Bob Padgett

Fig. 1: BOLDISH COFFEES.

It’s time to get your groove(shark) on with a magical new InMyEars playlist. No music lesson this week. Just a great bunch of charts complete with a prêt-a-manger widget:

• Three stellar tracks from David Gray, including two from his recent album Foundling (“Only The Wine” is the latest inductee into my EternalOneTrackRepeat™ Hall Of Fame, soon to be unveiled);
• Two from Coldplay‘s bodacious Viva La Vida, Or, Death And All His Friends (don’t space out and miss the last three minutes of “Lovers In Japan”);
• Rogue Wave covering their own track “Eyes,” plus the better-known studio version of the same song, which I referenced  a few weeks back;
• Questionable pleasures from Taio Cruz (“Dynamite”—with thanks to @abtaylor3 for the reco last summer) and James Blunt (“Same Mistake”—sorry, I can’t shake the ah-ooooo-oo-oo-oo-oo refrain);
• and a track each from Takka Takka, Federico Aubele, Mat Kearney, Michael Bublé, and The Carpenters.

OK, Turkeys, get InMyEars already. Direct link to my Grooveshark below the widget, if you fancy.

Hop into this handy intergalactic wormhole if you prefer to go listen with my pet Shark.

If you like this playlist, tell your friends, oy? And I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

This is just a picture. Playlist widget below.

A brand new, double-bodacious playlist to jumpstart your weekend. Twenty-one songs to sink your teeth into alllllll weekend. Coldplay, Federico Aubele, Rogue Wave, Alison Krauss, Mystery Jets, Fernando Ortega, Oppenheimer*, The Pogues, Dylan LeBlanc, Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová (AKA The Swell Season—the duo that acted and sang (and swore…) their indie hearts out in the motion picture Once), The Cars (everyone needs a little 80s in their life), and a few others you’ve found InMyEars before, too, including William Fitzsimmons, Mat Kearney, and Bruce Hornsby, plus Glee’s cover of “Defying Gravity,” sure to double-please all those fans of Wicked AND GLEE, which I’m tempted to refer to simply as “GLEEN.”

What’s that, Turkeys? You want to learn something? OK.

1. Listen up to Mystery Jets’ “Dreaming of Another World” and tell me what decade you THINK it came from. Now, tell me all the reasons WHY you think it’s from then—what do you hear that makes it SOUND like it came from then. Tone colors, instrumentation, phonation, harmonic progression, homophonic v. polyphonic vocal harmonies, effects, production, lyrics/content, and so forth. If you know some fancy words, be a music fathead. If you don’t, just use your own vocabulary. We’ll all get what you mean just fine. Go ahead, actually type some responses in the comments, OY?
   Incidentally, it might be fun to listen to this one back to back with The Cars’ “You Might Think” just for grins. Then again, you might think I’m crazy.
2. Some think of Fernando Ortega’s music and composing as being hymnodic in style. No, not hypnotic. Hymnodic. As in, like, kinda like a hymn. Give it a listen and tell me some reasons why “How Deep The Father’s Love For Us” might be called a hymn even though there were no dinosaurs alive when it was written and recorded (Aside from Nessie, of course, with respect to Marshall and Lily).
3. Do you find funky meters interesting? Maybe you do, without knowing it. Try counting a steady count thru “When Your Mind’s Made Up” by Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová (The Swell Season), from the soundtrack of Once. As in, “One, Two, Three, Four,….” How are the beats grouped? Is it a typical three or four in a measure/group? If you weren’t listening for it, would you have noticed it was not a typical number of beats? Probably not, right? Because they make it work so well. What are things they do that make it work smoothly?
4. Give Federico Aubele’s “Ante Tus Ojos” a careful listen or two and see how many different repeating patterns you can identify. Not a phrase that comes back once in a while, but a phrase, gesture, line, melody that repeats over and over. A repeating phrase or melody like this in music is often referred to as an ostinato. If you go back, you’ll find oodles of these ostinati in Thievery Corporation’s “Exploration” from our last playlist (The InMyEars Spring Break Edition—might be worth a re-listen). No surprise to find that Thievery Corporation and Federico Aubele are tight homies, and have done a lot of work together.
5. I’ve got more, but needn’t overwhelm. Come up with some thought-provoking questions of your own. Yes, go ahead and ask them. Preferably without any expletives.

And now, without further ado, behold, the WeekendImproverWidget™, for your listening and ear-expanding delight. A written-out setlist seems a little redundant since the tunes are all listed on the widget. Anyone disagree? As ever, if you’d prefer to listen over at the SharkyShark, hit the jump. Sometime this coming week I might explain a little about how I’ve set up the InMyEars™ playlists on my Grooveshark, so you can subscribe to them to stalk what’s next if you wish.

Rats, I just burned my chocolate chip cookies. Hope you appreciate the labor of love a little extra this time.

*NB: Grooveshark catalog’s (unacknowledged) ErrorOfTheWeek™: “Nine Words” is by Oppenheimer, not the well-known New Jersey cover band “How I Met Your Mother (Soundtrack).”

This is just a picture. The listening widget is down the page.

Happy Tuesday, Turkeys (fellow listeners). A very happy Spring Break to many of you! For the rest of us, we survived Monday—hopefully Like A Conqueror. And now, here’s a shiny new playlist (widget below) to reward you and jumpstart the second half of your Tuesday. There are tunes from artists including Bruno Mars, Britt Nicole, Thievery Corporation, Broken Records (thanks for the tip, Mike Ferrara), William Fitzsimmons, the Glee Cast, and Sara Bareilles (including “The Light,” one I’ve mentioned before for its power to make a grown man cry). A bunch of great soundtracks feature prominently: In Good Company (Iron & Wine’s “Sunset Soon Forgotten”), Dan In Real Life (Sondre Lerche’s “Let My Love Open The Door), Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Mark Mothersbaugh’s 80′s-esque Casio-style “Nick and Norah’s Theme”), Heroes (Wendy & Lisa’s “Peter” theme from the instrumental score for the TV show), Glee (the cast’s take on “Lean On Me”), and The Freedom Writers (will.i.am’s “I have a dream,” featuring the Black Eyed Peas).

Two other items I’d like to highlight:

1. Two of the tunes use pre-recorded speech, which is integrated right into the groove of the song–“I Have A Dream” (Black Eyed Peas) and “Exploration” from Thievery Corporation (it is not by The Trews–sorry for the typo in Grooveshark’s catalog). If you’ve ever had a chance to mess around with sequencing apps that use loops, like Garage Band or Super Duper Music Looper (yes, that’s a real application), then this sort of idea is not totally foreign to you. It certainly adds a different feel and, in the case of both these songs, gives a strong sense of hearkening to something else, someone else—a different time and place, if you dig.
2. Behold the awesome use of alternating 5′s and 6′s to offset the meter in the chorus of Sara Bareilles’ “Let The Rain.” Once you’ve had a chance to take the song in at face value, go back and see what happens if you try to keep a steady count all the way thru (i.e. “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3….”). The majority of the song sits in a nice duple/quadruple groove (something like 4/4 or 2/2 for you music nerds) but then it promptly drops into a complex mix of measures of 5 or 6 beats for the chorus. Go ahead, knock yourself out and get a little education while you’re listening.

As ever, if you’d rather make a flying leap over to my Grooveshark and listen there, by all means clickety clicky right here. And if you use grooveshark or last.fm, let’s connect in those places–friend/follow me (links to my profiles below), so I can reciprocate and start stalking YOUR listening, too.

As ever, I’d appreciate your feedback here in the comments (click thru to the individual post if you don’t see a place for comments at the bottom of this page).

Stay tuned, Turkeys. Next playlist will probably dig back into some indie stuff and other less mainstream music and artists I’ve been introduced to via Last.fm. But no guarantees—you just never know what you might find InMyEars™….

Bob on Grooveshark

Bob on Last.fm

Can’t wait for the weekend? No problem. I’m here to make Thursday AND your whole weekend awesome! Here’s a bodacious playlist to jumpstart the tail end of the week. And to see you through the weekend. Just give the widget time to load and then hit play. (There’s a link below if you want to listen to it over on Grooveshark.)

What you can look forward to:

• Kris Allen‘s “Live Like We’re Dying”
• “Be Surprised” from the Dan In Real Life Soundtrack, by the strikingly original Sondre Lerche
• The two opening tracks from Sara Bareilles‘ exceptional new album, Kaleidoscope Heart (make sure you get a good listen to this whole album sometime—it’s superb)
• Mat Kearney‘s “City Of Black And White”
• Two dear tracks from Iron & Wine, featured on the soundtrack of In Good Company
• “Everything” by Michael Bublé
• Two tracks from Bruce Hornsby‘s Levitate (the title track of the album was featured in Spike Lee’s documentary Kobe Doin’ Work, for which Bruce wrote the soundtrack)
• The bewitching “Samba 1000″ from Thievery Corporation
• And a spacey, spacious spin on Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” by Kyte.

OK, get listening. And tell me what you think in the comments below!

If you’re a Grooveshark user and/or you’d rather hit the jump and listen to the playlist inside Grooveshark, here’s the link:
Rock out InMyEars™ on Grooveshark