two music memes for the price of one: songs and live shows
Since we're on the subject of music, I'll start by observing that Jeffrey Foucault's recorded version of "4&20 Blues," available on Stripping Cane, is a damn fine song. Live, it's even better. Live with Peter Mulvey and Kris Delmhorst, it is smoking hot. Mm mm mm. (This observation brought to you by last night's Redbird show.)
And now, meme #1. sisabet tagged me and it's music, so I had to do it.
Total volume of music files on my computer:
7.61 GB. I cut way back about a year ago when I needed the space for vidding, but the quantity's been creeping up again, and will no doubt continue to increase as I rip whole CDs to put on the iPod and then can't bear to delete the files. It's not like I'm using the computer for vidding right now anyway. More's the pity.
The last CD I bought was:
Bettie Serveert, Attagirl. Which I'm pleased to report is pretty good. Not Private Suit good, but then what is? Of course, anything would have been an improvement on Log 22, winner of 2003's Heartbreaker Award, but still - Attagirl's a welcome return to form.
The last song I listened to before writing this:
"Hard Times," performed live last night by Redbird.
Five songs I have listened to a lot:
Like, ever? Over the course of my whole life? Um. Okay. I'm going to narrow this down by choosing songs I started listening to as an adolescent - between, say, 1986 and 1990 - that have proved to be personal classics, songs I still listen to pretty regularly. In fact every one of the CDs from which these songs are taken would still be somewhere on my (admittedly capacious but not actually infinite) list of favorite CDs.
1. R.E.M., "So. Central Rain" (from Reckoning, 1984 - though I didn't hear it until early '87)
2. The Connells, "Try" (from Boylan Heights, 1987)
3. The Church, "Disenchanted" (from Heyday, 1989)
4. The Sundays, "Can't Be Sure" (from reading writing & arithmetic, 1989)
5. The Blue Aeroplanes, "Careful Boy" (from Swagger, 1990)
Five songs that I have been listening to a lot in the past couple of months:
With commentary, because why not?
1. The Frames, "Fake." I realized a couple weeks ago that one reason I love this song so much is that it's The Frames channeling The Wedding Present, which is such an odd phenomenon that, well, it took me a while to recognize. But lines like "Come on, the guy's a fake, what do you love him for? / And it was my mistake just kicking in his door" are pure David Gedge. Except it's still unmistakeably the Frames. Wow.
2. The Frames, "Right Road (Wrong Road)." Old school Frames rediscovered. I love this band.
3. Bettie Serveert, "Attagirl." Specifically the plugged-in version. "You've paid for your place in this world." Hell yeah.
4. The Mendoza Line, "Let's Not Talk About It." The Mendoza Line is kind of three bands pretending to be one, and I am not equally fond of all three, but as long as they occasionally manage to put together songs like this I pretty much don't care.
5. Benefits of Being Paranoid, "New Frontier." This is a great song and a great album-opener, and lately I've been thinking it might also be really, really viddable. For a while I thought it might be Firefly but on sober reflection the song doesn't sound like Firefly to me - it doesn't sound like Firefly looks, if that makes sense. I think the tempo's wrong. Ah well.
Five people I am passing this baton to:
Only if they want to do this and if they haven't done it already - but I'm not sure I know five people who haven't done this already! Let's see...
renenet
coffee_and_ink
tzikeh
katallison (since she's been mainlining music lately!)
oracne
And then there's meme #2. renenet did this meme and since I actually saw many of those bands *with* her, I feel moved to do my own.
It goes like this: take the bands from my list that you have seen play live, and post them in your own LJ. Add more bands that you've seen until you have thirty.
I was strongly tempted to try to put these in chronological order, but then I realized I was just trying to make it more time-consuming, so alphabetical it is.
Overlapping bands:
1. Shawn Colvin
2. The Cranberries
3. Death Cab for Cutie
4. Kris Delmhorst
5. Ani Difranco
6. Jeffrey Foucault
7. Indigo Girls
8. Jimmy Eat World
9. Mates of State
10. Peter Mulvey
11. The Nields
12. Owen
13. The Promise Ring
14. R.E.M.
15. Rainier Maria
16. Redbird
17. Josh Rouse
18. Sting
19. The Story
20. Toad the Wet Sprocket
21. The Weakerthans
And a few of the best of the other live shows I've seen:
22. The Drovers - I've been to a lot of their shows, first in college and then when they used to play pretty regularly at the bar a block from my apartment. There are just not that many bands you can describe as "Irish-style jam band you can mosh to." Never a dull show. I think I've seen this band more times than anyone besides Peter Mulvey and Ani DiFranco.
23. Fiamma Fumana - Knocked my socks off when I saw them a couple of years ago.
24. Angelique Kidjo - Possibly the most joyful show I've ever been to. Everyone was dancing, smiling, responding. The energy in that room, the sense of uplift, was astonishing.
25. Laura Love - Probably the second most joyful show I've ever been to. Saw her in Seattle, in... I want to say it was some sort of chapel? Whatever. I love most of her CDs, but her live show is in a class by itself.
26. Moxy Fruvous - Double bill with The Nields at a small club here in town some years ago. The dancing and the laughing had me about equally worn out.
27. Kinnie Starr - The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is not, as it turns out, my cup of tea, but this show pretty much redeemed the entire experience.
28. 10,000 Maniacs - The best stadium show I've ever been to, period. Nashville, summer 1993. It helped that I somehow ended up with a seat in the ninth row and that Michael Stipe showed up as a surprise guest.
29. Richard Thompson - Electric, acoustic, whatever - this man can play the guitar like whoa; but it's the killer songwriting that keeps me coming back to Thompson's shows rather than, say, Leo Kottke's.
30. Dar Williams - Played the best free show I've ever seen, at the college coffeehouse right after The Honesty Room (which I had not yet heard) came out. The encore was "February," later recorded on Mortal City, and when she finished it the room was so stunned that we didn't applaud for a good seven or eight seconds, and more than half of us had tears streaming down our faces. That song still makes me cry every damn time I hear it. I've seen Williams play live several times since then, and in many ways she's become a much more polished and accomplished performer, but no show since has quite compared to the shock and delight of experiencing her for the first time.
...And now I'm frustrated because I want to write about Garrison Starr, Tegan & Sara, Luka Bloom, The Sundays, Zap Mama, Cheryl Wheeler, Holly McNarland, Negativland, and the list goes on and on and on...
Bonus track:
The five bands I would most like to see live are (going chronologically from most established to most recent longing)...
1. The Connells (since 1988)
2. The Blue Aeroplanes (since 1990)
3. The Candyskins (since 1991)
4. Bettie Serveert (since 1994)
5. The Frames (since 2003)
And now, meme #1. sisabet tagged me and it's music, so I had to do it.
Total volume of music files on my computer:
7.61 GB. I cut way back about a year ago when I needed the space for vidding, but the quantity's been creeping up again, and will no doubt continue to increase as I rip whole CDs to put on the iPod and then can't bear to delete the files. It's not like I'm using the computer for vidding right now anyway. More's the pity.
The last CD I bought was:
Bettie Serveert, Attagirl. Which I'm pleased to report is pretty good. Not Private Suit good, but then what is? Of course, anything would have been an improvement on Log 22, winner of 2003's Heartbreaker Award, but still - Attagirl's a welcome return to form.
The last song I listened to before writing this:
"Hard Times," performed live last night by Redbird.
Five songs I have listened to a lot:
Like, ever? Over the course of my whole life? Um. Okay. I'm going to narrow this down by choosing songs I started listening to as an adolescent - between, say, 1986 and 1990 - that have proved to be personal classics, songs I still listen to pretty regularly. In fact every one of the CDs from which these songs are taken would still be somewhere on my (admittedly capacious but not actually infinite) list of favorite CDs.
1. R.E.M., "So. Central Rain" (from Reckoning, 1984 - though I didn't hear it until early '87)
2. The Connells, "Try" (from Boylan Heights, 1987)
3. The Church, "Disenchanted" (from Heyday, 1989)
4. The Sundays, "Can't Be Sure" (from reading writing & arithmetic, 1989)
5. The Blue Aeroplanes, "Careful Boy" (from Swagger, 1990)
Five songs that I have been listening to a lot in the past couple of months:
With commentary, because why not?
1. The Frames, "Fake." I realized a couple weeks ago that one reason I love this song so much is that it's The Frames channeling The Wedding Present, which is such an odd phenomenon that, well, it took me a while to recognize. But lines like "Come on, the guy's a fake, what do you love him for? / And it was my mistake just kicking in his door" are pure David Gedge. Except it's still unmistakeably the Frames. Wow.
2. The Frames, "Right Road (Wrong Road)." Old school Frames rediscovered. I love this band.
3. Bettie Serveert, "Attagirl." Specifically the plugged-in version. "You've paid for your place in this world." Hell yeah.
4. The Mendoza Line, "Let's Not Talk About It." The Mendoza Line is kind of three bands pretending to be one, and I am not equally fond of all three, but as long as they occasionally manage to put together songs like this I pretty much don't care.
5. Benefits of Being Paranoid, "New Frontier." This is a great song and a great album-opener, and lately I've been thinking it might also be really, really viddable. For a while I thought it might be Firefly but on sober reflection the song doesn't sound like Firefly to me - it doesn't sound like Firefly looks, if that makes sense. I think the tempo's wrong. Ah well.
Five people I am passing this baton to:
Only if they want to do this and if they haven't done it already - but I'm not sure I know five people who haven't done this already! Let's see...
renenet
coffee_and_ink
tzikeh
katallison (since she's been mainlining music lately!)
oracne
And then there's meme #2. renenet did this meme and since I actually saw many of those bands *with* her, I feel moved to do my own.
It goes like this: take the bands from my list that you have seen play live, and post them in your own LJ. Add more bands that you've seen until you have thirty.
I was strongly tempted to try to put these in chronological order, but then I realized I was just trying to make it more time-consuming, so alphabetical it is.
Overlapping bands:
1. Shawn Colvin
2. The Cranberries
3. Death Cab for Cutie
4. Kris Delmhorst
5. Ani Difranco
6. Jeffrey Foucault
7. Indigo Girls
8. Jimmy Eat World
9. Mates of State
10. Peter Mulvey
11. The Nields
12. Owen
13. The Promise Ring
14. R.E.M.
15. Rainier Maria
16. Redbird
17. Josh Rouse
18. Sting
19. The Story
20. Toad the Wet Sprocket
21. The Weakerthans
And a few of the best of the other live shows I've seen:
22. The Drovers - I've been to a lot of their shows, first in college and then when they used to play pretty regularly at the bar a block from my apartment. There are just not that many bands you can describe as "Irish-style jam band you can mosh to." Never a dull show. I think I've seen this band more times than anyone besides Peter Mulvey and Ani DiFranco.
23. Fiamma Fumana - Knocked my socks off when I saw them a couple of years ago.
24. Angelique Kidjo - Possibly the most joyful show I've ever been to. Everyone was dancing, smiling, responding. The energy in that room, the sense of uplift, was astonishing.
25. Laura Love - Probably the second most joyful show I've ever been to. Saw her in Seattle, in... I want to say it was some sort of chapel? Whatever. I love most of her CDs, but her live show is in a class by itself.
26. Moxy Fruvous - Double bill with The Nields at a small club here in town some years ago. The dancing and the laughing had me about equally worn out.
27. Kinnie Starr - The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival is not, as it turns out, my cup of tea, but this show pretty much redeemed the entire experience.
28. 10,000 Maniacs - The best stadium show I've ever been to, period. Nashville, summer 1993. It helped that I somehow ended up with a seat in the ninth row and that Michael Stipe showed up as a surprise guest.
29. Richard Thompson - Electric, acoustic, whatever - this man can play the guitar like whoa; but it's the killer songwriting that keeps me coming back to Thompson's shows rather than, say, Leo Kottke's.
30. Dar Williams - Played the best free show I've ever seen, at the college coffeehouse right after The Honesty Room (which I had not yet heard) came out. The encore was "February," later recorded on Mortal City, and when she finished it the room was so stunned that we didn't applaud for a good seven or eight seconds, and more than half of us had tears streaming down our faces. That song still makes me cry every damn time I hear it. I've seen Williams play live several times since then, and in many ways she's become a much more polished and accomplished performer, but no show since has quite compared to the shock and delight of experiencing her for the first time.
...And now I'm frustrated because I want to write about Garrison Starr, Tegan & Sara, Luka Bloom, The Sundays, Zap Mama, Cheryl Wheeler, Holly McNarland, Negativland, and the list goes on and on and on...
Bonus track:
The five bands I would most like to see live are (going chronologically from most established to most recent longing)...
1. The Connells (since 1988)
2. The Blue Aeroplanes (since 1990)
3. The Candyskins (since 1991)
4. Bettie Serveert (since 1994)
5. The Frames (since 2003)