Good song...

12 questions

Got this idea from the biz-to-biz publication my employer puts out each month:

1. What brought you to Walla Walla? Originally, college. This time, a good job in a small city with great weather where work and a lot of other destinations are a short walk from my house, which is pretty much downtown.

2. Favorite memory: How to choose! Honestly, though, I look forward, not back. If I had to pick one, maybe having dinner with new friends in Redeyef, Tunisia, with the butterfly lady.

3. Current favorite song/CD: CD? What's that? Current song: Carvel, by John Frusciante.

Album: Sea Sew, by Lisa Hannigan


Favorite movie: The Deer Hunter, but it depends on the day. Maybe Heat, maybe Romeo + Juliet.

Favorite food: Well, that is an impossible question, isn't it? I guess it is a tie: Pastrami and swiss on rye with Russian dressing and sauerkraut or peanut butter and jam on country white.

Favorite book: Only one? Wind, Sand and Stars. But seriously, only one?

Favorite hobby: Bird watching. First easy question!

Favorite place in Walla Walla County: In the wheat fields east of the city, in the hills that overlook the valley.

Most recent local purchase: Two delicate drinking glasses with dragonflies from Willow of Walla Walla.

Worst job: Depends on how you look at it. You might imagine the curséd cannery, the miserable mill or the horrible hospital, but you'd be wrong. Worst job? Working at Roth's Vista Market as a box clerk, where the owner would drop by now and then to patronize his low-paid workers and exhort us to run, run, run when bringing those shopping carts back in from the lot. What a jerk. One of my jobs in New Hampshire was pretty high on the list, too.

Dream vacation: Beats me. How about three months in summer to complete the New England 67? (That'd be summiting the 67 peaks in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine that are over 4,000 feet). I'm between a third and halfway done now, but they're a long drive these days.

Person you'd most like to talk to: Cate Blanchett :)

A piece!

Beeswing

Here's another great cover, of a Richard Thompson song. I'd pay to hear her.

Wish I'd been at these "shows"

Lisa Hannigan gets a big fat gold star from me for hiding out in broom closets and back rooms to perform. Wish I'd been there!

here, too.

and here, too!

Influential albums - a list

Carlos tagged me on this challenge - Fifteen albums that changed your life. I'm not sure how to qualify some of these: I'm sure several albums helped form my world view. I mean, I'd say Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Cisco Houston and those kinds of people, but they're where I started. I guess that rules out Springsteen, who's in that set.

In a lot of ways, my musical experience has been one of blundering from my sheltered past into unknown universes. Cool, but also a little embarrassing when I arrive somewhere everybody's already been.

I'll shoot for albums that changed my outlook. These are pretty much in chronological order. I put in some samples, too.

1. Bad Religion - Suffer. I grew up listening to classical music, Dust Bowl folk and country & western. I rarely listened to rock 'n' roll until high school. I mean, I knew about Ratt, Styx, Foreigner, all that in middle school, but that wasn't what I usually listened to. When I heard this (with my best friend, Chris, over at Jay Dunlap's house), it blew me away.
   
2. Jimi Hendrix - Some compilation or another. I was unaware of the existence of classic rock that was other than what you might hear in Back to the Future.
   
3. Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers - My introduction to reggae. Chris bought that one.
   
4. Pink Floyd - The Wall. Weird-ass movie but a ton of great music.
   
5. N.W.A. - Straight Outta Compton. My exposure to rap was pretty limited until college (first roomie was an Army brat, a black guy from Oceanside, not a jazz guy). "Fuck the Police" was a revelation.
6. The Geto Boys - The Geto Boys. Pretty much the most outrageous and funny gangsta rap ever made.
   
   
7. Richard Thompson - Rumor and Sigh. Opened my eyes to the folk scene of the early 1990s.
8. Tori Amos - Crucify. My favorite from the angry woman movement. Alerted me to the existence of a completely unexpected scene.
9. The Butterfly Lady - Her musical taste is similar to mine, but she searches for new music in completely different circles, so I get a lot of exposure to music I probably wouldn't find on my own, like Ali Farka Toure, Outlandish, Mister Gang...
   
   that one is aka:
   
   
10. The White Stripes - The White Stripes. Opened my eyes to garage rock. I think I listened to this album about 50 times in a row.
11. Townes Van Zandt - Live at the Old Quarter. I obviously had heard his songs before, but not performed by him. This is a fantastic album. Minimal production is a big plus. This album got me to check out a lot of folk/country from the 1970s.
    
    
12. Joe Purdy - Julie Blue. Uh, yeah, there's a pattern here. I didn't know there was an L.A. folk scene until I blundered into Joe Purdy, who incidentally kicks ass live. Here is a song from his supposedly upcoming album, Last Clock on the Wall:
    
    
13. Mitch Hedberg - Mitch Altogether. Not music, right? Yeah, but he changed how I tell jokes and how I look at run-of-the-mill stuff, which was his bread and butter.
14. 9 Songs. OK, that's a movie. But it tuned my in to music of the hipster scene. What they were listening to in that five minutes, anyway.
    
    

Candy Cane Children

While making the rounds to see who has a new album out and who does not, I bumbled into my first time hearing this song (only on the first visit from this IP address, methinks, to the White Stripes site):

Brunch non-shuffle

Heard while checking work e-mail on a Sunday and punching butterflies out the butterfly lady's handmade paper, and while procrastinating, briefly, on finishing hang tags for my pieces at Willow of Walla Walla.

Loch Lomond (who knows? a found item)
Locomotive Breath (Jethro Tull)
London Calling (The Clash)
London's Burning (see above)
Lonely Girl (Pink, Linda Perry)
Lonesome Billy (Ennio Morricone)
Lonesome Road (Joan Baez)
Lonesome, On'ry and Mean (Waylon Jennings)

Play it, Jamie

I know you've all heard this before... This is one of those songs I am never not in the mood to listen to.

Yeah, yeah, I know

A sure sign of me being busy (or, I suppose, lazy) is posting music from U-Toob. Nevertheless, here's something I like a lot.

This guy is good...

and his lady friend's pretty damn good, too. Maybe they put something in the water at Elon University?



His channel is well worth checking.

What I listen to when I'm weaving

Besides the probably expected Joe Purdy, Tori Amos and other mellow(ish) tunes:


Also, a great use for an anthropology degree:

Which is here, in translation:

And a bit of this, too:

Every day's a good day for Queen

A few show tunes

(that last one is apparently played by Osama bin Laden?)

What's music got to say?

Plenty! Or so it seems.

Having read the butterfly lady's post on research into what music can tell you about yourself, I took the test. I think it was pretty much right on.

I wish these guys would do a cover album

I see the previous post's link is dead, so here we are:

Saturday morning shuffle

all from my bought-music category...

The First Cut is the Deepest - Cat Stevens
That Time - Regina Spektor
Conquest - The White Stripes
Mr. Bad Man - Tori Amos
abbie's song - Joe Purdy
San Jose - Joe Purdy
You Can Bring Your Dog - Tori Amos
Get Em High - Kanye West, Talib Kweli and Common
Munich - Editors
Fat Slut - Tori Amos

Boxing day

I think it is cool that some people actually get today off as an official holiday. The alleged etymology of the holiday is cool - To box is to give someone a present, in the old days people gave gifts to those less fortunate, etc.

This reminds me, for some reason, of the ubiquity of going-to-market/ye-olde-towne-festivale/ren-faire music in flicks set from, say, the 9th or 10th century through, maybe, 1650. After 1650 you get a lot of harpsichord, prior to that more lute stuff. I think this broad-brush treatment stretches the limits of credulity. Surely someone played something other than that kind of diet Muzak...

When I was younger and still thought I it possible to use my education for its express purpose (i.e. to be an anthropologist instead of a journalist, even though they are damn near the same thing), I planned to study contemporary Native American culture or to study language and music. So much for that.

Maybe that's not the only reason, but I think that inclination is part of why I have an attitude about movies that use the same two or three dippy Market Music for old-timey festivals or my favorite, the transition from a battle scene to a let's-go-to-town interlude. I should probably find some at youtube to give as an example...

Who is Alexa Wilkinson?

A singer/songwriter, of course. For me, a discovery for today, too:



You can also listen to her here.

Come on, people, this is easy. Big easy.

Jeopardy question for $1,000, cities in songs:

"I'm the train they call" this city. "I'll be gone 500 miles when the day is done."

Needless to say, nobody got it.