Conveniently Misplaced

So a couple weeks ago I put up the pictures from Emily Rose’s music video shoot for her song Temporary Help. Well, the video is finally done, check it out.

She’s off touring the country right now, so check her out at emily rose music dot com and see if she’s coming near you.

I went to Ann Arbor yesterday, not because it was the annual Hash Bash, but because I wanted to see The Breakfast, some old clients of mine back when my life was nothing but college and freelance web design work.

I’ll work on getting the pictures from everything up online, but the thing that amused me the most was the religious presence in Ann Arbor. At the corner of University and State, there were people taking turns standing on a platform yelling at passers by about how everyone was going to hell from sin, less they repent immediately. It’s one of those things you think you’ll never really see in person. For those who missed it, I remembered that my digicam does video. It’s great how the kids just kinda laugh in their faces.

Interestingly enough, the bible-thumpers weren’t the only ones bringing their message of love, there was also a small parade of Hare Krishnas wandering about.

After I stopped filming, I heard someone say “If I had to choose between 2 religions, and one was telling me what an awful person I was and the other said ‘Lets go out in the street to dance and sing!’, I know what choice I would make”.

Well put. The Christians were calling people out, pointing at them as they walked through the crosswalk, telling people that they lead lives of sin and were going to die because of it. Had this been in Detroit, they probably would have gotten killed themselves.

So every once in a while I get really inspired to do something creative. Its usually either some kind of computer creative thingy or a music creative thingy. Yesterday, it was music creative. I try hard not to listen to any kind of top40 music because they overplay it to the point where I can’t stand it, however Love Song by Sara Bareilles has trickled down into my ears recently. It’s an amazing song, but it sounds like it was written 40 years too late, it sounds like a 60s soul song, only without all the horns.

So I woke up this morning and decided to remix it a bit with some sax recordings. It’s pretty rough, but I like the way it came out and really didn’t want to make a big production about it all. So here it is, complete with the video so you have something to amuse you while listening. Please send me your thoughts, I want to know what you guys think of it all.

 

The recording session turned out to be a pain. Apparently there’s something in the latest version of MacOS Leopard that screwed up my USB audio interface driver, so it would randomly turn to static and I’d have to re-launch garage band. I tried logic too and thought my interface was blown till I googled and found the driver issue. The mix could have come out better but overall I don’t think it’s too bad. Also, I’ll update the h.264 version soon, but blip.tv was giving me crap about it so I just let Premiere do the Flash conversion. Enjoy

Let me know what you think.

I have some pretty diverse music tastes. My friends are always amazed at how across the board I am with everything that I listen to (apparently not a lot of people can sing along with Anna Nalick, Snoop, and Chicago). Because I’m always discovering new music, I can’t believe that there are people out there that don’t know how to find new music to listen to. So here we go, how to discover new music.

***This involves a little bit of internet research on your part but it can yield some amazing results. So if you really want to be able to find some good stuff, make sure you have a little bit of time to devote to the cause.***

The Charts

The charts are some of the best places you can check to find new music. You can start with the Billboard Charts, featuring top 100 lists and such. You go through there, and find something that looks intriguing to check out. Looking around the net you can find lots of top _____ charts for all sorts of countries. Some amazing music is being made all around the world, so don’t be afraid to look at places like the top UK charts, college radio charts (even Canadian ones), etc. The bottom line is that there’s charts for top albums, singles, for all genres. Google around and find a category that looks good. Now you’re presented with a list of artists you can take a look at and see what looks promising. 

Here’s the current independent artists album sales chart from Billboard.

There’s 3 artists here that could possibly be interesting. Except I already know about the Eagles, they’ve been around for a while. And the Radiohead album I already picked up when it went digital. But “Vampire Weekend” sounds interesting and intriguing. 

Now, we can proceed to see if this band is worth the investment of our ears. 

I’ve found an interesting artist…now what?

The first place I go is I fire up iTunes. Sure enough, Vampire Weekend is on there. iTunes is cool because you get reviews, similar artists, other stuff that people like that are into this band, and high quality, easy to use previews of all their songs.

I like Gnarles Barkley. I like the Arcade Fire, and the album has good reviews. After giving it a listen, yah I’m diggin the sound quite a bit. However, if you come across a sound that you aren’t feeling, just head back to the list and find something else. Of course because the song previews are so easy to access, give a good listen to a few of the songs before you decide you like or hate any given group.

Consequentially, you can also use Amazon.com instead of iTunes. I prefer iTunes because the music library is larger and usually I have iTunes open anyway, so it’s easy to find an artist and check them out. Go with whatever works best for you. Some people hate iTunes or can’t use it (like all you fine Linux folks), so do what you can. 

Once you’ve gotten a good sampling of the artist, check out their official web site, myspace profile, etc and i’m sure you’ll find lost of good stuff. 

Making use of media

The problem with using the charts as a method for discovering new music is that you only get popular stuff off of it, so you have to go about different routes to discover new music. This is where people find that magazines and newspapers come in handy.

I’m not a big fan of Rolling Stone magazine. Entirely too much politics and not enough music. However, they do have some worthwhile things in there. Features on new artists are what helped me discover Interpol. So check out stuff like that, as well as album reviews to see what’s new that might be worth looking into.

Even magazines like Entertainment Weekly can have something interesting every once in a while. Last week I got a supplement from them with the best indie rock albums of the last 25 years. Good stuff. Local independent news media can give you a fresh perspective on what’s out there. In Detroit, we have the Metro Times and Real Detroit Weekly, free independent papers that cover music, movies, among other things. Check for sources like this. Of course, googleing around can find all sorts of websites that cover the same thing. Be creative.

TV can also be good once in a while. And I’m not talking about some top 40 countdown or TRL, but instead look to places like Leno or Jimmy Kimmel Live and check out the musical artists they have on there. That’s how I discovered Esthero. 

Basically, keep your eyes open to all media on this one. Go through Ticketmaster and see who’s coming to town on the cheap. Spending $50 a ticket on a big name artist can be fun and exciting, but you can have just as much fun with a $20 ticket on a lesser known artist. Do the same as above only instead of starting with a top ___ chart, just use the ticketmaster listings. Then go have yourself a good time.

Another cool thing about picking up a cheap show is that you can discover awesome opening acts as well. A couple years ago I went to a show featuring Graham Colton with Blue Merle opening. While waiting in line I found out that a lot of people were there to see some dude named Michael Tolcher who wasn’t even on the bill for the venue that evening. But that aspect turned out to be just as cool as the rest of it. 

Even the age old medium of radio can be helpful. A lot of stations will feature new artists, just look for the stuff that doesn’t play the repeat top-40 all the time. Public radio and college radio are great for this, I discovered Lily Allen and numerous other artists after hearing an interview with her on Detroit Public Radio. 

Find Artists by Association

Another awesome feature of iTunes and Amazon is the ability to discover new music just by looking at artists you already like. They both have the “here’s what else people are into” feature when you look up a band. For example, a search for Wilco’s album Sky Blue Sky gave me the following recommendations:

Note the page 1 of 10 at the top. So there’s 50 different recommendations here for stuff. An instant guide to everything you might like, they practically do all the work for you. iTunes does the same thing pretty much, although I think Amazon does it a bit better. Here’s what happened when I searched for the Arcade Fire’s album Neon Bible:
 

The cool thing where I give amazon an edge over iTunes is for their Listmania! feature, which allows users to create lists for whatever and put items in there. For example, you can create a list called “Best Music to Have Sex to” and throw all your favorite music to get freaky to so other people can find it. 

Here’s what I found after a google search for “Listmania! amazon white stripes”
 

It gave me the list there on the left as well as other lists with similar stuff on the right (Egads, more Interpol!). Listmania! is a great way for you to really see what kind of music like-minded folks are into. 

Talking to other fans of your favorite bands can also be good to finding out what kind of music you might like. Strike up conversations at concerts or record stores, or if you’re part of an online community feel free to ask around with them as well. 

Take a look at the bands that your favorite bands tour with. Look at the openers, the other tour guys, etc. A lot of people will show up to a show late so they don’t have to sit through the opening act, and rightly so, as some opening acts suck. But check them out before you head to the show, see if it might be something you would be willing to sit through or something you can easily dismiss. After all today’s openers could be tomorrow’s headliners. And good music is good music, no matter what. 

Social Network Utilization

There are tons of ways that the internet can help you find new music. Sometimes, the music finds you. Either way, social networking can be a big help in discovering new grooves. Even just having a Facbook profile that will update you when friends add a new favorite group to their profile. Even with myspace, we’ve all had an obnoxious amount of bands try to add us as friends, and once in a while you actually get someone who’s good enough to check out. 

I’ve even gotten messages from random fans of bands.

Here’s a message someone sent me, the profile is now gone but the message was along the lines of “hey, you don’t know me, i’m just spreading the world about this group I know, check them out”. Who knows if it really was some dude or a ploy set up by the band. Either way, it worked. R0rshak turned out to be amazing, so much so that I purchased the CD and still listen to it pretty often. 

There’s a million ways to use social networking to your advantage to finding new music. From myspace to just finding people on Twitter who talk about their musical tastes. 

Take Advantage of Freebies

Always, always, always take advantage of free stuff. People that are into marketing and promotions know that people will bite and possibly come back for more. You have nothing to lose by taking that bite. If someone is offering you something for free, take them up on it. There is no risk, so why not?

Sitting at the counter of your local record store and in the hands of people outside of local concerts are sampler CDs, demo discs, all sorts of stuff. They may look something like this:

Or they could be from a specific band, etc. While a random sampler CD like the one above can really be hit or miss, the ones you get outside of concerts are usually much more on the mark. Outside of a Dropkick Murphy’s show I was given a sampler CD by a Tossers street team member, which was really quite good, made for a good listen on the ride home. 

Free music is all over the place if you just look for it. Amazon will offer random free MP3s (how I discovered Spock’s Beard) on their site, just as little incentives to sell CDs (and now MP3s) through their website. So it’s worth taking a look at, they might even have a freebie section on there somewhere. 

iTunes offers their own brand of freebies as well, every Tuesday they update with 2 or 3 new free (and sometimes DRM-Free as well) tracks for download. Like anything else, these are hit or miss. There have been songs that have been top-40 hits come through here, and there has been weird Opera stuff that nobody would ever want to listen to again. Either way, it’s free, so give it a shot. Who knows what you might discover with it. 

Of course, there is always the option of randomly downloading music torrents to see what you get. While this may seem like a good idea, it’s more or less the most random grab-bag of music somebody can imagine. You’ll be wasting more time with illegal music you’ll never listen to than anything else, so it’s more of a pain in the ass, forget about it (the same applies to going to FYE or any other record store that has the “scan and listen to the CD” feature. It’s kinda cool, but ultimately it’s a waste of time.

All In all

These are just some of the ideas you can use to discover new music, and some of the methods that I use personally. There are a million different ways to expand your musical horizons and find new things to groove to, it just takes a little creativity on your part. But that’s what music is all about right, being creative?

When you have a friend that you’ve known long enough, you know when they’re being insincere. Basically, you can tell when they’re bullshitting you. No matter how hard they try to cover it up and spin in, you can look into their eyes and tell “you don’t mean that”, and you’re insulting us both by lying.

You can see it in today’s music. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident. When musicians are under contract to make X albums, they have to do it. Or when they are commissioned to write a song for specifically for a movie soundtrack, they do it. If you listen to the lyrics, watch the way the songs are performed, and just say “how does this feel”, you can tell. Take Jay-Z for example. Watch the videos for 99 problems, then Blue Magic done for American Gangster. You can feel the sincerety in the first and the obligatory stuff in the second. Get past the catchyness of the song you’re listening to and you can feel how sincere the person singing it is. When Chad Kruger belts out “I wanna be a rock star” he really hopes he will get there one day, and who knows, maybe he will.

I’ve been listening to the new Counting Crows album Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings (while I’ve already mentioned how much I was looking forward to). Despite a Best Of Album and an Oscar-Nominated Top 40 hit, there hasn’t been a new Crows album in six years. And six years is a long time for an active, touring band to not record an album of any sort.

However, I can assure you that it has been worth the wait. A lot can happen in six years and this album is a true reflection of that. It tells the tale of what happens when you are just reckless, you get drunk, fuck things up, do things for all the wrong reasons and come the morning time you try to pick up the pieces and move on. Unlike what we heard with Accidentally in Love, this is some of the most sincere stuff I’ve heard Adam (Duritz) sing. His lyrics are strong and heartfelt.

As bands get bigger, the subject of their songs changes, and it becomes more about making a hit record then it does about the music. When you are first starting, you do it for the music, you throw your sound out there and hope someone picks it up, which is what they did with their now famously called “Flying Demos” album and even on August. But with Recovering the Satellites, This Desert Life, and Hard Candy behind them, the Crows now have enough staying power to truely do what they want as far as a record goes. I’m not dismissing their other work by any stretch, but this album is as sincere as any other words you have ever heard. It speaks honestly, from the heart, and in a very powerful tone.

I get the same feeling listening to this then I do with August although the albums themselves are very different. It is the feeling of the album being so honest that is done so well here and helps me to draw the parallel. There are also a few lyrics throughout the album that are similar to some ones from that album.

As a whole, the album is very polished, although some of the mixes I find a little strange (I did with AIL as well) but that’s a mute point at best. It also feels like a complete album. I was disappointed with You can’t count on me as the first single, as there are about half a dozen songs that would have made for a better single than that. It also sounds weird by itself, you almost have to listen to it in the album for it to make sense and transition well. The cool thing about this album is that it feels like a complete album, a group of songs that belong together. As opposed to an album which is just a bunch of songs thrown together on a disc.

It’s a shame that the Best Of album has already been done. It’s been amended once already to include AIL, but it might get re-released again with some of the amazing tracks on this new album. I’m not going to get into detail here about what each song is like and rate each one in turn. I’m not even going to say this album is a “X out of X stars”. That just doesn’t work here. The album is amazing, be sure to pick it up when it hits the shelves on March 25th or preorder it from amazon.

At this point, the actual album review is over, below is some person stuff of mine that relates to it.

Adam said about the album “Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is the story of what happens when all the bright lights start to burn instead of glitter and you become more of a part of the shadow they cast behind you than the person you are in front… it’s about a flood of sin and liquor and dissolution and insanity and it’s about trying to rebuild the life you wrecked in the wake of that flood. It’s about the way it feels.”

Unfortunately, that has been my life during 2007. In my 22nd year on this planet, I have magially managed to have more sin and regret than I really want to admit to, but at the same time here I am, still trying to pick up the pieces of a live that I screwed up in more ways than I imagined I could. There are too many things on this album that I have said to myself over the course of the past year that I could do an entire book on how these lyrics relate to something that has happened to me, or something that reminds me of someone or a situation.

At the beginning of 2007 I was on top of the world. Newly single, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted. I had a good job, was driving a Cadillac, and didn’t have any set commitment to anything other than myself. The year ended with me lying on my back unable to walk, stairing up at the sky. In that time I took my new found sense of self and came to the realization that I didn’t know who I was anymore. I tried to figure it out with concerts and parties, but there were too many Saturday (or Sunday) mornings where I woke up and said to myself “dammit, how can I be so fucking stupid?”.

I burned a lot of bridges without regret. I did some things that nobody should do and said some things that nobody should say. I took some risks that backfired on me and didn’t take other ones that I wish I would have. Some people I miss terribly, others I hope I never see again. 2007 started off with a bang, and ended up with a wimper of me trying to recover myself. Unfortunately, I wasn’t all physical recovery.

Cheers to Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, the soundtrack to my life in 2007.

In fall of 2005, Apple held a special event to announce a new program: Front Row. A multimedia interface for your Mac that allowed you to access pictures, movies, and video via a remote. Not a lot of people cared, myself included.  Now that things have all come full circle, I can see that Front Row wasn’t as much an effort to making an entertainment center out of your Mac as it was trying to perfect the software for their set-top box, the AppleTV. Which is cool, but still something that I never think that I will ever buy until it does more stuff that I want it to do. I’ve dismissed Front Row up until recently as not being able to find any realistic use for it.

Well, I found one.

I no longer have a need to buy a stereo for my bedroom. Sometimes I’m just lying around, going to bed, etc and want to listen to some music, but even with buying a stereo my music would be limited to an iPod input (and my iPod stays in my car now 99% of the time) or CDs or even worse, radio (I’m not paying for XM, screw that). Either way, I’d have to get up to change it.

So now, I’ve discovered that I can put my Macbook on my dresser, and with the Apple remote, fire up front row and have everything in my music library in 1 place where I don’t have to get up and change the music when I want to.

The only thing that’s bugging me is I don’t know if it can repeat songs/albums or not. Which is a bit frustrating. But I’m working on it. Either way, I’m very happy with this program. Good job, Apple.

Despite the world telling me that I was more or less insane for going to a concert 48 hours after having knee surgery, I went anyways. It turned out to be a complete blast and I’m so glad that we ended up going. We got there about 15 minutes before the doors opened, so I was envisioning a night of standing outside and praying that I get a seat on the balcony right up front so I wouldn’t be standing the entire time.

As luck would have it, that wasn’t to be the case. As we were walking in front of the building to get to the back of the line the guy doing security out front told us we could go inside and wait in the entrance way there until they started letting people in. So we got to be the first ones into the venue for the show — no waiting in the cold! A lady from guest services came out, told them to scan our tickets, and brought us down to the main floor next to the soundboard where there was a roped off handicapped area with seats. I was thrilled, not only did I not have to struggle for a seat, worry about falling down stairs and killing myself OR freeze in the process, but we got planted in the center of the house (best sound seat, of course) with a perfect view of the stage.

So mucho thank yous to the people at guest services at the Fillmore Detroit, you guys are amazing and it really made my night.

I had been looking forward to seeing Flogging Molly again since last year’s show, and it was all pretty spectacular. They played most of the stuff that’s going to be on the new album that hits in a few weeks, all the new cuts sounded great. I was able to take a lot of pictures as well, since I didn’t have to fight off an angry mob just to defend myself and stay on my feet. Once Picasa decides it will allot me to connect to their server and upload them to my web album I’ll post them all online, but for now the one pic will do. The set was awesome, and other than the encore being a little short (3 songs) it was all pretty perfect.

I don’t remember the first opening act, but they don’t really matter. The 2nd opener kicked ass, Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band was who they were. Not at all what you would expect out of a band in any way shape or form. Rev. Josh Peyton looks like a lumberjack and plays a steel gui-tar. His old lady plays the washboard and his brother bangs on the drums.  It’s really badass stuff, and Rev’s style is very unique and very, very good. Not your typical cup of tea, but I wouldn’t hesitate to go see a show that they were headlining.

I found this on youtube, it’s not from yesterday but a good example of what you missed if you weren’t there.

Jenn was able to grab me some stuff from the main area since I wasn’t able to really walk around, so I got a poster, a few promo cards for the new album and a Toledo Mudhen’s hat that someone left behind. Score one for me (I got my CKY hat the same way at the Cradle of Filth show).My next concert isn’t planned yet (there’s talk of a show for something or other in Toledo on March 8th, but I’ll have to check my schedule on that one. Don’t think i’ll be making it.), but I’m already looking forward to Dave King and the rest of Flogging Molly comeing through next year.