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Posts Tagged ‘Music’

Recently Wilco streamed their new album, “Wilco” on their website.   I had a chance to listen to it on a few different occasions, and I was impressed.   Wilco, I would argue, has put out one of the strongest albums in the last 10 years with “Sky Blue Sky” and I felt like they never would have reached that type of album composition ever again.  Well, in their self-titled album, they most certainly came close to setting the bar that they set just two years ago…

Part of the reason that this album has the same polished composition as “Sky Blue Sky” is because Wilco brought back Jim Scott, who helped mix Sky Blue Sky.   Wilco has come with an understanding that very few bands come with anymore.   Bands and artists have another instrument at hand when recording an album, as Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s front man would say, “use the studio as another instrument.”

Today, very few bands and artists are making full albums that have an overarching mood or theme.  Wilco, however, doesn’t look at an individual song without looking at the album as a whole.   In the world of iTunes and digital downloading, bands don’t feel the need to develop complete and polished albums.  There are still people like me who want to see good albums, from beginning to end that have a theme, a mood, a melody that sticks throughout the whole album.  And yet, there are still bands like Wilco who want to create good albums from beginning to end, hence, my admiration for coming out with another masterpiece.

This is “You Are My Face” off of their last album “Sky Blue Sky.”   This song most certainly captures a less is more feel to it, and exemplifies the beauty in rock and roll.

The album will be due out on June 30.   Check it out.

Ahh, yes, concert season has arrived, and what a year it is going to be.

As most of you know, Phish, my passion above and beyond any other band, has returned to the stage after a four year hiatus.   I get to see them in June.   Recently, I just bought tickets to Coldplay, the worlds most popular band today.   Tonight, I went to my first of many gigs, Trampled By Turtles.

Trampled By Turtles was very good, as expected.  There were only a couple hundred people at the show, but these guys really know how to rock out and improvise.  Their performance shows why they are one of the more predominantly known Newgrass groups touring today.

April 18 TRAMPLED BY TURTLES

June 20-21 PHISH

The most anticipated weekend of the year, at least for me.  I expect Phish to pull about 60 songs out of their hat this weekend, with extended jamming and a polished sound.   This is the last two days of their early summer tour, so I assume they’ll do something ecstatic.   Can’t wait!

July 24 THE MARSHALL TUCKER BAND

This one just came to my attention last night.  These guys are coming to the Calumet Theatre.   A perfect prerequisite to what who I get to see the following evening, Coldplay!

July 25 COLPLAY

Claimed to be the most popular band in the world, when these guys come to the United States, its a must-see.   These guys put on a magical show.

August 22 GAELIC STORM

These guys are something else, and I’m pretty excited they are coming back up to the Copper Country.   They have some talent when they really let loose, though this song does not necessarily expose that talent.

TBD EVE 6

Then you have Eve 6, the pop-punk band from the late nineties.   I used to listen to these guys all the time, and as my values changed, I don’t really keep up with the punk rock genre of music much anymore.   Nonetheless, its a show in Houghton, and I’m all for seeing these guys as they should put on a pretty good show.

Well, thats the arsenal for the year 2009 at this point.   I’m pretty pumped.   Maybe, if Phish plays in Chicago or Minneapolis for New Years Eve, I can spend my NYE party with them, but those days haven’t been released yet.   Dave Matthews Band should be playing songs off their new album, so if the price is right, I would like to see them this year as well.   Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and The Faces are also on my radar, but those tend to be $200 tickets a pop.   Maybe next year….

I went on a Bob Dylan jag this afternoon.   His playlists on my compressed version of my iTunes library consists of very few artists, those in which I most admire obviously went back onto my library first(since my recent crash of multimedia on my hard drive).    I decided to explore Dylan on YouTube, something I haven’t done in a while, and I stumbled across these.

Figured I’d share what is the most influential musician of the last 50 years.

Today, I was looking to add Boxee back onto my AppleTV.   When Apple released their last update, it cleared my AppleTV of anything that I had installed on it.   This was frustrating enough, as you would think that Apple would be willing to let others make their product better.   Long story short, you have to use a flash drive to install any software onto an AppleTV.   This involves partitioning the flashdrive.  I think you can see where this is going.

Since I have have done this before, I was just flying through the process of getting the files assembled into a folder on my desktop.   I hit the installation button and the partioning begins.   I noticed this process was taking entirely too long.   Then, it hit me.   I partitioned my external hard drive.   No, not the one with all my Time Machine Backups.   I partitioned the one with all my media: photographs, 90 gigs of music, and a bunch of movies that I converted to MPEG4.    I was close to having a mental breakdown.   Technology did not fail me, I failed technology.

So now over the next few weeks, perhaps months, I have to regather everything.  Luckily, I had about a third of my music backed up on DVD-Rs, the other two thirds is on CD-Rs or CDs.   My work/school files I have regathered from the servers at work, saving me some valuable time.  I can only begin to imagine that after I regather everything, I’ll also find that I’ve lost something else.

This has quite literally been the most difficult year for my technological dependency.   I’ve had computers crash multiple times, and have been able to get back up and running in a short period of time.  Well, not this tiem.   I’ve had terrible luck, and its almost all been my fault, not the wonderful world of technology.   Looks like I might be purchasing a Time Capsule for my Time Machine, that way I can have two media hard drives, one as a backup.   This is ridiculous.

Moral of the story, if you’re going to install things onto a jailbroken device, make sure Karma is on your side, and take the extra time to pay attention to what you are doing.   Taking that extra time to go over the installation process could save you a lot more time in the end.

The Rolling Stones