#musicdiaryproject2012

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Music Diary Project: Bitterest Pills and Leonard Cohen Covers

Blur - "Tender"

Scout Niblett - "Boy"

Eef Barzelay - "Could Be Worse"

Holly Miranda - "Waves"

Tune Yards (no, I'm not spelling it the creative way) - "Gansta"

Cher - "Love Hurts"

The Jam - "The Bitterest Pill"

Jenny Lewis - "Acid Tongue"

Jenny Lewis - "Carpetbaggers"

Ryan Adams - "This is It"

Marissa Nadler - "Famous Blue Raincoat"

Patti Smith - "Because the Night"

Richard and Linda Thompson - "Walking on a Wire"

Johnny Thunders - "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory"

Rufus Wainwright - "Montauk"

I tend to respect singers above all else. And that doesn't necessarily mean technical proficiency as much as means some kind of connection to the lyrics, whether you wrote them or not. (This is one of my primary issues with shows like American Idol.) Okay, I joke about the Cher love, but she is ridiculously consistent. Paul Weller has long been one of my favorite vocalists, too. His vocal attack is unique in that it's simultaneously soulful and brash. Merrill Garbus I've written plenty about already, but I love that she doesn't try to "pretty up" her voice, and that's it's not one I've heard before, though I have echos of it in everything from reggae to jazz.

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... because this song has been playing on a loop in my brain all afternoon.

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Music Diary Project: Sad Boys With Acoustic Guitars, Part Two

Blake Babies - "I'm Not Your Mother"

The Weakerthans - "(Past Due)"

Kevin Devine - "You're Trailing Yourself"

Marissa Nadler - "Little Hells"

Mika - "Toy Boy"

Liliput - "Die Mastrosen"

Rolling Stones - "Dead Flowers"

The Replacements - "Can't Hardly Wait"

Paul Westerberg - "Breath Some New Life"

New Pornographers - "Bleeding Heart Show"

The Weakerthans - "Reconstruction Site"

X - "Los Angeles"

The Weakerthans - "Plea From a Cat Named Virtute"

Ryan Adams - "This Is It"

Richard Thompson - "Why Must I Plead"

The Ike Reilly Assassination - "8 More Days Till the 4th of July"

This is pretty typical of my daily "background" music -- nothing too incredibly jarring or progressive: just a lot of "aging hipster" rock, or something. Recently I added back to my music library a bunch of stuff I deleted in a fit of self-righteousness. I know the Stones are problematic, but damn it, I like them. (Even if Mick looks like Don Knotts and sings like that old joke, 'hold your tongue and say 'I was born on a pirate ship.'" )

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Music Diary Project: Sad Boys With Acoustic Guitars

Okay, so I haven't been keeping up with this as best as I should. Aside from incidental supermarket music, I haven't listened to anything not on my iPod. The title aptly describes it.

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Music Diary Project

I heard the Style Council's "My Ever Changing Moods" in the supermarket earlier this afternoon. This is the same store that regularly plays Wilco, Rufus Wainwright, Rilo Kiley, and a whole bunch of other Triple A (do people even use this term anymore?) artists, which is simultaneously comforting and making me feel old and irrelevant.

Right now I'm listening to some sort of neighborhood sing-a-long which is annoying the fuck out of me. I have no idea what's going on outside.

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Music Diary Project: Fall Out Of The Window With Confetti In My Hair

From this morning via Last.fm:

Tom Waits - "Tango Till They're Sore"

A long time ago Gina Arnold about the Replacements: "It was like being captured midair in a swan dive off a cliff. The landing might be a disaster -- in fact it was sure to be. But those moments while you were flying, suspended in that beauty with the sea still such a long way down, it was pure, pure bliss." Tom Waits songs are a lot like that, this one especially -- that bliss before the crash sort of feeling.

Barbra Streisand - "Woman in Love"

I maybe don't have the greatest musical acumen, but I always hear this song in Britney's "Oops I did it again." Tell me I'm not crazy.

Via YouTube -- a bunch of Ewa Podles videos

Full disclosure: I'm not all that knowledgeable about opera, but she has the most amazingly deep, resonant contralto I've heard. She can even easily hit notes in the baritone rage. I hate when any female singer with a voice that isn't light and trebly is labeled a "contralto." Most of them aren't. Yeah, pop singers really don't have vocal types the way classical ones do, but still... this is what a contralto sounds like.

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Music Diary Project: Acid Tongue & Androgyny

Jenny Lewis's Acid Tongue and Rilo Kiley's Portions for Foxes

The former I'd completely forgotten I owned. Jenny Lewis is undervalued as a songwriter among my male music geek friends. Her voice, sure. Her looks, absolutely, but no one really talks about her words. And she's such a smart lyricist -- sometimes with a hint of meanness. Which I like, a lot.

The Replacements' "Androgynous"

The Replacements are the only band for whom I've managed an unhealthy obsession for more than two decades. I keep wanting to find fault with this song, given it addresses the topic of gender expression, but it's written by and sung from the point-of-view of a straight, cis guy. The "something meets girl/something meets boy" part is pretty problematic. Even with that, there's a still a genuineness lurking beneath the surface.

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Music Diary 2012 - Monday

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about music, infact I’d say it was the Music Diary session last year and I’m not off to a great start as I completely forgot to pay any attention to the music I listened to on Monday. As a replacement for Mondays “music listened to” I thought I’d compile the list of tweets I started at the beginning of May for #MusicInMay which had to stop as I left my headphones at work and for me it is purely a portable media project (I’ll be resuming that after this week) The First Word Is The Hardest #FourDayHombre #MusicInMay ____________________________ World C World A #Condor44 #MusicInMay ___________________________ Come On And Smile #Embrace #MusicInMay @embrace _________________________ White Winter Hymnal #FleetFoxes #MusicInMay ____________________________ The Greatest #CatPower #MusicInMay Lovely track ____________________________ I Can’t Stand #ZolaJesus #MusicInMay ___________________________ Endless Bummer #FantasticPlasticMachine #MusicInMay ___________________________ Burning #WildBeasts #MusicInMay ___________________________ Blood Collection #Wintersleep #MusicInMay ___________________________ All Things To All Men #TheCinematicOrchestra #MusicInMay #RootsManuva ___________________________ Hands Away #Interpol #MusicInMay ___________________________ Mugicone #Mugison #MusicInMay Short and beautifully haunting music ___________________________ Disassociative #MarilynManson #MusicInMay #notashamed ___________________________ Spanish Sahara #Foals #MusicInMay ___________________________