culture club

i'm listening to dylan, think about kate bush, drinking a guiness and digging on some havarti - it seemed like the perfect time for blogging.

dylan is great, but 'time out of mind' is off the hook. kate bush is great, but she does have some vanity issues as she has the greatest female, rock/prog-rock voice of all time, guiness is always welcome, and havarti is made better with triscuits. but lets see if i can tackle a few of these one at a time:

time out of mind: its a perfectly constructed record, perhaps the most accessible writer of the last 50 years paired with lanois production makes for one of the best records i've ever heard.

kate bush: its unfair that one could have such complete control of her voice to communicate the emotion of the songs so perfectly - but one pass through 'the red shoes' or 'hounds of love' seems to remedy the discrepancy.

guiness: dude, its guiness... vitamins + flavor = awesome

havarti: a staple to any diet, and seldom declined by the most strong willed of people.

thank you for indulging my insights into culture.


*pardon me for not actually referencing the band by the same name as the subject line, but i think you're grateful for my not.

Poems off the top of my head 2.0

the time, as we discovered,
held nothing for nothing more.
the change has come
but not won the war.

lyrics requests

some people have mentioned that i slur a bit when i sing, anyways... for the three songs i've put up on itunes a request for lyrics was submitted to all of us here at tomtastic enterprizes... so i'm gonna post them up and you can enjoy them at your convenience.

i've started a list of them. i didn't put any grammar into them because i'm above that, or beneath that, i can't remember which.

i'm listening to vigilantes of love right now, a welcome supplement to most meals. enjoy

eddie harsche

i've, for some time, been a fan of the man eddie harsh. he might spell his name a number of different ways, and you may never known who he was, but this is partly why my blog matters.

eddie hawrsche is the ex-keys player from the black crowes. i'll acknowledge that chuck levell took his place on the most recognizable crowes discs, but that doesn't denounce my boy from his due credit.

most keys players fault on either playing too much or too little... an overly notey jazz player will tell you that you can never play too few notes, but they are wrong. eddie is to organ and rhodes and piano like what SRV was to the guitar.

the only compareable keys player is norah jones who sides on too little but tastefully plays those notes flawlessly. but harsche can rip on the keys, and oh how he does. so what i'm saying is this... if you don't buy my songs on itunes... and you don't buy black crowes records between shake your moneymaker and warpaint, at least illegally download the tweeners. i'm not an advocate of the illegal downloads, but if it gets eddie the respect he deserves then i'll make some concessions.

i'm on itunes

didn't know the day would ever come... but here i am, on itunes.

its pretty sweet, you can listen to snips and clips of the three songs loaded.

then you can buy them. :)

will write more soon. but the excitement has paralyzed my fingers, and trying to type with my tongue has left me with a cramp.

that was weird.

tommy

My Narnia experience

i remember narnia, i remember a certain half beast half man character saying, "excuse me, are you what they call a daughter of eve?".

today i had a similar experience. i saw a guy come out of a hardware store with a few painting supplies... he got on an old rusted bike* and had a rocket ship taped to the front of it. he had a leather coat, shaggy hair, a half beard and pretty tight pants that seemed tapered. anyways, the only question that popped into my mind was, "excuse me, are you what they call a hipster?"

i mean, i listen to the pogues, i own a cardigan, i haven't combed my hair in a number of months, i play folk music, i play in an electronic rock band like depeche mode, i live in williamsburg and all my jeans have holes in them, but friends, with people floating around like the character mentioned above i'm confident i'm not a hipster... i'm just awesome.


* probably 20 years old

dave matthews band live on wall street?

i saw this flyer in a train the other day, i've decided it needed some attention. in this discussion there are a few points that need to be addressed.

1. national march on wallstreet
2. we demand jobs: bail out the people not banks
3. bring ALL the troops home now
4. April 3&4 1pm
5. mlk jr.

1. this seems interesting enough, but not interesting enough for me to say more than, i hope you bring blankets to catch the jumpers.
2. i think it not unreasonable to see how the people are kind of being bailed out by the bail out. i'm not going to say, "BAM", because i'm not sure its a perfect solution, but i'm confident that if the government split up 700 billion (or whatever it is) among the population, we'd all be super rich for a few days and then that mysterious inflation would set in, causing prices to skyrocket, and the perpetual taxation would repay the loan, and then... actually i'm kind of making a case for my 2 million.
3. bringing all the troops back? really, now? oh wait then i could get even more money because we could split up the remaining trillions again and i'd be even super richer.
4. ok, i think i can hold out my criticism on this one, why do we have two marches for the same cause? then i pause - because its national and soooo many people will be there that we won't be able to all fit. this makes sense too....
5. mlk jr. well if he endorses this posthumously i guess i don't have a choice but to rally behind him.

this might be the greatest march in history... other than that dave matthews band song about ants. it actually makes sense that this is the real reason people will bring their blankets and why its two days in a row... its all coming together.

Poems off the top of my head 1.0 - i didn't say they were good but they're quicker than my long blogs for you AND me. grade me like i'm in 10th grade

He didn't know her but she loved him
Its safer this way
If he knew, and if she loved
She would lose herself

Not for him.

She will lose herself

i've been hearing sooooo much about this girl adele...

...i suppose its not that i've been hearing about her as much as it is actually hearing her that has finally gotten to me.

i love bob dylan. i love his time out of mind record more than any of his other records. i love the song to make you feel my love when he sings it better than when anyone else does - kind of in the nick cave/shane macgowan singing its a wonderful world sort of way - and adele covered it, but i'll forgive her for that - however, there is something i cannot forgive her for, and that is the song chasing pavements.

i heard it once and i thought it was catchy. i don't think the lyrics are magnificent, but i don't think they are terrible. but then, this adele character is taking down all these grammy awards and is on the tip of every tongue in manhattan - also on every xm radio station, every website, every open window in the lower east side, and its getting a bit excessive.

after hearing it once, as i said, i thought it was catchy, then i kept hearing it and there was something about it that i just couldn't stand so i did my research and i put it all together and i realized the problem - adele, i know you're not sure if you should give up or if you should just keep chasing pavements, but every believable ounce, all the weight of each of the words and everything catchy and melodic about line is completely lost when you repeat it 15 times in a 3 minute song. thats once every 12 seconds.

now as i mentioned before, i love bob dylan but part of that love is that his lyrics carry so much weight by both the placement and sparse nature of his great lines. so, in like a rolling stone when he sings, "when you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose", this great line is said only once in the middle of an already great song. i could argue that the entire song is based around that line, but then if you counter argued we could at least likely settle that the line is perfectly set up through the entire song and when he sings it only once... it's perfect.

dylan also has these songs where he repeats a certain line at the end of each turn around - a great example would be the song to make you feel my love that was already mentioned here. in that tune he keeps saying, "to make you feel my love", but when he does this in songs, and he does it a lot, (listen to love and theft - or more specifically this song - ) every time whatever the line is drops it seems to get heavier and heavier. selah.

i don't love adele, i'm not going to lie. and its not that i hate her, but if i buy a copy of this record its likely for a christian cd burning (not to be mistaken for a christian cd burning*) but she's doing a good thing, and i think aspiring to be bob dylan is too lofty for nearly all songwriters, so maybe she should just do an investigation of why angels by robbie williams is sooooooooooooooo good.


* arrested development forever.