Music

Stuff about music, either mine or stuff I am listening to.

  • Video Games Live tomorrow

    Hours Categories Game talk, Music
    Comments 5 Comments

    Unless these allergies that have knocked me flat keep me still flat tomorrow, the whole family will be at the Video Games Live concert at the Hollywood Bowl tomorrow. There are even tickets left. I’ll be doing the Meet and Greet thing too, though I will probably miss out on meeting all the gameplayin’ celebs in Hollywood at the afterparty because I have to get the kids back home to get at least some sleep on a school night. It’ll be a late night as it is, but they’ve been pestering me about the show ever since they saw the classic game montage. (Note: YouTube seems to be down right now, but when it’s up, the first movie on that page should work).

  • Some musings on ephemeral pop

    Hours Categories Game talk, Music, Reading, Watching
    Comments 16 Comments

    The August 18th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a fun little gimmick: six covers, one for each of the James Bond actors, going back in time. It provides an interesting window into the changing pop cultural preoccupations.

    In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?” The Brosnan Bond movies of course answered that question; the 1995-era sense that history had ended was turned on its ear in not too many more years.

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  • The Sunday Song: After the Flood

    Hours Categories Music, The Sunday Poem
    Comments 2 Comments

    Once upon a time I wrote a guitar instrumental called “After the Flood.” It became the title track on my CD. It sounds like this:

    Then I mistakenly wrote lyrics to go on top of it. It’s not that the lyrics were bad; they just didn’t need to exist.

    They’re in the liner notes on the CD now, but I figured, why not post ’em as the Sunday Poem? So here they are.

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  • 1894 Stewart banjo

    Hours Categories Music
    Comments 7 Comments

    I’ve told the story of the ukulele I inherited from my grandfather. But I only briefly mentioned the banjo and electric guitar that I inherited from my father-in-law.

    The guitar wasn’t in terrible shape — a bit of elbow grease and she came right back to life. I’ll post something about that instrument later. Today, though, my mother-in-law called and wondered about the banjo. It was in terrible condition: when I found it in the basement, the case (once chip cardboard) was mostly green with mold, and lfiting it resulted in the banjo falling out of the bottom. The head was a cheap Weather King plastic head, and had been ripped. There was a random rusty screw embedded in the fretboard by the fifth string — maybe as a poor man’s capo, who knows. The strings were rusted clean through, and had been on it the whole time in storage, which didn’t bode well for the neck.

    All in all, a sad case. Most of my father-in-law’s instruments were low end ones when originally purchased, and only accrued value because of their age. So we didn’t know whether it made sense to fix the banjo up given the likely cost.

    Then I went on the net to see what I could learn…

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  • Ripping, ripping, ripping

    Hours Categories Music
    Comments 12 Comments

    I just finished ripping our CD collection.

    The result is 48.5GB, 15,788 songs. I didn’t bother counting the CDs. “A lot.”

    It was astonishing how many old friends we had not listened to in years. Some of the CDs we used to love still had soot on them from the house fire in 1999.

    The genre tags are all screwed up, but I can tell already that contemporary folk-slash-singer/songwriter stuff dominates, accounting for around 200 hours worth.

    Of course, I am dismayed to realize that we have 500 cassettes and probably 150 vinyl LPs with maybe a 5% overlap with the CDs. A lot of it isn’t even available on CD.

    I don’t think my record player even works!