After our breakout camping season last year I started hearing the song “Wild Child” by Mr. Brett Dennen on the radio. It does such a fine job of summing up the good times in the great outdoors as we have experienced them, it seemed like a souvenir of the summer. So he earned himself an entry […]
Read more "Smoke and Mirrors"On the drive home they had a story about the Lucy Wainright Roche record called “There’s a Last Time for Everything” on NPR. Good interview, with the Wainright wit well represented. And the title of the record is great, don’t you think? Then I stopped in at Whole Foods to gather more wine bottles, and […]
Read more "Turn of Phrase"If you’re going to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, I recommend the following strategy. Leave work early on Friday (got your attention now, haven’t I?) and check out the afternoon shows. Unless you’ve staked a claim early on Saturday or Sunday it’s hard to get close enough to hear the music, but Friday’s not yet as crowded. […]
Read more "Something to talk about"If you weren’t there, or didn’t see it on TV, or just want to hear it again, here’s James Taylor singing “America the Beautiful” at President Obama’s second inauguration. This was so darn good I went back and listened to some songs of his that I hadn’t heard in many years. One of those old […]
Read more "Sugar Trade"Kind of a last minute decision, but we jaunted up to SF for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass yesterday, and I’m so glad we did. It’s really super crowded now, but if you accept that and just deal, it is a fun thing to do. Especially this year, because the weather was fantastic and it coincided with […]
Read more "Hardly"Don’t freak out, this won’t be about Credit Default Swaps. I can’t remember what those are anymore. It’s about Compact Discs. Were they smaller than something? LPs, I guess. (LPs = Long Playing records, which apparently played longer than their predecessors. Nowadays, our media aren’t required to refer to the format they’re replacing.) We’ve been […]
Read more "The CDs"I was bummed out because my good guitar was becoming harder to play. You could see the neck was bending forwards a little bit, and a little bit goes a long way in the resulting effects on playability. It’s nice to have the ‘action’ on the low side if you play the guitar in a […]
Read more "little bit = long way"Every once in a while you’ll see the cat tuning in to some random song going by on the Pandora; this evening it happened to be Susan Tedeschi’s version of “Don’t Think Twice (It’s All Right)”. This song includes many of the sonic components favored by the cat: a lady singer, clever guitar work, and […]
Read more "today’s sounds"A couple of posts ago I mentioned that we had grown exceedingly weary of our iPod library contents. I believe I described the selections as “fuddy duddy”, which may have been a bit harsh. But I am so damned tired of hearing these songs, that I end up scrolling right through stuff that I’m sure […]
Read more "today’s new sounds"You might have run across this elsewhere, but I’m posting it again here so that I don’t lose track of it. Thought it was really good. What am I listening to? My iPod has a bunch of fuddy-duddy songs that I am so tired of hearing. I just added a few new ones, but my […]
Read more "just listen"