coal Mine) (TH had more funk flavors).  Both of these bands stripped down those sounds and made them abstract, sometimes by adding synthesizers, other times by just going really minimalist.  Then stuff could be added back to expand the possibilities of the abstract essence.  Both bands did it with the rhythm section. TH did it predominantly with rhythm section, reflecting the funk essence, whereas Devo added a lot of synths on top of things (TH was no slouch at this either) and later got into more of the 80s synth pop sound (whereas TH ended up going toward what David Byrne eventually did solo with the Latin influences he got into).  I really like this about these bands' role in new wave: abstracting, finding the essence of the music, and using it to make a completely different, and often completely infectious, sound.

September Morn - Neil Diamond

[link] From 1979.  That year I ended up listening to a lot of AM radio, more than most years of my childhood.  I think this was due to car rides to the Pittsford YMCA for swimming lessons and swimming with my dad and brothers.  Anyway, this was one of the big hits of that year and it kind of grew on me.  I learned this on the uke a few months ago, then forgot it, then relearned it again tonight.  I hope I can keep it available in the set.  Should be fun to play live.

Piccadilly Palare - Morrissey

[link] Morrissey  has to be indulged  when it comes to the dark material, but this song is musically delightful with any words.  Bouncy and sing songy. The edginess doesn't overwhelm.  And he really knows how to build through the song and rally out of breaks.  The dynamics of the song parts are great.  Just a terrific song.

Brilliant Mind - Furniture

[link] This song was on the sountrack of the 1987 movie Some Kind of Wonderful, which was one of my favorites back in the day.  Hugely wonderful song, especially for the introvert.  Everything works here, the tempo, the progression, the rhythm track, the vocal.  It's a lonely, yearning, song.  I was there then.
Tonight I've been going through old poems from 10-20 years ago.  I really was tied up into myself just as this song makes me feel.  Kind of got stuck in the process of writing through myself, running rusty water out of a pipe to get to clean fresh water.  Anyway, this song does a supreme job of complementing my inner life back from the late 80s on.  Still does today...

Papua New Guinea - The Future Sound of London

[link] From the 1992 movie Cool World. One of several songs from the then current rave culture that is on the sound track.  I really like this one.  I've never gotten sick of the use of vocal samples like this one uses.  I'd love to mess around with this kind of recording myself, but have never had the time.

New song memorized

I have the new song memorized. I just need to practice it a lot to work it into the set. I also want to record a vid if it. Tough to get time for that these days. Being a musicuan is mostly for people with no parenting responsibilities.

Special One - Ultra Vivid Scene

[link] Kurt Ralske's work as Ultra Vivid Scene was one of the trenchant sounds for me in the early 90s.  Here, with Kim Deal of the Pixies (another one of the trenchant sounds).  The emotional range here is narrow.  But it gets at a laconicness I had at the time.  Life was simultaneously moving fast (school and some science) and not moving at all (personal life and other stuff in science).  I was lurking in the universe somewhere, like Kurt's voice, with stuff to say that was poetic but hard to decipher.  I didn't have any stories so I made up words that could be interpreted as a lot of different stories if anyone were looking.  No one ended up looking.

New Song

I wrote this on the piano in March 2010 as a song for Megachild.  I decided to dust it off to see if I could play it solo with the uke.

Here are the lyrics.

My Life as a Tree

Princess Amy
One day would be Queen
She learned the spell craft
Walking beneath the trees
From the wizard Tralfaz
The magic - it was good
It came from the Earth
The soil and the wood
Her father aging
The king - he was not well
The kingdoms borders
Were visited by beasts of hell
Evil dragons
Were hatching in the north
Diabolical mages
Cultivating the dragons' source

My life as a tree
Got as tall as I could be
We marched down to the sea
But then the axe men came for me

Amy was crowned
A full Sorcoress and the Queen
But Tralfaz had departed
For a universe unseen
Her high council
Was corrupted by piles of gold
And she knew there was evil
Building in the mountains cold
She knighted many
Brave fighters for her cause
She built her army
Still hoping to avoid a war
The demonic mages
Saw their time was short
So they unleashed the dragins
--- it was War ---

When the clouds had broken
And the sun came beaming through
The field was scattered
With dragon scales of every hue
Many knights had fallen
But the dragons were all dead
The mages that did not perish
Threw down their staves and fled
Amy's face was blood
As she looked out in victory
But the Queen's tears streamed down
Because she had lost all the trees

including me

My life as a tree
Got as tall as I could be
We marched down to the sea
But then the axe men came for me
The Princess planted me as a seed
She grew up beneath my leaves
She became the Good Witch Queen
But then the dragons got free
No time to say goodbye
I let some of my seeds fly
In a Princess's garden someday
They may fall from the sky
-

The Unforgettable Fire - U2

Among their mid 80s material, U2 had some wonderfully atmospheric songs. This is a great example. In fact the entire Unforgettable Fire album really is of a piece with this.  It often gets lost in the analysis between their early punk-influenced breakthrough hits and their world-dominating Joshua Tree and later days.  For me, this was their peak.  I don't need any of the stuff after this album.  It hit me at a very inward part of my existence.  My latest conclusions about that particular time in my life are pretty damning, but at least I had this music, which was great even though I didn't really know how to be an interactive human being at the time.

A sort of dream

I would like to perform somewhere as a street musician.  Or at least try it.  Preferably out here on the island somewhere, not in NYC.  I saw some advice online and one of the points was to stand up, not sit down.  That's a bit difficult, for long, with a uke without a strap, because with the ukes I have (except the banjo, which has a strap) I have to hold them up while playing them.  It's tiring.  So I'm looking into various ways to use straps and types of straps.  There are a couple of them that don't require installing buttons on the uke.  One called the uke leash holds the head stock and frees up the left hand.  I got one of these and tried it.  Not good.  Playing angle not good and it doesn't free me up enough.  There's another that I will probably try, called the mobius strap.  It wraps around the waist of the body.  Looks like it could do the trick.  We'll see...

White City - Thomas Dolby

[link] One of the classics off The Flat Earth.  Wasn't one of my favorites at first but has grown on me immensely over the years.  The lyrics are great.  The dialogue at the end (by Robyn Hitchcock) has stuck with me over the years.  Dolby at this time is a master of creating a personal landscape within a song - really great atmospherics.

Hold Me - Fleetwood Mac

From 1982.  This song was played interminably when it came out.  But I always liked it and it still isn't worn out with me.  I think the piano intro and the verse really do it.  Whispery yet somewhat complex vocal.  There really isn't much to the chorus.  Weird how some songs manage to sound good.

Shot by Both Sides - Magazine

From 1978.  These guys were part of new wave from the UK.  Definitely on the edgier and harder side, and there are strong flavors of what would soon emerge as the goth sound.  The late 70s had a miasma of undercurrents in pop/rock.  Always rich to re-explore them...

Nothing Compares 2U - Sinead O'Connor

Usually not a fan of down temp ballads.  But this one works thanks to the production.  Very nice layering and atmosphere.  And her vocal captures soul like a windmill in a storm.

Overall

I'm pretty happy with the Earthstock set.  The weather really kind of ruined it but I can't complain about that.  I had a good number of different songs from last year and given the conditions, my playing and singing went off OK.

The rest of the set

And here's the rest of the set:

Country Roads

Layla

Ring of Fire

Please Come to Boston

Blue-Footed Booby Blues

A few more

The wind is a problem in most of these but here they are:

Southern Cross

Country Roads

Layla

Some of the Earthstock set

Finally got some time to work with the video files.
Here are the first four songs of the Earthstock set:

After the Gold Rush

Folsom Prison Blues

Evangeline

Last of the Famous International Playboys

No stupid questions

On its face, I originally thought the question "why do organisms age and die?" to be kind of a no brainer.  Stuff breaks down.  But of course I now appreciate that this is a complex evolutionary and biological question and that "stuff breaks" is only one of many facets.  In the same vein, the question "why are kids so troublesome?" sounds similarly kind of dumb.  They are developing; they are not fully self-aware or able to control their compulsions, etc.  But as in aging, this is a complex question with likely several biological and evolutionary facets. 

Man Turned Inside Out & Sexi Luv - Devo

[link] Two pretty good songs from Devo's 1988 album Total Devo, which seems forgotten and got panned by some.  They sound a bit like Blancmange et al. here.  Sort of a different sound for them...

Laughing - R.E.M.

Pretty good live footage from 1982.  Their early stuff is by far their best stuff.  And this is one of the earliest and one of the best, IMHO.  I've thought a lot about their sound and what made it so fresh and great in its time.  The vocal had something to do with it, as did the guitar work and the songwriting.

time to play

Got some time to play outside on the deck this past weekend.  Always fun to do music outside.  With the uke especially.

Spring Rain - The Go-Betweens

[link] Always liked these guys.  Learned this song this evening.  Works pretty well with the baritone uke.  Lyrics are a bit klunky, but that's sort of the nature of the song and their sound.

This Charming Man - The Smiths

[link] Other than the screaming falsetto stuff, Morrissey is a vocal model/muse of mine.  This is one of the songs that sealed it for me.  The album The Smiths came out in 1984.  I discovered it in 1987 after I taped it from my bandmate Tom's LP collection.  Marr's classic jangly playing in this song really sets an atmosphere, especially with the changes and in combination with the bass line.

Firestarter - The Prodigy

[link] Possibly the most disturbing video I actually sort of liked.

Songs during childhood I needed to have

Frank Mills - Music Box Dancer

Billy Joel - Piano Man (B side of 45 was Root Beer Rag)

Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around - The Police

[link] Still one of the best outfits to have ever played music on this planet.  My favorite band through most of my formative period. I was telling a friend the other day that the most straightforward bands I've been in were trios.  Take three good musicians and you can really do something, make something new.

Still no time

to go thru the Earthstock video.  Crazy week at work and home.

Watching the Wheels - John Lennon

[link] I am not heavily directly influenced by the Beatles and I don't listen to them except when their songs are on the radio, commercials, etc. But I liked (and bought) John Lennon's 1980 album Double Fantasy.  This is my favorite song off that album.

End of the Party - The Beat

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwC30oQcJAA] (aka The English Beat in the US).  Great chords. Sensual singing. The chord changes here really cannot be worn out.  And the production/arrangement really gets everything out of them.  Chord changes are narrative devices and sometimes the whole song can be an evocation of its hook over and over again.

Modigliani (Lost in Your Eyes) - Book of Love

[link] Absolutely love these guys.  Saw them live at Univ. Rochester in 1989.  Very electronic, of course (for the time).  But they have the progressions and the vocal is so low and sort of laconic.  Sets up a perfect atmosphere and attitude.

A wet set

The weather deteriorated after the late morning and it ended up being lightly drizzly and windy during my set.  But things still went OK.  I played for the full 30 min and got 9 songs in.  I'll see if the video turned out in the next couple of days and post vids.  10-20 people stuck it out and watched me in the rain.  I'm pretty happy with the way most of the songs turned out.

Weather looks good for tomorrow

Partly cloudy and mid 60s.  Should be good for the show.  I don't have anyone to run the video camera right now but I'm going to see if one of my undergraduates can.

Ring of Fire - Wall of Voodoo

Their cover of the Cash classic. Stan Ridgeway is a master of atmosphere.  This version really works for me.

Songs available for Friday

Folson Prison Blues (Cash)
Ring of Fire (Cash)
Southern Cross (CSN)
Thousands are Sailing (Pogues)
Country Roads (J. Denver)
On the Road Again (W. Nelson)
Evangeline (Icicle Works)
Leila (Clapton)
Last of the Famous Intl Playboys (Morrissey)
After the Gold Rush (N. Young)
New Years Day (U2)
My Little Stickleback (original)
Blue-Footed Booby Blues (original)
Roxanne (Police)
Please Come to Boston (D. Collins)
Unhappy Birthday (Smiths)
Here Come Cowboys (Psychedelic Furs)

Twilight Zone - Golden Earring

[link] Such a great song.  Pretty uptempo, great minor chord progressions in both verse and B part (beginning of chorus).  The guitar slide into the B part  really makes it. When Shian-Ren and I were in Leiden in 2002 we saw flyers up for these guys.  We weren't in town long enough to catch their show but I think it was in a small pub and was probably pretty great.

State of the Nation - New Order

A classic from 1986.  Heard it today in the lab listening to Soma FM's Underground 80s, which is truly excellent.  The vocal and low lead guitar are a high tension counterpart to each other and the always terrific New Order bass line.  The synth work and the strummed high rhythm guitar add the rest of the parts of the taut machine. High 80s dance pop par excellence.

Flier for Friday's gig

Sound Mirror - Clock DVA

[link] Clock DVA produced some of the more melodic stuff of the industrial genre.  In this one, the high synth line and the toned percussion line provide that. Not that it's that much, but it's there.

Wild Flower - the Cult

[link] One of the only arguably metal bands to get major airplay on US college radio in the late 80s and 90s.  Probably because they weren't hitting high in the rock charts in the US at the time ("alt-rock" had not yet broken into the mainstream rock of the time).  The Cult tended to use the same chord progression over and over, but they had a solid sound that was never boring.  This is one of their really good ones.

Fears to Remember - The Brothers Martin

Starflyer 59 led me to Joy Electric, which led to Dance House Children, which led to The Brothers Martin.  Now this is an excellent mid-tempo synth pop/dance song. Sort of a smoothing out of Depeche Mode with some more synthy elements thrown in.  Very nice.

No New Kinda Story - Starflyer 59

[link] Reading online about shoegaze led me to these guys.  I like the low-guitar/bass driven arrangement.  The light pulsing (synth or guitar) is a nice element as well.  Not in love with the orchestral elements, and the vocal is just OK.  But overall the atmosphere in this song is pretty good...