I. I taught myself the guitar in the spring of 1995. II. A dominant seventh chord is a regular triad with an extra note added to it. This note is the seventh on the scale, diminished by a half-step for reasons I’ll explain. So: a C seventh chord (C7) would go from C, the first [...]
I. Okay the easiest job for a critic is to be a judge on a cooking-based reality/game show. That, next to record reviewer, is the world’s easiest job. Music critics, looking as they do at macro levels of the artform, work harder. I mean, looking at how one thing fits into a continuum or context [...]
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I. Books Slow, here. I finished Didion’s Blue Nights this morning, which was a breeze to read through. It’s too soon for me to articulate how or why, but it seemed in this book that her mantric style and the brevity of the chapters did something to the grief running throughout that’s different from what [...]
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My mom when I was seven or so bought from a friend or coworker an upright piano. They put it at the top of the stairs. I guess she learned how to play it when she was young. Sang in the choir. Was proud of her musical background and hoped, the idea was, to instill [...]
Some of you may recall that my pal Steve makes great mixtapes. They are essentially all I’ve been listening to in the car since moving to Alabama. Steve favors a good 50/50 mix of UK and US music—at least, he does on the mixes he sends me. From them I’ve discovered such now-beloved acts as [...]
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Anyone in Maui can hire Don V. Lax, a violinist, to play music at events like weddings or dinners or I guess bat mizvahs. He’s got a Web site you can go to to contact the guy and book him. In his biography, he has this to say: Since moving to America, he has performed [...]
Right? Anyway, one thing I used to do “a lot” of is record beloved records track for track on Apple’s iLife’s Garageband. This was a way to not write that taxidermy book I was supposed to be writing. I did, um…well before the book I did Smog’s Wild Love and then I did Bee Thousand [...]
In a bit of Modest Mouse nostalgia and reverie last night, I stumbled upon an MP3 copy of the band’s 1993 demo-tape release, titled Tube-Fruit, All Smiles and Chocolate. It’s available to download here. I’m listening to it now for the first time. Expect lo-fi noise, much along the lines of Sad Sappy Sucker, with [...]
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So tonight I have some things that I have to do once I’m done with this ongoing call Adam. Then I might reread Mary and of glasses essays, but that something that I might stay for tomorrow night. I think that the quality of the voice recognition gets worse the further aware of the computer [...]
About 90 percent of everything I know about music I know from two friends who both now live (not together) in Brooklyn. One of those is my Pittsburgh friend Steve who has been making and sending me mixes for so long that the first ones were on tape, because few of us had CD-burning laptops [...]
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Thanks, Sara G. You’re welcome, music-starved ears of Lincoln, Nebraska.
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Everyone knows allegorical readings of anything written after 1500 are dull and limiting. They do the opposite of what reading is all about doing, which is to answer questions about a text with further questions, and with mental and associative play. Allegorical readings try to answer every question and they can’t help but look foolish [...]
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Some things: I. His Dark Materials It’s a trilogy that turns Harry-Potter grads into atheists, have you heard? The overarc(h)ing narrative is the quest to kill God. Here’s the thing: it’s so much more godly and Christian than any other book I’ve written. Even if God dies (spoiler alert) in a terribly anticlimactic scene, all [...]
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