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Improving the if-you-like-this list

Here’s something I’d like to see the music recommendation sites try out: Volume-sensitive proximity. How cool would it be if last.fm kept track of the relative volume with which I listen to tracks, and made recommendations based on the intersection not just of tracks in common with other users, but with respect to how much I crank any given song?

You cranked up Richmond Fontaine’s “1968.” LikeMindedUser cranked up the same song, as well as whatever-whatever.

I’ll tell you. Way cool.

To get really deep, iTunes could turn on my camera and listen to me singing along.

You and LikeMindedUser both sang along with Ray Parker Jr.‘s “Ghostbusters.” You should try out Another Song You’ll Be Embarrassed to Own.

What? Bustin’ makes me feel good.

General coffee shop observation no. eleventeen

When did every indie coffee-house-approved ascendant male singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar start to sound like a woefully inadequate imitation of Dave Matthews Band circa Remember Two Things? Have I just not been paying attention for the past thirteen years?

 

Update When the guy switches to the piano to play a cover of “What a Wonderful World,” it’s time to go home.

More on my musical miseducation

Why didn’t anybody ever tell me that Tom Waits was so good?

 

Update: “What’s He Building?” is officially on my Creepy Things List.

Doesn't look new to me

I’ve spent the last handful of days going to and from Newark, New Jersey (There’s a story there that involves trying to plan a large gathering in Manhattan on United Nations Opening Day, the conclusion of which was ending up in Newark), for a workshop and meeting regarding a volume I’m contributing to. The volume (on online and digitally-facilitated civic engagement) is part of a series sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and has introduced me to some really interesting scholars, as well as given me lots to think about. The chapter I’m co-authoring uses online entertainment-related petitioning to explore some “movement society” arguments and a few ideas about cultural contestation. The whole MacArthur series is specifically about implications of digital media for youth, so we also try to think about the ways, if any, that online forms of contentious activity might be particularly relevant to or formative of young peoples’ politics. It’s fascinating project to be a part of. (More discussion coming, as our chapter firms up and moves from beta to production.) Now for some travel errata:

“Sterile area”

If the area where I bought it was really “sterile,” they’d let me bring that mocha on the plane with me.

Vitamins

Next time I travel, I’ll down less coffee and more vitamin C. Seems like every time I get on a plane these days, I deplane with a cold.

Heavy rotation

Travel usually means lots of iPod time. Between a few flights and some long days driving to Phoenix and back, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve logged a lot of tracks to last.fm. In heavy rotation right now are:

  • Marah: If you Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry is a super album. Especially good are “The Hustle”, “Walt Whitman Bridge”, and “Dishwasher’s Dream.” (That last one, in particular, has this furiously dreamy sound that gets me every time.)
  • Teddy Morgan: Morgan was based in Tucson for a while and became a local favorite, mixing (alt-)country, rock, rockabilly. Put on a killer live show. Then he went to Nashville and started playing sessions and producing for everybody back in Tucson. Morgan has a Myspace page with a few tracks, including a striking demo of “Thousand Miles” (from his album Freight). It’s a little lo-fi, but it has a great feel.
  • Richard Buckner: Hard to classify. But good. His new Meadow is reviewed over here by Cheezeball. (No cheeze whatsoever, they say.) His Dents and Shells has some great tracks: “Firsts” and “Straight” are personal standouts. Buckner also has a cool album with John Langford that genuinely rocks out from time to time. It has to, with a title like Sir Dark Invader vs The Fanglord.
  • Bob Dylan: Heather at Fuel for Friends put together a sweet, sweet set of tracks based on a recent Rolling Stone profile of Bob Dylan. One song I hadn’t heard before, “Sign On The Window,” features Dylan murmuring about moving to Utah, building a cabin, finding a woman, and catching lots of rainbow trout. Sounds like a plan.

Radiodred

The strangest thing I found on eMusic this week, while searching for a version of Toots Hibbert’s “Pressure Drop”: Radiodread, by the Easy All Stars, is a reggae reinetpretation of OK Computer. (It used to be that I said of highly implausible things “That’s about as likely as a reggae version of OK Computer.” I’ll have to come up with something else now, I guess.) Suggesting either the broadening or the decline of my taste in music, it’s not at all bad.

Confirming your impressions of said taste, I’m happy to see that eMusic is stocking a pretty good John Prine catalogue now (Steve Goodman is new there, too). They’re not offering his Missing Years but they do have a great live version of that album’s almost-title song “Jesus, the Missing Years.” Good stuff.

La La -- just asking for it?

The La La CD trading service has launched, and it’s pretty cool: List the CDs that you own but no longer want, along with the CDs that you don’t have but want to get, and La La facilitates the rest by sending you pre-paid envelopes to ship out your CDs to other traders. Pay $1.49 for each CD, and La La sends a portion of the fee to the artists. The number of CDs you can get depends on the number that you send out—so you can’t simply buy in, but rather have to have something of value to other users to throw into the CD pile.

They have a nice Web 2.0-ish search feature, and it looks like a big database of titles already. La La will also make recommendations based on overlapping CDs in people’s collections.

Like La La says, they’re just like any used CD store—except for being massively distributed (and, perhaps, actually having what I want instead of 35 used copies of Jammin 90s Dance Hits), and I wonder if that’s where the inevitable lawsuit will come in.

Peacemakers

After Lago’s endorsement of the band , I went and saw Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers play at the Orpheum this weekend. The Orpheum was absolutely packed to the gills because the band are Arizona “hometown” favorites. Unlike a lot of performers, Clyne seems to really love the crowd—and the crowd loves him, plying him with shots of tequila throughout the show. This is apparently a tradition for the band. I’m surprised the guy could stand, let alone play the guitar, by the end of the night. Also, I had no idea it would be the kind of concert where women take off their tops. I haven’t seen that since the last Whitesnake video.

 

Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers

 

It was a good show: Tremendous energy and southwest-tinged guitar rock that ranged from warm and melodic to simply barn-burning. Lots of fun, so thanks much for the recommendation, Lago.

No account of a nighttime Flagstaff outing would be complete without a photo of the Hotel Monte Vista all lit up:

 

Hotel Monte Vista

Behind the music

I saw this over at Tom’s, and it looked like fun.

total tracks

2824

sort by title

first: ...Dust, Elvis Costello
last: Zoo Station, U2

sort by time

shortest: 0:09, Horn Intro; from Good News for People who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse
longest: 18:00, Play It All Night Long > [Encore:] 5D (Fifth Dimension) > I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead > Lawyers, Guns and Money; Warren Zevon, 2005-05-29

sort by artist

first: Chain Reaction, 31knots
last: Kodiak, Zykos

sort by album

first: #1 Record / Radio City, Big Star (same as Tom’s)
last: Zopilote Machine, The Mountain Goats

ten most-played

(actually 11, because one is a radio stream and Teddy Morgan is too good to miss the list)
Son Volt, Windfall, Trace
Bishop Allen, Eve of Destruction, Charm School
Joel RL Phelps, Goodbye Kelly Grand Forks, Customs
Son Volt, Live Free, Trace
Son Volt, Tear-Stained Eye, Trace
KNAU streaming audio
Calexico, Alone Again Or, Convict Pool
Erica Wylie, What’s Unseen, Stoop
Cake, Short Skirt/Long Jacket, Comfort Eagle
The New Pornographers, From Blown Speakers, Electric Version
Teddy Morgan, 1000 Miles, Freight

first five on party shuffle

Elvis Costello, Petals, When I was Cruel
Modest Mouse, The World at Large, Good News For People Who Love Bad News
Chris Cubeta, Sugar Sky, Sugar Sky
Jay Farrar, 6 String Belief, Stone, Steel & Bright Lights
Ted Leo, The Sword in the Stone, Balgeary EP

Number of search returns for

sex: 12
love: 136
you: 241
death: 22
hate: 2
wish: 4
life: 37

10 last played

The Hold Steady, Charlemagne in Sweatpants, Separation Sunday
The Hold Steady, Hornets! Hornets!, Separation Sunday
Okkervil River, A King and Queen, Black Sheep Boy
Okkervil River, Get Big, Black Sheep Boy
Okkervil River, Black, Black Sheep Boy
Okkervil River, In a Radio Song, Black Sheep Boy
Okkervil River, For Real, Black Sheep Boy
Okkervil River, For Real, Black Sheep Boy
Okkervil River, Black Sheep Boy, Black Sheep Boy
Gina Villalobos, Fooling Around, Rock N Roll Pony

Music appreciation

I read of an interesting study this afternoon, produced by Liecester University School of Psychology professor Adrian North. The study, which I couldn’t find in any online form, so I’m going from the news report, “monitored 346 people over two weeks to evaluate how they related to music.” According to North, music has become a commodity, “produced, distributed and consumed like any other.” This is quite in contrast to music of previous eras, says North:

In the 19th century, music was seen as a highly valued treasure with fundamental and near-mystical powers of human communication.

North goes on to argue that the great variety and easy accessibility of music online has made for a passive, consumer-oriented approach to music, one that lacks a true appreciation for music or a deep emotional connection.

I’d very much like to take a look at the complete study, because I wonder how much can be learned about people, musically, in two weeks of their lives. In the two weeks before Christmas, for example, I was downloading furiously from eMusic 1, loading up the iPod for the road trip, and burning entirely fair-use-friendly mix CDs for a few friends. By some measures, that woud look awfully mass-consumptive of me. But it would take more to convince me that that means either passivity or a shallow emotional tie. After all, entire industries are built on ties to product identity: Cars, computers, jeans. These are all mass-produced consumer goods, and I’m sure it’s not a stretch to say that our identification with them is built on more than a little bit of cynical manipulation on their part, meant to inspire brand loyalty through a shallow kind of identity. But cynical marketing campaigns don’t mean that consumer don’t take them seriously: I know people who will only wear Lee jeans because their rancher fathers wore Lee, and who will only buy Cadillac because it’s the model of value on which they imprinted so very long ago (Hi, Grandpa).

So when North suggests that accessibility and choice are part and parcel of not really appreciating music, I can’t help but think that he’s really talking about appreciating the right kind of music. This reminds me a recent essay over at Salon, from a food writer who once occupied the upper echelons of foodie culture. Ann Bauer writes of the way that culture ended up getting in the way of truly appreciating all the gourmet food she was eating:

I’m a novelist, supporting my family as a food writer. A restaurant slut, purveyor of food porn, author of articles that liken sea scallops to blossoming roses and lamb tartare to velvet and tiny chocolate truffles to explosions that move in waves of flavor over the tongue. I’ve written at length about the briney, dark quality of raw oysters, the way they wriggle down the tunnel of the throat as if entering with intent. I’ve advised my readers to close their eyes and let the silken heft of whipped cream and mascarpone drizzled with banyuls fill their mouths. But even as I set down the words, I’m checking my watch.

Opulent meals among foodies revealed what she saw as a culture that didn’t ultimately care about food, but about being seen appreciating food. It’s a pretty nice passage:

After dinner arrived, the conversation would switch from food people to food itself. There’d be groans and exclamations as each dish was set down. Reminiscences about other evenings and other meals. “What did you eat at Levain last time?” someone would ask, just as I’d taken a mouthful. And I would pause, feeling the same confusion you do when you’re listening to one piece of music and trying to recall another. But it didn’t matter. “Well, I had…” someone else would jump in. Then everyone would talk in turn about a meal he or she had eaten recently.

Only here’s the odd thing: They didn’t really eat.

Occasionally, one of the men would dig in. But the women, most of them, only picked—lifting their meat with the tines of a fork to snare a tiny fat-soaked shred, dipping a teaspoon into the sauce and touching it with the snakelike tip of a tongue. Plate after plate of food went back to the kitchen 85 percent uneaten, to be scraped into the garbage and thrown away.

This, of course, explained the fact that they ranged from willowy to preternaturally thin. I began searching the crowds for just one warm, sensual, zaftig creature. But most nights, there was none. Only long-necked people in beautiful clothes, talking ceaselessly about food, greeting the chefs and servers as if they were long-lost relatives, carrying $20 glasses of wine. Starving, it seemed to me, for something else.

Bauer’s essay makes it clear that the foodie aesthete is not an uncommon species, and I doubt the music version is, either. (Plenty of episodes of Fraser would confirm this, as Niles and Fraser fake their way, over and over, into the opera board and the wine club. Yeah, I’ve seen all those episodes; it was on after the news.) In contrast to North’s suggestion, I wonder if there is evidence for an alternate formulation of the effect of easy access and broad choice of music: If we don’t conflate appreciation of The Great Composers with depth of personal meaning, then finding music that resonates affectively is easier than it used to be, and our appreciation of it may end up being deeper than North can measure. Something like myspace might provide a place to test that sort of idea.

This, of course, doesn’t mean we can’t be insufferable snobs about our taste being better than anybody else’s. It just means that our snobbery can’t well be based on second-guessing what crappy music means to other people.

1 Which, by the way, turns out to be really pretty cool. I now have about two dozen albums on my “save for later” list, but for the $10 per month plan I only get three or four of them at a time. But hey, still a bargain. My best find there as of yet: Alligator from The National. This is seriously a great album: Rocky, moody, melodic, guitary. A few mp3s available from insound and their web site. eMusic offers 50 free downloads just for trying them out—and if you want to try ‘em out, let me know before you sign up; if I refer you and you end up paying for a month’s plan (no pressure), I get free stuff. Just sayin’. They’re cool like that.

Remix

I wrote a few weeks ago about some of the music I’ve been listening to this fall/winter, and I noted that I was only medium-warm on the Calexico/Iron and Wine collaboration In the Reins. The studio album still strikes me as a little too soft in places, maybe too much lush rolling instrumentation and too many whispery Sam Beam vocals. However, the NPR All Songs Considered broadcast of the two bands in concert is wonderful. Each band did a solo set, then Salvador Duran performed a bit of flamenco, and finally everybody got together on stage to perform songs from the album plus a couple of covers.

It’s great. Great. Where the album feels a little reserved, the live performance is vibrant and swingy, with lots of excellent musicianship. The Calexico set shows off a really nice sound as well as a few new songs. And, with the fuller sound behind them, Beam’s singing on a handful of songs becomes (sometimes startlingly) evocative.

The full performances are available in streaming audio or as downloadable mp3s for your portable digital lifestyle. (The mp3 blog So Much Silence has done the hard work of splitting the three sets into individual tracks—nice!)

pineTunes

An old friend from high school googled my name the other day, found this blog and sent me an email. It was nice to hear from her (Hi, Liza), and her email was helpful in reminding me that, hey, I have a blog. I’ve been spending a lot of time here at my desk, some of it quite productive, but none of it blogging. What better way to start up again than with navel-gazing, and there’s no easier navel-gazing than talking about music. *

On a whim, I downloaded Son Volt’s “Okemah and the Melody of Riot” from iTMS a couple of months ago, and then I went to see the band live downtown.

 

The show and the album were great, prompting me to listen to more. I had owned the band’s “Wide Swing Tremelo” for years, but never ventured beyond that. I’ve begun to remedy that, having picked up and put into regular rotation Uncle Tupelo’s “No Depression,” “Still Feel Gone”, and “Anodyne,” plus “Okemah” and Son Volt’s “Trace”. Without entirely renouncing my late 80s-early 90s love for prog rock,** I must nonetheless say, wow this is good stuff. I know that Uncle Tupelo was the icon for alt-country, but “Still Feel Gone” is a striking rock and roll album, first and foremost. The middle third of the album—the five songs from Still Be Around to D. Boon—is one of the best sets of tracks on any album I own. “Trace,” similarly, is just extraordinary, though much more rooted in the alt sound.

The good people at Cheezeball introduced me to another brilliant set of musicians, the band Richmond Fontaine, whose “Post to Wire” was picked by Cheezeball as one of the best albums of 2004. It’s just fine if bands like Son Volt and Wilco don’t quite fit the alt-country genre any longer, because Richmond Fontaine are redefining it entirely anyway. Not many bands can put together well-crafted and lyrical songs about places like Winnemucca, Nevada; you might wonder, “why should they even try?”, but that would betray your shallow heart and misplaced loyalty to your more metropolitan alt-country.

Also in the lineup: The two-CD soundtrack to the recent Bob Dylan documentary, “No Direction Home.” This was on sale for the scandalous price of $14.99 at my local record store and is stocked with wonderful alternate takes of your favorite Dylan tracks. Then the Calexico / Iron and Wine collaboration “In the Reins.” This is a good album, but for my taste it has a little too much of the latter and not quite enough of the former. And, “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning,” from Bright Eyes. I can’t make up my mind about Bright Eyes. Some of the songs from this album are great, but others, well, on the matter of other songs I quite agree with the reviewer of a recent Bright Eyes show who just couldn’t buy the hype: “Conor Oberst could have tied and re-tied his shoes for 90 minutes Tuesday night at the Brown Theatre and he would still have gotten a standing ovation from the army of 15-year-olds there to adore him and his band, Bright Eyes.”

To top it off, I’ve also employed this iTunes trick to generate interesting playlists and re-discover some of the music that’s become lost on the hard drive. Works nicely.

 

Update: Via Pandagon, here’s another Bright Eyes review. To call it “not complimentary” would fail to capture the venom. (Also, the Printculture blog publishing that article looks to be a really nice addition to one’s scholar-blogger blogroll.)

 

Another update: I’ve found that In the Reins gets better live.

 

* Okay, I suppose there are easier sorts: Cats, getting the lids off of jars, the weather, and so forth.
** By the way, FOR SALE: One barely-used Dream Theatre CD. What was I thinking?

Way, way behind the music

Use Band to Band to find connections between your favorite emo crooner and your guilty pleasure hesher. How many steps does it take to go from Ted Leo and the Pharmacists to Santana? Fourteen. How about Wilco to Social Distortion? Only 8. Bad Company to Fountain of Wayne? Twelve. But you’ll need 18 hops to get from Genesis to Green Day.

The site’s creators say that the project was born out of a computer networks class, and that the longest current path is 32 hops.

(Link via Let it Be Known)


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