Category: Music

Hear a Great Song, Save an Animal

Ever since I heard Neko Case sing Loretta Lynn‘s phenomenal song, Rated X, she has been one of my favorite musicians.  Well, as it turns out, Neko has a new record, Middle Cyclone, coming out on March 3.  An album I might add that has one of the greatest covers since Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down the Wind.

To celebrate the new record, Neko’s record label, Anti Records, has posted an MP3 of one of the tracks, the excellent People Got a Lotta Nerve.

Even better, Neko and Anti will donate $5.00 to Best Friends Animal Society, an organization that rescues animals, for each blogger who reposts the song.  Give it a listen.  Post it on your blog.  And, if you like good music, buy the record when it comes out.

Neko Case rocks, in more ways than one.

My Records of the Year

I have enjoyed reading the best of 2008 lists from my favorite music sites, such as Twangville (Mayer, Tom), AWOT, Hickory Wind, Nine Bullets and Hear Ya.

I do my yearly best of lists a little differently.  Since I buy more old records than new ones, I base my lists on records that I heard for the first time this year.  Here are my picks for 2008.

Record of the Year

Hands down and without a doubt, The Avett Brothers’ Live, Vol. 2 (2005) is the best record I heard for the first time in 2008.  These guys are from Concord, NC, which is less than ninety miles away (name that song reference for extra credit) from my hometown.  I have no idea how I missed them until now.  Live, Vol. 2 is not only my record of the year for 2008, it will likely wind up in my top 10 of all time.  There are 17 songs on the record, and every one is excellent.  November Blue is without a doubt one of the best songs I have ever heard.

Smoke in Our Lights and Offering, among many others, are also excellent.  The singing, playing and writing is uniformly excellent.

Do yourself a favor and buy this record right now.

Other Great Finds

One of the many wonderful things about Pandora is its function as a music discovery tool.  A few weeks ago, I was working in my shop when an absolutely amazing song came on.  I ran over to the computer to give it the thumbs up and write down the name.  It was a song called Speed Train by J.J. Schultz from his record Something to Me (2005).

Speed Train is the best song on the record, but there are plenty of other great songs to make this a worthy addition to your collection.

I’ve been a fan of The Band for years.  Dirt Farmer (2007), the latest record by Levon Helm, reminds me why.  It won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk album, which is great, but I wouldn’t classify this record as a traditional folk record.  It sounds like American farm music to me- which is even greater.  I would love to attend one of Levon’s Midnight Rambles.

I didn’t get all the hoopla about The Black Keys, until I heard their 2003 record, Thickfreakness, which was on Fat Possum Records, one of my favorite labels.  This is some righteous blues, and Have Love, Will Travel rocks so hard it will rattle your teeth.  If Led Zeppelin wants to tour and Robert Plant won’t come around, Dan Auerbach is the answer.  This album is a must for blues rock fans.

No other band has held my love and attention as much as the Grateful Dead.  I have a ton of their records as well as a ton of solo stuff by the members.  Somehow I missed Jerry Garcia’s records with Merl Saunders until I heard their cover of Positively 4th Street on XM a couple of months ago.  I don’t generally buy “best of” records, but this is the one I found when I went looking for that song.  It’s a mighty fine record, with the cover of Mystery Train being another highlight.

I have always loved female alt. country bands.  Freakwater is a long time favorite of mine, as were the Texas Rubies (Kelly Kessler and I co-wrote some songs back in the day).  My newest discovery is The Be Good Tanyas, particularly their record Hello Love (2006).  They do a great cover of Neil Young’s For the Turnstiles.  They even do a pretty darn good cover of Prince’s When Doves Cry.  My favorite song on the record is the beautiful A Thousand Tiny Pieces.  I played this song for my young daughters, both of whom are, to one extent or another, aspiring musicians and told them to write, play and sing just like this.

And, finally, as I predicted in a post last month, Porter Batiste Stoltz’s Moodoo, an excellent record anchored by the wonderful Funky Miracle/Sing a Simple Song/Rainy Day Women.

Those are my picks for 2008.  What are yours?

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I Just Heard It!

I just saw a reference on Twitter to Just Hear It, an on demand music discovery service.  According to the “About” page, Just Hear It was created by two college students and pays for licenses from the PROs.  The web page says it’s in private beta, but it worked for me and I have not been invited.

Based on some limited tests, this thing looks like it has legs.  I did my typical music search spectrum:

Easy: The Byrds (lots of songs)
Medium: Dillard and Clark (4 songs, plus more from the Dillards)
Hard: The Allisons ( 3 songs)

It even has some, but not all, of my songs indexed.

Some songs display album covers.

I don’t know much about this service, but assuming it’s legitimate (and the web page indicates that it is), it could revolutionize the way we search for music on the web.

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Evening Reading: 12/15/08

There’s a lot to talk about tonight.  Let’s dive right in.

AppCraver talks about iPhone app development.  This description of the app industry sounds like the music industry from a songwriter’s perspective: “with the hit-driven mentality behind the App Store that unless an app quickly gets pushed into the top 50-either by being featured on iTunes or by word of mouth-it’s doomed to only break even or lose money.”  I love browsing the App Store, but my advice to app developers is the same as it is to songwriters and auto makers: if you want people to buy your stuff, either make better stuff or make a lot of stuff and cross your fingers.  I’d pay way more than 99 cents for a really fun or helpful application.  I think others would too.

Ed Bott on the Windows Live Essentials programs.  I can’t put my finger on it, but something about Microsoft’s internet-related applications seems significantly less elegant and user-friendly than the various alternatives.  I say seems, because it may be a marketing problem more than a technical problem.  I’m using Live Writer right now.  Movie Maker is an easy yet powerful application.  The best of the bunch used to be Photo Story.  I used it all the time.  Why is it not part of this package?  Is it dead?  Anyone remember the Microsoft application from the nineties that let you create songs, sort of like Band in a Box?  It was really cool, and then it disappeared.  Microsoft’s ancillary products are like television shows- you’re afraid to get hooked because they may not be around for long.

Here’s a Christmas present recommendation for the hard to buy for lion in your family.

There’s been lots of talk about whether brands belong on Twitter.  I tend to agree with Lon in theory, although I think email is still the new phone company.  Twitter is the new chat line.  The problem with turning brands loose on Twitter is that corporate America has absolutely no idea how to use the web in a mutually beneficial way.  Until they figure it out, Twitter will be just another advertising medium, at best.  Still, since Twitter is opt-in, the noise can be easily filtered.

Maybe soon we’ll see ads like this on Twitter.

Now you can toss your shoes at President Bush without getting tossed from the news conference after a minute or so.  How did that dude get a second try?  Where were the Secret Service guys?  I’m not a big President Bush fan, but I don’t like the event or the game.

Fresh off the less than fulfilling conversation on the “Semantic Web,” Read/Write/Web takes on “Cloud Computing.”  After shaking off what, I think, was a tongue in cheek prologue about jigsaw puzzles and splendor and whatnot, I tried to assimilate the first paragraph of the article:

Not merely some game of buzzword bingo on an unprecedented scale, cloud computing is coming into its own, and it is becoming increasingly easy to see the opportunities for a significant shift in the way we access computational resources and to recognize that the walls separating organizations from their peers, partners, competitors, and customers will become ever-more permeable to the flow of data through which those distant machines will compute.

Oh boy.  Off to Wikipedia, which was slightly more helpful than it was during my “Semantic Web” quest:

Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

I think there is something to Cloud Computing (unlike the “Semantic Web,” which I think is either an inside joke or complete nonsense), but if its proponents want people to care, they have to learn how to explain and discuss it in a way that doesn’t read like something on The Onion.  I am dead serious when I say that I believe at least some of the people writing about this stuff are messing with the rest of the devotees.  In a Borat sort of way.

All 10 of us corporate iPhone users desperately need a way to exchange vCards.  I tried Snapdat, but it didn’t work on my phone.  When I tried to add or edit a SnapCard, the app just closed.  Anything tied to a network or platform won’t work in a corporate setting.  Few corporate users have iPhones and none have the same application you have.  We need a cross-platform, email based system.  I’d pay way more than 99 cents for that.

I’m still putting Technorati tags in some of my posts, even though Technorati no longer picks them up and doesn’t seem to be indexing my blog at all.  I think I’m about to pull the plug on Technorati.  Too bad Dave Sifry isn’t still there to help me out.

Three iPhone apps that every corporate user should have: Note2Self, Evernote and RTM (I could make RTM the perfect application with 3 tweaks).

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More Pandora Goodness: Kent’s Hand-Crafted Blues Mix

pandoraI’ve had an alternative country oriented Pandora radio station for years.  A lot of thumbs up and thumbs down have mapped a pretty specific genome: mid-tempo alternative country (not Americana, which generally bores me to tears) songs.  I love that station and listen to it regularly.

But it was time to diversify.

Over the weekend, I created my second station.  Kent’s Hand-Crafted Blues Mix.  If you know these names, you’ll love it:  Junior Kimbrough, Otis Rush, Byther Smith, Jimmy Reed, Otis Spann, Luther Allison and Pee Wee Crayton.  Give it a listen!

Record Recommendation: Porter, Batiste and Stoltz

I got a new band.  New to me at least.

It’s such a great feeling to discover a really, really great band.  I still remember the first time I heard a Grateful Dead song (Uncle John’s Band), the first time I heard the Allman Brothers (At the Fillmore), the first time I heard the Star Room Boys sing about Gastonia.

pbsrecordI had a moment like over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Delaney and I were driving a friend home, listening to the Jam Band station on XM (one of the great new channels we get post-merger).  Along comes a song medley called Funky Miracle/Sing a Simple Song/Rainy Day Women by a band called Porter Batiste Stoltz.

I was completely blown away 5 minutes into this 11 minute mix of awesomeness.  I recorded a note on my iPhone (via Note2Myself) for future research.

It turns out PBS is comprised of 3 well-known Louisiana musicians.  George Porter, Jr, Russell Batiste, Jr and Brian Stoltz.  Fortunately, you can buy or download the record from Amazon.

I haven’t heard a band rock this hard since, at least, the Allman’s Southbound on Brothers and Sisters.  This could easily end up being my record of the year.

If you like good music, you need to own this record.  And you need to support this kind of music.  So, if I get 10 comments (by 10 different commenters) to this post recommending another great record, I’ll draw two commenters’ names out of a hat and buy each of them a copy of this record.

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Great Desktop XM Radio Player

The XM Sirius merger has rekindled my interest in listening to satellite radio over the internet.  5 of the 6 pre-sets in my truck are former Sirius stations: Outlaw Country (12), the Led Zeppelin Channel (39), 1st Wave (44), Classic Vinyl (46) and the Grateful Dead Channel (57).  Deep Tracks (40) is the only former XM channel to keep its place.

Until today, the main obstacle to listening to XM over the net was the burdensome login and navigation process at XM’s steaming site.  I want- no, I demand- a simple one or two touch process to get the music started.  The Pandora desktop application is the best example of this so far.  One click and I’m listening to my excellent Pandora station.

Pandora’s my baby, but sometimes I want to drill down into a specific genre or a mix other than the great alt. country genome I have mapped at Pandora.

Now, thanks to the free Lenware XM Radio Player Desktop Edition (here’s the developer’s site, for donations and support), I can easily crank up my XM stations and navigate to and between my favorite stations.

The first time you launch the player, it asks for your XM credentials.  After that, the player remembers your name and password.  I’ve been flicking back and forth between the Grateful Dead Channel and 1st Wave while typing this.

The Lenware player lets you easily navigate between genres via the tabs at the top, and within genres via the list in the main window.  You can add your favorite stations to the Favorites list with the click of a mouse.  The player is snappy, with almost no delay when changing stations.  You can see what’s playing on other channels as well, so you can song surf if you want.

This is a fine piece of software.  I highly recommend it.

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New Drive-By Truckers: Hear it Now!

dbt

It’s a great day when you get to hear some new music by the best band in America- the Drive-By Truckers.

CMT (ironic, I know) is streaming full tracks of the DBT’s forthcoming record, Brighter than Creation’s Dark.  I had to fire-up Internet Explorer to get the player to work, but that’s a small price to pay.  I’m listening right now, and so far it sounds like another excellent record.

Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars.  Here’s Twangville’s take.

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That Sound You Hear is the Cat Laughing

emptybagAmid the never ending and ultimately futile efforts of the record industry to stuff the cat back into the bag and drag us all back in time to the halcyon days when they controlled the gateway to music the way Scoble used to control the gateway to blogging comes word that a government study has found that peer to peer downloaders actually buy more, not less, music.  So what if the government is Canada.  Canada gave us Neil Young and Rush.  We won’t mention Celine Dion or Bryan Adams.

The finding that most people are talking about is this one:

Among Canadians engaged in P2P file-sharing, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between the number of music tracks downloaded via P2P networks and the number of CDs purchased. For an increase in the average number of P2P downloads per month of 2.718282, the number of CD purchases per year will increase by 1.212. For an increase in the average number of P2P downloads per month of 1 (ie., 2.718282/2.718282), the number of CD purchases per year will increase by (1.212/2.718282 =) 0.44. This suggests that there is some form of music creation effect derived from P2P file-sharing, discussed below.

In other words, on the average a user who downloads two extra CD’s worth of music will purchase roughly an extra CD.  This is an interesting finding that certainly supports the position that music sharing is not the prime evil the record industry says it is, although the study also found that people who download songs because they find CDs too expensive buy less CDs.  I suppose that means those who actually buy CDs after downloading songs are subsidizing the cheapskates.

The more interesting finding is that, when looking at the entire population, the study found no evidence that peer to peer file sharing has any effect whatsoever on CD purchases.  That’s the only finding that should matter.

My personal experience with web accessible music (I don’t use peer to peer applications for reasons that don’t involve fear of the man) is similar to Rex Hammock’s:

I can look back over the last five years and point to literally hundreds of dollars of purchases I’ve made because I can sample music in new ways via the web. In my case, I am sampling music via Last.fm or the massive sample file the SXSW folks put together each March. So, while I do not actively participate in anything that can be construed as an “illegal” file-sharing network, I can understand how having more exposure to an unlimited supply of music will result in the increased purchase of a small sub-set of that music.

Much like the global warming debate, opponents will attack and dissect this study, and spin it to their position.  But it’s one more brick in the wall of arguments that scream for the record industry to quit grieving for its deceased business model and focus on the future.  The cat’s out of the bag and he’s not coming back.

It could be worse for the record companies- they could be polar bears.

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