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Post by orzelc on Feb 25, 2016 6:26:37 GMT -5
Been reading these off and on, and it's really interesting. And I'll do the annoying thing of adding to your workload by noting that there are a bunch of "Indian fringes" references in, you guessed it, Lifter Puller songs. For example, "Space Humpin' $19.99"
"She said it looks like a binge she said it felt like a blast Woke up in the grass with the assless chaps
"Looks like a blast she said it felt like a binge Woke up with your friend in the indian fringes Bring on the bedspins, bring on the mini-thins"
(That came up on shuffle play as I was reading, which is why I mention it...)
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Post by orzelc on Jul 24, 2015 18:09:22 GMT -5
Just picked that up, too, and enjoy the fact that one of the songs has a verse about "all his physicist friends"... My current oddball obsession is this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAYhQsQhSY
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Post by orzelc on Jun 27, 2015 6:49:51 GMT -5
These have been great. I always find the procedural details of stuff that I don't do fascinating, and these videos were exceptionally good at getting into that. Thanks very much.
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Post by orzelc on Jun 17, 2015 6:45:27 GMT -5
Wow. I thought I was the only one who liked anything off that Izzy Stradlin record...
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Post by orzelc on Jun 13, 2015 7:38:19 GMT -5
Twenty-Five Miles -- Edwin Starr Old 55 -- Tom Waits Won't Be Home -- Old 97's Papa Was a Rodeo -- Magnetic Fields Somerville -- Pernice Brothers Needle Hits E -- Sugar Tell Balgeary Balgury Is Dead -- Ted Leo Tennessee Plates -- John Hiatt Pirate Radio -- John Hiatt Corvette -- Golden Smog Little Red Light -- Fountains of Wayne Here and Now -- Del Amitri Driving With the Brakes On -- Del Amitri Taillights Fade -- Buffalo Tom
(Not all super-great driving songs in a pedal-to-the-floor sort of way, but songs with travel in them...)
More on the "Separated from somebody, wanting to travel to see them" side of things:
I Wanna Come Home -- the Bottle Rockets Nightclub -- Old 97's
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Post by orzelc on Jun 4, 2015 15:49:39 GMT -5
I've been getting absolutely crushed at work; I agreed to take two sections of an intro course, on top of being department chair, and, yeah, that was a bad idea. Last day of classes is tomorrow, though, and final Monday, so I'll have some time soon, and comment. I've had the mix for a while, and it's good, just no time to write...
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Post by orzelc on Apr 8, 2015 18:33:35 GMT -5
Showed up this afternoon. Haven't had a chance to listen yet, because I had to take the kids out, but tomorrow...
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Post by orzelc on Apr 7, 2015 21:13:20 GMT -5
Orzelc, I'm hoping you've received your mix. I'm assuming you haven't been able to stop dancing long enough to post? ;-) Haven't got it yet, alas... Could've used some good new tunes this afternoon. I'd guess probably tomorrow.
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Post by orzelc on Mar 30, 2015 6:51:32 GMT -5
I probably slightly over-rate Teeth Dreams in an objective sense (at least, insofar as it makes sense to talk about objective rankings of art), because it was exactly what I needed when it came out. I was trying to power through revisions of my book, on a tight deadline, and between teaching and being stuck as department chair, my writing time was reduced to about an hour and a half every morning before class, and all morning Tuesday and Thursday. A new, loud, Hold Steady record was exactly the motivational soundtrack I needed for that process, and it was followed closely by a new, loud, Afghan Whigs record, which also worked really well.
I'm pretty proud of the resulting book, and those two records will always be inextricably linked with it, which gives them a bit of a boost in my mental estimation of where they fit in their respective catalogs.
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Post by orzelc on Mar 22, 2015 16:42:43 GMT -5
There was that Holmes/Lovecraft pastiche that won a Hugo a few years back, and The Graveyard Book had the same feel for me. It didn't help that I thought both of those works won awards over other stories I thought were better.
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Post by orzelc on Mar 22, 2015 13:31:02 GMT -5
Gaiman's best stuff is amazing, but on off days he slides too easily into a sort of smugly in-jokey kind of mode, where if you don't already know the story he's riffing on, all you can really tell is that you're missing out on what the author thinks is an excellent joke. It's more pronounced in his short fiction, which is why I'm not likely to bother with Trigger Warning.
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Post by orzelc on Mar 17, 2015 8:29:06 GMT -5
My favorite weird Tom Waits recording story was a profile in the mid-90's where he said he didn't approve the final mix of an album until after he listened to the whole thing played at high volume through the stereo in the beat-up old car he drove.
I kept to CD length just barely (though as noted above, I didn't actually burn it to CD); probably could've squeezed one more song on, but I wanted to leave some cushion, just in case.
It's been quite a while since I did a real mix-- long enough that my default mental image for what goes on a mix is based on a 100-minute cassette tape...
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Post by orzelc on Mar 16, 2015 14:13:16 GMT -5
I don't have any blank CD's lying around, either, but happily my assigned recipient was willing to take a download link for a bunch of audio files... Kinda takes the magic out of it a bit, don't you think? Not really, for me, anyway. The first thing I would do with a physical CD is rip it to my computer, so it's just cutting out a step... I'm not sure when I last played a CD on a regular CD player (i.e., not the one in my car, where I keep a Weakerthans disk as emergency backup music when I forget my iPod and the radio sucks). (The computer playback outputs to an audio amp and decent speakers, because I'm not a total philistine...)
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Post by orzelc on Mar 15, 2015 12:23:17 GMT -5
I don't have any blank CD's lying around, either, but happily my assigned recipient was willing to take a download link for a bunch of audio files...
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Post by orzelc on Feb 17, 2015 8:15:37 GMT -5
What the hell, I'm in. Been a while since I did the mixtape thing-- these days, I mostly live on shuffle play.
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Post by orzelc on Feb 6, 2015 16:41:20 GMT -5
"I said a couple things that probably weren't technically true."
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Post by orzelc on Feb 6, 2015 6:23:11 GMT -5
To be fair, there's also a shift toward explicit advice toward the guys in the songs, too-- for example, "Soft in the Center." But you can probably trace that back as far as "Stay Positive," at least, so I don't think it's that recent a shift.
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Post by orzelc on Jan 20, 2015 10:01:15 GMT -5
My list, with explanations:
Hard to rank-order these, because it's mostly a list of songs that have been personally significant to me at some point, so this is basically reverse-chronological autobiographical order. Which is also why it's such an odd mix of stuff.
1) The Mountain Goats, "This Year." Song number three off John's Nth CD... Played a lot when I was up for tenure, and when I became department chair, and right at the moment, too... 2) THS, "How a Resurrection Really Feels." I bought the album because I heard "Hoodrat" on the radio, but this is the song that convinced me they were genius. 3) The Weakerthans, "Reconstruction Site." Fantastic imagery, catchy tune. I can never write about aesthetics without getting "Beauty's just another word I'm never certain how to spell" stuck in my head. 4) The Afghan Whigs, "Lost in the Supermarket." Off an album of Clash covers (obviously); got this off Napster when that was a thing. My wife loves it, and I surprised her with it at our wedding (found the CD in a cut-out bin, slipped it to the DJ). 5) Bob Dylan, "Mississippi." Album track of "Love and Theft," which he had previously let Sheryl Crow record. Was doing the long-distance thing my first year as faculty, while my (not-yet-)wife finished law school. Resonated really well for me. 6) The Old 97's, "Big Brown Eyes." I had a beat-up CD boombox in my lab that would only play a handful of discs, and "Too Far to Care" was one. Held up remarkably well. 7) Sam Cooke, "Bring It on Home to Me." Spent three months living in Japan as a grad student, and listened to this a lot. Not quite sure why I latched onto that specifically, but there you go. 8) The Rolling Stones, "Beast of Burden." I do a great sing-along version of this after about five hours behind the wheel. Had it on one of my essential driving mix tapes. 9) Sugar, "Hoover Dam." Copper Blue is one of the most perfect albums ever, this is the best sing-along song off it. 10) Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here." Because reasons.
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Post by orzelc on Jan 18, 2015 17:38:37 GMT -5
IMO i'd separate Dylan from the likes of Zeppelin and Floyd, mostly because he's still releasing great music and has yet to become a nostalgia act. though i'm not sure anyone (including myself) listed any of his later material in their top 10. also, i'm making this distinction because i really like Dylan and not so much the other two (or classic rock in general). I had "Mississippi" on there, off Love and Theft. Mostly for personal reasons-- my now-wife and I were doing the long-distance thing the year that came out, while she finished law school and I was in my first year of a faculty job. That song really clicked for me at that time.
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Post by orzelc on Jan 16, 2015 12:13:00 GMT -5
Let's roll out some more! All of these songs are tied for "third to last" place, which isn't a bad thing! Have you gotten to any with more than one vote yet, or are these still all singletons from different lists?
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Post by orzelc on Jan 13, 2015 9:36:56 GMT -5
While the list I sent in was nominally chronological, I did fiddle with the chronology a little so that I'm basically okay with treating it as a rank order, too.
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Post by orzelc on Jan 11, 2015 7:28:38 GMT -5
Nobody's asked because there's only one era of Van Halen that matters. Come on now. Mostly agree, though I have a soft spot for the first couple of Van Hagar records-- they were the first big show I went to, up at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, with some friends on my high school soccer team. Fall of 1988 (William Butler Yeats didn't make it to rural Central New York). There would be some ironic cachet to forming a band dedicated to covering the Gary Cherone era, though. You know, if anybody knew any songs that version of Van Halen had recorded...
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Post by orzelc on Jan 10, 2015 6:42:20 GMT -5
The crucial question nobody has yet asked: What era of Van Halen will Steve's band be covering? Dave? Sammy? That other dude?
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Post by orzelc on Jan 7, 2015 9:10:36 GMT -5
From the same song, I kind of prefer:
Tonight we're gonna have a really good time But I wanna go to heaven on the day I die Gonna make like a preemptive strike Hit the 5:30 mass on a Saturday night
Is there a particular reason why they basically never play "Our Whole Lives" live? It's probably my favorite track off that album, but I never see it in setlists...
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Post by orzelc on Dec 27, 2014 20:17:06 GMT -5
I got an official-ish email with a Dropbox link to download the show. Probably soundboard, but I'm not good with that sort of thing. It's a good recording, anyway.
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