Category: Music

So WSIE played this song called “Poetry Man”, and I thought, hey, it’s like she’s singing to me!

So I researched it, and, as you might already know, Phoebe Snow’s song is not new at all.

It’s from 1974. Which means it’s newer than I am, but not by much.

Phoebe Snow’s self-titled debut LP went platinum, so there’s a decent chance I’ll find one in the wild for a couple of dollars. I’ll be on the lookout.

You know, Springfield is not Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, you can find more than one church festival on any given weekend, even the weekends where Summerfest is or one of the heritage festivals is running down on the lakefront and drawing tens of thousands of people.

No, in Springfield, only two churches through proper church festivals with food, music, and whatnot. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic church and St. Thomas the Apostle Greek Orthodox church are about a mile apart on the southwest side of Springfield, and they both have their festivals on the same weekend.

Given that I’m half Catholic and went to a “Catholic” university (Catholic in quotations because it may have been founded Catholic, but it’s all modern university), you can probably guess which I attended.

I am half Catholic, but all Milwaukeean. I went to both: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton on Saturday and St. Thomas Apostle on Sunday.

As my boys and I were entering the festival on Sunday, I saw a man with a camera, and I briefly thought he might be for the News-Leader, but I dismissed it. Most of the time, the faces in the crowd photos are taken by Brenna Stark or Karen Bliss, who you might remember was following me around a couple weeks ago. The photographer took a pass on taking a picture of moi, but it turns out it was the News-Leader‘s photographer.

Instead of me, he captured jazz vocalist Kristi Merideth:

Kristi Merideth, unlike Erin Bode, is a local performer who does shows individually and with a band called 83 Skiddoo. I’ve meant to catch her live, but her performances don’t tend to coincide with the date nights my beautiful wife and I infrequently enjoy.

Here she is singing “Rhode Island Is Famous For You” from her self-titled EP which I picked up a couple years ago:

More Stacey Kent than Sacha Boutros.

Full disclosure: Our children go to school together and, dare I say it? play in jazz band together. But I don’t know Ms. Merideth other than to say “Hi” and “How are you?” a couple times over the years.

So I listened to Perry Como’s By Request, and it has the song “Once Upon A Time” as the lead song on side 2.

And I thought, You know who else does this song? Frank Sinatra.

You know, I think Frank Sinatra is best when he does songs of reminiscence and regret; this song appears on my favorite Sinatra album, September of My Years, a platter full of reminiscence and regret.

You know, Sinatra’s got that that pathos going on, but on balance, the richness of Como’s voice outweighs it in this instance, at least as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve no evidence that Eydie ever did this song, so I must give the MfBJN Musical Throwdown award to Perry Como on this one.

I must be getting so old now that I’m passing out of Sinatra appreciation into Como appreciation or something.

On one of the listicles that they’ve started running on PJMedia entitled Top Five 1980s One-Hit Wonders to Rock the Midterms, we have this gross mischaracterization:

Grim Reaper would seem to have had it all, a catchy Sabbath-esque riff, one of the most piercing song-ending screams in the history of headbanging, Satan on a stick. It’s a one-hit masterpiece, but GR only got marginal traction at a time when metal was selling like Garbage Pail Kids.

The problem? They were rightly or wrongly perceived as poseurs. Seen to be cashing in on metal’s finest hour while dispossessed of some undefinable, dues-paying authenticity.

Here’s the song, which I don’t remember:

I mean, they’re no Danger Danger.

But the problem lies in asserting that metal’s finest hour was sometime in 1983.

My friends, metal’s finest hour is, and ever shall be, now.

Because the memories of metal past is nothing compared to metal blasting out of your windows right now.

Here’s something from now called “Awakening” by a band called Unleash the Archers whose latest CD will soon make an appearance on my music balance posts:

I’ve determined that the local radio stations have not been feeding me a steady enough diet of new music, so I’ve joined the 21st century and have started prowling YouTube and then listening to a band on Spotify if I like them. So YouTube keeps suggesting metal bands fronted by women, which makes me wonder how this will affect the balance of heavy metal and jazz songbirds in my musical taste. Time and scientific experimentation will help me understand, I suppose.

Update to the story about the elderly German men who broke out of a nursing home to go to a heavy metal festival:

They were going to see Inge Ginsberg and the TritoneKings.

(Link via Ace of Spades HQ.)

Halestorm is a metal band fronted by Lzzy Hale:

Alestorm is a metal band fronted by pirates:

You really have to pay close attention if you want to be a metal fan.

is Abby, as in Abby Jeanne.

She’ll be at the Wisconsin State Fair this year, which is another festival I’ll miss in Milwaukee for the twenty-somethingth year in a row.

To be honest, she falls outside of my preferred poles of songbird or heavy metal. The paper calls her rock, and maybe some of her live music rocks harder than the samples I find on YouTube, but she’s more bluesy rock with the F word kind of like Adele or Bonnie Raitt.

Herb Alpert shared on Facebook that he’s got some upcoming shows, so I clicked through to see if he’s going to be anywhere nearby.

“Whoa!” I thought, “He’s going to be in St. Louis…Michigan. Never mind.”

Oops. That’s a mistake on Herb Alpert’s Web site.

Herb Alpert sells out the Grandel.

Apparently, the Grandel Theatre is a new venue up by St. Louis University that opened in 2017, which explains why I was not familiar with the name.

Well, I always have the concert I saw last year if nothing else.

I’ve already booked our annual concert with a septugenerian. However, as it is a birthday gift for my beautiful wife, I will not divulge its exact nature in case she stumbles upon this blog in the next nine days.

As you might know, gentle reader, I like to flip through the society pages of the local slick and browse through the equivalent gallery pages of the Springfield News-Leader because Springfield is a relatively small city, and I’ll often see someone I know attending some event.

So yesterday, I’m scrolling through the gallery of people attending a recent Alison Krauss concert, and there, just like she were a mere mortal, was Erin Bode.

That is jazz vocalist Erin Bode. I’m not sure the photographer from the News-Leader knows it.

I’ve seen her twice in concert. Once at a little club in Clayton called Finale where I dragged my beautiful wife on a date night sans our only son at the time. The other was at the Old Trees annual musical festival, where I walked up without the family to catch a bit of her set. I got her 2006 album Over and Over and listened to it, well, over and over in the office where I worked five flights above Washington Avenue.

Strangely enough, I don’t have any of her other albums. Which might mean that my musical purchase might become unbalanced in the coming months.

In 1986, I might have been sympathetic to the youngsters’ point of view in this video:

Thirty years later, however, I’m reviewing the parents’ accused behavior to see what I can learn from it and apply it to my own children.

(Full disclosure: Even at fourteen years old, I thought this song was puerile and obnoxious. To be clear, I had what they might call an “old soul,” were they calling it an “old man’s soul” which I might have to this day, fixation on metal music and comic books not withstanding.)