Category: Music

Persistent Remnants

So, irony–I spent ten consecutive days in all day meetings in Boston, and what are the things that are the important concrete results of the trip for me (as opposed to my employers)? A signed book, and a signed CD. Important persistent result number one, is this: Amanda, as she apparently always does, stayed after the show to sign things.… Read more →

Lazy Post

Did you know I will be in Boston tomorrow and Tuesday? Did you know Amanda Palmer is playing at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston both of those nights? I’m just saying. She’s been doing videos on YouTube for the tracks from the recent album. Here’s the one that makes me smile the most: I love that it’s dedicated to… Read more →

Aside

I’m normally not much for ordered lists, and especially not ordered lists of “favourites”. I tend to break things down into relatively low resolution buckets and am happy with that. For instance, with music I tend to assign a song to one of {Awesome, Good, OK, Tolerable, Terrible, OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP} and stop there. There’s not a lot of reason to try to assign comparative rankings among Awesome songs–they’re all worth listening to, pretty much at any time, and the ranking would be a function of my mood, what I’ve listened to lately, etc, and thus would be so constantly changing as to be useless.

That being said, it occurred to me earlier this week, that I have a ready answer to “What’s your all-time favourite song?”, and that answer hasn’t changed at all in over half a decade now. And second place has been locked for just as long. After that there’s just a bunch of Awesome songs, though.

Five For Friday

And now, an unthemed mix of music for a Friday. We’ll start off with a selection from the typically great new Oysterband album. This probably isn’t “the single” for most people, but since I’m getting quite comfortable in my self-selected role of aging and cranky progressive type, it appeals. I saw this live earlier this year…on a cannonball run from… Read more →

Friday Tunes

I’m in the mood to put up a mix, but it seems like going to the trouble of hosting MP3s and creating xspf files, etc, is just too much work. So, let’s use YouTube instead. It’s easier, and it offloads the bandwidth and copyright violation to someone else. Let’s start with a dedication to Sarah Palin and all her Red… Read more →

Diverse practyk in many sundry werkes

My goal is to redefine the whole history of rhyme ‘Cause the only way to free the soul is to free the mind And no wisdom as old as this should be confined To total mystery, so we’ll just read the signs And DaVinci codes, and try to see the science In this linguistically-composed pristine design –extracted from Rhyme Renaissance… Read more →

Some Lovely Canadian Music

While I was driving today, I took the opportunity to listen to Tom Barlow’s eponymous album. I’ve mentioned the album here a couple of time before, embedding the song Billion Dollar Rockets in a previous post, and also discussing How Low Can You Get and Married By Elvis in some other posts. So I did a little YouTube digging when… Read more →

Old John Paul is keepin’ a tab

My musical crush on Montreal blueswoman Dawn Tyler Watson continues. While “Hey Hey” is still the top of my playlist, some of the covers from the recent En Duo album are climbing up. For instance the cover of Patty Griffin‘s tune “Wiggley Fingers” (lyrics) on the album is pretty amazing. Something about Dawn’s voice, especially when she gets to the… Read more →

Indie Artist, multiple media

My pal Danny Michel just whipped up a homemade video for the track “Tell Sally” from his latest album. Check it out. Apparently the budget for making this video was… $9.00. I love living in the age of digital media. Speaking of making art with digital toys, Danny has also made the all the raw tracks from his latest album… Read more →

Cursing Music

On my recent drive back to Canada, among the many other good things that happened, I had a chance to be reminded why I love Etta James singing Damn Your Eyes so much. Here, you have a listen, and it should be obvious why that is: As I was listening to it, I got to thinking that I don’t have… Read more →

Under The Covers, Up On Youtube

Remember back in May 2007 when I mentioned my pal, musical genius Danny Michel was planning to co-host a radio show for the CBC with his pal Emm Gryner? (If you don’t remember, click back and refresh your memory) Well the pilot for that program aired quite a while ago, but it did get picked up, and Danny and Emm… Read more →

Robyn Tuesday

This post is in honour of my old pal Roach, a real fegManiac, and my pal EBOC“of the Shire” who is about to have his first Robyn Hitchcock experience. I’ve got about a half-dozen Hitchcock albums, mostly from the 80s and 90s. I think I might have had one or two before Roach started campaigning heavily in favour of Hitchcock,… Read more →

Officers, in offices, being official.

Look, if you know me, or you’ve read this blog for any length of time, it should come as no surprise that I am a huge Tom Waits fan. I dig Tom’s music of course–hell Hold On is probably my all time favourite song, and he’s probably got a dozen at least in the top hundred, but I also like… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.