music

I bought a CD today. It was a little bit strange. I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual compact disc. I’m sure this isn’t the first one I’ve bought since I moved to LA seven years ago, but I know that since I got my iPod the number of CDs I’ve purchased is in the single digits. That is somewhat incredible.

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From mefi: The 15 Most Outrageous Claims in Pop Music History. Hilarity abounds.

A week or so ago I found a link to the Griffin Mirrored Chrome Finish iPod case on Dan’s site. Anything that beautiful must be mine. I ordered one immediately and it arrived last night. The previous case I had — Agent18’s video-shield — was awesome, to be sure. After a year and a quarter, though, it had seen better days. It’s a testament to Agent18’s quality that my iPod doesn’t have a scratch on it. But my new chrome one is just rockin’ cool. Sweet.

The feature I’d most like to see added to iTunes “smart playlist” building is the ability to exclude songs based on metadata. I like to listen to music that I haven’t heard in a long time and / or that I haven’t heard very often. The only problem is that when I choose to select songs based on the criteria “Least Often Played”, iTunes annoyingly adds its own sub-sort based on Artist. That means that my 50-track “smart” playlist will include, for example, 25 songs by Bruce Springsteen. That doesn’t give me much randomness and it drives me crazy.

What I should be able to do is create a “Recently Played” playlist (or use the existing one) and add a limiting factor to a separate playlist like this:

Artist is not in the playlist “Recently Played”.

That is what I’d really like.

I don’t get addicted to songs very often. If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this site you know that I am infatuated with music and I love just about every genre. I have no doubt that I have spent the great majority of the last two decades with music playing. I love listening to music and I love hearing songs that I haven’t heard in a while. It’s rare that I listen to the same album or song more than once a day. But every now and then I get addicted to a tune and I want to hear it over and over again.

A few years ago it was Green Day’s Jesus of Suburbia. A few months ago it was The Killers’ Sam’s Town. (I’m going to see them next Monday, by the way.) Right now it’s Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats. Believe it or not, I had never heard of Ms. Underwood until I saw her on SNL last weekend performing this song. I, of course, immediately found it on LimeWire and have listened to it two dozen times this week. It’s the ‘07 version of Alanis‘ You Oughta Know — angry and nasty. I love it.

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Head coaches in the NFL often “script” the first dozen or so offensive plays of a game. They do this to set the tone and pace of the game, and to try to get their players to understand that they want to dictate how the game will go. With that in mind I have “scripted” the first 3+ hours of the music I’ll hear on my iPod during Sunday’s LA Marathon.

For more than two years now I’ve been aggregating my favorite “running” songs into a discrete playlist specifically geared towards keeping me motivated and moving towards that 26.2 mi marker. Any time I see a song in my 9900+ track iTunes library rated with only one star, I know it means one of two things. Either it’s a crap song that needs to be deleted, or it’s a song that I one-starred while running because I wanted to save it to my special cardio playlist. It’s my own little iTunes lifehack.

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After last night’s 6.7 mile run — Death by Doheny, I call it — my girlfriend and I headed to Hollywood to catch The Perfect Victim (previously mentioned here) at The Knitting Factory. These kids put on a damn good show. The lead singer is energetic and bounces around the stage like a young Billie Joe Armstrong. The songs are slick and powerful, with a ton of punk-hard rock guitar riffs. I could have done without the drunk girl sprawled in a pool of her strawberry-daiquiri vomit outside the front door, but that’s just life in Los Angeles. If you get a chance to see them, go.

How’s this for an impossible task? Last night my girlfriend asked me to make her a Bob Dylan mix CD. I have exactly 100 Dylan songs in my iTunes library, and one can only fit about 73 minutes of music on a standard audio CD. Deciding which tracks to include has proven to be a monumental task. I finally chose the following seventeen, but it wasn’t easy.

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Five Underappreciated Tom Petty Songs

1. “Cabin Down Below” — from Wildflowers
2. “Change the Locks” — from She’s the One
3. “Billy the Kid” — from Echo
4. “the last dj” — from The Last DJ
5. “Southern Accents” — from Southern Accents

I really like my gym, LA Fitness. It’s inexpensive, it has lots of great amenities, and there are enough of them scattered around Los Angeles that I never have to travel very far to find one. I have a laundry list of complaints about the place, of course: one of the ergs is almost always broken, the hinges on the doors of the lockers are constantly malfunctioning, the sauna seems to be out of order every few days, stuff like that. But in general I like the place.

One of the things that keeps me motivated while I’m there is the music. It’s some sort of cable system, like “LA Fitness Radio”. There weren’t any commercials until a few months ago, and even now it’s just a short promo for the gym about once an hour. (This makes little sense to me. I’m already a member! Why are you trying to convince me of how great the place is?) They play seriously great music. The last time I was there I heard “Panama” by Van Halen, for example. Sure, they play a ton of Top 40 bubble-gum garbage, but it’s nothing obnoxiously bad. And they somehow manage to squeeze lots and lots of deep cuts into the mix.

A few days ago I heard “Get Off This” by Cracker. The album Kerosene Hat had one hit — “Low” — and, as far as I know, I am the only person on Earth that actually bought the CD. It’s one of my all-time favorites. (The entire CD is great, by the way. If you don’t have it, go buy it.) Hearing a track like that while lifting weights was quite a surprise and, like I said, one of the reasons I dig LA Fitness.

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Now that the dust has finally settled, I’m prepared to pontificate on what I consider the top five songs released in 2006. I think last year was kind of a “down year” for new music; there just weren’t that many great new tracks added to my iTunes library, especially compared to the previous two years. Normally I would post an mp3 of each one for your downloading pleasure, but lately whenever I do that my site is slammed with thousands of leeches. (If you don’t have one of songs, let me know and I’ll get it to you.)
So, without further ado …

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Last week my girlfriend and I had dinner at Cucina Paradiso. It’s a great little Italian restaurant that shares a building with The Palmer Room on Motor Ave. The Palmer Room is a bar / club with a tiny stage for live music; Their website is fairly bland, but the bar itself is quite cozy and a perfect spot to catch a show. We were there to see Landon Band perform. We got to the bar a bit late and only managed to catch the last three or four songs, but I liked what I heard. The lead singer has definitely got some pipes and she put on a helluva good show even though there were only maybe a dozen other people in the audience. It’s tricky because the whole thing is done in Flash, but if you work at it you can download three of the seven songs from their debut album from the official band website.

When my mom was in college she had a part-time job as an usher at a movie theater. The only film shown the entire time she worked there was The Sound of Music. She must have seen it hundreds of times. I’ve caught pieces and bits of it over the years, but have never actually seen the whole thing. All I know is that it’s about a nanny and Nazis. Whatever. My mom always has had a soft spot for Julie Andrews, so it’s little surprise that one of my all-time favorite movies as a kid was Mary Poppins. I loved the singing. I loved the songs. I loved Dick Van Dyke as a chimney sweep. (I think there were penguins, too.)

This morning I found a link on TheBrad’s site to a story about Julie Andrews participating in a promotion for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I mean, even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, how great is is that the word they gave her was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? (video)

Last night was another crazy cool one in Los Angeles. The fun began with dinner on the Sunset strip: Ron Jeremy was at the table on our left and Scott Baio was at the table on our right. The service was uncharacteristically craptacular, but the food was excellent. (You can’t do much better than the steak and lobster at the Rainbow Room.)

After that we went to see Von Cotton play at Molly Malone’s. (Photos at Flckr) They played eight or ten original tracks — all very, very awesome country tunes. I think my two favorites right now are “Shotgun Blast” and “The Tell”. Then Brant closed with a great cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”.