The Glamorous Life - Sheila E

A unique and amazingly talented performer. This live performance is scintillating. Beyond that, for me there is a mystique around this 1984 song and others of its time because I wasn't listening to top 40 at the time yet there were some really really great pop songs emerging. There's an abstractness about this particular song that I've always found appealing. It's almost like the song was wasted on most of the ears it hit. Ephemerality is a key character of most pop. They didn't know what they had there.

Piano in The Dark - Brenda Russell

I don't know any of her other material but this is a brilliant song. B part into C part is about as hooky as a hook can get. It's all about the hooks.

Night Ranger

This 80s band is still loved by many, no doubt, but is also a bit senamentalized as lightweight kitsch by some. Probably both because of their name and because of a single song, the accessible but sort of strange Sister Christian. Somewhat unfortunate that this is what they are remembered for. Their breakthough hit Don't Tell Me You Love Me is really great and is even a bit proggy in places. And their lesser known hit Sentamental Street (couldn't find good video) is also a really nice song.

Sine qua non

Are misogyny and sexual hang-ups the sine qua non's of all fundamentalist religion? Sure seems that way.

Cyndi Lauper - All Through The Night

Another great song by Cyndi Lauper. When this genre of 80s songs came out I was busy transitioning from hard rock to college radio/alternative music. I was not attracted to top 40, didn't really take time to listen to the songs, didn't take them seriously. It's sort of a personality trat of mine that I tend to discover things many years after they were popular and have been long abandoned by the mainstream culture.

Shooting Shark - Blue Oyster Cult

My all time favorite blue Oyster Cult song. From 1983's underrated The Revolution By Night album. Very atmospheric. Great chord progression. Awesome vocal.

Time After Time - Cyndi Lauper

A classic pop song from a very classy and talented artist of the 80s. Started learning it tonight. Took a bit of listening and trial and error to get all the changes.

Got some practice in yesterday

With the plugged in baritone uke setup in my office. Getting more use to it. Had the effects box working and played with settings on it and the amp. Tightened the end screws on the tuning knobs for the two high strings. Seemed to stay tuned better after that.

another new learn

Unhappy Birthday by the Smiths.
Love this song. Dark like all the rest of their stuff. But a heck of a fun song to sing. And play.

Crush - Jennifer Paige

I've always loved this song, from 1998. Chord progression rocks. Separate hooks in verse and chorus. I have a thing for high, breathy female vocals and Paige is killer throughout, the soul is right there. Don't think much of the video but Paige has the dark eyes with blonde hair contrast going, which hooks me as well.

low hanging fruit

Currently searching for easy to learn songs by the Replacements. Let's see if I can find anything.

Lola

After an aborted attempt a few weeks ago, I finally learned it tonight. I was telling Shian-Ren and Ru-Jun about Al Yankovic's "Yoda" version of this song and got the lyrics to both of them. It's a hard song, with three distinct parts that take me all over the fretboard the way the instrument is tuned and the way I do chords. I tried three different transpositions and settled on the middle one of those.

I love this TV version of the Kinks "Lola"

Here is "Yoda" by Al Yankovic

new learns

"Alsatian Cousin" - Morrissey
"The Gambler" - Kenny Rogers
"The Zoo" - Scorpions

The first and third are long time favorites of mine. The second is a classic song I grew up with and a lot of people know (easy to play too; even with the key change).

How it went

Antarctica - didn't play; was running short on time and confidence
Country Roads - went well; opened the set with it; a keeper
Last of the Famous IPs - good, need to slow it down though
Breakdown - good but short
American Girl - ditto; could have been sharper
Smoke on the Water - hard to do the guitar lick consistently while performing live; closed the set with it; may not actually be a keeper
Karma Chameleon - did not play; very underconfident about this one
Smells Like Teen Spirit - went pretty well, one of the highlights; got good response
Ghost Riders in the Sky - made some mistakes, hard to pull off without messing up lyrics
Roxanne - the other highlight of the set; people liked it
Free Bird - there was a request, but my mind was blanking, didn't attempt it

Gig went OK

The Megachild set went well. I'll miss playing with Pat and Rocio. Rocio's new band, which she is fronting, is pretty good. The TralfazWizard Experience set was OK but very rough around the edges. I'll have more to say about it in future posts.

gig tomorrow

The Tralfaz Wizard Experience gets off the ground tomorrow night opening for Megachild and Electric Platypus at the E&E retreat afterparty. The songs are ready give or take some lyrics I have a mental block issue with. The hardest thing will be getting used to the acoustic-electric, which has a much higher action. And playing it through the effects and amp. And playing and singing into a mic. Haven't done that before. OK, this will be pretty challenging. Hopefully I can still relax and have fun with the songs.

A half step too high

The third string on my new acoustic-electric ukulele just would not stay at Bb. I even tried changing to a wound metal string instead on a nylon one but the same thing happened. So I took all four strings down one half step. The string seems to hold OK there. I'm now playing all my songs a half step lower because of this change (I also made the change on my acoustic one at home). This actually impoves my ability to sing a few songs and doesn't seem to harm the others.

Simone - Thomas Dolby

Apparently Thomas Dolby had a new album out last year. I ran across this advance video and gave it my first listen. Jazzy, Latin rhythm, laid back. With the visuals, both rollicking and retro, as he is wont to be from the beginning. Very nice.

Destination Unknown - Missing Persons

Got really into Missing Persons in early 1989 in my last semester of college even though their main work was from the early part of that decade. This performance is a lip-sync of Destination Unknown for German TV.

Free Bird

Some fool will be calling for this Saturday night, so I went ahead and learned it. Pretty simple, but couldn't pick it up from just listening - it has a prominent D chord which makes it too low for my baritone uke, which only goes down to F. So I picked up the chords from a guitar tab site and transposed it down a bit so I'm not going way up on the neck to get that chord.

It's of course a tremendously boring song to listen to. Lynyrd Skynyrd has a bunch of much better songs, such as Gimme Three Steps and I Know a Little, to name just a couple.

Antarctica - Men Without Hats

My version of this song is pretty different (no synth lead, but I manage to get the menacing relative minor to major change in the rhythm guitar/bass down pretty well). The lyric sites don't agree on the lyrics to this song at all and there are a lot of propagated errors. This is a fun song to play. Will be interesting to see how it flies in the set. Pretty cryptic song that not a lot of people have even heard before.

Cloudburst at Shingle Street - Thomas Dolby

(click on entry title above for link to song on Youtube)

One of my favorite unconventional pop songs ever. Lyrics below. The last two lines have been iconic in my mind for over half my life (even with an ever-changing definition of "you"; a lot of the time there was no "you")

We climb the cliffs
And hang from trees
Wrap the rocks and pave the beach
State of shock at flick of switch

(mindless) into the cloudburst overhead
I wanna get my face wet
It's been buried in the sand for years
(headlong) into the cloudburst naked
There's really no escaping it
There's gonna be a cloudburst here.

Come out of your shell
And look at the sea
It may be just as well
You stayed here with me
Private hell at turn of a key

(blindly) into the cloudburst overhead
I wanna get my face wet
It's been buried in these hands for years
(mindless) into the cloudburst naked
There's really no escaping it
There's gonna be a cloudburst here

And it's dawning on me
I've been a cork in the ocean, been bobbing in the North Sea
Then take this vest of plaster, these boots of concrete
And mark them down as surplus, return to Mulberry...
Cloudburst at Shingle Street
Cloudburst at Shingle Street
Cloudburst at Shingle Street
When I was small I was in love in love with everything
Now there's only you

Flying North - Thomas Dolby

Somewhat continuing in the futurist dystopia theme, although Dolby always adds a decidedly retro-tech flavor, this song is one of my favorites off The Golden Age of Wireless. (lyrics in the screen shot)

My solo act

I'm naming my solo act The Tralfaz Wizard Experience. First gig is 17-Mar E&E retreat afterparty.

Revised set list

Antarctica
Country Roads
Last of the Famous IPs
Breakdown
American Girl
Smoke on the Water
Karma Chameleon
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Ghost Riders in the Sky
Roxanne

Someone will proably yell for Freebird. I wish that cliche involved one of the Lynyrd Skynyrd songs that was actually interesting.

Blue Flower - Pale Saints

In the 90s I went for shoegaze/dream pop in a big way. Pale Saints were one of the main artists in that genre on college radio. Here's Blue Flower. Would have been great to see them live.

Thirty Frames a Second - Simple Minds

One of my major influences as a band, their early stuff is relatively unknown. This song has that futurist dystopic vibe I've been talking about. Machine like rhythm section pumping drone throughout. The vocal is either trying to escape robothood or embracing it it, maybe both.

Heaven (Must Be There) - Eurogliders

This was the only US hit by this Australian band (1984). Very jaunty and bright with a nice vocal. Still have the 45 rpm record of this around somewhere.

Sleep (is For Everyone) - Sad Lovers and Giants

I really love these guys. Very atmospheric. Bleak but melodious. Pretty clearly Joy Division/early New Order/ early Cure influenced. Here's Sleep (is For Everyone) from 1989. Pretty sure it's about heroin, like a lot of great songs, sadly.

Added to the set

Karma Chamelion by Culture Club. Was not into them back in the day. Those were my hard rock days, before I shifted to alt/college rock via a quick journey through pop. But huge respect for a lot of these songs now. Virtually all pop was throw-away in the 80s. But a good fraction is worth revisiting. My favorite Culture Club song (I don't know many) is Miss Me Blind, but that one is ill-suited for a solo uke/singing rendition.

Learning songs

Learning songs, especially for playing them solo, is a great way to study the basics of songwriting in detail. I'm learning and appreciating a great deal about the artists' aesthetics in the songs I've been learning.

Blue Kiss - Jane Wiedlin

The Go-Go's were amazing and Jane Wiedlin was always my favorite Go-Go.

Blue Kiss