Good morning, Interwebs. Hope you all had a great weekend. May I introduce you to the lovely music and haunting vocals of Rosi Golan? In the last few months, I have spent a fair amount of time listening to her music, and it’s lovely. I’ve put together a playlist over on my Grooveshark to get you started.
If you’d like to know more about Rosi, here’s her page on last.fm, which includes bio and more info–as well as an alternate way to listen to some tracks if Grooveshark doesn’t work for you (those without mobile Grooveshark subscriptions, those with un-jailbroken Apple devices, etc.).
Yesterday, the world said goodbye to Davy Jones, best known as an anchor of The Monkees. CNN had a nice write up, if you missed it. I linked to it on Twitter yesterday. For those of you who would like a trip down memory lane, or who need a primer on these oddly-spelled ape-cousins and one-time television and pop music sensations, look no further. I have prepared an InMyEars playlist chock full of Monkees goodness to get you started or get you sentimental.
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.
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).”
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:
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.
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™….
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
Well, this is what it’s all about. Something special, important to me that I hope will be of value to you. Value—not more noise from the interwebs. Here, I offer you not just a fine tune or recommended artist, but a well-honed playlist of some of the tunes that have been InMyEars the most. In truth, this one has been ready for a while, waiting for the right time to launch. Hope you’ll enjoy the HANDY WIDGET, enabling you to listen right here while you catch up on your bobpadgett.com fix.
I’d really like to hear some feedback about this playlist, these songs, and all this InMyEars™ stuff in the comments. Will you take time to chime in?
NB: Here’s a link for direct Grooveshark listening if you prefer. If you’re a Grooveshark user, you can also subscribe to any of my playlists and simply listen to them there in your own window. You’ll find me under the cryptic, mysterious username bobpadgett .
OK, yes, there’s admittedly some nostalgia involved in this for me—my older sisters listened a lot to The Carpenters back in the proverbial day. But it’s also lovely, enduring, chart-topping, memorable, beautiful, achy, haunting, yearning music. Richard Carpenter is a musical wizard, regardless of whether he’s barking up your preferred genre tree. And Karen Carpenter left a permanent hole in audiosphere when she left us far too young. I won’t dishonor her voice by any further attempt suitably to laud it.
Younglings, don’t be scared off by the era. I realize it may make you feel like you’re kickin it ElevatorMusicStyle™, but may I invite you to an extended listen? Go ahead, risk creating a rift in the space-time continuum. It’s music everyone should know. Really. And stay with it for a while—like the first minutes of a movie in black and white, you’ll get past the hurdle and it’s well worth it. I offer you a pretty nice cross-section of The Carpenters’ catalog, conveniently pre-chewed for you InMyEars™ at my Grooveshark.
Rogue Wave’s “Eyes” will forever stir up images in my mind of Hiro Nakamura staring up into the sky in search of deeper meaning and a unique world-changing niche for his life. I’m referring to an early episode of Season 1 of Heroes, in case you’re not familiar. There’s something profoundly beautiful to me about those early episodes of Heroes, as Hiro and Peter Petrelli and others wrestle with inner yearnings and big dreams and life-altering visions of, well, flying and bending the space-time continuum. And those yearnings and dreams and visions are tightly wrapped up in their corresponding, haunting motifs and themes–soundtrack excerpts that years later still stir something in me and reactivate the screen, if you will, of my own mind.
I marvel at the power of music to create and extend and then hearken back to the dramatic content of a story, a movie, or moments from our own lives. I have largely been moved to create music for this very purpose, particularly in your lives who listen to what I craft.
Are there songs from the soundtrack of your life that have had this kind of abiding, meaningful association? I’d enjoy hearing about them.
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And give it a listen at the link below. It’ll take a sec to load, but its worth it. Also, if you’re a Grooveshark user, you can find me under the username bobpadgett .
As a full-time stay-at-home dad these days, I often find myself with my hands full. By which I mean, full of different things than they once were, and not so much full of pencils and paper and pianos and performing. This time is a treasure and I’m not interested in trading it away for anything, musical or otherwise. And while this season has not left me with a lot of time for writing and performing and recording, there will be time for such things when there is time.
BUT, while my hands have been full, I’ve made it a point to get my EARS full as well. I’ve found some great tools for discovering, listening to, and sharing new music, and I’ve got some things to share with you.
So I’d like to invite you to hop into my ears. If you’re interested, you’ve got some options:
Come find me on last.fm! I use last.fm to “scrobble” all my listening (from several streaming radio sites, my droid, my own computer, etc.)—and I do the majority of my listening right on last.fm as well. My last.fm profile is public, so you can go look me up there if you’re a user or you want to be.
If you shark your groove, hit me up over on Grooveshark—I do a lot of my focused listening there, and I’ll probably also use their playlist-sharing feature here in this thread from time to time.
If you rock the tweets, you can follow @WBBP (my listening feed) on twitter. It’s almost entirely auto-tweeted via RSS feed from last.fm. (If you’re looking for the warm fuzzy goodness of non-listening-related tweetage, hit up @bob_padgett instead.)
If you’re not a real-time-listening-following-web-stalker-monger, and you’d just like to be there when I talk up a tune or share a playlist, well then, you’re in the right place. Just watch things here on the InMyEars™ tab at bobpadgett.com. And don’t be a wallflower—say something, react, like or dislike, analyze, give us a pithy Schenkerian reduction, anything. Let’s talk, people.
What do you say? Will you join me?
(Before I sign off, let me frontload the disclaimer, so I can skip it in the future: I am not necessarily “recommending”each song I reference (let alone listen to), but rather presenting them to you, encouraging you to join me in a conversation. There may be songs that captivate me musically and leave me wanting or even displeased with lyrics and/or programmatic content (or vice-versa). And it could be that, from time to time, the former delight will outweigh the latter resistance and I might very well share such a song from time to time. Each post will have a place for comments, and I’d love to hear what you think and experience as you listen, initially as well as over time.)
This dear, quiet chart spends a lot of time on one-track-repeat these days. Morning and evening. It’s a pretty sweet phonic companion. Go ahead, hop InMyEars™, friends.
Trying to sort receipts and catch up on a month of paperwork. But thanks to Sara Bareilles’ “The Light” I’m just sitting in the library mopping up tears. Absolutely beautiful. Makes a man look forward to his next chance to make some music.
If there’s something here in one of these entries that strikes you, moves you, gets you thinking, join the conversation with a contribution to the comments section of an individual post by clicking through to the full post (click on the title heading of the entry). I look forward to hearing from you!
(If you want to tell someone about this InMyEars shebang, you can share this page [i.e. the whole thread] using these links below; Or, to share an individual post, use the share icons associated with that post. Thanks!)
