Category: Music

New Steve Forbert Record

Everybody has songs that serve as the soundtrack to parts of their lives.  I’ve got a lot and one of them is Steve Forbert’s Romeo’s Tune from 1979.  That song will forever remind me of my sophomore year of college, including a road trip to Orlando for the 1979 Tangerine Bowl.

“Bring me southern kisses from your room.”  Yep.

I’ve heard most of his records and seen him live a time or two.  So it’s always news when Steve does another record.  He’s about to release his 16th studio album, Compromised, on November 6, 2015.  Recorded in Woodstock and Cape Cod, it was produced by Forbert along with John Simon, who produced Jackrabbit Slim, the excellent 1979 record that included Romeo’s Tune.

sfcompromised

I received a review copy of the title track, and it’s pure Forbert.  An excellent song that sounds a bit like a look backwards at the ups and downs we’ve all had in the decades since 1979.

Compromised collaborators include bassist Joey Spampinato (NRBQ), drummer Lou Cataldo (The Freeze), pianist/trumpeter Kami Lyle, and keyboardist Robbie Kondor, the latter of whom played on Forbert’s classic 1978 debut, Alive on Arrival.  “I recorded with the band that did the Arrival and Jackrabbit anniversary tours with me in 2013 and 2014,” Forbert says, “where we played those albums in their entireties.  It just seemed natural to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to rehearse for this tour — but let’s record an album together, too.’   And it was great reconnecting with John Simon again after all this time.”

Look for a full review as soon as I get my hands on a complete copy.

How to Find Great New Music, with Spotify

I keep hearing my fellow Mac enthusiasts raving about the “For You” tab in Apple Music, and how music discovery is so much better in Apple Music than in Spotify.  I get it, we’re Apple fans, we are supposed to be excited about new Apple hardware and apps.  And I suppose if someone forced me to speak kindly of the mishmash that is iTunes and is bolted on new addition, music discovery would be the second thing I’d mention (the first thing being the very real benefit of combining, on both the desktop and your mobile device, your streaming music and your owned music).  But I have to say, I hear a lot of people trying very hard to convince themselves that they like Apple Music.

Let’s take a look at music discovery within Apple Music and Spotify.  For this experiment, we’ll focus on discovering music I don’t know about already, as opposed to other similar music already in my library.

First, let’s take a look at the “For You” tab.  Here’s the top screen of mine.

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There are only two records in there I haven’t heard (Hound Dog Taylor and Bob Mould), and no artists I’ve never heard of.  I like The Band, but bombastic and heartfelt classic rock ballads is most definitely not one of my genres.

Now, Spotify.

There are three primary ways to discover new music in Spotify.  First, the “Discover” tab under Browse.  Here’s the top of mine.

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I’ve heard of all those artists too, but I’ve only heard two of the records listed (Otis Gibbs and The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash).  All of these are clearly within my preferred genres.

Second, there’s the new “Discover Weekly” playlist.  Here’s my current one.

https://open.spotify.com/user/spotifydiscover/playlist/3ByhxStuAQrW5ULZaw7Gh4

 

Of those 30 songs, I’d previously heard only four of them.  That’s pretty amazing, and while I don’t love all of them, there’s a lot of good stuff to be mined from that list.  It’s closer to what I like than any “human curated” playlist I’ve come across while trying to work my way through the corn maze that is Apple Music.

Finally, there’s the most fun and rewarding way to find new music on Spotify. Surfing around the “Related Artists” links.

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I have spent hours surfing around looking for new music this way.  Most of the stuff in Rancho Radio, my “Kent curated” public playlist, was found that way.

Competition is great for consumers.  Apple Music will make Spotify better, and there’s room for both.  But don’t tell me it’s hard to find new music on Spotify, because I have a thousand or so tracks in my various playlists that say otherwise.

Maybe Apple Music will become the best music service out there.  But let’s be honest.  The announcement at WWDC was a disjointed disaster, and the app is confusing and hard to use.  I’m hoping it will get better (though I’ve been hoping iTunes will get better for years), but there’s a lot of work to be done.

In the meantime, I’m sticking with Spotify.

Song Ideas Workflow for Songwriters

Song ideas are like dreams: you have to write them down right away, or you will forget them.  I can’t count the number of song ideas I’ve had while driving, that were lost before I got to a place I could write them down.  For example, a few weeks ago while driving home from the farm I noticed, not for the first time, that just about every car I passed had two occupants.  A guy driving, and a girl in the passenger seat.  An idea for a light-hearted, hopefully funny song started to percolate.  The hook was something along the lines of “all these cats with all these cuties, they must be pirates with all that booty.”   [NOTE: I will use this line eventually so don’t steal it!]  I had parts of two verses, a chorus and the beginning of a melody in my head, but everything but the hook was forgotten before I got around to writing it down.

All of this got me thinking, again not for the first time, about a way to capture song ideas before they are lost.  I needed a way to capture a few lines, a hummed melody, or maybe just a concept.  Here is what I came up with.

Using the indispensable and highly recommended iOS app Workflow, I created a “Normal” workflow (this will make sense when you see the app) that does the following:

  1.  “Record[s] Audio” at “Normal” quality (because all we are doing is capturing information), beginning “On Tap” and finishing “On Tap.”
  2.  saves the recorded audio to the “Song Ideas” folder in my Dropbox.

workflowapp

Then I  created a Hazel rule on my Mac to monitor that Dropbox folder and move any incoming files to the “Song Ideas” subfolder in the “Music Creation” folder on my Mac.  This rule also sets a green color label on the file, so I’ll know it came via this workflow.

hazelsongrule

Finally, I added this workflow, called “Song Ideas,” to the home screen on my iPhone via the Sharing> Add to Home Screen function within the Workflow app.  Now it sits on the first page on my iPhone home screen, for easy access while driving.

kentshomescreen

This workflow allows me to quickly record and save any song ideas I have, from anywhere and in very close to real-time.  While I created it specifically for songwriting, you could use this workflow to save and manage just about any information.

GoodSongs: Well Worn Soles

wellwornsoles

I get a lot of music to (hopefully) review.  Most of it is good.  Some of it is great. Every now and then a record matches up perfectly with my musical DNA.  Like the one I received recently from Well Worn Soles.  This record is wonderful from the first listen.  It sounds like what I want to hear when sitting on the porch at the farm.  It sounds like music I’d love to hear live.  It sounds like life.  Real, authentic, natural.  When I read their bio, I began to understand why .

They met while enrolled in the bluegrass program at East Tennessee State University and quickly recognized that there was something special about the two of them together.

Yes, there is.  Emerson Wells-Barrett and Chelsea Dix-Kessler make some amazing music.  I could share just about any of the 11 songs on their forthcoming record, “Country/Folk by Well Worn Soles,” which is scheduled for release on August 4, 2015, and you’d love it.  But when someone writes and sings “We were something, me and you.  Two happy spiders, all tangled up in our web,” well, that’s the one I have to pick.

Big Red Fire – Well Worn Soles

There’s a lot more to love on this record.  Chelsea plays a beautiful fiddle and Emerson plays a mean mandolin, among other instruments.  There’s traditional country, there’s bluegrass arrangements, there’s honky-tonk, and there’s even the right amount of humor (humor on a record is like whiskey; a little is good, too much makes my head hurt).  They remind me of so many of my favorite bands.  Freakwater, The Be Good Tanyas, The Everybodyfields (the benchmark for Tennessee duos), etc.

When this record comes out, buy it, stream it, heck, steal it if you have to (not really).  If you like well written, well-played rural American music, you’ll love this record.

I do, and I do.

Keep up with Well Worn Soles via their website, Facebook, and Instagram.

Apple Music Is Missing Some Notes

brokenrecords

“Apple Music is just too much of a hassle to be bothered with. Nobody I’ve spoken at Apple or outside the company has any idea how to fix it, so the chances of a positive outcome seem slim to none.”

via Apple Music is a nightmare and I’m done with it.

Here’s my conclusion.  Apple Music is geared towards young people who grew up in an era when few of their friends bought, listened to or cared about the entire album experience.  They just want to hear music they like, and maybe save (e,g,. buy, add or steal) a song or two here and there.

That may work out OK for lots of people, but it’s not going to work for people like me who have spent decades compiling, organizing and curating a vast music library.  I find the Apple Music experience to be a jumbled mess (compare just about any screen in Apple Music to the comparable one in Spotify; I gave up on Apple Music when I realized it was going to take more time figuring it out, slogging through its interface and getting things organized the way I want than I would spend enjoying the results).  I’m not interested in “personally curated playlists,” because no persons are curating playlists of the sort of music I like (and, as I noted the other day, no personally curated playlist will ever top Pandora when it comes to finding new music).  Neither am I naïve enough to think the marketing scheme feathered up to look like a way to “connect” with artists is anything more than a new age advertising platform.  America is celebrity-obsessed, so I understand the logic behind it.

But like the rest of Apple Music, it’s not for me.

GoodSongs: The Pollies

pollies

The Pollies, a quintet from Florence, Alabama, is preparing to release its new record, Not Here, on September 25, 2015 via Single Lock Records/Thirty Tigers.  Recorded at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi, and produced by Ben Tanner (of Alabama Shakes) and The Pollies’ lead singer and songwriter, Jay Burgess, the record is the band’s first for Single Lock/Thirty Tigers and the follow-up to their 2012 release, Where The Lies Begin.

This is a mighty fine, genre-defying, progressive southern, grab bag of ear candy.  The first song, Jackson, is an early clue that you’re into something good.  As a bearded, southern, country-raised social liberal, it makes my heart sing when other southern musicians take up the progressive flag.  “I’ve always been into revolutions—more specifically thinking about what things would be like if they hadn’t happened,” Burgess says.  “Obviously, a major movement in this country’s history was the Civil Rights movement.  I think about how long that effort took and how great the risk was, and it’s amazing to me.”  Jimmie Lee Jackson, a church deacon, was beaten and shot to death by Alabama State troopers in 1965 during a peaceful voting rights march. His death was one of the inspirations for the Selma to Montgomery marches.  It’s a great sounding song- one of my favorites of 2015, that tells a meaningful story (as an aside, I can’t wait for some southern bands to produce some great songs celebrating the marriage equality victory we joyfully witnessed this year, a movement that traces it lineage back to the Civil Rights movement).

Lost, the second song on the record, has a wonderful 70s-ish, alt. country vibe with some great harmonies.  I really dig this song.

The arrangements on this record stand-out, on almost every song.  She has a lot going on behind some wistful vocals.  A big shout out to whoever played the piano on this record.  Very nicely done (as another aside, best piano playing on any record ever?  Chuck Leavell on Brother and Sisters).

There’s a lot of range here as well  You Are alternates between a garage rock sound and a Cure vibe, and it works.  Losers is a rocker that would have fit right in on a dBs record.  Lonely Betty sounds like good Ryan Adams.

Like most good records, it changes as you listen to it.  Initially, I didn’t think much of Paperback Books, but then later, as the record was playing while I did other stuff, I though “damn, that’s a great song.”  Now it’s one of my favorites.

This is predominantly an alt. country record, but it has strong elements of folk rock, alternative rock, and the best parts of modern rock.  It’s easy to classify on first listen.  But the details blur the genre in a very interesting way.

Whatever you want to call it, this is an excellent record.  I put most of the songs in my primary playlist.  I suspect you will too.  Buy this record when it comes out.