Vanilla Dome Blues

O, Sleep -

sweet as any pleasure. After a weekend of late to bed and early to rise, I finally "got some". To make matters better I woke up with this song playing through my mind:



except it was in Fleetwood Mac fashion.

Digging

Am I the last person to find out how awesome the Blow Monkeys are?

What a Day, For a Night

At the bus stop, this song keeps running through my head, several days in a row. I like the video, reminds me of another MPLS musician/writer, Dylan Hicks.
He would wear all red too. And voila... casting the internets out with brief googly-doo produces this:




Live - What a Day 2004:

Voice of an Angle

I mean angel...



but I always thought it was Rick Danko singing.

One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21

It is cold out...winter reminds me of technology... cold, digital and because we need it in the winter to stay alive & connected. One of my favorite winter isolation songs is One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21 by 'The Flaming Lips'. Beautiful song, no one ever seems to mention this one when talking about the flaming lips, but it's one of their best. Maybe I'll put in that 'UFOs at the Zoo' DVD and use technology to motivate my brain circuitry to recall the concert last summer.

One More robot Legomation

Bad

I have to admit that I am not a "huge" (i.e. "ginormous") fan of the new Spoon record. It gets to be a little boring in the middle. BUT, that third track "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" ranks in the top 10 songs of the 2000s for me - I probably listened to it about 50 to 150 times over the course of a couple of days when I first bought the record. It's ethereal-ly perfect, sexy and satisfying. In my Itunes, if I play "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb," usually it's also tracked with the Runaways' "Cherrybomb." The thing I love about the Runaways is how they were these cute high-school girls who managed to look so f'in' baaaad. I mean, look at them:
They look like they're going to steal your lunch, eat it, make out with your boyfriend in front of you, and then kick dirt in your eye and walk away like it's no big deal.

I always wanted to look bad. If you look bad, it's easier to get the bartender's attention or to convince that creepy dude on the bus to not try to talk to you. It's pretty hard for me to look bad. It's hard for me to not look 13 and have people ask me if I'm a child. So I've been trying to practice sneering.
This is how I look normally:I generally look a little confused but attentive. (These were all shots done in my bathroom by the way, since it's the only place in my apartment with a mirror to practice sneering to.) Okay, this is me with my first "bad" look. I just thought to myself "look bad!"I don't look so bad. I just look like I smelled something bad. I think here I am trying to incorporate more "frown" to my sneer:I still look like something just smells bad, but now I am mad about it! Now here, I'm just trying to get more of that "bad" feeling going, like "Hell yes, I WANT TO LOOK BAD!"Uugh. I don't look very "bad." I just look like one of the Runaways took my lunch money and laughed at me. I'm going to go back to practicing what I know how to do already, which is lookin' cute:Aaaah.... much better. So tie tie from sneering... Sleepytime!

Cast Off Crown

The first 30 seconds of 'Cast Off Crown' by Deerhoof was kicking ass in my head this morning. It is such an awesome monster groove where the drums, guitar and keyboards all pass-the-dutchie seemlessly. The song then flys in the opposite direction with a halting computer blip sequence before finally resolving the two when the dreamy vocals come in, mixing textures as the digital and analog themes intermingle. Deerhoof have reached masterpiece level quality on last years 'Friend Opportunity' and this is just one high point.

I tried to find you a version to hear online, the best I could do was this.
'Cast Off Crown' is playing in the background of this clip, you'll never want to try on anything at the Gap after hearing
this employee's gross-out story.


Cast Off Crown on iTunes

Channel The Will To Find Peppermint Patty

Songs playing in my head this morning were:
Channel the Will to Find
and
Peppermint Patty by The Owls.

'Channel the Will to Find' is THE healthy drug-free way to kick off serotonin-rich euphoric moments. The only truly cinematic moment I experienced on MySpace was when I clicked on Geoff Herbach's page to leave a message and 'Channel the Will to Find' kicked in. I was instantly rocking and it made me feel Herbach was really cool. This is what MySpace designers' must have hoped that the 'Add Song' feature would do all the time. Normally, I'm startled when some random song starts playing on MySpace, usually at some freak time & volume, and I think 'Lame, lame, lame' as I mouse towards the player controls. I will henceforth make an exception for users that have 'The Owls' and make more 'friend' choices with this in mind.

'Peppermint Patty' is as unique and perfect as a song can be. It has a special place in my heart. I love you Peppermint Patty.

The Owls iTunes

Falun Gong Love Song

Mick Jones (The Clash, Big Audio Dynamite) and Tony James (Generation X, Sigue Sigue Sputnik) have a band that I just heard about. On the band's blog Tony James answers a question that has come up for them a lot since the release of their first record. They've been posting mp3s for free download on their site for 4 years, so why release a record?

The funny thing is his answer jives with my experience of discovering the band. They only hit my radar after the CD was released and they did interviews and TV to promote it. So the CD is still the motivation for people who control media to write about a band and for record companies to promote a band. They aren't really promoting the band, just the record. I had never thought about that fact before - that the band and the record are different things in the eyes of the sales people.


Falun Gong Love Song is the song I've been listening to today. The title is a good description of the song's content. Mick lets clarity of message trump poetry in a couple spots but I think the song still holds up. If you're gonna write a message song, you should probably make it pensive and give it a hook.

Karakatu, AL

Last November, I moved from one corner of Matthews Park to the other, which now means to get to my bus in the morning, I need to transverse said park. Pythagorean noted that on a triangle, vertices A, B, and C, it's shorter to travel the hypotenuse than the length of the two other sides. So, I cut straight through the park in the mornings, snow boots crunching through the ice and drifts. Lately it's been as "cold as hell" as my Chinese lab mate would say, and the snow is actually packed and frozen in a way that I can almost float atop the snow icing covering the entirety of the park. But I'm just a little too heavy to stay on top, and so with every step, my feet break through the top of the snow, like a spoon cracking through the burnt top of a freshly-flamed creme brulee. It makes that exact sound too - "crack crack crack crack." Except no moist pudding inside.
When it's cold like this, it makes me feel good and triumphant inside. I recently fell in love with that Stephen Malkmus song "Phantasies," and I sing the first part of it when I'm cracking through the snow. "Woke up early in Karakatu Alaska *crack crack* Put our masks on, and welcome the dawn *crack crack* It's cold as shit! It's always that way/it gets to 99 below..."

Campaigner

Walking to the store this morning to buy cat food for the hungry cats this morning, the Neil Young song 'Campaigner' popped into my head. I've been playing it with some frequency on the guitar lately because of terrific melody line and chord sequence. It's the kind of song that is an equal pleasure to play as to listen too. A good song to hear on a Wednesday after all the Michigan voting that was going on yesterday.

The story goes that Neil saw a news clip of a teary eyed Richard Nixon entering a hospital visiting his wife Pat, who was in for a serious illness. He then went on board his tour bus and wrote this elegy that seems to acknowledge the common human roots of two itinerant adversaries, the right-wing campaigning politician and a touring hippie superstar...'Roads stretch out like healthy veins' indeed.

The beginning section of 'Campaigner' serves as the chassis for the P. Westerberg 'Skyway', and sounds uncannily familiar to Replacements fans.

The track was only released on 'Decade':
Campaigner on iTunes.

An unreleased version with an extra verse can be found towards the bottom this relatively recent and still active blog post on among the 'bonus tracks' links:
That Tuncheon Thing.

Fantastic Voyage

Walking to the bus this blue sky morning, I had the lush David Bowie song 'Fantastic Voyage' playing in my head. Last weekend I picked up a used copy of David Bowie's 'Lodger' remastered in Dinkytown, so it's been spinning at my house.

'Fantastic Voyage' features one of Bowie's greatest premier croon deliveries. The apex of the climax is guaranteed to thrill ya! Here is a clip from 2004's live tour:


I saw this tour in the bisected Target Center theater set-up. We snuck down from the nosebleeds, to some unoccupied front row seats, and Bowie delievered 1st class all the way, with full voice and in bloom. One of my first shows ever was the Glass Spider Tour, an sadly unfulfilling experience. 2004 more than made up for it. When he played 'Fantastic Voyage', a relatively rare inclusion; I thought nice, now that's more like it!

We Will Rock You

While cleaning out my iTunes today...I listened to 'We Will Rock You'. Written by Brian May, the worlds #1 rock anthem consists entirely of hand claps and foot-stomps recorded in an old church and a guitar solo played through a tiny amp. Strangely appropriate...

I saw the remnants of Queen a couple yrs ago when they did a tour with Paul Rodgers of Bad Company (whose work I am only familiar with through the Replacement bootleg 'The Shit Hits the Fans'). Got a heavily discounted ticket through a ornary scalper; they seem to get that way when selling at a big loss. But it was a grand show none the less, as Brian May is the ultimate Arena Rock guitar player..check this vid clip I took from the actual performance of a Brian May guitar solo...
...
Seeing 1/2 of Queen was like viewing the Parthenon...a grand ruin that retained some of the majesty of its former glory when viewed at twilight from the right angle. The guitar tones were sheer ecstasy, but of course... no Freddy Mercury. My attendance was driven by my rock anthropology quest and I gleened what I could from the studying rocks below. The set was peppered with a few Bad Company hits too. Seeing 'Feel Like Makin' Love' played through that classic May guitar set up was f'kin funny and awesome, an ultimate guilty pleasure.

What makes Brain May cool:
- built his own guitar, the same one he still uses
- looks (and talks) like Issac Newton
- completed his work for a PhD in Astrophysics this year, 30 years after he was interrupted by his rock band's success
- and most importantly, his playing sings with sweet resonance in an arena like no one else's... makes you feel like an 8-year old seeing 'Star Wars' for the first time.

We Will Rock You/Champions @ Live Aid


Type 'greatest rock performance ever' into google and see what comes up.

It's the ...

Ear of the Tyger

MPLS Wild Things blog about the songs that pop into their heads.

It's the thrill of the fight!