Top of the B-List
Thanks to Frank for alerting me to this. Holly Miranda is the gorgeous singer of the Jealous Girlfriends, a band he turned me onto last year and whom I had the distinct pleasure of seeing in Austin at last year’s South by Southwest. Frank reports that she’s working on a solo album and linked to this solo show she performed last spring. I think you’ll agree that not only is she nice to look at, but that she has a uniquely soulful voice.
By the way, FabChannel looks to be a great find too!
Exactly one year ago, I posted my list of the best of 2007. Strange then that I woke up at 6:00am this morning thinking of putting together my 2008 list. I’m a subscriber to eMusic, so most of my music this year has come through downloads from this excellent service. As well, my experience attending some of the music portion of SXSW has helped me find new music this year. Looking over this list, some are quite recent listens, while others have become old favourites, so it’s a little hard to rank them precisely. That being said, here are my choices (idiosyncratic and personal, definitely) for the best music released in 2008:
Just outside the top ten (either due to quality or just not enough listens yet):
Here are some of the “pro’s” lists:
Chromewaves Best of 2008
Pitchfork Top 50 Albums of 2008
Last.fm’s Albums of the Year
Britt Daniel (Spoon) picks his best of 2008 on the Merge Records blog
How about you? What were some of your favourites?
Amazing blog: For Those Who Tried to Rock, chronicling “every band to have been formed by teens with that perfect mixture of big dreams and questionable talent in suburban garages, high school music rooms, and college dorms across America. And to preserve them cryogenically with the very dry ice they once merited, for future generations.”
You’d better believe that the Gitch Band will soon be included in the canon of “those who tried to rock”!!! But I’ll post the story here first. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to lift some of our music off that ancient cassette somehow.
(via Canuckflack)
Last night, on my friend Jay‘s recommendation, I downloaded Radiohead’s “video album” In Rainbows – From the Basement from the iTunes store. It’s fantastic, with the band playing most of the album live in a basement studio. And it made me realize that with CD sales dropping, the future of music is for musicians to really connect with fans again, to show how music is made and what kind of passion goes into its creation and performance.
Simply listening to music doesn’t bring us face to face with the people who make it. Going to live shows is somewhat better, although it can often be hard to make a connection in a crowded sweaty club full of drunk people, or, in the case of a more successful band like Radiohead, in a huge stadium sitting quietly in an overpriced plastic seat.
Stripping the music down in some way, and allowing us to get closer, really helps to make the musicians human again, and the music feels much more immediate when it’s being played live in an intimate setting.
I noticed this trend taking hold recently when I began to download the wonderful HD video files from Soft City Lights, sometimes from bands I either didn’t know or previously didn’t like. The Black Cab Sessions is another favourite, with musicians performing live and acoustic in the back of a London taxicab.
The Radiohead album is the first time I’ve actually paid for music video online, but I suspect that it won’t be the last.
I’m barely 40 pages into Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and I’m already feeling jealous. Not of his talent for comic writing, though he has plenty of that. I’m feeling strangely jealous that I’ve never been able to go on a solo road trip with 600 CDs like he’s doing. You see, I’ve never had a driver’s licence. 99% of the time, it’s no big deal at all. Well, more like 80% of the time. When my wife and I do occasionally need to drive, we either rent a car or borrow my Dad’s or her Mum’s, and Brooke does the driving. I know she resents it a bit (okay, maybe a lot), but at this stage I really think it might be too late for me to learn.
I did know how, once. Just like every other kid, I signed up for the driver education classes at my high school and did perfectly well. Except for one thing. It was probably at my very last lesson when my driving instructor advised me not to book my test appointment until I practiced my parallel parking. A lot. At this point in the story, my memory gets a bit foggy (this is, after all, now more than 25 years ago). I did NOT practice my parallel parking. In fact, I got a bit annoyed with his advice. And when it came down to it, I guess I just didn’t care enough. All of my friends were getting licences, and some of them were even buying cars. I was happy, like Iggy, to be the Passenger. Until now.
It’s not that Klosterman has made me crave the experience of actually driving thousands of miles. The physical and mental effort of keeping the car safely between the lines and away from the cars in front and behind strikes me as exhausting. But there’s just something about the particular kind of solitude with musical accompaniment a “road trip” offers that a bus journey with an iPod just can’t match.
Even if I were to practice my parallel parking, after all this time, and successfully obtain my driving licence, I doubt very much whether I’d be able to take off on my own with a trunk full of music. I suspect that there would be some marital payback which would involve me doing every single bit of driving for the next ten years, and beyond. And as a much older new driver, I could never build up the self-confidence that would let me roll down the window and rest one arm on the doorframe. Instead of the freedom that I have in mind, more likely I’d be squinting at highway exit signs, nervously changing lanes and trying not to fall asleep behind the wheel.
If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get back to my vicarious road trip now. At least when I start to get sleepy, I can just put the book down and go to bed.