Daily Archives: June 2, 2008

Jun 2

I May Have Been a Tad Premature About Feeling Premature About the Paint Picking-Outing

So, dear friends and casual observers, we may get the house with the big back yard and the car port and the awesome fireplace after all.

So, what can I say?

Holy shit.

We have a verbal agreement in place and they’re formalizing their counter offer and I, I am back to considering what color we’re going to paint the front door.

The house is red brick with white trim.  I want to paint the door a sunflower gold and then plant black-eyed Susans or some similar flower in the front.

I am scared to death about how we’re going to afford this and whether we’ll be sitting around all winter in fourteen layers of afghan slowly burning our furniture to keep warm.  But, on the other hand, the yard is big enough for a garden, so when we run out of oil and revert to cannibalism, I’ll have some nice greens to eat with my neighbor.

Jun 2

Oh, Come on, Tiny Pasture!

Tiny Pasture today reports on the big Hobbs story in the Sunday paper.  And yet, he leaves the obvious comment uncommented upon.  For shame, Tiny Pasture, for shame.  Look at the comedic potential.

Here’s Tiny Pasture’s post.

Here’s the uncommented upon comment:

Some politicians don’t like people who throw bombs

And here’s the grist for the mill:

In the comments thread, Hobbs replied. “I posted that cartoon, and invited others to draw their own cartoons, as a way of protesting both American media cowardice and Islamist attempts to suppress free speech via threats of bombs and bullets and burning and beheading,” he wrote.

You couldn’t make anything out of that?  Nothing?

Come on, Nashville.  I expect better from you.

Jun 2

More Music, Music, Music

The buzz around town is all about Keith Urban’s new single.  Not that it’s particularly good or bad.  It’s a fine song, if you like that kind of song.  But the reason folks are eyeballing it, and the reason you should keep an eye on it too, is that this single is off his 2004 album, Golden Road. 

Over at The 9531, they’re saying

All and all I think that releasing this song as a single is a great decision. The song is a winner with a track record of success and, in the era of iTunes when an artist’s whole catalog is easily available at all times, I think that more artists should follow Urban’s lead and release strong songs from their back catalog.

And I think there’s a strong element of truth to this. 

It’s interesting, though, to think about this.  For a lot of historical reasons, if any genre of music is primed to go back to the mode of each individual track making its own way in the world uncoupled from an album, it’s country music.  That’s how the music worked much, much later than other genres.  But there are a lot of folks in town who make their livings working towards a hit song while supporting themselves writing songs that get on hit albums.

As people buy fewer albums, but pick and choose through catalogs buying songs, it’s going to be harder for song writers to make a living the way they are now.  Okay, it’s going to be impossible.  Changes will have to come.

In the era of MP3s, we’re clearly seeing the song break free once again from the album.

What I wonder–in terms of “everything old is new again”–is if we’re going to start seeing the song break free of the artist.  Back in the day, a song would come out and lots of people would cut it (see Dean Martin’s beautiful take on “She’s Got You” as a for-instance) and you’d just buy the version of the song by the artist you like.

Right now, you can go to Amazon.com, for instance, and type in a song title and it will bring up every version of that song it has in its catalog.  This is great if you’re looking for “Travelling Riverside Blues” because you’re a huge Zeppelin fan, because it leads you to Johnson’s original version.  But that’s still about being a Zeppelin fan and then finding their source material.

What happens when you hear a song, say on a commercial, and you like the song, but you aren’t particularly invested in the artist?  If you were to look that song up on Amazon.com and see that the song was performed by four different artists, what version would you buy?  And why?  And, is it so hard to imagine a future in which you pick the version that is seventy-nine cents over the version that is ninety-nine?

Hmm.

Like I said, lots to think about, and this is just marks the official start of Nashville’s realizing that you might as well embrace the new ways of doing things (especially when they so closely resemble the old).

Jun 2

Music, Music, Music

I had a dream last night that I was watching the other CMT and they were playing this Alison Krauss video in which she’s dressed like Jimmie Rodgers in his singing brakeman get-up.  Fittingly, she was singing a song about trains.  I have a friend who’s working on a project about Jimmie Rodgers and I think this may be a sign that his work is infiltrating my brain.  I’m now making up Jimmie Rodgers covers.

I decided yesterday that I could no longer live without Zeppelin’s version of “Travelling Riverside Blues” on my iPod and it made me wonder if that’s my favorite song.  Because, I do love that song with my whole heart.  If I met a man who made me feel the way that song makes me feel, I’d have to crawl every time I was near him, because my knees wouldn’t hold me. 

But can a person have just one favorite song?

Because, I think, right now, my favorite song is this one, which I did see on the other CMT this weekend.  It’s got four of my favorite things–an unexpected cover, creepiness, cemeteries, and Willie Nelson.

Ha, that’s what I should be asking Kathy to find me.  An inexpensive, creepy house near a cemetery in which I can listen to Willie Nelson.  How hard can that be?  Plus, I’d like it fenced in for my dog.  Sadly, I see on neither realtracs or realtors.com where one can put in “creepy” or “near cemetery” as parameters for one’s search.

I did drive by a house last night with great creepy potential.  It’s for sure got the roof-line of creepiness (and if you look too carefully at it, you can see it’s got a roof of great terror, because that puppy looks like it’s going to need to be replaced pronto) and you could do some awesome magical herb garden planting around the porch.  But no cemetery nearby.  And right now, the paintjob kind of gives it a look of tired cheerfulness.

But…

A witch with better rehab skills than me could make great use of that house, I think.