music

So Apple released a new version of iTunes today. Version 8 includes a new feature called “Genius”.

Play a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes creates a playlist of other songs from your library that go great together.

This sounds like a cool idea, although I consider myself already pretty handy at creating smart playlists.
What really intrigued me was the new Genius Sidebar:

As you select songs in your library, the Genius sidebar displays songs from the iTunes Store that go great with it.

Lots of other people are, of course, getting paranoid about sharing their listening data with the Apple mothership, but I’m not. I’m thrilled if iTunes is going to start watching what I’m playing in order to recommend other stuff. Finding new music is one of my favorite things to do.

Unfortunately for me, it is a complete FAIL.

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There is a secret to creating killer Smart Playlists in iTunes. You have to know what not to play. The best way to do that is with an “ignore list”. And I’m going to show you how to make one.

For several years now iTunes has given you the ability to use playlists themselves as parameters when building smart playlists. That means you can make a smart playlist that does (or does not) include another playlist. Why is this important? It’s important because — if you’re like me — you love to hear almost all of the music in your library, but there is a tremendous amount of stuff that you do not want to hear out of the blue.

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My grandmother’s wake and funeral were — of course — very, very sad. I think one of the things that bothered me the most was the music at the wake. It was so … depressing. Now, my grandmother was 86 years old before she was killed by the incompetence of morons; she wasn’t exactly a fan of rock n’ roll. So I didn’t expect them to be playing Def Leppard in the funeral parlor, y’know? But anything would have been better than the canned funeral parlor soundtrack.

I can only hope that when I’m gone someone has the balls to bring an iPod to the wake. And please — if you’re going to even have a wake for me — do it in a house for the love of God. And bring some Maker’s Mark and vodka. If there’s one time when it should be completely acceptable to tip one back, it should be at my freaking wake. So anyway. Don’t play “Ave Maria” or Mozart (although I do loves me some Wolfgang). You don’t have to blast the stereo or anything and start a dance party. But at least listen to something I would have liked.

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I am a big fan of Bloodhound Gang. They had two big radio hits — “Fire Water Burn” (1996) and “The Bad Touch” (2000) — so I guess it’s not fair to call them one-hit wonders, but generally they’re not exactly “pop” music. Most of their songs are painfully sophomoric — “The Ballad of Chasey Lain“, “I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks”, and “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” come to mind. (One of my favorites is “A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When The Stripper Is Crying”, although I don’t play that one in the office very often.)

If you can somehow manage to ignore almost all of the lyrics, the song Pennsylvania has a refrain that I think is actually pretty beautiful:

You are the heart dotting “i”
In the word “apologize”
Scribbled drunk on a postcard
Sent from somewhere volcanoes are
I am the heart with no name
Airbrushed on the license plate
Of a Subaru that was
Registered in Pennsylvania

While we were waiting for the Olympics to start out here on the West coast, we caught the end of an old Entourage episode on HBO. The track playing over the end credits was Sinnerman, by Nina Simone. That song is also played during the conclusion of The Thomas Crown Affair remake with Pierce Brosnan, which has been on television a few hundred thousand times lately, and I really like it. This time I remembered to email a note to myself from my iPhone to download it.

Since Phelps isn’t racing until 10pm, I decided to grab the song. I’ll gladly pay $.99 for a track on iTunes, so I fired ‘er up and … ugh … Of course that’s one of the “album only” songs. For some mysterious reason every now and then Apple (or the record label, or who knows) sets it so that some songs cannot be downloaded individually. You have to buy the whole album to get the track. While I’m okay to shell $.99 for a great song, I’m loathe to drop $9.99 for an album when I only want one song.

So of course I flip iTunes the bird and fire up Limewire. But for some reason, even though there are apparently hundreds of copies of that song available, none of them will download. (I suspect my ISP is blocking Limewire, actually.)

Torrents to the rescue. I found a copy on torrents.to, fired up Transmission, and should have the whole Thomas Crown Affair OST in about twenty minutes. This is why I love the Internets.

Last weekend I hopped on a flight to Denver for my friend Bob’s 36th birthday party. His wife spent months planning “Bob’s Amazing Race 2008“; we spent Saturday as six teams of four people roaming around LoDo, barnstorming bars and looking for clues. It was a total blast.

The event was conveniently simultaneous with the first annual Mile High Music Festival, which featured a few dozen bands and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and Dave Matthews Band.

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Recommended by a friend:

iToner: No hacks. No per-ringtone fees. Unlimited custom ringtones for your iPhone.

Update for Windows Users: Make Your Own Ringtone for Free with iTunes

Rap Lyrics Explained With Charts and Graphs

If I knew where it was
I would take you there.

An open letter to Amy Winehouse, from Ernie.

Another awesome night in Los Angeles: After work on Friday, Tricia and I had dinner on the West side and then headed to the East side to catch a secret, surprise performance by James. The band played an excellent set to a sold-out crowd at Silver Lake’s über-chic Club Spaceland. The show lasted a little over an hour and a half and we got Laid at the end.

I just finished reading Mark Hertsgaard’s excellent book, A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles and I loved it. My father-in-law — who, in 1974, was actually kicked out of the Troubadour with John for heckling the Smothers Brothers — gave it to me a few weeks ago after he’d read it. It’s an awesome read for any Beatles fan. Instead of the typical biography drudgery, Hertsgaard writes the story of the music that was created. So although there’s a little bit of the same old “Lennon was born in Liverpool … They played at the Cavern Club a zillion times …” it is mostly an analysis of how the songs themselves came to be created. Hertsgaard managed to gain access to the archived Abbey Road recording studio tapes and gives blow-by-blow accounts of which of the artists added this line or that chord to each song. He also chronicles the often hysterical banter between the lads from Liverpool as they worked.

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Tricia and I went to see The Cure on Sunday night at The Shrine. We had dinner at The Foundry on Melrose first and got to the show at nine, about an hour late but just in time to catch most of our favorite songs. Just Like Heaven was first, which was the song I played non-stop through most of high school and my absolute favorite Cure track, so that was awesome. I assume that the show started with mostly songs from the new album, because we got to hear almost all the classics. They played four two-song encores, including Tricia’s favorite song, the heartbreaker Plainsong, and the rocker Killing an Arab. I managed to get a few great photos, too.

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More proof that Los Angeles is the world headquarters for Club Awesome™: In how many other cities can you get to the office one day to find you’re now working in Madonna’s crotch?