Heart Songs

The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald - Gordon Lightfoot
Morning Has Broken - Cat Stevens
Diamonds And Rust - Joan Baez
I Love A Rainy Night - Eddie Rabbitt
S.O.S. - Abba
Whip It - Devo
Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Pat Benatar
Hungry Heart - Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band
Just The Two Of Us - Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers
Metal Health (Bang Your Head) - Quiet Riot
Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden
Breaking The Law - Judas Priest
Raining Blood - Slayer
I Think We're Alone Now - Tiffany (in the song Rivers says this is Debbie Gibson)
Man In The Mirror - Michael Jackson
Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley
Wishing Well - Terence Trent D'Arby
It Takes Two - Rob base and DJ EZ Rock
The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air - DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince
Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
Undone (The Sweater Song) - Weezer

Jukebox the Ghost

This Thursday I made my second adventure to the 9:30 Club in DC to see a band I accidentally walked away from a year and a half ago. In March of 2010 Jukebox the Ghost headlined a show with Tally Hall and Skybox at DC's Black Cat. I was there for Tally Hall, having never listened to either of the other bands before. Unfortunately, it was a school night and I was focused on meeting the guys of Tally Hall. So I left, and that was a big mistake.

I imagine your grandmother would like the guys of Jukebox the Ghost. They're nerds. But that's okay, because their fans would probably consider themselves nerdy too. They're music is catchy, poppy, and theatrical with just a hint of apocalyptic terror. As Ben Thornwell, their pianist, and Jesse Kristin, their drummer, put it in an interview before they took the stage, "classical music as a genre... mixed with prog rock and punk new wave" is what they sound like. In the end though, its all just really fun music.

Despite some technical hiccups at the beginning of the set, their live sound was one of the tightest I've ever heard. For a three piece band, they put out a super full sound. Thornwell and guitarist Tommy Siegel both have amazing voices that match their talent on their respective instruments. Spooky apocalyptic songs like "Static" were balanced by playful covers of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and the infamous "Never Gonna Give You Up". They introduced two songs from their new record  for the DC crowd, "Somebody" and "Say When", which promise a little more funk inspired guitar style from Siegel than has been heard previously. Their album Everything Under the Sun is available now and their new album comes out in 2012.

Are You Experienced?

As I prepare to go to a show in DC tonight for a band that many of my friends have not heard of, it occurs to me that discovering new music is a serious problem for a lot of people. We are creatures of habit, and even I find myself listening to the same albums over and over again. There's a sense of familiarity and a touch of nostalgia in listening to a favorite album, Stadium Arcadium comes to mind for me. This habit of listening to the same music over and over doesn't help us discover new music though. I get it, finding new bands requires a bit of work. First you have to find a suggestion of a band someone thinks you might like. Then you have to listen to a few songs, and if you're not hooked by the first couple, there's a chance you might never listen again. Even if you do like the first few songs you listen to, it takes several listens to become familiar enough with the band's work to consider yourself a fan. I have a way out of that. We need to rediscover old music.

It always shocks me to find out that I have friends who have never listened to Jimi Hendrix. As much as Rolling Stone gets criticized for making classic rock-centric lists, Hendrix tops their "100 Greatest Guitarists" list, and with good reason. Although people who haven't given Jimi a seriously listen dismiss him as an acid dropping hippie, he revolutionized the way the guitar is played and was a fantastic blues player. Which, starting with Robert Johnson and the delta blues could be considered the first really American music.

There aren't a whole lot of blues standards anymore. Without getting too technical, I feel comfortable saying that all of the pop music on the radio today is based on the same three chords that a standard twelve-bar blues uses. There's really no such thing as "new music" when its all based on the same music that we've been listening to for a hundred years now. So if you have trouble finding "new" music, but haven't listened to Hendrix, you're really doing yourself a disservice since all of the electric guitar players you're listening to now pull from him (for the record, I understand that "all players" is a pretty strong statement, but I don't know anyone who plays guitar seriously and doesn't know "Purple Haze"). If you're a Hendrix virgin, start with Are You Experienced?. By the end, you'll be able to say "yes."

Impossible

I wanted my first post to be about what has been the most influential album in my life, Are You Experienced? However, as I started looking at other albums from 1967 to have something to compare to, I quickly became aware that it is impossible to talk about just that one album. I've always thought that the music I listen to now (and I'm not talking about what is on the radio, more on that in a later post) could be traced back to Hendrix, or The Beatles, or Bob Dylan. I have not changed my mind about that. What I have changed my mind about is that you can't talk about any one of these artists without the others.

Looking through my collection of 60's music I find The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys and Cream, to name a few. What is not included is The Velvet Underground. So I took a quick listen. What I found was that  I probably didn't even need to listen to this band to talk about them. Their sound is already so in everything else I listen to. Lou Reed sounds like Bob Dylan to me on tracks like "Heroin" and "There She Goes Again". The feedback and distortion sounds are staples of Hendrix's playing.

Usually when I am asked the question "what does that band sound like?" I usually respond by comparing the band in question to another band. But perhaps a better, albeit more vague response, is "They sound like music." Musicians today have an entire catalog of musical history to pull from. Everyone sounds like someone else because they are all inspired by what is going on around them and what went on years before them. Its impossible to talk about one artist if they all draw from each other. It is impossible to talk about a single artist without also talking about the context in which their art was created.

The Beginning

My friend Daniel Singer and I met on a baseball team in the seventh grade. Sitting on the bench waiting our turn to bat, we would talk about our favorite Green Day songs, since that was what our middle school selves were into. Now we're both in college.

We've come a long way, but nothing has really changed. Nearly every weekend I take a ten minute walk to south campus, rain or shine (or snow on one particular October night), and we spend a good portion of our time talking about music. Our tastes have changed, but we never shy away from a good talk about the high points of the latest Fun. single or the influence of the Beach Boys on a band like Tally Hall.

I'm starting this blog because it has occurred to me that I spend most of my free time now listening to new music. I've become quite the Spotify addict and have an active "to listen to" list. I've started shying away from just listening to catchy pop tunes and wonky rock to dabble in some hip hop. The point is, I need a place where I can organize all of these thoughts about new and old music into one place, and "Led Zeppelin IV is really good #rockstars" is not enough. As far as reviews go, I've never been and don't really plan on becoming a frequent Pitchfork or Rolling Stone reader or anything like that. Thumbs up and thumbs down is too simple. Even a ten point scale doesn't seem to do a piece of art justice. More useful questions are "how much is this influenced by past musicians?" or for an older work, "how is this album/song still relevant?" In addition to "reviewing" some albums, I'd like to answer some deeper questions like "as performers and consumers of music in 2011, are we responsible for knowing what is popular, even if what is popular is not 'good' music?" Maybe once in a while I'll come up with a "top five" list in true High Fidelity fashion.

Although I'm studying Electrical Engineering here at UMD and Dan is off learning about Twitter and iPads, music has in no way left us. He has his radio show (Pastiche Quiche on 88.1 WMUC Wed. @ 3pm) and I'm in the marching and jazz band here. Neither of us are ever going to be professional musicians. Dan will probably write comedy articles for some newspaper or start the next Cracked.com. I'll graduate and get a job behind a desk in some cubicle. But we'll always be listening. And with that, let the blogging begin...

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose