music « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

music

music / photo / Re-Listening / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Mar 23

The final trick of winter is upon us

At last, I noticed the last of the series of winter’s tricks. I’m a few weeks late in the observation, but we’ve now worked through the full sequence. The sun returns. Then you have a random day or two of unseasonably warm weather. We’ve done that too. And now, these guys.

That’s about as low angle as I can get in coat and tie. But when these emerge, from this particular spot, in a bed between the parking lot, the street, and our campus building, that’s the signature trick of winter here. You want it to be spring; just look at these petals …

… but winter isn’t done with us yet. You don’t know when, or why, but winter will be back. This stems from a 2017 observation. Oh, I was fooled that first winter. The next year, I had that in mind. You want to believe the outliers break your way, but outliers don’t always break your way.

One’s a dot, two’s a line and three is the dawning of understanding a pattern. By the time 2019 rolled around I recognized this for what it was. The winter and first flowers of 2019 didn’t fool me. I was, by then, wise to Mother Nature’s tricks.

Thing is, this has been a remarkably mild winter. It got up to 75 today! It makes you want to believe. But winter isn’t done with us yet.

We are 51 days from spring.

Not many people liked this album, apparently, and most of them were wrong. That’s the takeaway from today’s installment of the Re-Listening project. We’re listening to Seven Mary Three’s third studio album, and that puts us in the early summer of 1997.

My roommate and a friend and I saw them in a small venue the year before. It was very much a post-grunge type show. (Moe opened for them. Their bassist did the stage-dive-crowd-surf thing. His giant clodhopping boots were a danger to society.) And the band was continuing down this route, even as “RockCrown” was flirting with the idea of becoming a concept album. It went to number 75 on the Billboard 200. Two singles hit the top 40 on the Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts. But critics kinda panned them and the one-hit wonder jokes started right away.

I liked the record.

This one was just uploaded three weeks ago. It’s a 2008 performance. And the original song isn’t acoustic, but maybe it should have been.

The problem, I think, is that most of the songs on this album aren’t designed for airplay. That doesn’t make a project bad, or even unsuccessful. Maybe everyone had misplaced that concept for a time. But if something sticks in your head for whatever reason, it sticks in your head.

There are a few lyrics from this song that still come to mind unassisted — sitting quietly, working in the yard, walking down a sidewalk, they just float to the surface — all these many years later.

These guys are from Virginia, and using a guitar like this is allowed on that side of the mountains, I guess.

This was always a car CD for me. Windows up or down. Better when moving around at a fashionable speed. And I don’t know if it evokes the desired response, but this song always makes smile.

So it is good to hear all of this in the car. And the next CD has started, to my delight, which means we’ll be Re-Listening here again soon. We’ll be going all the way back to something released in 1991, though I picked it up six years late. I enjoy it every time I listen to it, though. I may listen to it twice. But that’s a topic for another day.

adventures / Mastodon / memories / music / Re-Listening / tabs / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
28
Feb 23

‘Hey kind friend’

I’m in the middle of the three longest days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday and Friday will be postscript and epilogue. But yesterday was 10 hours, today was 10 hours and tomorrow is 12 hours. Tonight, tonight I had a bowl of soup for dinner at 9:30.

It isn’t the hardest work in the world, or overly demanding, but the hours do accumulate.

Also, despite my best efforts, no amazing anecdote emerged from the day. No outlandish story, discovery or incredible sequence of events fell into my lap. No astounding coincidence, tale with a surely fabricated punchline or other incredible thing happened. It was a Tuesday, he said, grateful that he did all of the ironing on Monday.

Some things from Mastodon, which is where all the cool kids are now that Twitter is sliding int its news inedible pot of broth.

Saw this on campus today and picked one up.

It’s a getting-on-our-feet first issue, 10 pages. Heavy on design, light on copy, but rich in information.

You wonder about the practical feasibility of research like this. It seems like we should have this and a few verifying elements of research and then, ya know, implement it.

But the corporate bosses don’t read studies like that, I’d bet.

Every time you turn around archeology is discovering a new not-so-small discovery that resets our understanding of what we understand. It says a lot about what we don’t yet understand, and all of the things there are to learn.

If you click through the link, and wait out the preroll ad, there’s a fantastic NPR package here.

I can’t go all the way to Charlottesville for a photo exhibit, but if I was at the University of Virginia, I would definitely spend some time with those displays.

It is once again time to clean up the browser a bit. These are some tabs I’ve been holding on to for … quite a while, as it turns out. Too good to close and never be found again — and bookmarks being a different, quixotic enterprise altogether, I guess — I’m collecting them here.

This one is dated 2021. Is it possible I’ve had it opened for that long?

A self-made millionaire and CEO shares 5 ‘quick tests’ he always uses during job interviews to decide whether to hire:

Having these quick tests in your back pocket helps you make smarter business decisions. Why? Because the more we think about something, the more our minds will try to play tricks on us. We second-guess, we let doubt and fear creep in, we hesitate, we overthink. The purpose of the five tests below is to get past all of that and get back to the truth that you’ve known deep down all along.

This is especially true regarding two of the most important decisions that managers at my company, Compass, make: When to hire someone, and when to pass on them.

All of those will strike you as general, but not incorrect.

I stumbled upon this sometime early last year and thought, “Clearly anyone can do this.”

I just need some canvas. (And paint. And artistic talent.)

This was a much more recent, perhaps realistic, find. Buckwheat chocolate chunk cookies:

I am a chocolate chunk girl all the way because they melt into the cookie so much better. In contrast, chocolate chips hold their chip shape even after they are baked due to their waxy coating. I also love the size variation that the chunks give. This recipe also doesn’t make you choose between milk chocolate or dark chocolate because it has both! The inner kid in me loves milk chocolate way too much to leave it out, and I think the sweetness balances out the bitterness from the dark chocolate perfectly. Always use good-quality chocolate — especially when it is the star ingredient.

This recipe yields a slightly thin cookie with the crispiest golden edges and a gooey center — just how a chocolate chip cookie should be! It calls for mostly all-purpose flour, with a touch of buckwheat flour. This addition adds a delicate texture and a hint of nuttiness. Lastly, a finish of flaky salt on top adds the perfect amount of crunch. Flaked salt just makes everything better — what can I say?

Say “Pass the cookies, please!”

Because of an impulsive decision to close some shopping sites, a decision no doubt brought on by a distinct lack of cookies available as of this writing, I am now down to just 30 tabs on my phone’s browser.

Today we also return to the Re-Listening project, which is where I’m working my way through all of my CDs, in order of acquisition. Not reviews, but sometimes memories, and most often an excuse to revisit music — most of it great!

This installment brings us to the late spring or early summer of 1997. I bought my second Indigo Girls CD. The first was the double-live “1200 Curfews,” this was a studio record, and “Shaming of the Sun” solidified my love for the band. I saw them that May and, thanks to the web, I can see the setlist.

Thin Line
Power of Two
Don’t Give That Girl a Gun
It’s Alright
Shed Your Skin
Get Out the Map
Reunion
Mystery
Scooter Boys
Everything in Its Own Time
Shame on You
Caramia
Chickenman
Southland in the Springtime
Cut It Out
Galileo
Chiapas Bound
Here I Am
Closer to Fine

Nine of those songs are on this record. I wish I could remember if I’d already bought it by then. Probably so. (I also saw them the next year, in Atlanta. I’ve seen the Indigo Girls more than anyone else, I imagine, and almost always as a two-piece.) It became their highest-charting album, at least in the United States. It hit number 7 on the Billboard 200.

The most important memories from this record would come still a decade later. The first two tracks are songs The Yankee and I sang together on a long car ride.

This is important because I don’t really sing in front of people, or sing with people outside of church. But it had been a good week and the sun was bright and the road was long and we were actually using an actual map.

Sometime later she made me a mix CD and that song is on there, too. We’ve also seen the Indigo Girls together twice, in Atlanta and Indianapolis. But for Covid, we would have seen them in Nashville too, just to round out the map a bit more.

The still-intriguing thing about this record is that it still fits at any time. Also, there’s a lot of message music on here. Protests and the like have never especially appealed to me, or sent me away, but the messaging is obvious, even to me. When I first got this I was still mostly taken by Emily Saliers’ incredible writing, even as I was starting to pay more attention to Amy Ray’s background vocals.

It was the next record when I would really learn to dive into everything Ray did. They compliment one another so well, of course. At the time, what Saliers wrote, the way she played, it all felt so true and intently earnest. And sometimes brooding and mysterious.

I just wasn’t hearing Ray yet, which seems hilarious in retrospect. (I have her entire catalog now, and I’ll ramble on and on about it in future installments, I’m sure of it.)

Those harmonies!

That’s why you sing along with a pretty girl, even if you’re not in the habit of making such a small thing about yourself available.

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.