Sometimes I Just Can’t Think of Anything to Say

I really like the new Clem Snide record. Here’s a song.

Beard of Bees from Hungry Bird.

Rock and Roll Friend

This weekend, a great friend of mine died. He was a brilliant person, and I’m lucky to have known him. He shared music with me – about a million songs and records over the 11 years I knew him – and contributed his writing to the old Bad MonkeyX when he could have easily sold it somewhere else. He leaves behind a beautiful, strong wife / best friend and a trail of sad hearts miles long, and while he was here he lived a life of constant generosity and kindness and intelligence. I will strive to be more like him.

He and I talked about God sometimes, and life, and death. One night, drunk, on the way home from a show by Apostle of Hustle, he asked me what I believed, and I said that the only reasonable answer was I Don’t Know.

Now I hope desperately that there is a heaven, so I can see him again. He’ll invite me to sit down at a table where he’s engaged in cracking conversation with Kurt Vonnegut, who, while still gobsmacked and sheepish at being in Heaven, is ragging mercilessly on an even more embarrassed Norman Mailer. We’ll drink excellent and reasonably priced coffee, and then we’ll all shudder when we’re summoned on the PA back to Mandatory Shuffleboard With Jesus.

Til then: I miss you Derek. Thanks for everything.

Here’s a song from one of his fine mixes.

Earworms Can Kill You

I have a couple of reliable earworms: the accordian part from Paul Simon’s Graceland (the track); Popcorn; and Ding Dong the Witch is Dead. I have no explanation for them, but if I bust out whistling, it’ll usually be one of those melodies. Perhaps a good (or creative) shrink could tell something about me from that, but I assign the significance to the drugs ingested by my mom while I was in vitro. I don’t mind them, inexplicable though they may be: they’re comfort songs.

What I object to are the songs I hate that get stuck in my noodle. A very reliable one is one of the two or three worst songs from my youth: We Built This City by those Starship/Airplane farts  in their very worst incarnation.  (The only upside is that if I even whisper the name of this song to the Info Pusher, it’ll happen to her too. Which is amusing for me and can serve as good leverage in a number of situations.)

I mention this all because this week, I have had two in my head that I do not appreciate. One is an insipid tale of suburban divorce from that sticky Costello/Bacharach album ( the song called Toledo, though most of that album could be substituted). The other is the Counting Crows song Round Here – particularly the line “round here we stay up very very very very late!”

Both songs are awful in a similar way: people being really overdramatic about things that barely deserve mention. Both songs irritate the shit out of me, but there they are, everytime I turn around (in my brain).

And that makes me wonder: Do they say something about me? Am I giving myself a hint? I hope not. That would mean the other earworms mean something too.

graceland

Gravity Seems to Be Increasing

My apologies for the slow updates lately. For some reason, since our vacation, the Info Pusher and I have both felt deeply tired. We figure, when we think about it, that there are a couple of likely reasons.

One, we walked so much in New York that our bodies couldn’t hold all the tiredness at one time and so we’re getting it doled out over time.

Two, we have a long-lasting but very mild virus (the sort I am sure will end the world with a whimper).

Three is my favourite: Gravity is increasing.

In any case, I’m still backed up sharing the music I found on the trip. I have some interesting audio recordings of ambient city sounds, which I’ll post asap. I already talked about Charles Spearin. I told you the great Blue Note burn. I also stumbled across an interesting band playing on the stereo  in a kitschy robot/spacemen shop.

They’re called RH+, although it seems they go by Rock Hudson in their home country Chile. Most of the info I’ve been able to locate on them is either minimal or in Spanish; reviews tend to mimic the language from (I’m guessing) some original review or press release  and compare them to Broken Social Scene, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They sound more like the Human League to me, if Human League had stayed active and kept being influenced by new music for the last 30 years.

I don’t love it, but I do like it. The album’s called Quintana Roo, and here’s the track that caught my ear.

Curb – by RH+