Road trip time!
Tomorrow morning I will get in the car and, rather than heading to work, I will embark on one of my signature crazy-man concert road trips. Previous editions of the road trips have taken me to Chicago and Nashville... this time I'm heading west, to Omaha. The goal this time: the kickoff concert of the 2008 Behold the Lamb of God Christmas tour, featuring Andrew Peterson and friends.
My current plans are to leave Cedar Rapids first thing in the morning, meet Curt McLey for lunch in Elkhorn (suburban Omaha) around 11:30, and then head over to the church where the concert will take place. It will be good to catch up a bit with the gang of musicians who make up this tour - Andy Osenga, Andy Gullahorn, Jill Phillips, Ben Shive... talented songwriters and musicians, all... and when you put them all on the same stage... amazing things happen. The concert is at 7 pm and then it's just 4 short hours on I-80 back home. Good times.
If you haven't heard Behold the Lamb before, you should go buy yourself a copy from the Rabbit Room store. Best Christmas album I own, hands down. I'll be bleary-eyed and saddle sore come Wednesday morning, but it will definitely have been worth it. Hopefully I'll have some good pictures to post when I get back. Only 18 more hours to wait...
A weird iPod Genius playlist bug
Discovered this one last night: when I tapped the Genius icon to create a Genius playlist out of the currently-playing song, the playlist it created began with a different version of that song. It was repeatable, happened twice.
In detail: I was playing "All the Way Home (live)" from Andrew Peterson's Appendix M record. I hit the Genius button to create a playlist, and it generated one quite neatly. Unfortunately, rather than starting the playlist with "All the Way Home (live)" from Appendix M, it started the playlist with "All the Way Home" from AP's Carried Along.
Don't know quite what's going on here, but something ain't quite right with the Genius.
Gilbert & Sullivan & an embarassing admission
During an online conversation with Lydia this morning I was chiding for her unfamiliarity with Gilbert & Sullivan's "Three Little Maids from School Are We". Just to get everyone on the same page, here it is:
But then I got to thinking about my familiarity with Gilbert & Sullivan, which leads me to an embarrassing admission: most of my familiarity with the music of Gilbert & Sullivan comes from two sources: the movie Chariots of Fire, and the "Cape Feare" episode of The Simpsons.
In Chariots of Fire, as I recall, one of the main characters is interested in an actress who is playing one of the three little maids in The Mikado. There's also a scene when the olympic team is traveling on the ship and they're singing Gilbert & Sullivan songs around the piano. (The scene always sticks in my mind because the audio is just off - the piano chord sounds a split-second before the actor's hand hits the keys.)
In The Simpsons, the villain Sideshow Bob tracks down the Simpson family (who were living on a houseboat in a witness relocation program), ties up the parents, and is just about to kill Bart. Bart stalls Sideshow Bob by challenging him to sing the entire score of The Pirates of Penzance H.M.S. Pinafore (thanks for the correction, Jamie!). Bob can't resist the challenge and so sings and sings and sings while the boat floats down the river, into town, and to the authorities.
I really should take some time to become more familiar with these guys.
[Edit: I found a good version of the Simpsons' scene.]
Time for some piano music
I switched over from my usual podcasts and indie rock this morning to give some iPod love to a genre I've ignored far too much as of late: classical piano. To be more specific: Bach and Chopin. What a fantastic way to start the morning.
Now, I've spent innumerable hours over the past 20+ years with my backside on a piano bench and my fingers hacking away at some composer or another. And ever since I was a kid, let's face it, I did a lot of hacking. Sure, I had assigned pieces that I was supposed to practice every day. But more often than not what I'd do is just play through those pieces once or twice, then put them down and move on to something far too hard for me, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto or a Chopin Ballade or something by Debussy. The weeks when I actually did practice my lesson, my teacher was always blown away by my progress. I wonder at times how well I would've progressed if I'd practice like he expected.
When you have small children, though, the amount of time available for you to practice the piano goes down quite a bit. First, they take up your time directly. Second, they go to sleep early and playing the piano would wake them up. So I haven't done a lot of practicing in the past few years. Occasionally I'd pull out a book and hack through a little bit of Rachmaninoff, but that has been about it. If I get a chance to sit down at a piano somewhere else, I usually just improvise for a while, though it has been frightening just how much I remember of Beethoven Sonatas and Bach Fugues that I learned back in high school.
The other night I sat down at the piano after dinner and actually practiced a new piece. Rachmaninoff's Polichinelle Op. 3 No. 4, if you really care. (You can hear Rachmaninoff himself perform it on YouTube.) It's difficult enough that I can't just sight read through it at full speed, but not so difficult that I get disheartened trying to practice. I am hoping that I can actually put a little time into it, commit it to memory, and eventually have something new to play on occasion, rather than just murdering a section from Chopin's Ballade #1 like I usually do.
How I do love my piano music.
Music Tuesday: Andy Gullahorn’s “That Guy”
Andy Gullahorn is a guy that will sneak right past you without you noticing, if you let him. A supremely-talented songwriter and guitarist, Andy has perfected the songwriting technique I'll call the "Gullahorn Gut Punch", GGP for short. His song tells a story, gets you all involved, and then at the last moment sucker-punches you with a conclusion or moral to the story that you were not expecting... and that takes your breath away. I first experienced the GGP when I first heard Andy as he sang "Holy Flakes" during a concert back in 2005. But Andy takes it to a whole 'nother level in the song I want to share with you today.
The song is called "That Guy", and is on Andy's latest album, called Reinventing the Wheel. It starts out this way:
He scoped out the market
All the women and kids
With so many distractions
Nobody noticed him
Nobody noticed him
He had a jacket a size too big
A skullcap on his head
And a couple of homemade bombs
He duct taped them to his chest
He taped them to his chest
You're already into the story, right? What's gonna happen? The first time I heard this in concert the audience was breathlessly on the edge of their seats. For real.
God loves that guy
God loves that guy
Now there's the Gullahorn Gut Punch. Whammo. All those horrible things you were thinking about this terrorist are suddenly reproved as Andy reminds us that yes, God loves that guy. Ouch. Then comes verse two and the bridge:
He followed his heart
To a co-worker’s bed
He could have salvaged his marriage with kids
But he chose to leave instead
He chose to leave
He thought it was love
But it was just a mirage
So he sits in his idling car
Parked in a closed garage
Inside a closed garageGod loves that guy
God loves that guyMe on the other hand I can write somebody off
Like the last check for a student loan
I can love when it’s convenient
But it’s not always convenient
It’s not always the easy road
I want to look past the outside to the well-meaning heart
To the good they forgot that they had
Teach me to love, teach me to love
Teach me to love like that
OK, if the song ended right here it'd already be an awesome song. But Andy takes it up another notch here with a sort of reverse-GGP.
He messed up again
Wanted to disappear
But he can’t ‘cause he’s easy to find
I see him in the mirror
I see him in the mirrorGod loves that guy
God loves that guy
And here's the beauty of the song. For two verses we've been remonstrating ourselves about our lack of love for others, feeling down on ourselves. And then in this third verse, Andy sneaks up on us and gets us back, telling us to remember: God loves us, too. Wow.
You can buy Reinventing the Wheel and Andy's other CDs at the JillPhillips.com store. (Jill is Andy's wife, and she's the one with the fancy website... Andy's is less-fancy but hysterical, well worth a visit.
Good free music
OK, so I'm biased a little bit. I really like Andy Osenga's music. I run his fan website. I drive for hours to see the guy play shows. But all that aside, yesterday Andy put out Letters to the Editor, Vol. 2, and it's definitely worth a listen. Or multiple listens.
As the "Vol. 2" would indicate, this is the second in what I hope will be a long-running series of EPs from Andy based on inspiration sent in by his fans. His fans are all over this album, really - in addition to the song ideas, they submitted pictures, which he uses in an extensive "album liner" PDF file, and recorded "Webground" vocals and instrumentals, which he mixed into one of the songs. (I am kicking myself that I didn't find time to record my own Webgrounds. Next time.)
And the best thing: it's free. That's right. Click on the picture below and you can download the 6-song EP gratis. If you like it, head over to his site and donate something to the cause.
My Genius playlist for this afternoon
I mentioned before that I'm enjoying the iPod's new Genius playlist. I hit on a really good one this afternoon, and at Hunter's request I'll just post the whole thing.
The seed song was Fleet Foxes' White Winter Hymnal. The playlist it turned out (from the 7 GB of music on my iPod, not the whole library I have at home):
- White Winter Hymnal, Fleet Foxes, from Fleet Foxes
- Chinese Translation, M. Ward, from Post-War
- Impossible Germany, Wilco, from Sky Blue Sky
- Boy With A Coin, Iron and Wine, from The Shepherd's Dog
- Can't Go Back Now, The Weepies, from Hideaway
- Smokers Outside the Hospital Door, Editors, from An End Has A Start
- Glosoli, Sigur Ros, from Takk...
- Everybody Knows, Ryan Adams, from Easy Tiger
- The Golden Age, Beck, from Sea Change
- Falling Slowly, The Frames, from The Cost
- Ragged Wood, Fleet Foxes, from Fleet Foxes
- Lovers in Japan/Reign of Love, Coldplay, from Viva La Vida
- Half Acre, Hem, from Rabbit Songs
- Lovesong of the Buzzard, Iron & Wine, from The Shepherd's Dog
- Casimir Pulaski Day, Sufjan Stevens, from Illinois
- What Light, Wilco, from Sky Blue Sky
- Post-War, M. Ward, from Post War
- Bones, Editors, from An End Has A Start
- Orbiting, The Weepies, from Hideaway
- The Limit To Your Love, Feist, from The Reminder
- Missing, Beck, from Guero
- Goodnight Rose, Ryan Adams, from Easy Tiger
- Blue Ridge Mountains, Fleet Foxes, from Fleet Foxes
- That Dress Looks Nice On You, Sufjan Stevens, from Seven Swans
- Strawberry Swing, Coldplay, from Viva La Vida
Adventures in Genius playlists
I've quite enjoyed playing with the new Genius playlist feature in iTunes 8.0, but found out yesterday that it makes some interesting choices when it's limited by the subset of music I have on my 8GB iPod touch.
(To make sense of this for my mom and others who might read this who have no idea what the Genius playlist is - basically you give it one song, and it generates a playlist of "similar" songs from whatever you have on your iPod. It works really well with my full music library.)
Case in point: I asked it to generate a 25-song playlist based on Simon and Garfunkel's classic Mrs. Robinson.
Near the middle of the playlist: John Williams' Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back.
I don't even wanna know how it made that leap. (Well, I sorta do.... but not really... but yeah.)
Two Tune Tuesday
Tomorrow is June 17, 2008. Tomorrow, two records that I have long anticipated will be released and find their way into my hands: Coldplay's Viva la Vida, or Death and all His Friends, and Ben Shive's The Ill-Tempered Klavier. An odd pairing, you ask? Not so fast. Let's compare for a minute.
Coldplay: has a drummer named Will.
Ben Shive: has played on a record with a drummer named Will.
Coldplay: Lead singer Chris Martin has children with unusual Biblical names like Apple and Moses.
Ben Shive: Has children with unusual Biblical names like Ezra and Jude.
Coldplay: Lots of piano-driven songs.
Ben Shive: The dude was born with a piano already attached to his fingers.
Coldplay: Song on first record called Daylight
Ben Shive: Song on first record called She Is The Rising Sun.
Coldplay: Two band members had cameos in the movie Shaun of the Dead
Ben Shive: Has appearances in many Andy Gullahorn-directed short films.
Coldplay: New record available for $10 tomorrow at Best Buy and Target.
Ben Shive: New record available for $10 tomorrow at the Rabbit Room Store.
Eerie how the similarities stack up, isn't it?
The bigger question to me is this: a year from now, which one of these records will have gotten more play on my iPod? If I were to hazard a guess... it won't be the band with the leader who shares my name and birth month; it'll be the guy with whom I went to Best Buy last time he was in town. Guess we'll find out.
