• R.E.M. :: Automatic for the People / Monster – my first favorite albums
• Phish :: a Live One / Billy Breathes – my first musical obsession
• Miles Davis :: Kind of Blue / Sketches of Spain – my 1982 datsun in hs had these two albums on a tape, listened every day for 3 months … two classics
• Miles Davis :: Live Evil – Michael Henderson’s bass is unreal on this … incredible playing by Miles
• Cannonball Adderley :: Somethin’ Else – perfection
• John Coltrane :: Blue Train – Lee Morgan’s solo on Blue Train is unreal
• John Coltrane :: a Love Supreme – the absolute best expression of spirituality I’ve ever heard/seen/felt
• MMW :: Combustication – didn’t know jazz was going to progress to modern times until I heard this
• Radiohead :: Amnesiac – late to the Radiohead train, this was my first. I’m obsessed now.
• Wilco :: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – a band I’m looking forward to getting old with
• Stravinsky :: The Rite of Spring – Listened to this obsessively in the spring of 03 … reminds me of the strange tension and lies that brought us to an ill conceived/illegal war.
• Mahler :: Das Lied Von Der Erde – Nobody ends a symphony like Mahler. The end of the final movement is breathtaking. I stop whatever I’m doing now and stare at the wall when I hear this.
• Bartok :: Symphony for Orchestra – intensity
• Black Star :: Black Star – my first introduction to hip hop …
• Joni Mitchell :: Blue – grew up with this album. This album defines beauty and the disappointments of youth.
• Van Morrison :: Moondance – the other album I grew up with. a classic
• the Beatles :: Rubber Soul – My first Beatles album. Any self respecting person ought to remember the first time they heard the Beatles.
• Clifford Brown :: with Strings – he recorded this at 24, just a year before he died. He played it with the maturity of a grown adult … a shame.
• Lee Morgan :: Sidewinder – Lee Morgan has the technique of a high flying gymnast.
• Flaming Lips :: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots – A modern classic
• The Roots :: Things Fall Apart – I had no idea hip hop could sound like this before I heard it.
• Elliot Smith :: xo – I remember walking around Fremont smoking after work to stay warm while I waited for the bus to get home in the cold. This was the soundtrack.

I had a blog that about 5 people read on a yearly basis. It was called, http://birth.ofthecool.com, I updated it every 2 months, and never told anybody about it. I’ve tried to be a little more active on this new blog and decided to collapse the old blog to the new blog. 

All birth.ofthecool.com blog entries can be viewed here.

I grabbed a copy of this at work the other day and I listened to it for about two weeks straight. I listened to it with the kind of obsession reserved for only select bands. I listened to it in my car, while eating dinner, at work, on the iPod on the bus. It’s a simple piece of work, when it comes down to it. Female songwriter with a killer band playing interesting instruments, interesting progressions with great musicianship; you’ve heard that before, right? Not this band, you haven’t heard a band that sounds like this before, I guarantee. Thao Nguyen has the kind of voice that you remember. It’s not pitch perfect, nor is it sweet like so many singers on the radio. But it’s totally 100% honest. The lyrics are funny without being cheesy. I adore her voice.

“I am all in a ball,
In your front yard,
I have this bag of hammers,
and I won’t ask you to come in,
cause I have sold everything”

The band … gawd damn, these guys are good. There are some heavy hitters on the album, that’s for sure. Seattle organist Wayne Horvitz, indie rock queen Laura Veirs, Tucker Martine. The grooves are in the pocket, but not stiff. The band plays with confidence and intensity. There are great little guitar lines in the background that pop and fizzle, occasionally meeting up with the piano/organ. Cool horn lines come in to cover the chorus. Plus, the band knows when to say when and sometimes provides a little silence in the breaks. Clapping, snapping, tongue in cheek noises (literally, not figuratively), all give the album the sprinkles on the sundae.

“I will keep my station wagon stationary,
and I will learn to juggle all the things we carry,
Must be hard on your bodyguards,
when you charge at icicles”

As an avid reader of Tape-Op magazine, I was glad to see that they recorded a portion of the album at Jackpot! studios in Portland with Larry Crane. Portland is a lucky town.

“Let’s go home and eat sweet things,
throw our arms across our eyes
they are angry like motorcycles,
tuck your chin and ride”

Oh ya, the beginning of the song Geography reminds me of Norah Jones. Then Thao’s voice comes in and I breathe a sigh of relief. Thao’s an IPA (hoppy and interesting), while Norah is more of a Lager (simpler and domestic).

Don’t steal this record, buy it.

p.s. Please come back to Seattle soon.

It reminded me of the news of Maharishi dying from earlier this week. He was an awfully important dude. He introduced transcendental meditation to the west. He also had a song written about him by the Beatles. The name was changed from ‘Maharishi’ to ‘Sexy Sadie’ prior to recording.

… and I don’t care.

EMI in the past year has lost Radiohead, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones from it’s roster. Last week they laid off 2,000 people. The other majors aren’t too far behind either. The word is, jobs at the labels are being lost left and right.

According to Bob Lefsetz of the LefsetzLetter …

Sales in 2007, including both physical and digital, topped out at 500.5 million albums. The peak year was 2000, when 785 million units were sold. So, you’d expect sales of best sellers to drop by approximately one third, or 36.25%, to be exact. 

There are are so many reasons for the majors to die. They refused to grow beyond what they had at the peak of music purchasing in 2000. They refused to redraw their business plan when the technology allowed people to get whatever they wanted, when they wanted. They waited for silicon valley to make the easiest, sexiest, and most satisfying method. It turns out that silicon valley would much rather sell ipods than maximize profits on singles.

I was in college from 1999-2003 and I hated file sharing. When I lived in the dorms it was the first time I experienced having a high speed connection every day. I downloaded Napster to my iMac (baby blue, 6gb’s on the HD, 350mHz processor) and I tried to steal as much as I could. As a college student, what you don’t get caught for isn’t really illegal. I loved music more then anything else in the world. My cd collection had been growing substantially, I spent the previous summer following Phish for 3 shows, nothing else seemed to matter but listening to music or playing my trumpet. Napster always gave me nothing but crap. Even when I did find the music that I wanted, it was incomplete, poor quality. Most of the time, I didn’t find anything close to the eclectic tastes I had as a 18 year old (regrettably, I listen to far more mainstream music now).

When iTunes came about in 2001 it was a revelation. I loved the fact that I didn’t have to hike from my dorm room to the Tower Records on University Way to buy a CD if I wanted something right away. I loved the fact that you knew what the quality would be when you purchased it. I loved the fact that you knew it would be the entire song. I still didn’t get into buying any music from the iTunes music store until i received my first iPod in 2003. It held 10gb’s and I loved it. I told everyone I had a new best friend. At the time I was finishing up my music degree from the University of Washington. I remember walking through the halls of the School of Music with my white earbuds in thinking, why the hell does nobody else have one of these. I could listen to essentially anything I wanted to without worrying about hauling 100 cd’s around in my backpack all day.

The major labels have abandon what made them big and great. They built artists careers. They promoted quality musicians. Not junk that sells heavy for a summer and goes away the next (souja boy, wtf??!?). They got greedy and stopped treating it as a record label and started maximizing profits over the short term, rather than long term.

Once record labels lost the main distribution point, they lost the industry. In ten years, two more labels will consolidate and we’ll be left with 3 (not-so major) majors. In ten years, all music that is purchased digitally will be equal in quality to uncompressed music. In ten years, digital sales will account for > 75% of all music sales. In ten years, homeowners insurance will cover hard drive failure for those who don’t back up their music. And most importantly, in ten years, artists will have the ability to make most of the money they earn without paying middle managers in suits at record labels.

The major record label is dead and you should be happy.

Long live Ubiquity, Nonesuch, Concord, Kill Rock Stars, Sub Pop, Okay Player, Rope-a-Dope, and all the other purveyors of quality music.

I’m really excited to get going on the next album. We’re writing a concept album in the vein of Yoshimi/Tommy/etc. I guarantee it won’t take another two years to finish.

If you want to buy Starshine on the Devilwoods now, go to iTunes (or amazon mp3, rhaphsody, emusic, etc.). If you’re into getting a real CD, just like the ‘ole days. Wait another couple weeks. We’ll have a humble cd release show in the next couple months, as well.

Dr. Dog, “We All Belong”:
I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about this band from the musical tastes makers that I trust the most (see: favorite local and national writers, band mates, and friends). The album was everything I expected it to be. Most people seem to say that they remind them of the Beatles. I have a hard time hearing that, because while everyone WANTS to be the Beatles, nobody but the Beatles actually is. Luckily, these guys don’t let down. The whole album is full of great songs that make you want to sing along, listen intently to the changes or just rock out. These guys are great, I’m really looking forward to appropriately absorbing the album over the next month (or more).

Two Gallants, self titled:
The Stranger is all over these guys as the savior of music, in general. As a loyal reader, I felt obligated to give them a listen. They’re good, not great. Good songwriting, interesting (enough) melodies, and good musicianship made it worthwhile. Kind of reminded me of Tom Petty (?).

West Indian Girl, “4th & Wall”:
They’ve got it all, good horn sections, nice songwriting, and (I never thought I’d write this) good electronic dance beats. The combination makes me feel okay about listening to it. I don’t think there is a single bad song on that album and enough variety to please the whole family.

btw, I really wish the Rockies would win a couple games to make this World Series interesting. Another sweep would be really, really, really boring.

Last week I plopped down the money for it, and boy is it nice. The tuner was a former music teacher who is now an elementary school teacher. He explained to me that most piano tuners use software these days. He happened to have a nifty HP iPaq Pocket PC with some pretty advanced tuning software. Piano tuning is a very difficult time consuming skill. The pros have hearing that has been learned and perfected over many years. The biggest problem with tuning a piano is temperament. My friend John has a nice article explaining temperament on his blog.

But seriously, I was rocking out to it today. Was I cliche? Please tell me …

My first time seeing them was in April 06 in Amsterdam. I had been meaning to see them a long time ago, but it always seemed to fall through. That show more than made up for it. Andrea and I didn’t have tickets to the sold out show, so we went and waited in front of the Paradiso a couple of hours before. Wayne walked by while I was talking to a British fella. He was really friendly and shook our hands while he walked by. Later on, we had procured one ticket, but were still trying to get a second. Another guy came out with an all-access pass on his leg. I asked him if he had any extra tickets. He said he might and that, “someone had put his name on the guest list a couple of extra times.” We talked for 2-3 minutes and he said to wait here and he’d be back in 10 minutes. So we continued our quest for one more ticket at face value. It came through a couple of minutes later. We disappeared into a local pub to get a pint before the show. Turns out, that guy that had a couple of extra tickets was none other than Michael Ivins. While he was outside, he was looking for fans to dress up in santa suits and alien costumes to dance on stage. Upon further inspection, we both realized that other people looking for tickets, like us, were dressed up and getting down on stage. Damn! That would have been a thrill.

I would recommend anybody and everybody with a pulse to see them. It’s just a good fucking time.