I recently mentioned my ongoing efforts to discover new music. I continue to have the musicaltaste of a female college freshman at Brown, but what’re you going to do?
I thought I’d share five songs that I’ve recently come to really dig. I make no hipsteresque claims to newness, obscurity or coolness. If you’re any kind of music fan, I expect you’ve heard most or all of these. These songs are just new to me, and I like them
1. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” by Vampire Weekend - A jangly Afropop tune by four white kids from New York. The song mentions Peter Gabriel, and he’s actually done a cover version. Honourable mention: “Oxford Comma” by the same band. I, too, don’t care for the Oxford comma.
2. “People Got a Lotta Nerve” by Neko Case - How can you not like a song which includes the lyric “you know, they call them killer whales”. Ms. Case’s voice is in excellent form, and you can always count on her to write a catchy song in about two and half minutes. Honourable Mention: Ms. Case’s “This Tornado Loves You”, live on Letterman.
3. “Cartoons and Forever Plans” by Maria Taylor - A simple, hummable song and straight forward lyrics about love never dying. The backup singer sounds decidedly like Michael Stipe. The video seems to be cynically trading on the current popularity of crafting, but I’m in a forgiving mood. Honourable mention: hmm…how about that charming Lisa Hannigan song I mentioned on this site a couple of months back.
4. “This God Damn House” - The Low Anthem - Band geeks, certainly, but I saw them at SXSW and really liked them. They’re not quite to the video stage yet, I guess, as this is a live recording. If you watch to the end, you’ll see the lead singer whistle through a couple of cell phones. Honourable mention: “Scavenger Bird”, which is a terrific song by the same band. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a playable copy of it online.
5. “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” by Sophie Milman - A lovely jazz cover of the song from “Fiddler”. I’m not a huge fan of vocal jazz, but I quite dig Ms. Milman. Maybe it’s that she was borne in Russia, raised in Israel and now lives in Canada. Honourable mention: “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”, a cover of the Paul Simon song, off of her latest album.
I take an embarrassing amount of pleasure in pruning, tweaking and annotating my iTunes library. It’s strangely important to me that all of my songs display the right meta-data for song title, artist, album and so forth.
One of my long term goals is to rate every song I own. At the moment I’ve got 8487 songs in my library, and I’ve only rated 2856 of them.
So, most of the time, I have iTunes playing a particular ’smart’ playlist through Party Shuffle. The playlist looks like this:
When I remember, I alt+tab over to iTunes and rate the currently playing song. I play it through Party Shuffle because, otherwise, when I rate a song in my ‘Unrated’ playlist, it instantly stops playing and disappears from the playlist (it is, after all, only obeying the rules).
My rating system is largely ad hoc, and works like this:
1 star = Awful, and I usually delete these.
2 stars = Not great, but I want to keep it because I have the whole album. Also, it could be a specialty song, like a Christmas song or a novelty track.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = I like it, and would be happy to hear it once or twice a week.
5 stars = Songs for the ages. If this song was playing on my iPod when I was killed by a bus, that’d be okay.
A couple months ago I ran two quick polls about mix tapes. I asked because I had an idea for a related web-based service. I won’t get around to creating it, so I figured I’d send it out into the universe.
It’s a simple concept. Your mix tapes are beloved artifacts of our youth. As we get older, they decay and we lose the ability to easily listen to them.
You sign up for my service, and we send you a prepaid mailing box. You put your mix tapes in a box, and send them off. They go to India or China, where each mix tape is converted in MP3 files. Importantly, you can get the files in a variation of forms:
Each side of the mix tape as a single MP3 file, retaining the organization of the songs, and any between-song commentary.
Individual MP3 files
A CD
The service doesn’t replace the recordings with ‘clean’, digital recordings of the songs. It just converts the version you own to an audio file. I think this is important, as the crappy recordings, pops and scratches are part of nostalgic remembrance of the mix tape.
The service also scans the cassette sleeve, and sends you a high-res version of that. Plus, of course, you get all your original cassettes back.
There are probably lots of audio conversion services out there, but I’d position this one specifically (and only) for mix tapes.
I actually think there’s a market for this–it could become a sort of hobby business for somebody. My ad hoc survey found that 64% of respondents owned at least one mix tape, and 56% of those said they were ‘precious momentos’. That’s radically insufficient as market research, but an encouraging result nonetheless. What do you think?
I was reminded about this idea by the lovely Cassette from my Ex, which I just discovered. Totally subscribed. And I’m going to submit one, when I get the chance.
It’d be appropriate to end with a mix tape of my own. The following is a few songs from, to my memory, one of the first mix tapes I ever made. The source? My father’s extensive (and rocking) record collection.
Gordon Downie’s first solo album sort of got lost in the fact that he was also releasing a book of poetry to go with it, which is about as far away from the hockey arena venues of his day job in the Tragically Hip as you can get. When it stays on track though Coke Machine Glow is a really good album, or rather it has good songs.
That album features a number of good songs, including “Canada Geese”, “Lofty Pines” and the terrific “Chancellor”.
There are some other good suggestions in the comments, but to both the commenters and Jeffery’s shame, they omitted a classic song full of Vancouver place names: “The Crawl” by Spirit of the West.
The Gaelic romp details a drunken pub crawl across Vancouver’s North Shore, from the Troller in Horseshoe Bay to The Raven in Deep Cove. I see some folks recently replicated the crawl’s path in an epic bike ride.
I also remembered an obscure hockey song, entitled “What’s Wrong With Lumme?” by Glenn Ford and The Piers. I suppose that vaguely counts as ‘about Vancouver’, doesn’t it?
