music

A Partial List of Artists in My iTunes Library That I Cannot Decide How to Properly Name

• Joan Jett and the Blackhearts or Jett, Joan and the Blackhearts?
• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers or Petty, Tom and the Heartbreakers?
• Rilo Kiley or Kiley, Rilo?
• Ted Leo & the Pharmacists or Leo, Ted & the Pharmacists?
• Biz Markie or Markie, Biz?
• John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band or Cafferty, John & The Beaver Brown Band?
• Camper Van Beethoven or Van Beethoven, Camper?
• Lynyrd Skynyrd or Skynyrd, Lynyrd?
• Rob Zombie or Zombie, Rob?

GatorDVG: I didn’t know Elton John was gay until like 2002.
a.friend: well, i can see that. I mean in the ’70s (when I was listening to him) he was considered cool rock and roll
a.friend: still kinda is, just the gay thing never came up
GatorDVG: I just thought the Donald Duck costume was him being kooky.
a.friend: so did everyone else…sort of like David Bowie
GatorDVG: wait
GatorDVG: David Bowie is gay?
GatorDVG: are you serious??
a.friend: u said that like you were a kid who just found out about the Easter Bunny
GatorDVG: dude
GatorDVG: come on
GatorDVG: really?
a.friend: really

One of my favorite songs is “Radio”, by Alkaline Trio. (mp3, lyrics) My sister got me to start listening to this group a few years ago and I’ve since collected everything they’ve recorded. What’s really funny is that for the longest time I thought it was a beautiful love song. Part of the chorus is — I thought:

I wish you
Would take my radio to bed with you
Plugged in and ready to fall

“What a romantic line,” I always imagined. The rest of the song is so sad, and sounds so angry. But with that one line he’s saying that he wants her to listen to him singing to her as she falls asleep. I thought this for many, many months … until I actually read the lyrics one day. I was so wrong. He’s really singing:

I wish you
Would take my radio to bathe with you
Plugged in and ready to fall

He’s no longer in love with her at all. He wants her to get electrocuted! So. Yeah. Totally changed the song for me. Still a great song, don’t get me wrong. But completely different. Talk about misheard lyrics!

It’s been ages since I posted an mp3 for you. Here’s a great one for today »
Song of the Moment

Yes, I know not always. But some days it would just be nice if you felt like every now and then you could.

Bryan has posted an elaborate examination of the “Play Count” metric used by iTunes. I, too, use the “Play Count” metric as a component of many of my Smart Playlists, so I was interested in his research. I agree with one of the comments on his post, though, and think that iTunes really simply considers a song as “played” and increments the “Play Count” about ten seconds prior to the end of the song. (It would be interesting to know if the “Cross Fade” option affects this. Maybe Bryan can investigate …)

In most of my smart playlists, the “Last Skipped” metric is more important than the “Play Count”. I have a “base” smart playlist which I include in almost all my other smart playlists. It contains all the tracks which I do not want to include. If a track is a music video, or holiday music, or from an audiobook or podcast, for example, I don’t want it to play while I’m jogging along Olympic Boulevard or doing the laundry. Consider this my Exclusion list.

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Let’s get serious here. What’s better than Kermit the Frog singing the Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime“? I can’t think of anything.

One of my wife’s friends died a few weeks ago. He was only 41, a manager in the music industry, and he had battled cancer for a long time. His wife held a memorial service — a Catholic mass — on Saturday night, and hundreds of people attended. The mass was held at a smallish Church in Westwood, just a few blocks from our house. It was in all respects a traditional Catholic mass, with one notable exception: Instead of a choir, the Polyphonic Spree performed all the music. Before the service started they played John Lennon’s Imagine, and, after the eulogies at the end, they played a few more songs, including their hit, Light & Day. It was incredibly moving.

Again I’ll say it: Best line ever in any rock n’ roll song:

And dropping a barbell
He points to the sky, saying
“The sun’s not yellow.
it’s chicken.”

Last night Tricia and I went to see Tamar at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood. She played a great set and we had a good time. We didn’t get home until after 11, and I couldn’t get to sleep.

I was up until 1:30am reading Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. What a crazy story! Can you imagine seeing a 50′ tall wave of molasses barreling towards you at 35mph? And the ten-year legal battle that followed was one of the country’s first major class-action lawsuits. Truly a fascinating tale.

Tonight is our big engagement party at the Viper Room. We’ve got the club reserved for the night, which is pretty flipping cool. (Give me a ring if you want to get on the guest list.) Our good friends Von Cotton play at 9pm and our other good friends becky start their set at 11pm. It should be a pretty wild time.

A perfect t-shirt for the cool kids in the music industry …

Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.

The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.

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Y‘know what song holds up well? Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing. You realize the song is frickin’ 22 years old? We got to move these refrigerators. We got to move these color TVs.

Somehow I managed to forget to write about this wonderful book. I read Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime over a year ago and it is brilliant. I’ve been thinking about it lately because of the awesome song “Maps” by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. You see, I have been in love with this song for months and I just can’t make any sense out of it. Let’s ignore the fact that I had heard the song a dozen times — and loved it — before I (a) knew the title and (b) realized that what she is singing in the chorus is “Maps / They don’t love you like I love you.” Maps? MAPS? What the hell does that mean?

So I’ve decided that she’s madly in love with this guy. She found a bunch of maps in his possession and now assumes he is going to leave her for someone else far away. The “they” in the song refers to the people at his destination. The “maps” is just an anguished exclamation. It works.

But a few days ago I started thinking that maybe she’d read this book. Maybe that’s what this song is. She’s madly in love with the main character in the book and is desperately trying to convince him to stop stealing maps and (re)turn his attention to her. The maps don’t love him. (He’s a little bit twisted.) Either way: Great song. Great book. I recommend them both.

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh. Funny. Very funny. Keep laughing, sweetheart. You just go to sleep giggling your pretty little head off while I am stuck in the freaking bathtub. How is that fair?