music « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

music

cycling / Friday / music / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
24
Feb 23

Flying into the weekend

Look who is passing back through. The nearby ponds are a stopover. And since they’re only here for a short time, and since their presence is a welcome signal, we welcome the site of the Canada geese. The squeaking, honking, flapping, fluttering geese are back.

May they fly north with great speed, and may warm weather be in their wake.

We’ll see 50s and 60s for the next few days, and some sun. I’ll happily take a few more weeks of that, and then complain internally until the real spring weather arrives.

Timing is everything for spring weather. Those geese know it. That’s why they’re heading north now. Some of the trees understand it. That’s why you’ll see buds emerging at some of those naked little twigs. The days are getting longer and the insects are noticing all of this, too. Now we just need to prevail upon the prevailing weather patterns.

Spring will arrive in 54 days.

I’m doing a bit of a silly thing. As regular readers likely recall, I’m working my way through all of the routes on the Zwift bike riding game. It’s a great way to work up base miles, between outdoor riding seasons and trying to tackle all of the routes at least provides some variety. There are 124 routes and growing. I started that at the beginning of January, ticking routes off this checklist. Not all of the routes are available every day, and, of course, I have to work around my regular schedule, as well. At some point all of this will get a little more demanding, because of that selectivity, and because I started crossing the easier routes off first.

And now we come to the silly part, I am going to try to knock off three of the more demanding courses this weekend. The gimmick being that if you do all three, your Zwift avatar gets a nice new Rapha kit to wear.

So, tonight, I rode the first of the Rapha Rising stages. I wound up climbing 2,500 feet, all of it felt nice and easy, but it will get more demanding. There are another 7,400+ feet of climbing to go tomorrow, and Sunday.

That’s a fair amount of work to do for a virtual kit, I think. But I need to get those three stages off the list anyway. It’ll dominate the weekend’s fun, and just might impact how I feel about stairs on Monday.

In this installment of the Re-Listening project, where I am playing all of my CDs in the order that I acquired them, we find ourselves firmly in the summer of 1996, and listening to Tonic’s debut album, “Lemon Parade.” It went platinum and featured three singles, including “Open Up Your Eyes,” and the smash hit “If You Could Only See.” The former got a lot of rock and alt rock attention. (This will come up in a future edition of the Re-Listening project.) The latter topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks, and number 11 on the Billboard Airplay Hot 100. That single spent 63 weeks on the chart. The record itself peaked at 28 on the Billboard 200.

There’s a lot of texture and distortion in the guitars, but the rhythm section deserves some attention throughout the record, too. And we’ll come to that, but first, the one that was, I guess, inspired by Steve Earle or The Pogues, or perhaps both.

You can hear what I’m hinting at with the drums and the bass line, if you listen all the way through. And that’s great, but the ballads are, to me, the best part of the record.

Here’s the other standout. And there’s a video, which is … odd. This wasn’t a single. Fine little ditty, though.

Tonic struck at the right time. The sound was just right for loud big speakers and soaring, noisy solos. Along the way, they earned a few Grammy nominations. I’m listening to this in the car, trying to imagine having all of this in headphones or earbuds. It seems a challenge.

They released five albums, the first and the second saw their biggest chart success. It was the mid-late 90s and pop music was about to change underfoot. They self-released their last record, in 2016, as a lot of people were doing by then. On the website they’re now a three-piece, and there’s one show listed this fall, in Oregon. The lead singer, has released three solo albums. The other two guys do a fair amount of work scoring TV and movies, it seems.

Up next in the Re-Listening project was a John Mellencamp maxi-single. This was a radio station giveaway, I’m sure. It features four tracks, one of them the single he was promoting that summer, and two B-sides you already knew, so we won’t spend a lot of time here. But this, which I had no recollection of at all, really captured my imagination last night.

Like you, I had no idea I needed Mellencamp to cover James Brown, but now I realize the error of my oversight.

In 2018, Netflix released a documentary-of-sorts. It was a live concert from 2016, with Mellencamp doing voiceovers, telling extra stories about life and art and whatever else. It was worth watching, if you ever found yourself nodding along to Johnny Cougar.

He released his 25th studio album last year, and, a few days ago, the 71-year-old set out on a North American tour that will keep him on the road through June. Maybe that’s what the geese were on about.

music / Re-Listening / tabs / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
21
Feb 23

‘Only tomorrow leads the way’

Got up this morning in time to ride my bike. I got in 18 miles and about 1,500 feet of climbing. That makes four consecutive days of riding, and the rest of today, and tomorrow, and Thursday, as rest days. So tomorrow and Thursday are rest days. Little morning rides like that feel, later in the day, like they didn’t even happen.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 73 routes down, 51 to go. And, this weekend, three big climbs.

Later in the day, I taught someone had to tie a tie. Then he did it on the first try. Looked good, too. I’m not entirely convinced he wasn’t beginning some elaborate ploy, but if not, it was a big part of my contribution to the day.

Let’s close some tabs! These are things sitting on my phone. Some of them are too good or useful to X and forget. So we’re memorializing a few here each week. PSA: Do your browser a favor, and choose good tabs.

I don’t need this one anymore, because we had to replace some baking sheets. Some things are beyond cleaning, some things just need to be replaced. Marie Kondo speechs are being delivered. But maybe you’re not there. Maybe you’re here. How to clean a baking sheet in 3 easy steps:

Although cleaning a baking tray seems like it requires plenty of elbow-grease, it’s not that hard to do. All you need are a few household items that you’ll find in your kitchen, that will save you time and effort of scrubbing. Best of all, you don’t even need to spend a fortune on expensive cleaning products.

Anyway, that’s an old, ollllld tab. This one I found at the beginning of this month.

There’s something to this sort of material I’m profoundly interested in. I haven’t been able to understand, yet, precisely what I’m after, but it is somewhere at the intersection of culture and history and tradition of food and foodstuffs. This semi-profile dips into some of that.

They call her the godmother of Southern seeds for a reason:

“When you say her name in our community, all this love comes up — a standing ovation every time, from all the young’uns and friends who sit at her feet, whom she has blessed,” said Bonnetta Adeeb, of Ujamaa Seeds. Ms. Wallace has advised Ujamaa, a collective of Black and Indigenous growers focusing on culturally relevant seed, which just introduced its second online catalog.

Witnessing this traction is joyful for Ms. Wallace, and even a little surprising, in the best way — particularly set against the backdrop of the last century’s sharp decline in Black-owned American farms, to fewer than 1 percent today.

“The seed world is a particularly white aspect of the sustainable agriculture movement,” she said. “Where Black people were coming in at all to farming was in CSAs and that aspect of the food system — not to grow seed.”

[…]

In the way that the South’s population has evolved, so has the Southern Exposure seed list. Alongside Doe Hill golden sweet bell pepper, a pre-1900 Virginia family heirloom, is Pimiento Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorean sweet pepper with two-inch, pumpkin-shaped fruits. An Acorn Community member whose mother is from Latin America volunteered with Ecuadorean seed-saver groups, forging the connection.

“We realized that, just like the European immigrants spread their versions of different vegetables around, that the current immigrants have communities and varieties,” Ms. Wallace said. “We’re trying to make that a part of the web of American heirlooms we offer.”

I’ll figure out what it is I’m after one day. Precisely what(ever) it is, I bet Ms. Wallace has known for quite some time.

These are lovely. But when I see things like 11 of the most remote homes in the world I wonder, ‘How expensive is it to ship these materials — and get whatever machinery is required — in and out of there?’

If you’ve ever had the—completely reasonable—desire to get away from it all, perhaps the more appropriate retreat is one of the world’s many remote homes. Spread throughout the globe, these homes are often accompanied with views of near untouched nature. What’s more, isolated properties make it easy to disconnect from the distractions of everyday life while embracing simplicity and solitude. Below, AD rounds up some of the most stunning examples of remote homes, from small villages set atop mountains to islands with just one home on them. These 11 far-flung abodes prove that sometimes the most beautiful thing one can experience is the feeling of truly being alone.

Anyway, that’s a terrific collection of photographs. And that’s enough tab closing for one day. Wouldn’t want to get below 40 tabs on my phone’s browser. (I have 43 tabs still open.)

Two consecutive days of the Re-Listening project? Why, yes, you see, I had to drive to campus — we live 4.5 miles away — on Sunday and that’s somehow another fortnight in the car. What it really means is that between Friday and this morning, I worked through two CDs, and started a third. Time flies when you’re stuck at every single red light. And that’s fine, because it allows us to magically transport to, let’s say April 1996 or soon thereafter, when the Dave Matthews Band released “Crash.” Just last week we touched on the debut Under the Table and Dreaming. They sold six million copies of that, but this sophomore effort was even bigger. They moved seven million units by the end of the decade, just about the time that sales get all blurry and don’t we need a more modern metric anyway?

The record went to number two on the Billboard 200. Debuted there, behind Hootie and next bested by The Fugees (which is coming up for us soon) and it stayed on the chart for two years. They released five singles over the next 11 months. All of them charted, two — “Too Much and “Crash Into Me” — climbed into the top 10.

Here’s a jam of #41. It’s one of my god-sister-in-law’s (just go with the nomenclature) favorite songs.

That’s a 21 minute performance from 2009, and I thank you for sticking around. The album version has a modest run time of 6:39. The original song was somewhere in-between. There is, I think, an awful lot of jam compositions on this record and I would like to thank the entire music industry for hearing this, seeing the sales, and resisting the urge to remake this in countless ways for the next eight years.

Here’s the two-man performance of “Let You Down” with Tim Reynolds. (Their duo-live show will come up in a later installment of the Re-Listening project.)

We played this at our place, a lot. I’m not sure if I liked this more, or my roommate did. Maybe Charlie just tolerated it, but I have great memories of the sun coming through the pines and the blinds, listening to this on his stereo or mine, grilling out, hosting friends, having a ball.

It would have been midway through the spring quarter. We’d just had spring break, which was kind of a farce, but everything else was clicking into place nicely. I was broke, but tuition was still (comparatively) affordable. I was hanging out with a minor superstar and I knew it. One of the few things I did know, actually. It was a great time. And that’s a great gift of time. Left to think about it, you can come up with the difficulties of a time long past. But it is, somehow, a bit easier to blur some of those out. And you get to choose! I’m choosing the carefree moods of that spring. This record was a big, big part of the soundtrack. I can smile on that the rest of the night. I might, even!

Up next in the Re-Listening project, probably Thursday, more overly polished rock ‘n’ roll with no particularly overwhelming impressions.

adventures / cycling / memories / Monday / music / photo / Re-Listening — Comments Off
20
Feb 23

‘So we tripped upstairs’

We spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon on the deck. We built a fire. There are woods behind us, but we went out and purchased firewood. I have joked about buying a chainsaw, finding the owner of those woods and … well, maybe I should do that in the other other … meeting the owner of the woods and ask if they minded if I pulled the occasional felled tree out for the fire pit.

But I haven’t done that. The Yankee bought some wood, some really green stuff, and we struggled through that for a while. I used every trick before adding an accelerant to make that stuff to burn. But we needed more firewood and so, yesterday, we went to a proper lumber man. He has an honor system set up. Put your money in the box over here, draw your wood from that stack over there. It was perfect. When we put the flame to the wood it caught straight away.

It was the perfect temperature. You didn’t need to hug the fire to be warm. You didn’t get too hot if you leaned in too far. I wonder how long a trunk’s worth of wood will last.

Light weekend on the bike for whatever reason. I just go by feel, really. And after a few low key days I’m sure I’ll feel the need to put in more miles. But I have screen grabs, because I need content. Here’s a flat spot after a downhill from Saturday’s ride.

And then, for some reason, all of the HUD graphics disappeared. It was lovely. No times of other rides or maps, just a road. It was a bit like, well, riding a bike.

I’m not sure how I managed to do that to the Zwift interface, or what brought the graphics back. I’ve cropped them out here, because I like the side view as a change of pace, those flowers are nice and … what is going on with my avatar’s knee?

My knees sometime feel like that, too.

I also got in 26 miles this evening, and my knees feel great! (It was a generally flat course, just 1,000 feet, or so, of climbing.)

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 71 routes down, 53 to go.

But enough about me on my site. Let’s get to what you’re really here for, the weekly check-in on the cats, who are both doing well, by the way.

Phoebe has absolutely developed a sun routine. At a certain point of the morning, on those days when we have sun, it can stream into the bedroom. We have some heavy duty curtains, so if her time of the morning has arrived, and we haven’t opened those curtains, she knows. She’s not a big complainer, mind you, but she will sit. She will sit, and she will wait. She will sit, and she will wait for the sun to be presented to her. She will sit. She will wait. She will judge.

She judges me a lot. Fortunately, she is fair, and forgiving.

Mostly because she likes to cuddle. Here’s the standard issue Sunday night cuddle.

Sometimes, you just have to sit on the steps and think on the deep, profound issues of life.

On this particular night, Poseidon was thinking about how he comes to find himself with a napkin over his head, holes cut out for his ears.

He’s thinking of a ghost costume for Halloween this year.

We play a game every Sunday morning. He rolls around on the oven cover, delighting in the heat that’s escaping after bacon and biscuits. After I do the breakfast dishes I rub his face down with a napkin. We pay special attention to his ears and his cheeks and his chin and he loves it. After a time, he feels his face is clean and at that point the napkin has somehow become offensive, and he starts biting it, and me. Yesterday that got a bit aggressive, and he tore a hole in the thin paper. Open it up, and the holes were the perfect size and spacing for his radar ears.

Back then, I just didn’t buy everything right away. Probably because I couldn’t afford it. Plus media consumption was a little bit different. It is also possible that some of these CDs got slipped into the CD books a little out of sequence. One of those, or some other banal explanation, applies here. Anyway, let’s call it the spring of 1996 and return to the Re-Listening project with a perfectly produced example of alt pop from Arizona.

“Congratulations I’m Sorry” came out in February of 1996. I probably bought this from one of the two independent music stores that were in town. (It wouldn’t be too many more years before that sentence was, itself, outdated.) I probably paid between $7 and $12 for it. Worth every penny. Panned by critics for a lack of innovation, it’s really a continuation of Gin Blossoms’ previous record, which we breezed through earlier this month.

This one went platinum, but underperformed their second record. It made it into the top 10 on the US Billboard 200 weekly chart, and settled at 138 on the year-ender. They are, of course, still playing the hits from both today. (We saw them twice last year.)

So here are some more prime alternative pop deep cuts coming your way.

Somewhere between the flannel and finding jobs, these songs were part of the soundtrack of a century slowing wrapping itself up. That’s as profound as I can get.

This one got nominated for a Grammy, and was probably a profound breakup song for someone trying to wrap up a century. Not for me, but for someone.

They were really after something with that video, no?

No video here, but a nice live audio recording which does a nice enough job pointing out that Jesse Valenzuela makes the whole band work.

The Wikipedia entry has a “People” review I can’t find quickly online, but runs the quote “a quick fix for any dark mood … the songs are so upbeat they almost conjure sunny summer afternoons.” And that seems fair.

Also, I think this is one of the better songs of its genre and time.

A lot of people posting and uploading to YouTube seem to agree. There are a lot of shaky phone shots of live shows, and more than a few personal covers of “Competition Smile.”

I saw them on campus on this tour, and not too long after that they went on hiatus for a few years. They’d been through a lot. The title of this record, after all, stems from people acknowledging their last record’s success, and sharing in their grief of the 1993 suicide of former lead singer, Doug Hopkins. “Congratulations I’m Sorry.”

He’s not on this record, but they’ll be playing his songs this weekend in New York and Pennsylvania.

The band in our next installment of the Re-Listening project is also on tour this spring. If you’re in Florida next month, maybe you can still get a ticket. But more from them tomorrow.

cycling / memories / music / Re-Listening / Thursday / video — Comments Off
16
Feb 23

Time is mutable

This I don’t understand. It was 67 yesterday. We’ll have the chance of snow tomorrow. This is my only comment on the day, the only one that needs to be recorded for posterity about the mysteriousness of February 16, 2023.

But also this, time is a mutable construct. Tuesday, I unsubscribed from two series of emails. I have read them, perused them, skimmed them, clicked the interesting links within them faithfully. But, lately, they just seemed a chore. I have been on the fence for a while. A developer I know made some comment about each of these services that finally pushed me to the unsubscribe side. So, then, yesterday was the first day that I didn’t receive those daily emails — it could be two, it could be 12 a day, and you never knew what your inbox would receive. And yesterday, I noted at 3:31, had already been 32 hours long.

A friend told me I should re-subscribe, because friends are enablers, but I’m curious to see how this plays out. Today, for instance, was only 17 hours long. Time is mutable.

Let’s quickly get caught back up — before falling behind once again — on the Re-Listening project. I am forever impressed by how fast a CD goes by in the car. It’s a nine-mile round trip from the house to the office, but that’s somehow 40-50 minutes, whether I want it to be or not, and that’s in the window of a standard CD run time. But I digress.

As you know, I’m playing, and putting these here, in the order of acquisition. So we’re somewhere in 1996, but this was one of those tape-to-CD format upgrades, so we have to step way back in time, to 1994. And according to the arbitrary rules I have arbitrarily made, I can gloss over the upgrades.

I saw DMB on tour on the next few records, just before they got prohibitively expensive.

Back in the day my roommate, Chuck, and I had a sophisticated musical code. Certain records meant certain things. This CD, for a time, was one of those signals.

Yes, fair or not, I blame DMB for starting the concert inflation trend. But I caught them twice, right place, affordable times, I suppose.

Back then, virtuoso guitarist Tim Reynolds and fiddler Boyd Tinsley seemed like the band to me. I don’t think I’ve heard anything new since LeRoi Moore died in 2008 — so I’m four albums behind. There’s been some turnover in the band, but Reynolds is still there (he’s the secret weapon) and the rhythm section is intact. I’m sure it’s fine, but I don’t know if it is a time and place thing. Something else we’ll have to get around to discovering one of these days.

But not right now. When we next visit the Re-Listening project, we’ll be hitting peak emo pop 1996.

I asked my lovely bride to bring me some Advil this evening. She was nearer the bottle, and I didn’t want to get up to fetch it. It is one of those countless easy things one person does for another person from time to time.

“What’s hurting?”

Me.

See, I came in and wanted to get in a little bike ride, but I am also trying to be conscientious of not riding all night, because there’s dinner and getting ready for the next day and so on. At the same time, I am now getting into Zwift routes that are a little longer, so they’ll take a few more minutes, but there’s also a weird in-betweenness to them. I did two routes tonight. The first one was 10 miles and change, that’s nothing. But I thought I could get the next one, too. Only, it was about the time of the evening that I wanted to get it done. So I pressed a little bit.

There’s one two-mile climb on that route, and I hate that particular climb.

But I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and got over the thing. I set a new PR and somehow got the polka dots jersey marking the fastest climber on the course at the time. I also got a second polka dot jersey for a second, smaller climb, as you can see on the right hand side of the graphic. (I am not a climber.) I also got a green jersey for the best sprint segment on the course. (I am not a sprinter.) All of this says more about who was riding around me, rather than me.

But I probably should have used better gearing on those climbs. Anyway, that was 75 minutes on the bike, tonight including two Strava PRs. And now my legs are tired.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker 68 routes down, 56 to go.

history / memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
15
Feb 23

Did you have “Appalachian murder ballad” on your Bingo card?

I took three photographs today, each one less useful than the last. First, two big wheel cars came down Indiana Avenue. I have seen them both before. You see a lot of cars over and over in your daily routine, of course. Most sensible mid-sized sedans and the ubiquitous SUVs don’t stand out, but when you see the classic land yacht on oversized rims, it stands out. When one of them is purple and gold and celebrates the Los Angeles Lakers, you make a mental note. I saw that car today. He was in front of this guy.

They generate a lot of interest and, it turns out, they have annoyingly interesting horns. I only looked out of the window because it sounded like an animal was dying, over and over. And, thus, the from-the-hip photo.

The next picture was of a daisy someone brought into the building. It seems there was someone outside handing out flowers. If you’ve seen one thoughtless composition of an oversized flower, you’ve seen them all.

Also, this little guy. I’ll let you figure out what it does. I know, but do you? Here’s your hint, we have four of them in the studio.

And, if you cheat and look up those letters, you’ll quickly learn what it is. But it is more fun if you guess.

We have some catching up to do on the Re-Listening project, and so we should dive in while I can still remember the order of things. So two quick ones today, both of which I picked up from a radio station I worked at, probably in early 1997, or the very very end of 1996. I know that because this first one had a stamp in the liner notes. Not for promotional use.

It was The Lemonheads, their last record on the Atlantic Records label. Band members were coming and going around lead singer Evan Dando, including a lot of talented session musicians, and for whatever reason — promotion interest, most likely — it was not as successful as the previous alt rock records from the Massachusetts group. But it has developed a cult following, and that’s the least we can do. This is a great record.

The first track is one of my favorites.

But then there’s the next song, which was the one that got a fair amount of air play.

But you see pretty quickly, I think, how The Lemonheads’ style was being outpaced by what was being offered on radio and MTV. The mid-third of the record gets a bit eclectically moody.

Then, and I still don’t understand why, though I’ve certainly burned brain cells on it, there’s an Appalachian murder ballad in the eighth spot. I knew this song right away.

Let’s take a little detour. This is worth it. This is why I knew that song.

The Louvin Brothers’ version was published in 1956. And in the Tennessee Valley, in the Highland Rim, I heard that around a kitchen table or in a garage, or both. Charlie Louvin, who was born on the other side of the mountains, in the Sequatchie Valley, in the Cumberland Plateau, did a haunting version of it again, 51 years later.

It’s deep in the marrow, is what we’re left with. Knoxville Girl dates to the 1920s, but it’s all borrowed, a version of “The Wexford Girl,” a 19th-century Irish ballad, which owes its origin to a 17th century English ballad, “The Bloody Miller or Hanged I Shall Be.” (Samuel Pepys wrote that one down for all of history.) It may go back even further. I wonder if the three dozen or so bands that have recorded the song in the last several decades knew all of that.

For some reason, and maybe this is why this record has a cult following now, there’s an ode to the movie Se7en. Then another ballad and, finally, more glorious noise rock.

I wish I could give you a count of the number of country roads I sped down listening to that song, or, indeed, the whole record. It would be a substantial amount.

I could not say about this next record, which was another radio station freebie. It had a little airplay. It was not for me, the guy who is referring you to the history of an Appalachian murder ballad, but a girl I liked at the time loved ska, so I picked up Goldfinger’s eponymous, debut, record.

I remember one sunny day, one curve in a particular road, where I caught the punchline in one of these songs. Which, hey, if anyone remembers a joke I’ve done 20-some years on, I’d be pleased, but other than that …

On this listen, this is the only one that I find interesting at all.

I know what is coming up in the next few CDs, I’m going to like those much better. Maybe there will be some stories to tell. Maybe you’ll like them too. The stories, or the music, either one.