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Mostly music

We had some big winds and a great lightning show last night. Other parts of the region got hit quite hard, but we did OK. There were two branches in the road when we went out to pick up some dinner. (We tried a local pizza place, ordering things that weren’t pizza. The manager’s son, who looked all of 9 years old rang us up. No idea if he got the price right, but his dad was right there, cracking wise for us, so I’m sure he didn’t undercharge.

The lasagna was OK. But plentiful. I got two dinners out of it, last night and tonight, and I’m happy with that.

Anyway, this morning we found that the hydrangeas got waked by the storm. Mostly the rain, I think. One is in the back, on the eastern side of the house, but close enough to the structure that it’s hard to imagine those gusts got in there. The other is on the northeast corner. But hydrangeas will lean from the weight of water alone, and these guys were big and proud and tall.

So we went to a hardware store for some stakes and twin. Poured out a pint of blood to pay for it all, visited the grocery store to stock up on a few supplies. (How long does that take, we’re still re-stocking things. It seems a slow process. That’s fine. No one is going hungry, it’s just the idea of it, Shouldn’t there be more things in the refrigerator? There will be in time. What’s the next great meal that provides an abundance and leftovers? Thanksgiving? Will I be wonder about this in November?

Anyway, I tried my hand at staking up the hydrangea bushes. I spent a long time pondering strategies. I spent an almost equal amount of time wondering if I was up to the task. Am I kidding myself? It’s a weird question to ask yourself over such a small matter. First, they’re flowering bushes. Second, and you can look this up, it’s a common problem, and everyone has an easy peasy attitude about the solution. On the other hand, having driven most of the stakes into the ground and tied up a lot of branches, they don’t look quite as nice as they did yesterday.

Which was when I stopped, and decided to check on the peach tree. It was fine in the storm, but gravity put some more fruit on the ground, so I brought them inside. I ate six or eight peaches today. I may have a few more in a minute. The kitchen is stocked in fresh fruit.

I guess we’ll start cutting those up tomorrow.

Tonight, I’m apparently working on someone else’s project. Instead of reading about that, though, read about this.

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We are still trying to catch up to the Re-Listening project, and this post is helping us make a lot of progress. Remember, the Re-Listening project is the one where I listen to my old CDs in the car, and in the order in which I acquired them. I think I am seven CDs in arrears right now. These aren’t reviews, just an excuse to post some music, recall the occasional fond memory and pad the site with some extra content. It’s fun! And musical! And there’s a lot of it, so let’s get to it.

Tracy Bonham’s first album was certified gold, earned her two Grammy nominations and in 1996 saw a single top the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart. (She was the last woman to top that chart for 17 years, if you want a bit of trivia.) “Down Here” was the delayed follow-up record, released in April 2000. I got it off the giveaway shelf at a radio station. It was a signed copy. It wasn’t commercially successful, but Bonham shows her talent throughout. Here’s the single.

Wikipedia cites a ridiculous review about how it sounds like an album recorded in 1997 rather than 2000. Hey! There’s someone who reads the industry trades!

I’d go with a line like this. It feels like a song on the soundtrack of a movie about movie soundtracks.

The important thing to appreciate about Bonham is that she’s a classically trained violinist, playing at making pop records.

Bonham put out four more records after this one, the most recent in 2017. She still plays a few live shows, and has continued her varied and impressive musical career. She’s now a curriculum developer for kids’ music education. She also produced a kids album, 2021’s “Young Maestros Vol. 1,” that is aimed at teaching music theory and confidence building.

That’s a cool followup to a pop music career.

In May of 2000, Matchbox Twenty’s “Mad Season” hit the shelves. Their second album, it entered the Billboard 200 at number three and was four-times platinum in the next 18 months. Because the music industry is, well, the music industry, this success was a quantifiable disappointment. Their debut, after all, sold three-times as many units.

There are two memorable tracks to me. One I forget about every time, until that soaring riff that sets the tone. Kyle Cook can.

And this track, which has a way of haunting you, and is best not heard on the highway at night.

They’re on tour right now, supporting “Where the Light Goes,” an album they released in May. (Also, they are apparently climbing the charts again, apparently thanks to the Barbie movie.) The new record was a surprise, I guess, because they said they were going to become primarily a touring band prior to Covid. I haven’t heard any of it yet, but it gets four-out-of-five stars on AllMusic.

And I love this promo photo. There’s Cook, a rock star, but looking like he wants to play it like he’s not. Especially so since he’s standing next to Rob Thomas, who is showing his ultra rock star confidence. On the end is Paul Doucette, looking like he’d really appreciate it if you could think of him as a rock star, too. Behind them all is Brian Yale, who is just wondering if you’re done with that drill he loaned you last week.

He’s got a project to get to and he needs his tools back.

Someone gave me a copy of the next entry into the Re-Listening project. Tracy Chapman’s “Telling Stories” came out in February of 2000 and I got it that May, when it was on its way to becoming a gold record. The title track is song one. It was also the first single of the record, and it’s laying the groundwork.

Rolling Stone has a concise 16-word summation of her fifth record, calling it a “strong and steady — clear-eyed, poetic folk/funk of the kind that first got Chapman noticed.” That’s correct, and is always the case with Tracy Chapman, it’s never enough. She’s such a unique performer to me, historically, that every song is enough, but every song leaves me wanting more.

This one was a leftover from “New Beginning,” and this is, in part, why Rolling Stone called this album strong and steady, because you could put this anywhere in her catalog.

For my money, this might be the best song on the record. The woman is a poet who happens to be holding a guitar. Oh yeah, the Songbird sneaks into the chorus, too.

I’ve never produced an album, so I don’t know how this works, but is the last song supposed to be so awesome? Because this is track 12 and it feels like a third-song sort of tune.

The summer of 2000, when I got this, was an unusual one. College was over, real life was beginning, sort of. It took a few months for things to get going — not an unusual story, not everything begins on schedule. But there was Tracy Chapman, getting a lot of plays. I was grateful for that. No idea why I didn’t buy this one myself, though.

Before that happened, there was this. I was working for a company that, at that time, had three stations in their cluster. One of those stations, the best one, I thought, was a mid-century big band/jazz music format AM station that the station owner tolerated because the old music, the sports, and the absolute legend that did the morning show paid the cluster’s bills. It was a great place to learn because you could make all sorts of mistakes and everyone left you alone. It was a difficult place to learn because everyone left you alone. But it was fun. And one night, in a bin of discard CDs, I ran across this record.

Contemporary jazz just didn’t fit the format, so they were happy to give it away. The only memory I have of this CD is putting it in a player in one of the production studios, and making a tape for a pen pal in Arkansas. She did cute things like send me a postcard made from a cereal box, and blowing up a beach ball, writing a letter on it, and shipping it my way. Then or now, I couldn’t keep up with that level of creativity.

But I did have access to studios, so I set about to see if I could talk over an entire record. And I did. I talked about everything, and about nothing, really, for the entire CD. The run time on that CD is 55 minutes.

My poor pen pal. She lives in Texas now, and she has a beautiful family. They have two daughters who are in musical theater. I follow them on Instagram. Pen pals are just one of the ways that I’m sure social media does us a disservice.

I’m going to write her a letter, using some unconventional format – not a cassette or an mp3, though. Can’t play that lame card twice, even with 23 years in between. There has to be a local good or product around here that would be a sufficiently silly novelty.

Anyway, I think I am just three CDs behind on the Re-Listening project now. We may even catch up before the week is out!

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18
Jul 23

A full day’s worth

This morning we took The Yankee’s car to a mechanic. It was a planned event. She needed an oil change and, I suspected, a radiator flush. She searched around, found a place that got great reviews, and made an appointment so, literally, a planned event.

I followed her over, we met the guy, sitting three rooms deep into his shop. Large fellow, sleeveless shirt, bandana on his head. Hunting paraphernalia on his desk. There were fishing rods in the corner, a Dale Earnhardt flag hanging on the wall. I felt like I understood him right away.

We left the car, which he said would be ready this afternoon. We headed back, stopping off at the grocery store for a few lunch supplies. The afternoon passed easily enough. I believe I was finishing up a bit of reading and writing on LinkedIn when she said the mechanic called and her car was ready. So we went back over, the first half of the short trip entirely by memory. And the car was ready! Windows rolled down. Key in the ignition. Inside, she paid the fellow. Cash. He made change, from his pocket. He said the radiator flush was the right call. Said he tested it. So we established I knew what I was talking about, that he’d work on both of our cars, his prices are fair and, possibly, he doesn’t hold up progress by slow-walking maintenance work.

If that’d been it, that would have been a day’s worth, right there.

At the house, she said, there was something she wanted to show me. Turns out, we’ve got a peach tree.

Five varieties of peaches grow here. Now we have to become peach experts.

There are also some tomato plants out back. Do you know who is a tomato expert?

And there’s a corner of Lactuca sativa. Funny, you just don’t think of growing your own lettuce.

This is something called clammy goosefoot, an herb from Australia. I don’t know what you’d use it for, and I have yet to find a site that screams “You simply MUST put this on your pasta.” So probably I won’t.

But we also found some chives …

Nearby was the oregano.

And, of course, the sage.

We’re going to have to determine the schedules for all of these plants now. And, if that had been it, that would have been a day’s worth. But no.

For, you see, we went to join this running club. But, for the second week in a row, they no showed. They are, in fact, running away from us.

Which is fine, because ~~I need someone to chase~~ I wasn’t going to run this evening anyway. It usually works like this. I think Rest day? Schmest day! And then, the next day, I realize the error in that thought, and the wisdom in a rest day. So today, I did not run, or anything else, because I had eight days of workouts (be they ever so humble) in a row, and 11 days in the last 12.

Tomorrow I’ll … exercise … or something.

Instead of running, we got milkshakes. Dinner. We got dinner. And also milkshakes. We carried that back to the house and watched today’s stage of the Tour de France. And here’s the thing about the Tour … it’s 21 days of racing and this is the 110th edition and that means there’s a lot of history and trivia and wonderful anecdotes and a lot of it, until recently, wasn’t kept with baseball statistic precision. We did know, coming into this stage, that this was the third-narrowest time differential (10 seconds) between first and second place riders after 15 completed stages. We knew that because the TV producers made a fine graphic telling us about it.

Also, you know, it’s a bike race. Real roads, differing technologies and external circumstances and terrain and routes and all of that. It’s hard to compare the apples and pears of the time differential in this year’s race with the leading comparable statistic, which was four seconds between Jos Hoevenaers and Federico Bahamontes in 1959.

Bahamontes wound up winning, Hoevenaers finshed eighth, down 11-plus minutes. But everything about the style of the race was different then.

It also seems difficult to compare the tight affairs of this year’s Tour with the legendary 1989 race, which was a 50-second race on the last day, ultimately won by Greg Lemond by eight seconds. Someone put together the Lemond and Laurent Fignon time trial side-by-side.

Evolving cycling technology is coming into play here. Lemond, on the left, has aero bars and a new teardrop-shaped aerodynamic helmet. He only used the disc wheel on the back. Fignon ran two disc wheels, which leaves you more susceptible to crosswinds. Also, Fignon road a conventional style. It got so silly after the fact that people also speculated that, had he cut his hair, Fignon would have avoided eight seconds of air drag.

I’ve heard Lemond say, more than once now, that he was told Laurent Fignon was haunted by that race for the rest of his life. That he walked around counting eight seconds. Fignon, in his autobiography, wrote “You never stop grieving over an event like that.”

Anyway, that was the closest finish in history, but after 15 stages, the difference between them in first and second was 40 seconds.

It’d be a bit easier to compare the technology of today to the second closest, the 2008 edition, where Frank Schleck, of Luxembourg, was leading Australian Cadel Evans by eight whole seconds after 15 stages. (Also, bikeraceinfo.com reminds me that Austrian Bernhard Kohl was in between them, down only seven seconds to Schleck. Kohl later confessed to doping, so he disappears from the official records.) Eight seconds! Neither of those guys won the Tour.

At least that looks familiar. Modern. It’s only 15 years ago, and those riders have all retired, but the names are familiar. Indeed, I remember that particular tour. The technology and nutrition have jumped significantly ahead in the generations hence. Even the way they race, in terms of strategy and tactics, has been evolving since then. It’s the same, but different, remember.

But this year’s tour will be difficult to forget. Today …

Time trials aren’t usually very interesting to me, but I’d love to know how this ranks historically. The guy in second place, two-time Tour winner Tadej Pogacar, started the day down 10 seconds, and he had an incredible ride. The only problem was the guy behind him, his rival, the defending champion and current leader, Jonas Vingegaard, had an incredibler ride. A gobsmacking ride. Watching the time gaps grow at the checks was something that strained credulity. You could tell he was riding hard, working for it, riding well. It was in the body language right away. But that stage was a deconstruction. This is a place I actually want more statistics. Has a time trial ever done such a thing to an evenly matched opponent? SBS offered a slightly more technical comparative look of the two rivals.

What started the day as a tense, 10-second race finished a mind-boggling one minute and 48 second race between the two best road racers in the world. This will be hard to forget. And there are more mountains to come.

If that’d been it, that would have been a day’s worth, but no.

Because I also updated and upgraded a deadbolt. I only messed up two parts, and it only took several more minutes than the directions promised. But, it is installed. It is square. It matches the door knob. And, importantly, it is functional.

Each entry and exit through that door will now be reported to the ninja barracks out back, via a military grade wifi network, so that they can monitor and approve of all of the comings and goings.

When they aren’t worrying over that oregano.

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14
Jul 23

Romeo and Juliet

I’m putting this up front because I want to. Because it is great. Because you should listen to it.

Mark Knopfler wrote this song. “Romeo and Juliet” is a big part of the Dire Straits catalog. It’s a classic song, and that means it has been covered a lot. But this is Amy Ray’s song now. Her intensity with this puts it in a class by itself. I’ve heard the studio recording, of course, and a few live recordings, but I’ve never been seen her do this song in person. It’s a rock ‘n’ roll moment, no doubt about it.

Goosebumps.

They’re playing a few hours from here in a few more months. Maybe we should go see them again. We should go see them again.

Today we made a recycling run. Always a little smelly, but also satisfying. We stopped at the local hardware store, at place that still holds the name from way back when ice and coal were the big sellers. On the sign out front they were advertising a now oddly popular horse wormer medicine. We met the owner, Doug, and his son, who looked like a young, bearded version of Gregory Sporleder, their high school employee, who’s name I did not catch, and two cats almost as big as any of the humans in the store.

They had one of the three things we went in for. We’ll get the other two online, I’m sure.

This afternoon I took a nap, dozing off while reading a Belgian poet’s journal. My second nap in two weeks, this summer is going great, thanks for asking!

And then we went for a run. Mine was twice as long, but not as good as my Tuesday run, which was my first run in seven months … maybe because I didn’t have take off seven months. I should really look into that. The Yankee had a nice run, though.

It was 84 and felt like 90 degrees and, well, it felt like it. Good timing on our part for that run.

The sunset, off the front porch, was lovely as well.

And now, at the time of night when Saturday seems long enough to mean everything seems possible, I say to you, happy weekend!

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9
Jun 23

This is (obliquely) about photons from the sun

Things here were quiet today. Not too quiet, a movie trope which doesn’t really occur in really life. It was just the right amount of quiet. If, that is, spending an hour and 45 minutes on the phone is your idea of the right amount of quiet.

The first call was one hour. And it was a long hour. Also, it was barely productive. But, I did get my email added to an account. This took an hour.

Also the poor woman who had to deal with me had her mind go blank when she was trying to suggest I look something up on “that search index.”

What is it called? Oh yeah, Google. Or that other one, oh, she said, which one is it, I forget. But you can, she said, in her proper Texan drawl, look, oh, yeah, you can look it up on YouTube.

Because I was calling 1996, apparently.

No, I said into my Nokia candy bar phone, I prefer AltaVista.

On my second call, I found myself talking to a guy from Massachusetts. He wasn’t even with the company I needed, but he assured me he is passionate about this work, and he gave me a 45 minute education on something I knew nothing about.

This makes me wonder about the extent of customer service and phone calls as reputation devices. Let’s be fair. That first woman, she might have just been having an off afternoon. Perhaps she was new. Maybe she was multitasking. It is very possible that the things I was asking her about isn’t something she does a lot, or maybe she wasn’t even well trained in that particular area. Any of these are possible, and it’s just one person and one call, but the experience leaves you with a feeling, doesn’t it? The second person I talked to, he was on top of his game, explained things in conceptual and operational ways. Patiently let me distill his knowledge and his explanation into loosely applicable analogies. Corrected me a lot. Repeated himself as necessary. It was great.

I told that guy to have a great weekend, and that, when the time came, I was going to do business with his company. He’s just the work-from-home customer rep. He’s not even in the state I’m talking about. It could be an entire one-off. But Tyler made the lasting impression today.

Weird how these things work, and how we justify and rationalize things based on them.

So a quiet day.

Also, I watched the second half of this video today.

That could be subtitled “the things you don’t read about in books.”

But if that’s too grim, this is nonsensical and fun. It is amusing to see a real pro like John Oliver get upstaged, lose his bearing and be a fan.

I never noticed, though, how Cookie Monster has no shoulders. That’s a wardrobe problem.

I wrote recently about Sean Demery in the Re-Listening project, and this one gets back to him, too. He’ll probably pop up once or twice more as we continue on, but he played this breakthrough single a lot in Atlanta, and that’s where I found it.

I’ve also mentioned how I load these in the CD player without looking at the discs. So while I can sometimes remember what’s next in the old CD books, a lot of times the disc change is an exciting little mystery. The first track on this record is the big single, and from the initial A it’s immediately, distinctively recognizable.

Those guys got signed in high school, they were 20 when that song accidentally blew up. The single topped the Modern Rock charts and took over Billboard’s Heatseekers new artists chart. The record went platinum. They pushed out four more singles, but most of them didn’t resonate with me.

But this one, it’s got a catchy little hook, and it’ll stick with you all day, and into tomorrow, if you aren’t careful.

Also, look how impossibly young those guys are.

They released two more records before splitting up in 2004. While the first went platinum, the second was certified gold. But the third disappointed, commercially. A few years later they got back on the road. There was an EP in 2021, and a full album in 2022. I listened to a little of it. Still noisy. Not really my type of noise anymore, though. I saw them on the summer festival circuit in their big boomlet. But they’re not touring right now.

Also, their website is written by ChatGPT, maybe.

eve6 isn’t a very good band. they got lucky and had like a hit and a half like twenty years ago and sold some records but who cares. they’ve had all the terminally predictable ups and downs of every other band thats been chewed up and spit out by the machine … eve6 thinks music industry people are the worst people in the world and this includes label people, lawyers, publicists, managers, radio program directors, music supervisors etc. thanks for taking the time away from your fake slack job to read this.

Counter-counterculture, I guess.

There’ll be a lot of music here in the coming days, and some of it will be in the form of the Re-Listening project. The next installment here is from a soundtrack. And it’ll probably be brief. You’re welcome for that.

Be it noisy or loud, have a great weekend, at the decibel level of your choice!

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8
Jun 23

I hope you can get there

Whatever work it is they are doing in the road by my office, they are only doing first thing in the morning. I showed you, yesterday, how they cut a small hole into the role. This morning, they’d dug out a bigger, longer channel. This was what it looked like when I went to work this morning.

And it looked like that all day, too. No one came around for any more work, or to move the big yellow machines.

That patch asphalt, whatever it is actually called, was still tacky this morning. I was tempted to find a good stick and scrawl in a message, see if they’d leave it. (I’ve never written anything in a construction medium.) By this evening, it was solid. I wonder if they’ll leave the roll of tape and the drink bottle in hole when they fill it in tomorrow.

We went to Menard’s this evening. There’s no real story here. We picked up some cat litter and storage bins. The woman that was working the cash register was so slow that they opened three other registers whenever anyone fell into line behind us.

And, plus, she has three cats. One sleeps by her feet. One by her hip. One at her had. She had the robotic kitty litter cleaner. And she liked it. While it worked. It died a year-and-a-half in, after the warranty had expired.

If all else fails, I said, sometimes the old ways are the best..

No one got the reference. Just as well.

I began to understand why she took so long to ring up customers.

In today’s installment of the Re-Listening project, we go back to November 1999 for a new record from a California band. The point of the Re-Listening project is to revisit all of my old CDs in the order that I acquired them, so sometimes I am listening to something that was released earlier that I am just catching up on. But in this case, I know this record was newly released when I picked it up for at the time I was a big Counting Crows fan and I would not have wanted to wait.

I’ve felt, for some time, that I have more of less outgrown the Counting Crows. The Re-Listening project has largely reinforced that feeling. But today’s installment might be the exception to the rule. I think it’s because they’re finally displaying a bit of irreverence, and humor. After spending the rest of the decade being a mainstreamed line of emo, this was a, well, positive move.

It went double platinum, and the album, “This Desert Life” peaked at number eight on the US Billboard 200. It all started with the first track, the first and most successful single.

A friend of mine was a huge mark for Counting Crows, the sort that knew everything about every song before it came out. This, being 1999, was a bit more difficult then than now. But he put in the time to find these things out, and he’d share the interesting bits with people that would listen and so I knew some of the interesting things early too. One night that October, before the album was even out, but when the single was just beginning to get airplay, we were at a restaurant eating chicken fingers and playing foosball. There was a guy in the corner playing pop covers as a solo act and he did “Hanginaround.” We were leaning over the foosball table at the time, my friend and I, and we stopped playing, straightened up, and did the clapping refrain part in the third verse. The musician was surprised. Everyone else in the place thought we were weird. My friend and I, however, were very impressed with ourselves.

That song hit 28 on the US Billboard Hot 100, topped the US Adult Alternative chart and peaked at number five on the US Adult Top 40 which, I guess, is why they waited 10 full months before the second single was released.

I’m surprised how well this song holds up for me. I think it is the guitar distortion. The minimalism of it still seems fresh, somehow.

Perhaps then, as now, this was my favorite track on the record. Oh my, the many highways and several county roads where I turned this up too loud, and the parking lots where I stayed an extra two minutes to get to the best part.

And the hidden track, which never got enough attention, I think. As the youth say today, it’s a banger.

I guess the last time I saw them live was 2001 or 2002 or so. I think they were supporting “Hardy Candy,” which is the next entry in their catalog. They’re playing in Indy at the end of next week, but I’m not going. I think I had my fill. But they will show up a few more times in the Re-Listening project. Up next, though, is a band with an X-Files inspired name because, no matter how often I do this bit, I can not get out of the late 1990s.