Presenting The WeekendImprover™ (InMyEars™ Strikes Again)
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.
- 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. - 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).
- 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?
- 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.
- 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).”
