I forgot to blog about it, but a little while ago I added a wimpy player to this site on the right sidebar, mostly for the purpose of being able to access some music and audiobooks of mine over the web, but also to share with you some music and stories I listen to as I create. “What’s your creative soundtrack” is a popular question in art forums, so I thought I’d show rather than tell.  You can listen to the files on your own computer via this site as you work, and I’ll be uploading more soon. I think I’ll concentrate on the audiobooks for now since I am kind of on n audiobook kick right now. I have several full, unabridged books now in the library - just scroll down to the player (the little iPod thingy) and navigate like a real iPod.

If you want to get your own, it is a simple script with a very reasonable price and it’s super-easy to install, skin and upload music. No, they aren’t paying me to write that, I just like the player.

This scene from the movie “Once” is one of the most organic things I have seen all year. The characters have recently met and he is halfway-through showing her a half fleshed-out song he has scribbled down, while she ad-libs some harmony and a beautiful piano accompaniment.

We use the term organic way too much these days to mean non-chemical, not genetically-altered, not mass-produced and the like, but these all focus on what it is NOT. Organic is growing, natural, not forced by a hand or design, free to flow to it’s own form. What happens when you just let it be. By this definition, this scene is entirely organic; hesitant and almost feeble at the start, getting a footing, learning the notes, growing into the tune and finally feeling the piece as they are making it, and I can almost picture a little tree shooting branches in fast forward to visually frame the music that these two people are growing in this scene.

You wouldn’t be making a bad decision if you went out and nabbed the spectacular soundtrack for the movie highlighting Irish-born Glen Hansard of The Frames and Czech singer Markéta Irglová or checked out their collaboration effort, The Swell Season.

Adam ’s Pictures of one of my Guitars

“I love Guitar Hero. I wish they had a guitar hero, but for, like, singing.”

“How would that work, then? How would the game know if you are hitting the right notes?”

“I don’t know, maybe there could be, like, a controller and when you sing a specific note you hit a specific button, so the game knows you know the notes.”

“Huh. What kind of controller?”

“Any kind - just something with buttons on it in a row to represent notes.”

“What if it were shaped like a guitar?

“Well, yeah, that would work…..Oh.”

I hope you can tell which side of that was me.

Brian put me on to this, but I am sure Adam and Colin already knew about it, since they both seem to have a hotline to the Pearl Jam rumour pit. Pearl Jam and Ames Bros are releasing a book entitled “Pearl Jam vs. Ames Bros.” with the collected collaborations for their legendary concert posters over the years, and I’m drooling already.

Anyone who has wandered into our living room (intentionally or not) has probably noticed the poster/ticket collections from the concerts we have been to that Adam and I have been accumulating and a couple of them are Ames Bros genius. They design for artists such as Dave Matthews, Sting, Phish, Moe., and (of course) Pearl Jam, as well as event posters for House of Blues, MTV and various other music festivals. We may not have walls full of Fillmore Auditorium Classics, but I think the Ames Bros. fill out the drywall canvases of our house just as nicely.

Chris Cornell Working On Solo LP - “Carry On” to arrive in spring 2007
From VH1.com news:

“Since March, when Audioslave wrapped the recording and mixing sessions for Revelations (a process that took all of five weeks), Cornell’s had a lot of spare time on his hands.”And I spent that time writing,” he said.Cornell said the LP will be more or less an acoustic effort and “not so much straight-up guitar, bass, drums and vocals — just kind of layerings of acoustic guitar and sounds.” And fans should expect a few surprises from his second solo studio LP — like, say, his cover of Michael Jackson’s 1982 hit Billie Jean. “This coming year will be the 20th anniversary of me being a recording artist, so I am looking forward to the idea of putting out another record and going out, doing my own tour and playing everything from my entire history. There’s a lot there. It’s actually staggering when I think about it.”

Okay, this is likely old news to all you who haven’t been under a rock all winter like me, but still, YAY!

Check out this posting by Stereogum at Prefixmag.com for a live version of Chris doing “Billie Jean” - I actually like it, minus the Mariachi strums, but he has apparently dropped them for the recorded version. It kind of gives you a new appreciation for the base musicality of the song, which is often lost in the relentless beat and synth of pop songs. But I have found Jackson to be a touchy subject with most “I was a child of the ’80’s” home music critics and I can say for sure that you are either gonna really love it, or really hate it.