Americana Tunes Competition!

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There is this contest going on through Neil Young’s website, where people were to do covers of the same Americana tunes that Neil Young did on his just released album. I did a couple, and here they are.



This Land Is Your Land


Wayfaring Stranger

The winner gets $1,000. And, looking at the vote totals, there’s pretty much no chance I’ll even get close, but I thought since I did the covers and all, to at least post them here. The money was, ahem, a nice draw, but I mostly did the tunes because I've never done anything like that before.

If you have Twitter or Facebook, and feel so inclined, you can vote here:

http://www.talenthouse.com/creativeinvites/preview/a3d7c92787619170b03cb601b71e8740/565

The Detente of Representation 1

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Weeeee!
I just read Peggy Nelson’s take on speed:

http://www.berfrois.com/2012/05/peggy-nelson-tragic-speed-modern-life/

It reminds me that bridges often have interesting undercarriages. And artists are doing a lot of interesting, ephemeral things out there. Consider:

“Consider: what may be absorption and focus from one angle could be irresponsible escapism from another: surfing the web versus gazing at a Van Gogh looks much the same from the point of view of the object. And the converse may also apply. What may be fragmentary and distracted frittering might also be a way of integrating the experience of art into everyday life. Because as much as we crave continuity, we also crave interruption; and in the space of those breaks, art can surface.”

I like this. And, as Nelson says early in her essay, we’ve had complaints of the “speed” of modern life since before “modern.”

But, even so, there is a pervasive feeling that things are pretty spaghettified these days. I think of it as the contemporary American epicurean impulse—Skittery, Hoagland called it, but in the catalogues of nouns it reminds me more of the other side of the Victorian age, the wild scramble for more random sparkly things from the corners of the globe.

As an American who’s not gone further than Puerto Rico, I can only speak of “American” with anything approaching even tentative confidence, and this America, the almost empire, mixed with globalization as supermarket, has stocked the shelves, and stacked the deck. As seen on TV, so seen in the arts.

The postmodernists called it the pastiche that follows modernist collage. Church night called it several BINGO cards at once. So we’re all multi-tasking now, with bulldozers and glue. It’s not subtle, but it can be rather fetching, in a buzz buzz zip zip kind of way. All Bodies Fall Equally Fast, as science tells us. It’s there in the principle of equivalence, as well.

The Swedish say “lagom” and we head to google and .5 seconds later we're all up to speed. There has been a fundamental shift over the last decade or two, from an economy of knowledge to an economy of search terms. This is not necessarily a bad thing. No longer does one need to hold knowledge in one’s head, one just needs access to the internet. Information used to be valued by how difficult it was to get (the journey to a library, etc), one had to travel to the information, to how fast it is to get (google), where the information travels to you. So that now, if information isn’t readily available, then it’s deemed to be of little value. Research is easy. But only a certain kind of research.

What (repetition compulsion) are we teaching ourselves?
Contemporary art is busy. This is not a focused or languid or slow time. Even our focused or languid or slow artists are busying it up. And how much of this—if anything—is a real change in how we pay attention? Were things really slower once? Nelson uses the example of Vaudeville, how acts were targeted to under three minutes so as to fit in the attention span of the audience . . .

The flip side of this energy, this busyness, this epicurean impulse, is the charge of a flattening of value. I understand that charge, but rather than a flattening of value, what I see in a lot of art—or even most art—is ambivalence. It’s not irony that marks our age, it’s ambivalence. And ambivalence is not the flattening of value, but the difficulty of settling on one value.

It’s easy to charge poets with irony (as if irony in and of itself is a bad thing, which, by the way, it’s not). There’s a value judgment in that, right? “The poets these day, they’re just ironic.” It makes them sound hollow, snarky, shifty. But if one were to say they’re ambivalent, that to some large degree the entire age is, that doesn’t carry the instant critique. A symptom of our busyness is the instant, and, as well, the quip, the instant diagnosis, the instant dismissal, those are as much a part of the speediness problem of our time as what they critique.

Maybe our contemporary relationship with silence—it scares us—explains the busyness of our art much more than does saying John Ashbery did it or Postmodernism did it. Silence, as TV has it or most art has it, is a missed opportunity for noise.

So how is art to take an adequate picture of this reality? The pleasures of simple answers to impossible questions? A new rug?

The Paper Chase, indeed

Friday Playlist: SXSW and Beyond

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Good news, everyone, the Friday Playlist is back!  Today's edition features mostly bands I heard about this year at SXSW, with some old favorites thrown in for good measure.  Enjoy!

1. TUnE-yArDs - "Gangsta"
   Despite the monstrously inappropriate use of mixed-case letters in their name, this world-music-meets-hip-hop-meets-a-bunch-of-other-stuff album from musician Merrill Garbus is really incredible, and is everything the last Dirty Projectors album should have been.  She also recently produced and penned a few songs for the latest Thao Nguyen album, which (in my not-so-humble opinion) has made Thao more interesting than ever.
   
   
2. Beach House - "Used To Be"
   This album came out last year, but I finally got around to listening to it a couple weeks ago and was struck at how Beach House put out the perfect Walkmen album.  It's really beautiful but never boring.  Excellent.
   
   
3. Shad - "Rose Garden"
   Shad, or Shadrach Kabango as his parents called him, is a Canadian rapper who played at SXSW this year to much acclaim.  This whole album is great, and this song in particular showcases his lyrical prowess, flow, and ear for a good sample.
   
   
4. Yuck - "Get Away"
   Another SXSW darling, this London group has been getting a lot of press lately as a band who obviously worships the sound of the 90s, despite seemingly being way too young to have actually been cognizant of music during the actual 90s.  My cynical prediction is that you won't be hearing about them for very much longer, but it's a fun album if you were around for the real thing.
   
   
5. Gold Panda - "Quitters Raga"
   This is a cut off of Companion, a digital-only download of tracks released prior to this SXSW star's Lucky Shiner.  But it's still a cool song.
   
   
6. Superhumanoids - "Cranial Contest"
   Hailing from LA's Echo Park, Superhumanoids got a lot of press at SXSW this year, and they deserve most of it.  Their sound borrows pretty heavily from the late 80s/early 90s, but they turn those influences into some cool lo-fi pop songs that stick with you.  They show a few sides on this EP, and I like that they haven't decided on one yet, it makes for a more interesting sound.
   
   
7. Braids - "Lemonade"
   I know it's simplistic to call Braids "Animal Collective with a female singer," but I'm going to do it anyway.  Not all the songs on this album hold true to that description, but enough do that I feel OK with it.
   
   
8. Destroyer - "Kaputt"
   Ah, Destroyer.  The thinking man's Steely Dan.  Who else could make an album full of songs about girls and cocaine sound so goddamn square?
   
   
9. Paul Simon - "Dazzling Blue"
   Amazingly, Paul Simon's voice still seems to be serving him as well as his songcraft and his gift for lyrical poetry.  I really liked a lot of his new album, but I don't recommend listening to it on a long drive that you start at 7:00 AM (like I did).

Thanks for listening!  As always, please let me know what you thought in the comments.

Music Without A Net

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Hello loyal readers.  I'd like to take a break from my usual spotty coverage of music and technology plus the occasional playlist to let you all know that next weekend, I will get not 1 but 2 opportunities to do one of my favorite things in the world:  perform musical improv in front of an audience.  And if you're going to be in New York City the weekend of May 20th, I'd love for you to come out and see me.

Friday May 20 @ 8:00 PM
Vox Pop Presents:  An Evening of Musical Improv
My 2-person group Vox Pop will be hosting an evening of musical improv, with a ton of amazing guest groups from the Big Apple.  Vox Pop performs an entirely sung show - every word you hear will be sung, every tune and lyric will be made up on the spot, and it will be entertaining as hell.  My co-star Karen Lange lives in Washington, DC, and I live in New York City, so we don't get to perform together as often as we'd like, which makes this show a big deal.  So come on out and see an event that's way more rare and entertaining than a triple rainbow or a super moon or any of that other crap.

Details
Friday 5/20 8:00 PM
Theaterlab, Studio C
137 W. 14th St., btwn 6th & 7thNew York, NY$10 - Tickets
More info


Saturday, May 21 @ ~ 8:00 PM
iMusical:  The REUNION Show!  (Part of the Queens Fringe Festival)
Washington DC's acclaimed iMusical is coming to New York to participate in the Queens Fringe Festival.  iMusical has performed to standing ovations up and down the east coast, and was called "spot on" by the Washington Post.  Despite these accolades, various cast members (including yours truly) have left the group over the years to pursue life in the Big Apple.  Well, on Saturday May 21st you can see these all-stars back together on stage for the first time in years.  This is bigger than [some awesome all-star sports game that I can't reference because I don't follow sports]!!!  You don't get a chance to see this many musical improv heavy-hitters on stage at the same time very often, folks, so don't pass it up.


Details
Saturday 5/21
We are in a slot of groups which starts at 6:40 PM.  We're expected to go on around 8:00 PM.
The Secret Theatre
44-02 23rd StLong Island City, NY
$15 for an all-day pass which also gets you $3 beers all day(!)
More info

I hope you can make it out to one or both of those shows, I can pretty much guarantee [Editor's note: not a guarantee] that they are going to be awesome.

Google Music - Still a Mystery

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After reading some interesting reviews of Google's new "cloud"-based music service, [Editor's note: can we please stop calling anything hosted online "cloud-based?"] imagine my delight (go ahead, imagine it) when a beta invitation arrived in my inbox yesterday.  I was particularly interested in its playlisting abilities - i.e. how well it performs in the task of "recommend a bunch of songs from my own collection that have qualities in common with the seed song/artist/album."  Over at Echo Nest, Paul Lamere (one of my music tech heroes, who's involved with a really cool company) did an in-depth head-to-head comparison of Google Music, iTunes Genius, and the Echo Nest's own API.  The result:  Google Music fails what Paul calls the "WTF Test."  Meaning, way too many songs in Google's playlists would cause the listener to say "WTF?  This has nothing in common with my seed song."

I've written about music recommendation engines in this space before, and generally I've found them to be a mixed bag.  While I do sometimes hear about new artists I might not have heard otherwise from the web-based tools, these days I'm actually more interested in diving deep into my own collection.  I have about 80,000 tracks in my digital collection.  I use a variety of tools to manage this beast, primarily SqueezeCenter, which is the software that enables streaming to a device such as the Squeezebox.  One of my favorite features of SqueezeCenter is its integration with a nifty little product called MusicIP.  MusicIP used to be a great tool for generating playlists based out of your own music library.  It's perfect for someone like me with more tracks than I can handle.  It finds hidden gems, reminds me of things I forgot I had, and of course generates a few WTF moments.  Sadly, the folks over at Amplifind Music Services discontinued support for this product a long time ago, thus ensuring that some of its most maddening bugs (my personal favorite is the one where it has trouble analyzing FLAC files on a network drive, but can analyze those same files perfectly on a local drive) will never be fixed.  Kudos to folks like whoever runs Spicefly, who keep the torch burning for MusicIP, but the fact is, it's never going to get any better.  And I haven't yet had the time to devote to learning the Echo Nest API enough to have it analyze my whole collection and thus fulfill the same function for me.  Which brings me back to Google Music.

Despite its purportedly high "WTF factor," and the fact that you can only upload 20,000 tracks, and the fact that they will delete any track that Google deems to have violated copyright (I'd love to know how they know which track is the one I ripped from my own CD, and which is the copy I might have given to someone), I was still hopeful that Google Music might, one day, fill the coming void in my life when I finally upgrade Windows and MusicIP breaks down altogether.  So now that you've imagined my delight at receiving an invitation to the beta, imagine my disgust when the stupid thing told me I already more than 2 authorized user accounts tied to my current device, whatever that might mean.  This for software that I've never installed before.  So I consulted their help page, which told me to simply go to my Google Music settings in my browser, and de-authorize my devices.  Now, finally, imagine the words I uttered upon discovering that, according to Google, my authorized devices numbered exactly zero.  I wrote to support, but haven't heard back yet.  So for now, Google Music doesn't even have a chance to fail the WTF test for me, it's too busy failing the WFI test (Won't Fucking Install).

Anyone else used this thing?  Let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: Google support got back to me, apparently this was an issue where by default the software assumed if you had any virtual machines on your computer that you were already using Google Music.  They have released a fix, so I'll be trying again soon.

Web Developer's Lament

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This one's for all the web developers out there...

I'm on a "working vacation" for a couple weeks up in Belfast, ME, staying in a house on the bay.  Somehow working from here doesn't feel quite as much like work as it does when I work from my usual office location.  However, events have conspired to make it feel as much like work as it possibly could - namely, a client has been doing their best to make sure that no piece of code I write this week is ever actually done, due to the specifications changing daily, not unlike clouds shifting in a summer breeze.

So I wrote this song to explain how I feel.  [This isn't all about this particular project, but that was a good starting point.]

This is a live recording made down by the water.




Lyrics:
They changed the specs again
Just when I was nearly finished
Said the client changed their mind
I don't know if I can take this

They changed the specs again
I've already written so much code
And the thought of starting over
Makes my sanity erode

Chorus:
Why won't they just let me finish?
Why can't I just be done?
Why won't they just let me finish?
Is this their idea of fun?

They changed the specs again
Pushed the launch up by 2 weeks
They've added a shopping cart
God, my knees are feeling weak

They changed the specs again
To match the new designs
They want it to just "work like Google"
Lord, I'm losing my mind

[Chorus]

I give up, I give up.
I give up, I give up.

Let's add some features, I give up.
Let's build a CMS from scratch, I give up.
Let's refactor every function, I give up.
Let's start calling ourselves agile, I give up.
Let's have a status meeting, I give up.
Let's adopt a framework, I give up.
Let's add members' only area, I give up.
Let's change databases, I give up.
Let's review my timesheet, I give up.
Let's never document anything, I give up.
Let's outsource to India  

Still More Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck

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SK Holiday Open House by flickr user vastateparksstaff

"Christmas music."  "Holiday tunes."  "Mind-numbing winter-themed muzak pabulum."  Call it what you will, our ears are subjected to a lot of crap every winter.  Well, Wired For Music is here to help, with yet another edition of our patented "Holiday Music That Doesn't Suck" playlist.

This year's playlist has some songs that a lot of you will probably already know, but I've had enough people ask me about them in the past that I finally decided to put them on.  Hopefully there'll be some surprises on here too for more "advanced" listeners, whatever that means.  And it even features one song I swore I would never, ever include (it grew on me).

Enjoy, and be sure to check out the playlists from previous years!

1. Dean Martin - A Marshmallow World
   "The King of Cool" gives us his take on this sugary classic.  Dean's version was never as popular as Bing Crosby's, but it does feature some of his trademark near-drunken slurring, particularly on the last verse's "take a walk-with-yourfav-or-itegirl."  This song makes me wish it was snowing right now.
2. Gruff Rhys - Slashed Wrists This Christmas
   This is the first track of the Super Furry Animals' frontman's brilliantly titled "Atheist Xmas EP."  It's a bit repetitive, but then, so this this whole season, isn't it?
3. The Futureheads - Christmas Was Better In The 80s
   Not entirely sure why these guys are so nostalgic given that I think they're younger than I am, but it's still a great song.  Apparently it's a big deal in the UK to release a single at Christmas time, which explains the existence of a few tracks on this playlist.  Some of them work out great, and others...don't make it to this playlist.
4. The Gasoline Brothers - Hungover Boxing Day
   This Dutch band really nails that feeling of waking up on Boxing Day and realizing - wait, what the hell is Boxing Day?  Europe is weird.
5. Badly Drawn Boy - Donna and Blitzen
   This song definitely sounds like it was written a few days before the deadline for getting on the Xmas single charts or something like that.  The lyrics read like he was doing a holiday-themed Mad Libs and just plugged in words like "sleigh ride" and "reindeer" here and there.  But the music saves it, especially those massive timpanis.
6. Marvin Gaye - Purple Snowflakes
   Nothing says Christmas like (a presumably high) Marvin Gaye singing about "purple snowflakes" while his backup singers sprinkle phrases like "chestnuts roasting" and "tootsies toasting" all over the place.  This song is ridiculously good, and his voice is just angelic.
7. Okkervil River - Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas
   I can't decide if this is more depressing than Tom Waits's "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis" (featured on 2008's playlist), but it's damn depressing regardless.  Seriously, go read the lyrics, I'll wait.  Can you imagine if Jeff Tweedy still wrote songs like this?  Wow, that would be awesome.
8. Morphine - Sexy Christmas Baby Mine
   Still not depressed?  Listen to a dead man croon "Merry for you. Not too merry for me./I want you here with me. Misery loves company."  You're welcome.
9. The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York
   I resisted this song for the past 5 years - in fact, I really hated it until late last year when it suddenly just clicked for me.  I don't know if it's living in New York or what, but one of my most-hated Christmas songs ever has finally wormed its way into my heart.  This one's a classic that I'm sure you've heard a million times, but it still belongs on this playlist.  
10. Barenaked Ladies - I Saw Three Ships
    Just a pretty little palate cleanser.  They really should have let Steven sing first, but that's being nitpicky.
11. Lord Nelson - A Party For Santa Claus
    Feeling chilly?  Let the hot island rhythms of Tobago (by way of Brooklyn) of this little ditty warm you up (or go drink some cocoa, I don't care).  I like the message of this song - how come no one ever gets presents for Santa?
12. The Beach Boys - Little Saint Nick
    Of course The Beach Boys would write a song about Santa's sled.  This song is stupid, but I love it.  And it features the brilliant line: "Christmas comes this time each year."  Deep.
13. Aimee Mann - I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas
    A happy little song about getting off the ol' drugs for Christmastime.  Isn't that sweet?
14. Ella Fitzgerald - Good Morning Blues
    Leave it to Ella to have a bad time at Christmas.  "Don't send me nothing for Christmas but my baby back to me" - it's a great time of the year to be alone, isn't it?
15. dj BC - Waltz Of The Flowers (reflower)
    An interesting mix of a classic, from dj BC's "A Very Re:Composition Christmas."  Lots of interesting stuff on that album, it's really worth checking out if you like classical music, remixes, or both.
16. The Ramones - Merry Christmas (I Don't Want to Fight)
    A message of love and peace for the holidays from Joey Ramone.  [Presumably he and the person to whom he was singing were allowed to resume fighting on Boxing Day.]
17. Kanye West ft. CyHi Da Prynce & Teyana Taylor - Christmas In Harlem
    Despite famously being from Chicago, which does not include Harlem, Kanye does a serviceable job with this sequel to Louis Armstrong's "Christmas Night in Harlem" (featured in 2008's playlist).  I think the best verse here belongs to CyHi Da Prynce, who raps in character as Santa Claus.  This song gets extra credit for the part at the end when Teyana Taylor starts singing the melody of "Strawberry Letter 23."
18. Milly & Silly - Getting Down For Xmas
    Looking at Santa's outfit, I'd say that playing funk music at this time of year is pretty much a no-brainer.
19. Frightened Rabbit - It's Christmas So We'll Stop
    These guys really do a great job with the whole "suicidal but catchy" thing.  Sample lyric: "Oh it's Christmas so we'll stop/'Cause the wine on our breath puts the love in our tongues/So forget the names/I called you on Christmas Eve/In fact forget the entire year/Don't reflect just pretend and you won't feel scared."  Yikes.
20. David Bowie & Bing Crosby - Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy
    For a song that was conceived of, written, rehearsed, and performed in a little over an hour, this is pretty amazing.  If you haven't heard this before, you're probably going to like it.  I think it's all the more incredible considering the backstory (see link above).
21. Lovebyte - Auld Lang Syne
    I actually cut another electronic instrumental song off this list, but I just had to give a nod to the robot inside me with this overly upbeat, bizarre version of the New Year's classic.
22. Sarah McLachlan - Song For A Winter's Night
    Sarah McLachlan's take on Gordon Lightfoot's beautiful little song is spare and beautiful, and I find it really evokes the feeling of a cold winter's night effectively.  Great harmonies, too.

Like the list?  Download it!  [you can now download previous years' lists, too!]
Hungry for more?  Check out some of these awesome holiday playlists:

• Annals of Spacetime
• Fuel/Friends
• ilovethis
• Wired For Music

What are you listening to this holiday season?  Tell me in the comments, and have a happy December!