Press the Eject

This band is as good as chocolate cake!
 

Let's Do the Time Warp!

A friend of mine turned me on to a weekly radio show called Time Warp on 89X, which is an alternative rock station in Detroit (The Only New Rock Alternative, according to their slogan). The show is four hours of early alternative music: new wave, punk, grunge, synthpop, etc. The best thing about it? You don't have to actually be in Detroit to listen to it! You can listen online!

The show is on from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM on Sundays. It's hosted by the one-named DJ Cristina, who fills the gaps in the music with interesting information about "classic alternative" artists. She also writes a blog called Hang the DJ that includes playlists from past Time Warp broadcasts among the posts about Morrissey, Alison Moyet, The Cure, et al.

And just like when you were listening to the radio when the songs were new, you can make requests to Cristina. I suppose you could call the station if you wanted to be really old school but email, Twitter or Facebook are probably better options.

But don't ask her to play "Stay" by Oingo Boingo. I don't think she likes it.

MUSE

This is my first attempt at taking iPhone pictures at a live concert. These are from the MUSE show in Cleveland on February 28 at the Q. I'm still getting used to a decent camera phone so these aren't the greatest shots. Also, I didn't want to snap pics and miss the actual performance. 

We started in the general admission floor section. We were pretty close to the stage (stage left to be precise) and got closer as the night went on. This a picture of the bass player Chris at stage level, drummer Dom in the background, and the lead singer/guitarist Matt on the screens above.

Washed out picture of rock god, Matthew Bellamy.

I moved to a seat during the second half. I'm glad I did since it gave me a chance to see the stage as a whole. It's hard to see, but there were screens below the stage floor, behind the group and in the drop-down pyramid overhead. It was incredible to say the least! My favorite use of the setup was as a giant roulette wheel to pick a song. It was between "Stockholm Syndrome" and "New Born." I was happy that it landed on Stockholm Syndrome since it's one of my favorite songs from Absolution. 

If they are scheduled to play an arena near you, you should check it out. Unless you hate good music, spectacular light and sound production, or are generally not awesome.

Peach Hand Pies

I wanted a portable dessert for a couple of Cleveland Orchestra concerts at Blossom Music Center.  These little pies were the perfect solution!  

Peach Hand Pies.

  

I followed the filling recipe as written.  In hindsight, I would have peeled the peaches and cut them smaller to release more juice.  I made home-made pie crust but since I was out of AP flour I used self-rising flour, which made the crust a little biscuity.  Different, but delicious!

iPhone photo

I got the peaches from the farmer's market that morning, and they were ripe but not very soft. The vendor said they would be fine for baking but, ideally, I would have waited a day or two.  I'll have to plan better next time.  I'm glad I made these since Ohio peaches have been wonderful this year!

Questions

 A Question of Lust. 


Today is Martin Gore's birthday and when I heard that, all I could think of was this song. It is my favorite Depeche Mode song where he sings lead. 


I don't know if his Wikipedia entry is accurate, but it's a fascinating read.

Promises, Promises

I have a trial subscription to SiriusXM, which I use to listen to very few of the hundreds of stations available. My dial is mostly tuned to 1st Wave, which is their "classic alternative" station. About 1 in 3 songs that I hear on this station are already on my iPod, but occasionally they'll play a song that I almost forgot existed like this great tune:

Weren't the 80's the best time ever?

Punch Brothers Punch

The Punch Brothers came out with a new album last week. If you aren't familiar with the Punch Brothers, give them a listen below.

"This Is The Song" from Live from the Lower East Side: It's p-Bingo Night! from Punch Brothers on Vimeo.

You might recognize the gorgeous lead singer and mandolin player, Chris Thile, from Nickel Creek or from the recent Goat Rodeo Sessions with Yo Yo Ma. But all of the members of the group are incredible musicians and their albums are like nothing else out there.

There is a tour to support the new album, Who's Feeling Young Now? and I would highly recommend seeing The Punch Brothers live. I saw them on their last tour and was wowed by the music and charmed by their personalities. It was great to hear their own songs played live, but one of the best things about that show was their rendition of The Strokes, Reptillia, which I've posted below.

Red Flags

This is one of my favorite songs released this year. I've liked Sondre Lerche for a while, and I thought this would be the year I saw him live. Unfortunately, he got a gig on The Late Show with David Letterman and cancelled his Cleveland show at the last minute. I hope Cleveland is a stop on his next tour!



The Letterman appearance:

Freegal

This might not be news to anyone else, but I just found out about Freegal. For those of you not in the know, Freegal is a music service website that lets you download up to three songs a week for $0. It's a small amount of free songs, but it's still something! Your local library has to subscribe to the service in order for you to use it and luckily, mine does.

I keep a running list of songs and artists on my iPod notepad, and Freegal has a good chunk of my list available. It's going to take me a few months to get through my picks, but I'm open to suggestions when my list runs out.

Eighties Mania!

Back in April, I won tickets to the Eclipse tour, which is a concert headlined by Journey. The other two bands are Night Ranger and Foreigner. It was my ultimate I-wouldn't-buy-these-tickets-but-would-go-if-they-were-free concert. Here's the official trailer for the tour!





The show was actually great! My concertmate and I knew we would be running late , but we saw most of it. I was mainly interested in seeing Journey anyway, and we caught their whole set. They played some songs from their new (who knew?) album, called "Eclipse" and all the songs I wanted to hear except "Who's Crying Now?" Their lead singer, Arnel Pineda, has a voice that deserves to fill an amphitheater or arena. He sounds a lot like Steve Perry, but he managed to make the songs his own. And you could tell he was having the time of his life! If you don't know his story watch the video from CBS Sunday Morning. It's a little corny, but sweet.

Folksy Trio

I saw a great live concert the other night on what was possibly the hottest night of the year. The first performers were The Secret Sisters, Brandi Carlile was the opening act and the top-bill was Ray LaMontagne and The Pariah Dogs. If the show hasn't hit your town yet, I highly recommend catching it. It was pretty perfect from start to finish, although there was a minor gaffe where Ray forgot the words to a song (that was actually kind of cute.)

Here are some clips of the performers I saw, which are great, but pale in comparison to the live concert.

All Rise

This song popped up on my iPod the other day. It's from Volume 49 of the British version of "Now That's What I Call Music" that was released a while back. It's got a good beat and it's easy to dance to, but it's very much a boy band song. It makes no sense.

What makes this song particularly great is all the legal terms thrown in. Here are my favorite lines:

"And if you thought you had me fooled, I'm telling you now, objection overruled!"

"I'm going to tell it to your face, I rest my case!"

"I just can't wait, now the case is open wide"

"You'll try to pray, but the jury will decide."

I'd like to file an appeal since this video should have been set in a courtroom.

Listen To This

I downloaded a new app for my iPod Touch called Top 100's by Year by Bing. The app streams the "top 100" songs from each year from 1947 to 2010, one year at a time. The app information describes the tunes as, "songs that have stood the test of time" so they aren't necessarily the most popular songs of the years. Although the songs play on a shuffle mode, you can skip ones that you don't want to hear.

I'm not sure I would have paid for it since I don't generally buy apps for my iPod, but it's worth a free download. It's completely entertaining to listen to songs from a particular year. But I wonder who ranked the songs on the lists? Is Free Bird really the top song of 1973?

Suspension

My mom got the DVD box set of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century for Christmas and we watched the first two-part episode today. I remember watching the show as a kid, but I don't know whether I've ever seen the pilot. What I do know is that I was completely taken by surprise when the theme song started and the familiar tune had lyrics!



When the end credits rolled, I found out the song was sung by Kipp Lennon, who has a website with audio clips available for download. Do yourself a favor and download Suspension (Theme from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) immediately! It is awesome.

I'm Your Man

I watched Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man the other day. Mr. Cohen is best known for his version of Hallelujah, which might itself be better known as sung by Rufus Wainwright (from Shrek) or Jeff Buckley. I was familiar with the songs in this movie since they popped up on my late beloved Launchcast station. His songs are great, but I have to admit I prefer them as interpreted by other people.

Here's an example of his singing style.




This is the version of "Tonight Will Be Fine" that was on the DVD as performed by Teddy Thompson.




The movie itself was good. It was partly a biography and partly a documentary about a tribute concert. It's worth a viewing and the soundtrack is definitely worth a listen.

Unlikely like

My music taste is generally in the alternative genre, but I also like indie. And I love college radio.

Every once in a while I like something that can only be classified as pop. Usually, it's a sappy song with a good hook that gets me.

So here's the latest song that I hate to admit I like. The worst thing may be that it's by someone from American Idol. The horror!






I like this video. It's cute!

New Wave Mix Tape

I came across a tape the other day that I made from an LP called K-Tel's The Beat. It's a good compilation of new wave groups. I was shocked to find Mixwit had all of the songs on the tape except for one called You Hit the Spot by Graham Parker. No big loss since it's my least favorite song of the bunch anyway.

The better known songs are part of this lyrics quiz called One Hit Wonders: New Wave Trivia, which just told me:

You got 10 questions correct!

If you scored between 8-10, fantastic! The frosted hair look is so you!

Don't I know it!

Incidentially, I only have five of these songs on my iPod. It would have been six but the Depeche Mode song didn't make the cut.

Mixtapes

I used to love making mixtapes from songs on the radio and my albums and tapes when I was a kid. I made tapes from my CDs when I got a boombox that had a cool dubbing feature. And when I first got iTunes I made so many playlists-- a lot of which were CD copies of my old tapes.

Well, now I have a new reason to pick up my old habit. Mixwit.com lets you make mixtapes that look like oldschool tapes that you can customize with pictures and such. I first heard about it from Jason at Hands On Your Ears whose tapes can be found here.

Below are my first two mixes. "Sun Mix" has songs with good beats that are easy to dance to and "Moon Mix" has maudlin music you might find on a college station.

One crappy feature is that you're limited to the songs that the site has available unless you're savvy enough to get songs yourself, which I'm not. The worst feature has to be that songs can disappear on you once you've made the tape. Even with those flaws, it's still pretty cool.

A less exciting (and both more and less limiting) website is muxtape.com, which lets you upload your own songs into a single mix. You can listen to mine here, which is taken from an old CD mix from a bunch of years ago. That website is just as boring as a list of songs can be.

Sugar and Lime

The song currently running non-stop through my head:

Different Drum

I love karaoke. Really, check my profile.

So how excited was I that not one, but two karaoke game shows were on tonight!?! Not very, but I watched them anyway. First, an encore presentation of The Singing Bee on NBC and an hour later, Don't Forget the Lyrics on Fox. Here's my assessment of the two shows.

The Spelling Bee is hosted by Joey Fatone. The show starts with Joey strolling through the audience and hand-picking six contestants. The six are whittled down to four, then two and finally one. That one is crowned the winner and gets a trophy and a chance to win $50,000.
The band and a rotating group of singers do most of the work. The contestants aren't really heard until the music stops and they must finish the song clip. The singers tonight were good. I'd guess a spare few make a living singing commercial jingles. Actually, the contestants weren't all that bad either.

Don't Forget the Lyrics is hosted by Wayne Brady. The show features one contestant for the entire hour (or two hours, the show ended in a cliffhanger!) picking songs from categories on a board and singing them karaoke-style in front of a giant video screen displaying the lyrics. The contestant sings with a live band for what seems like forever until the screen stops showing the words and has blanks that the contestant must fill-in. After they sing their guess, they can change their minds. They can also use one of their three lifelines, I mean "back-up singers" to help 'em out if they get stuck. The grand prize is one million dollars.

I like the format of Don't Forget the Lyrics better. The Spelling Bee was a little too slapdash. The pace was too quick and their was no second-guessing tension.

The singing was the worst part of Don't Forget the Lyrics. The fact that a terrible singer was showcased for an entire episode made it painful to watch/listen. I like The Singing Bee's use of professional singers as song starters.

What surprised me was the overlap of songs. Is "Walk Like an Egyptian" a hot karaoke selection?

Neither show was interesting enough to watch again. I probably would have been better off singing along with my Karaoke Revolution game.