(note to self: This is a shallow and juvenile post. Playing bass is clearly retarding our personal development.) Playing live is better than sex. It’s sweaty, noisy fun and I can go for hours. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s slow, it’s tender, and there’s plenty of eye contact. Yes, ladies, not only am I the…
Category Archives: Music
Hipster music defined
Care of Berklee Music Blogs, and originally from Diesel Sweeties. This is very true. Hipsters, you are the death of all that is honest and joyful in the appreciation of music.
RIP Gil Scott-Heron
Wow, this was surprising news to come home to: Gil Scott-Heron has passed away. He and my friend Rory kept me going through many a retail assistant hour. Here’s a man who combined speaking a message we need to hear, with music that needed to be heard. Decades it old it may be, but The…
Turn it up louder!
Rehearsal studios often have gear with odd layouts, as I found out yesterday when I plugged by bass effects gizmo into a tuner output rather than the effects return as planned. Normally if you plug your bass into an output jack, it gets you nowhere. But it turns out you can turn it up to…
Screw the artists
I know the tech sector loves Google, automated curation, and algorithm-driven content aggregation. But essentially, the message to artists is: screw you. This is said in rather more appealing terms, of course. Witness Google’s launch of its music service: We are open to discussion, as long as those discussions are aimed at creating a product…
Four Armed Lady Gaga Guitar
I’m going to suggest to my guitarist buddy Dave that we try to do this at a gig: But only if he grows the beard.
Karmin Music
Nice cover here, hat tip to the Berklee Music Blog. Hip hop lends itself to sparse arrangements; this is as sparse as it gets. Absolutely love Amy Heidemann’s performance. Beautifully expressive expressions, if that’s not too redundant. Of course, the reason this is getting huge numbers of views is probably yet another example…
The difference between equality and equal treatment
or, “A long post about short people”. Randy Newman’s Short People was a surprise hit in 1977. Randy’s way of parodying prejudice is to write in character. Even with the over-the-top caricature in the song, it wasn’t always taken as intended. There was widespread criticism for the extremely negative picture it painted of the “vertically…
Totally addicted to bass
I successfully auditioned to join a band as bass player last week. That was remarkably gratifying. After strumming guitars for twenty years, I guess it’s not so amazing, but after putting a fair bit of effort the last year or two specifically into the bass it was nice to turn in a decent enough performance….
This Land is Your Land
It gets right to the heart of what this country is supposed to be about .. There’s a lot of people out there who’s jobs are disappearing. I don’t know if they’d feel this song is true anymore. And I’m not sure that is, but I know that it ought to be. I’d like to…