Category: Music

Speaking of artists who try to cross types of art, Severian sez:

Indeed it seems the only “artists” who won’t stay in their lanes are actors. I can’t even count the number of actors who have released shitty albums (and no actors who have released good ones).

C’mon, man, I know William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and most of the other actors who appeared on Golden Throats compilations (full disclosure: I own three of the four) fit this description, some actors/actresses did release records that did not suck.

It might not be high art, but Bruce Willis’s The Return of Bruno was fun:

I like it so much I am disappointed there was never a follow-up.

I am not sure I ever saw an episode of E.R. in its entirety, but Gloria Rueben had a role in it somewhere, at sometime, before she started releasing jazz recordings:

Of which I have two so far, and they’re pretty good.

And, as you might recall, I ordered Pier Angeli’s record, which is not half bad:

She was a movie actress in the fifties and sixties linked romantically to James Dean and Kirk Douglas. She, too, looks to only have released this single album.

And Chris Jericho’s band Fozzy rocks:

Alright, alright, alright, so he’s a professional wrestler, but you know that’s not real, right?

So, most actors recording music (and a lot of contemporary “musicians” recording music which is their voices, corrected, dubbed over computer renderings) are vanity projects of dubious quality. However, using the logical square, or rectangle, or quadratic equation (it’s been decades since I’ve formally studied logic, so I’m a little fuzzy on the particular geometrology of it), to disprove Severian’s All assertion, I need only to prove One is not, which I most certainly have.

But one must have sympathy for Severian, who apparently thinks the Lenny Kravitz version of “American Woman” is superior to the original by The Guess Who. Clearly, this marks him as a closeted fan of 1990s music.

UPDATE:I was talking this over with my beautiful wife this evening, and I said, “You know, there are some actors who fronted bands, like Gary Sinese and Kevin Bacon. And…wait…. Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars…”

Which doesn’t suck, although I haven’t listened to a lot of them. Here’s a recent track:

Jared Leto strikes me as a moonbat. Which is better for a rock star than an actor anyway.

So maybe this will evolve into a series of posts over time.

By the way, my beautiful wife suggested Jennifer Lopez, but I demurred, saying she was a dancer, so she was in music first. But her timeline on Wikipedia indicates she was an actress first and a singer second. However, gentle reader, I cannot in good conscience put her forward as an example as I am unconvinced as to the merit of her music. Strangely enough, for a guy who owns a bunch of Paulina Rubio and Shakira CDs, not to mention jazz artists like Rocio Durcal, Rocio Jurado, The Triplets, and, yes, even Selina (for whom Jennifer Lopez got noticed when she acted in a movie about the young songbird), I don’t know much of Jennifer Lopez’s music.

Last night, on the way home from Maundy Thursday service, my oldest in the back seat said, “‘Learning to Fly’ is a pretty dope song.”

“Coming down is the hardest thing,” my beautiful wife said, quoting Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

“He doesn’t mean Tom Petty,” I said. I know the young man. He did not mean the Foo Fighters either.

No, the young man, my son, meant Pink Floyd’s “Learning to Fly”:

You know, it’s the oldest of the three; it came out in 1987 on A Momentary Lapse of Reason which I first got on audiocassette early in college. Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s version came off of their 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open; I am pretty sure that I bought the song on a cassette single, but not the whole album. The baby of the bunch, the Foo Fighters song, came out in 1998; I bought the CD for There Is Nothing Left To Lose based on this song. They all came out within, what, eleven years of each other, each an aspirational sort of song about trying and succeeding.

Do they even make pop songs about that any more? Don’t ask me; I don’t listen to pop, and Brazilian death metal is not quite so aspirational.

Actually, unlike previous reports of fusion between traditional Japanese music and metal, this is more straightforward funk music by a band composed of pretty Japanese women:

Coming soon to a musical balance post near you. Assuming I get around to compiling my recent music purchases before they stop being recent.

(Link via Robert Zimmerman.)

Last week, I posted about confusing Misa and Maysa (not to mention Misia).

This week, Misa¹ posts:

I need your help. I have decided it’s time to shake things up and change my name. Now as much as I’m a change maker, I wanted to change my name quite simply because many of you find it challenging to find me on Spotify, itunes, Youtube and across other social media channels.

Brian J.: Major influence on emerging artists, or merely a coincidence?

Yeah, coincidence. But interesting confluence nevertheless.

Misa (pronounced like Jar Jar Binks would have you pronounce it) is a London-based “trip hop” artist.

Maysa (pronounced like it looks), an American jazz singer.

Only one is currently in my library so far, so expect Maysa to appear in a musical balance post sometime soon.

Although, to be honest, you might be more likely to confuse Misa with the Japanese singers of the same name or American rapper of that name or Maysa with the Bossa Nova singer who also went by that name. To clarify for my own expertise, perhaps I will have a lot to report on that future musical balance post.

There is only one Sade, though. Although maybe not; apparently, Sade is the name of the band named after the lead singer. Perhaps I should stop my research before I discover a little learning can be a bad thing.

As I have mentioned, gentle reader, the one genre of music I do not like much at all is not rap or hip hop (although I don’t like much from that genre either) is the seventies folk, especially male folk singers like Dan Fogelberg and John Denver (women like Linda Ronstadt, Lynda Carter, Olivia Newton-John get a pass because, well, PWOC).

Explain to me, then, how I have come to enjoy the vocal stylings of Michael Franks?

I could probably go into a paragraph talking about his distinct vocal stylings, but I’m not that smart, or I could point out that he is more smooth jazz than folk, but….

Really, it’s because WSIE provides a steady diet of a couple of his works, and I tend to pick up my jazz recordings based on what WSIE plays. I have not picked up any of his CDs, but I have gotten a couple of records when I’ve found them in the wild.

Honey, former crushes of mine are sending me pictures of themselves in bed.

The Triplets sent me an email wishing me happy holidays, along with the above photo, and invited me to join their email list. I did. Strangely enough, I had listened to their Christmas album, Christmas Time Is Here, earlier in the day.

Time was when I could tell Sylvia, Diana, and Vicki apart. But that was thirty years ago. Also, in this picture, they’re upside down. Although I can read a book upside down–the product of a lot of practice reading books to children so they could see the pictures–I cannot easily recognize an upside down face. Which is why I am pleased that gravity works for all of us, and special effects from Doctor Strange movies are just that.

KCSM, the Bay Area’s Jazz station, posted this on Facebook:

Great, now that’s something I must own.

I actually bought Canta en Español and Cuatro Vidas on CD about ten years ago when I was adding to my Spanish language CDs (the time I bought a lot of Claudia Acuña, Rocío Dúrcal, Rocío Jurado, Paulina Rubio, Shakira, and José José among others), and I have picked up a couple of the records since then. But there’s a Christmas record? I really, really want to find that out in the wild now.

Probably more likely that finding Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas by Ella Fitzgerald. In the original, anyway; apparently, there’s a reissue on vinyl, so I might run across one somewhere, but one does not find Ella Fitzgerald records in the wild, like almost at all.

As I have mentioned, one of my methods for finding new bands is to search for a video from a band I like and run through some of the suggestions that YouTube provides to keep me engaged and watching ads. Although my ad blocker means I don’t suffer through the ads.

At any rate, Sirenia has come up a couple of times, and I like it.

Well, maybe not. The videos I see look to be a couple from the band’s 2006 album Nine Destinies and a Downfall which was the only album by the band to feature lead singer Monika Pedersen. The band has had four female lead vocalists over the years. Maybe I just like Monika Pedersen. Continue reading “Apparently, YouTube Thinks I Like Sirenia” →

This morning, as I was taking my youngest into school, one of my favorite Elton John songs, if not my favorite Elton John song, came on the radio:

“Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road”. I asked him what he thought it was about; he said, “The Wizard of Oz?” I said it was about a guy of humble origins elevated by a relationship with a wealthy person, but who comes to think that the wealthy person does not care for him, but rather likes the novelty of having a partner of lower origin. So the poet-narrator (if they have such things in songs) is breaking it off and returning to his roots. I pointed out how Elton John and the brown dirt cowboy (Bernie Taupin) used a lot of metaphor in the song, which gives it depth you don’t find in much modern pop.

I changed the radio stations; after we caught the last chorus off “All Star” by Smashmouth, “Don’t You Want Me, Baby?” by Human League came on.

“That’s basically the same story, but from the other perspective,” I told him. A partner with a better station in life elevates a cocktail waitress, but she breaks it off with him. This song presents both sides of the story, though, so one gets sympathy for both sides of view. But it’s not as deep as the Elton John song, probably because of the metaphors and imagery in the former.

Tomorrow, on the way to school, perhaps we will talk about the monomyth in love songs. I mean, the young man has a mind to an engineering track and career, but there’s no reason I cannot infect him with some comparative literary criticism skills for fun.

Well, since no one played along with this post from 2017 called Is That the Name of the Song or the Band? wherein I challenged readers:

I’ve often asked this when presented with the written title of a song and a band I’ve not heard of. Mostly, I’m joking.

But when I learned that Fozzy has a song (and album) called “All That Remains”, I thought that was funny because there is actually a band called All That Remains (whose album I bought before I bought Fozzy’s Judas this autumn).

So I got to thinking: What other bands have songs that are actually the names of other bands?

A new band has come to my attention: Plush.

As you might remember, gentle reader, Stone Temple Pilots had a hit with a song called “Plush” thirty years ago:

You know, I will grundgingly admit that STP might be the only decent grunge band, but this song annoyed me. Thirty years later, I’m still not really sure what they’re talking about. Probably drugs.

Live Metal, a blog that offers brief mentions of new metal music.

Better than YouTube’s algorithms, which leads me to Kalidia/Walk in Darkness no matter what I search for.

So I just got Diamante’s album American Dream:

I first heard Diamante in the song she sings with Bad Wolves, a band that the local rock station loves and whose new singles they play all the time:

Diamante, not so much.

But I picked up her previous album, Coming In Hot, based on liking what I saw on YouTube.

She’s got a more husky straight ahead rock voice and presentation than the usual symphonic metal songbirds I pick up. Husky, without going full dirty vocals a la Elli Berlin.

I vote “Ghost Myself” from the new album Most Likely To Appear On Brian J.’s Gym Playlist:

Also, she is pretty in a variety of hair colors.

Continue reading “Coming Soon To A Musical Balance Post Near You” →

So I mentioned that I recently bought Brenda Russell’s album Get Here amongst sixty or so other records at the Friends of the Library Book Sale a couple weeks ago. I didn’t recognize the name, but as I was spinning the platter tonight for the first time, it yanked me back.

Her biggest hit, “Piano in the Dark”, comes from this album.

Suddenly, I am back in the computer room–a, what, spare room or bedroom except it had the stairs to the basement in it–in our house down the gravel road. It’s summer, and I’m monkeying around on the Commodore 128, typing programs in from magazines or playing disks’ worth of games we downloaded from BBSes before moving to a house in a valley a mile or so off the state highway where we had a party line. In 1988. The songs from those two and a half years are somehow more vivid than from other periods in my life.

Then I heard her sing “Get Here”, the title track from the album, and I thought, That’s not quite right.

Because I remember the Oleta Adams cover, which charted much higher, a couple years later.

Suddenly, I’m in college, noodling around either on the Commodore 64 I bought from the later Goth King of St. Louis to take to school or on the old 286 that that my stepmother’s mother bought for $2000 with an employee discount at Sears and I repaid over the course of six months at minimum wage. Probably playing it on the stereo I bought from Iron Maiden poster Dave for $20 My mom says I should charge more because it’s a good stereo, so give me $5 more for the speakers in the days where WKTI played songs like this one and “I Wanna Be Rich” over and over again.

Well, that was certainly worth the dollar I paid for it.

When I pulled up the YouTube video for “Piano in the Dark”, YouTube queued up Breathe’s “Hands to Heaven” and Glenn Frey’s “You Belong to the City” as things to play next. I already have both on CD already, on All That Jazz and the Miami Vice soundtrack. Because I was into 80s pop in the 80s, and I’ve only gotten into LPs and R&B records (and R&B influenced pop) in the 21st century. Or because I’m a racist/misogynist. Maybe both.