superbad Tiuke Tuipulotu to the fro

When and if Seth, Evan, and Fogell grow up, this guy is the one they want to be.

He has to make it big at football so we get more photos.

I love Lyle Workman's soundtrack. Time for a 70s revival!

music: pirating early Joanna Newsom albums

Joanna Newsom's bio on Drag City lists "Walnut Whales" (2002) and "Yarn and Glue" (2003) both self-released CDs. These home-made albums are no longer sold.

Bizarrely, stupidly, and short-sightedly, these songs aren't purchaseable as MP3 downloads from Amazon, even though this is exactly the sort of long-tail, low cost, make-fans-happy monetary transaction that the Internet should enable. I'll gladly pay for these songs, but can't. Probably her record company contract forbids her to release her own records.

Anyway, where legit business fails to meet a demand, the pirates step in.

• Google for "Joanna Newsom" "Walnut City"
• One of the results hits is for Mininova's tracker of a BitTorrent file. BitTorrent is a protocol for sharing files piece by piece among computers. A fan has digitized the tracks from both early CDs, and taken pictures of the covers, and included an excellent early interview.
  
• What should happen next:
  • Click to download the .torrent file, it opens in the BitTorrent client which downloads the file from peers, and a few minutes later I play the songs in my music player
    

What actually happened:

• click to download the .torrent file, BitTorrent client starts, nothing happens. After contacting the tracker, zero download activity, 0.0 kilobits per second.
  
• kill all the other inactive BitTorrent downloads, quit BitTorrent and restart, still nothing.
  
• download and install latest BitTorrent client. It reopens the torrent, shows its contents, finds 5 other members of "the swarm" but no download, no activity
• suddenly I can't access the internet at all (a coincidence?), so power off cable modem and router.
  
• tinker with the Firewall settings for BitTorrent in my P.O.S. Norton 360. It has a rule to allow some incoming and all outgoing. Just replace that with Allow all.
  
• new BitTorrent client displays a neat warning icon in its status line: "No incoming connections... could be your network". Double-clicking that leads to a dialog with a neat [Test if port is forwarded properly] button, which takes me to a neat web page that tests and says "Error! Port 6881 does not appear to be open" with a link that takes me to a neat port configuration guide.
• Indeed, my port forwarding settings are out-of-date since my Vista laptop slog, so I update my router to forward to new IP addresses
• the web page test now works, the warning icon goes away, but still no download activity
  
• disable Norton 360 Firewall altogether
• then a computer in Sweden starts handing me pieces of the file. Estimated time to download: 31 hours.
• the warning icon comes back, the web page test fails, yet the little-computer-that-could in Sweden is still slowly passing me pieces of the file
  
• 20 minutes into this two other computers join in, one handing me pieces at a rapid clip.
• After another 24 minutes I have the entire download on my computer
  
• The anonymous uploader had converted the CD tracks to Free Lossless Audio Codec format. The key is "lossless", these are shrunken files to save disk space and time but they don't use audio compression like MP3 or AAC files.

  FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.

• But Apple with their monopolistic bullshit not-invented-here "We'll only work with open source when there's a business case to do so" attitude doesn't support .flac files, so I can't play them in iTunes.
• bitch yet again about this on Apple's feedback form
• try to find the obscure music player I used last time to play flac files. Nope, not Media Player Classic, it's VideoLAN VLC music player with some Xiph codec bundle.
• play Joanna Newsom's tracks.

I feel I deserve a merit badge for getting it to work, but it is wrong. It's definitely not stealing, but it is piracy as in "copyright infringer." Alas, the Fairtunes site built by two Canadians in a dorm room that let you voluntarily donate money to artists when you rip them off went defunct years ago. Even during the Napster boom when millions of people were downloading billions of songs, they only received a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Joanna Newsom, I owe you $7.80 (13 songs at .60 cents). What's your PayPal account?

music: finally buying unprotected songs

I wrote about our multimedia phone:

The big downside so far is there's no way to play protected music files ... This is why DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is evil!

I've been jotting down a list of songs I like but not enough to buy the artist's "Greatest Hits" CD. iTunes announced iTunes Plus where you pay $0.30 more to get an unprotected track that plays anywhere; I've been meaning to put my money where my mouth is but the iTunes Store doesn't make it easy to search only for unprotected music.

But Amazon now sells MP3 downloads! Since that's all they sell, there's no will-it, won't-it work uncertainty. They're often cheaper ($0.89) than protected iTunes, let alone iTunes Plus. The quality may not be as good, but these are just pop songs. I'm going through my list:

• Search Amazon's MP3 Downloads category for artist name
• buy (Amazon Downloader puts it in iTunes library)
• search google for lyrics artist name fragment of lyrics, select and copy the lyrics
  Tip: To avoid the ads all over lyric sites, Get Firefox (try FF 3 beta, it's even better!) and install Adblock Plus
• while the MP3 downloads, search YouTube for the artist and title and watch the music video
• in iTunes' "Recently Added" playlist, right-click on song, Get Info > Lyrics, paste in lyrics
• back up your "My Music" folder (c'mon, you know you should)

I don't like having all my music ratings and lyrics tied up in Apple's proprietary iTunes software, so some day I'll switch to a different player than iTunes, maybe Amarok when KDE4 works on Windows.

Folks, your phone plays music files! (A friend got a Sanyo M-1 phone; she was stunned when I dragged a few songs onto it.) As I predicted, everything is a music player now. Digital photo frames, cars, phones, toys... if it's got speakers it'll probably play unprotected MP3 and AAC files.

Electronic downloads are instant gratification candy , but it doesn't feel right. I still have an archaic connection with the physical object of music—I was playing 12-inch 45RPM disco singles from my true library before transferring these 1s and 0s.

music: no Yes in Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

CHIC were nominated, but didn't get in this year.

You can't speak of killer musicians and the so-called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame without noticing that Yes aren't in it. That hostility towards progressive rock is inexcusable for something that pretends to reward excellence and achievement. For years in the 70s the members of classic Yes (Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman, Bill Bruford/Alan White) would appear in readers' polls for best vocals-bass-guitar-keyboards-drums. Even forgettable pop groups like the Bay City Rollers would name-drop Yes when asked for their favorite musicians. The conventional history is that the punk revolution showed how pointless talent was if it didn't have authentic street credentials. But I was there when "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the Queen" came out. People liked both kinds. The punks were hostile and dismissive towards “muso”s and musical talent, but they were hostile towards everything. If you're going to limit rock to certain attitudes, why nominate CHIC?

I played through Tales from Topographic Oceans recently. A double-album single piece of music

based on the Shastric scriptures, as found in a footnote within Paramahansa Yogananda's book Autobiography of a Yogi

is so pretentious that it satirizes itself. But there are so many themes and moods and musical figures over the 80 minutes, it's a steady delight if you ignore the over-ambitious framing. Throughout Steve Howe is a guitar god and Chris Squire unleashes the expected titanic bass solo; but Alan White's drumming is excellent, and even Rick Wakeman (who wasn't happy with the album and left the group) lends wonderful keyboards on side 2 and great shading throughout.

music: CHIC nominated for Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

I belatedly heard that CHIC were 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees. Wow, nice to see them getting respect. I loved "Everybody Dance" the moment I heard it with that killer fast bass line, and when "I Want Your Love" came out with the unique tubular bell melody and those nervous, desperate lyrics

I think of you
and I dream of you
All of the time
What am I gonna do?
I want your love, I want. Your love

They're the tightest group ever, yet they have a large sound from lots of musicians. It's like concentric circles: guitar and bass (Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards), then drums (Tony Thompson), then two girl singers and a guy, then two or three keyboard players, then the CHIC strings and brass.

I was shocked by the repetition of CHIC, especially after a diet of Yes records where after a phrase is repeated twice the melody or chords change. CHIC just gets into a groove and stays there, forcing you into submission. When I taped Risqué I got fed up with "My Feet Keep Dancing" so I switched the turntable to 45RPM. But compared to modern looped samples, CHIC's grooves are alive.

music: big men sing of heartbreak

I'm a sucker for big man laid low by the power of love. You expect women to write of such things, but when a rocker does it, he's compelled to craft a solid, ultimately uplifting song so as not to come across as a tearful whiner. To me the original is Led Zeppelin's Going to California from 1971, where Robert Plant torturously emotes

Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams,
Telling myself it's not as hard, hard, hard as it seems. ...
Going to California with an aching in my heart

(supposedly written about Joni Mitchell).

Steve Perry's Street Talk (another gem from 1984!) has some lovely aching ballads despite overly glossy production, including "Foolish Heart":

Foolish heart, heed my warning
You've been wrong before
Don't be wrong anymore

I'm feeling that feeling again
I'm playing a game I can't win

And this of course is reminiscent of "What a Fool Believes" by a master of the genre, Michael McDonald. From inside the underrated Doobie Brothers, he wrote a string of heartsick songs, climaxing in the desperate, great "Real Love":

Darlin, I know
I'm just another head on your pillow
If only just tonight, girl
Let me hear you lie just a little
Tell me I'm the only man
That you ever really loved
...
Well we've both lived long enough to know
We'd trade it all right now
For just one minute of real love

I have his first two solo albums, and he pens even deeper depths of misery, such as "That's Why":

Look back loneliness, you won't see me behind you
Hey now emptiness, no more leading the way
Go on desperateness, I don't need you beside me no more...
That's why, I won't be down very long
That's why, I'll be all right from now on

But he needs at least the memory of a hard-rocking band to make this bearable. It's easy for it to descend into "in the cabin of my BMW, I laid down and wept" sentimentality (that's my line, I'm saving it for my group). Or as Elvis Costello put it in a 1986 interview:

Two types of rock 'n' roll had become bankrupt to me. One was 'Look at me, I've got a big hairy chest and a big willy!' [obvious reference to Robert Plant] and the other was the 'Fuck me, I'm so sensitive' Jackson Browne school of seduction. They're both offensive and mawkish and neither has any real pride or confidence.

True, Elvis, true, but put them together and a hairy-chested big-willy man sings of love, and it can be magic.

music: Joanna Newsom wish partly granted

Wasn't too proud to beg:

Joanna, please please please please please please release a concert DVD!

So along comes Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band EP. "Cosmia" performed by the same band, a reworking of "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie" and a fine new song "Colleen."

I'd still love to have a video of her amazing performance. Twinned with the UK appearances with orchestra. I wonder how long before you can assemble a concert video from phone cam captures off YouTube. So long as the artist can get appropriate compensation, why not?

   "In the trough of the waves,
which are pawing like dogs,
pitch we, pale-faced and grave,
as I write in my log."
(Sawdust and Diamonds)

music: why so much sounds so bad

This short video tells you all you need to know.

More on the loudness wars here and here

I want the numbers from the last link on every CD review. Average sound level as percentage of loudest, and instances of clipping.

music: Elvis has pummeled the building

Driving up for the last skiing of a crummy season, we saw a billboard for Elvis Costello and the Imposters in Reno. I knew it would be strange to see him in a conference room/ballroom and that his recent Imposters work is channeling his rock impulses, not his wide musical horizons.

Well, it was a pounding, loud, nearly unrelenting set from the Man in black. They played a lot of Attractions' greatest hits, a great "Alibi" off When I was Cruel, an acoustic "Alison", and ended with "Pump it Up". All very predictable. It was nice to hear several songs off High Fidelity, but lacking the loose R'n'B shuffle on the album. Likewise a raucous "Shabby Doll" from Imperial Bedroom but none of the more varied tracks off that ambitious album. And nothing from the poppy albums that followed.

I'd have to lay the blame at Pete Thomas' feet. EC hailed him as a great rock drummer in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech, but without a producer to dial him back, he's just hitting hard with the knobs stuck at 7 to 10, and the rest of the band follows.

Elvis' guitar work ever since playing with Marc Ribot has tended towards noise chords accompanied by belting vocals. It's clearly an intentional musical decision, but I don't get it.

Steve Nieve gave a scintillating solo on "Clubland", but for much of the set he played that weird funhouse organ style from early Attractions.

Worthy, but one-dimensional.

music: pick jaw off floor at Joanna Newsom concert

So after listening to Ys all day we went to the concert. She was jaw-droppingly good, concert of the decade for me (not that we see many concerts). I've never ever seen an artist throw herself into a performance so completely. Just like the New Yorker review said, "Without seeing Newsom’s hands and feet, it is difficult to understand how hard she must work to pluck the strings and press the pedals while reciting by heart a small book’s worth of verse. I haven’t seen a performance of such sustained intensity all year."

She performed some solo songs off "Milk-Eyed Mender", and all of "Ys" but with a weird band (accordion, tambura, saw, glockenspiel, banjo, ...) rather than orchestra. The shrieks and cracks in her recorded vocals are obviously intentional because they were largely absent live. Watching her pour everything into her singing and playing was transporting. The reorchestrations for her band were great, the harp and strings sound from the record spread around the musicians like quadrophonics.

Joanna, please please please please please please release a concert DVD!
"And I miss your precious heart" (Cosmia)

Categories: music, JoannaNewsom

music: Joanna Newsom Ys good

As I wrote in my Amazon review of "The Milk-Eyed Mender", it's pretty straightforward: Play the Sprout and the Bean video four times in two days, and you'll know if you can get past the vocals. She does sound like Bjork's niece going nuts in detention.

I've been listening to her ambitious follow-up "Ys" all day prior to the concert. The lyrics are fantastic. The music varies, tracks 1/3/5 are standouts; it does meander over the course of the long songs. If anything the orchestrations by Van Dyke Parks (who most recently worked on Brian Wilson's "Smile") are more of an acquired taste than her voice, but they highlight the lyrics and music. She's got a strong command of her instrument in service of her songs, but she's not a harp virtuoso (I saw classical harpist Dan Yu perform, and she's about three times faster than Joanna Newsom).

It's not as balanced as "Milk-Eyed Mender" because the lyrics overpower the rest, but what lyrics. They move from precise natural descriptions (of skipping stones, puppets, meteors, ...) to talismanic phrases of birds and water, to epic adventures.

And, Emily - I saw you last night by the river
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever,
In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror

Categories: music, JoannaNewsom

music: Hejira, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorius

I used to listen to my cassettes in alphabetical order, out of a nearly perverse loyalty to the artists. I would get anxious when the 'M's came up, because that meant Joni Mitchell and I knew I'd be an emotional wreck, climaxing with "Hejira", her moody masterpiece of isolation and travelling.

On re-listening, it's not quite as great as the musical Kryptonite of my memory, though the iconic pain of "Amelia" had me sobbing gently. But Jaco Pastorius' fretless bass playing is fabulous. On songs like "Hejira" itself, the acoustic guitar just builds and builds, but there's never a trite release into a "rock-y" guitar solo, instead he plays such liquid, musical lines. It's like a submarine or a whale making its presence felt and briefly seen.

Categories: music, Hejira, JoniMitchell, JacoPastorius