Harmonium

I love Vanessa Carlton.  She has a new album coming out really soon and I am dying with anticipation.  This might be a dangerous thing though... the dying with anticipation part... because last time I did that, I was sorely disappointed.  Think Lady Gaga.  Born This Way.

I really have hopes for this one only because of Vanessa's track record.  Her first album was ok with a few really great tracks that piqued my interest.  I got tired of it after awhile, but it lasted me an entire summer, so I can't complain.  You all remember A Thousand Miles.  It's still a great girl song.  Love it.  She also does a really great, emotional cover of Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones.  I don't know if at this point it is worth it to purchase this album, but there are some good moments.  If you are a playlist fiend than it's worth it to sample and buy the one ore two songs that you like for your playlist.  This was largely a label album.  Vanessa didn't necessarily call the shots on the song picks although she did write the songs and play the piano on the album.

My favorite thing about Vanessa Carlton... her second album Harmonium.  It is exquisite.  The album tanked, although I really feel that it has more to do with the lack of press from her record label then me being the only person on the planet that stood in awe of it.  I'm a musician.  I know when something is crap.  It is good. Click on the link above and test it out for yourself though. I think a lot of people just didn't know that it was out there.  The one single that got released didn't get any attention, and I imagine these bigwigs sitting in boardrooms saying that she's too "girl with the piano" for them to back up financially.  Well those of us who appreciate music for it's aesthetic value and not just for the KA-CHING, bought the album seven years ago and still listen to it today.  SO THERE!

Seriously, it is probably my twelfth, all time favorite album.  And you thought I would really stop at eleven?

Harmonium had beautiful piano riffs and is ripe with hopeful, unique songs.  This album is about her falling in love and getting married to Steven Jenkins from Third Eye Blind.  My favorite song is Afterglow.  Sample the whole album, I really love the entire thing, every song.

Her third album is Heroes and Thieves.  It is about her break up and divorce from Steven Jenkins.  It is beautiful too although I don't love EVERY song like I do on the Harmonium album.  This third effort features Stevie Nicks.  Apparently, after the disappointing album sales from Harmonium, the record label took her contract, she had to wrangle a new one and Stevie Nicks stepped in somewhere along the line to mentor her on the "new" album.  Stevie did a great job as a mentor and is featured on the song The One, which represents the melancholy, haunting tone of the entire record.  Steven Jenkins is still really close to his ex wife and produced this music.

Ok.  So.  If you are going to delve into Vanessa Carlton, I say start with Harmonium, move on to Heroes and Thieves and then keep your fingers crossed that the new album Rabbits on the Run is lovely and memorable as well.  It comes out on 7/26/11 and I am downloading it as soon as it comes out.  I guess, keep your fingers crossed for me that my heart does not break yet again over another lackluster record this year.

Here's the new video to check out.  I like it.

The last thing that excites me about this artist is her sense of fashion.  Oh.  She has a great wardrobe. I'm a little obsessed with her clothes.

Hello Summer

So.  Finally. It's summer time.  We have had an extended winter and spring barely existed in the first place here.  All of this summer sun that we're getting makes me feel nostalgic.  I am reliving all of the days where I drove to the beach with my favorite album of the moment playing as loudly as possible.  Then I thought of all the albums that have been important to me and realized that I wanted to go through my collection and pin down the music that means the most to me.

So.  If you are finally having summer sun and want some new/ old music to listen to, here are my top ten favorite albums of all time.  My friend Anna gave me a phrase the other day that has totally stuck with me and that I am using a lot: "I am quite promiscuous with my music."  Taking time to figure out which are my truly favorite albums out of my entire music collection has made me giggle.  I seem to have "quite promiscuous" taste.  This could be good though because that way there is something for everyone.

Anyway here goes:

1. Portishead/ Portishead Live from Roseland NYC
Portishead is that magical band for me.  All of their music comes from this amazing,creative, blow your mind place and I adore them.  This album is sheer genius.  They mix big band with orchestra, goth with hip hop.

2. The Beatles/ The White Album
What can I say about the Beatles that hasn't already been said?  They practically are their own genre.  The White Album changed my life.  Simple as that.  Whenever I hear While My Guitar Gently Weeps, I am transcended to another place.

3. Tori Amos/ Boys For Pele
If you've read my blog, you know that Tori Amos is my Obi Wan Kenobi.  Boys For Pele is art in motion.  It is also the album that I identify most with in the entire world.

4. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers/ Greatest Hits
My sister and I.  Driving in the car.  Hollering Last Dance With Mary Jane at the top of our lungs.  Her picking out the guitar riff to Breakdown while I sing the words.  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers made this sensational compilation of all their best work and we have paid tribute to it time and time again.

5. Neko Case/ Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
Please see my prior blog.  This album is perfect from start to finish.  I have never met another like it.

6. Nickel Creek/ Why Should the Fire Die?
Who said that bluegrass can't be sensational, sexy and tear you to bits?  Not only are Nickel Creek incredibly talented but Why Should the Fire DIe? is also emotional, provocative and haunting.  Such depth from bluegrass is really moving.

7. Marilyn Manson/ Mechanical Animals
I love Marilyn Manson.  I am a huge fan of Manson and always will be.  I wrote about Mechanical Animals briefly last week.  I will just say that he is a truly great lyricist with a hardcore sound that is unrivaled by most artists in the same genre as he.

8. Cake/ Fashion Nugget
Fashion Nugget is Cake at their best.  Quirky and fun with a very serious message at the core (listen to Going The Distance), this album is timeless.  Put it on and it will surprise you just which people in the room start singing along.

9. Lady Gaga/ The Fame Monster
Lady Gaga really came close to perfection with The Fame Monster.  Lyrically it is filled with twists, turns and puzzles.  Musically it is hyper and pop production at it's best.  I know that Lady Gaga annoys people very easily, but don't take for granted that her music will necessarily be the same way.

10. Fiona Apple/ When the Pawn...
I will never tire of Fiona Apple.  I will always want more music from her and who knows if she will ever write another album?  It might break my heart forever.  When The Pawn... was her second album and still moves me to this day.  If you want to understand the raw, female psyche.  Download this album and listen to it with your mind, body and soul.

11. Counting Crows/ August and Everything After
I snuck a number eleven in there.  Sorry.  Well, I wish I was sorry.  I had to add the Counting Crows album because it has always been monumental in my life.  What can I say about Counting Crows?  I wish that they hadn't run out of creative ideas.  I listened to this album for the first time when I was eighteen years old and never got over it.  Moody and vital are the adjectives that come to mind when I try to describe this record.

Check out something new that you don't have yet.  Not all of this is summer music.  Portishead and Fiona Apple are great autumn/ winter albums... as in they could last you an entire season.  So think about these selections very carefully and how they can fit into your life.

I hope this list is complete.  I pondered these for a long time, agonizing over every detail.  I had to move things around over and over because each record is in a very specific spot.  Believe it or not, the top five were the easiest, it was the bottom five that gave me the most trouble.

I will leave you now with something for the road.  wink wink.

This is one of my all time favorite songs.  It seemed appropriate to post with the theme of the blog as well as the tie in to my "best of" list... 

Now, make your way to the pool and pick up some BBQ while you are at it!

Tournaquet

Rough week.  Not gonna lie.  The kind of week where you are in agony almost every second.  Luckily, I have a good ol' chum in Marilyn Manson.

I am a huge Manson fan... although I will admit that his last album, released in 2010 interested me not one bit so I declined that purchase.  Besides that, I have all the rest of his music.  One of his albums is actually in my top ten all time fav list:  Mechanical Animals.  Animals was flawlessly executed with one exception... cheesy background vocals on a couple of the songs.  Speed of Pain was the main culprit.  Songs like Dope Show, Dis associative and I Don't Like the Drugs more than make up for the little snafu.

The Manson album that got me through this week was not Mechanical Animals though.  It was Antichrist Superstar that did it.  When you are hurt, angry and depressed all at the same time, listen to the Irresponsible Hate Anthem.  Oh man.  It really helps.  My favorite line from that song is "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers."  When ever I hear that lyric I get chills.  I take all my negative emotion, gather it up in a big ball in my chest and imagine that I have a million middle fingers to stick out all at once.  Then I sing along at the top of my lungs.  Then I play the song on repeat a couple more times.

Tourniquet is another song on that album that gets repeated.  I'm a girl, what can I say?  If I'm really into a song, I can listen to it 6 or 7 times in a row.  Amazing.  Tourniquet is a song that stays with you. It is perfectly produced and another great song to sing out all of your aggression to.  The words to this song are beautiful and eerie.  Creepy yet soothing.

"Prosthetic synthesis and butterfly
Sealed up with virgin stitch
If it hurts baby please tell me
Preserve the innocence"


This is definitely some of Manson's best writing ever and many people really believe that this entire album is his best.  To me, some of the later songs on this album drag so even though the first half is sublime, the second half takes a little nose dive.  Still, great music.  


Golden Age of Grotesque is another great, solid, old school Manson.  Eat Me, Drink Me... is a recent favorite of mine  It is so different from his other work.  There is so much electric guitar as a focus, with all the other instruments taking a back seat.  It is definitely his tribute to the great music of rock and roll.  It is so well written from a lyrical perspective as well, true to his usual style.  Sometimes beneath all of the strong music, you forget how great his words are.  So next time you listen to Marilyn Manson, take extra care to pay attention to his words or you will miss out.

Here is my favorite one for now...  hopefully this helps you throughout your rough times too...

Tori Time

I have had a difficult week.  When my world is upside down and I need fortification, I don't turn to food, I don't turn to exercise... I turn to music.  There is one artist above all others who has the ability to help me transcend above all of the chaos and find some kind of peace.  That artist is Tori Amos.  Now, I know that you all think that she has had her time in the sun and is totally irrelevant to your life today, but I would say that if you have the ability to dissect the music that you listen to while delving into it at the same time, Tori Amos will cure your ails.

What I love about her is the absolute perfectionism and the fact that her craft is her religion.  I also love that she doesn't censor herself to sell more albums but rather has such a soul deep connection to her fans that she can stay true to her message and we don't expect or ask her to compromise.  I had a very similar upbringing as she did and so I understand the deep religious exorcism that goes into her songs even today after her christianity has been shed for probably a good 40 years.

The last thing that so impresses me about Tori Amos and always keeps me coming back for more is the way that you can't have her music without their words and you can't have her lyric's without their melodies.  They are vital to each other and are all superb.  Her melodies are detailed to a science and her lyrics are abstract like Miro.  She is a brilliant piano player.  Her skill with the keyboard is almost overwhelming to me sometimes and I play the piano as well.  It's her ear and personal style that make her skill stand out so much.

Ok, I will start giving you some examples of what rescues me:

"Icicle, Icicle where are you going?  I have a hiding place when spring comes around..."

"Don't judge me so hard little girl, you've got a playboy mommy..."

"Muhammad my friend, it's time to tell the world, we both know it was a girl, back in Bethlehem..."

Intrigued yet???

Today I started with Under The Pink.  Ten years ago, when I purchased this album and all the others that she had out at the time, it was my least favorite.  I had no use for it.  I couldn't comprehend the ideas that lay beneath the majority of the tracks.  Now, Under the Pink is my second favorite album of hers.  I listen to it often, but I totally had to grow into it.  I am still discovering things about this album, every time that I listen to it... little revelations about meaning and importance, pop into my mind as I sing along to every song.  My all time favorite Tori Amos song Cornflake Girl, is also on this record.  No matter how many times I listen to it, I can always play it back one more time.  This album is about a woman coming into her own, shedding the religion that has hugely disappointed (and betrayed) her and the sexual awakening that comes with leaving archaic rules and prejudices behind you forever.

Tori Amos will definitely appeal to the more feminine personality types, but that is because she delves into female archetypes often as a reoccurring theme throughout all of her music.  I know many mature men that greatly appreciate both her wisdom and her humor as they are comfortable with their own identities though so don't think that it is just one big chick fest waiting to happen.

Try Tori.  Don't just give it a quick listen and give up.  Try Tori over and over.  You will find yourself hypnotized and moved under the guidance of her skilled piano hands.

I will most likely devote more blog space to this artist, so beware...

Here is her cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, which she sang live in honor of Kurt Cobain a year after he passed away.  It is a brilliant cover and the only way that a female voice can effectively sing this song. This is on the Crucify Ep... it is really old but still powerful.

SUCKS

Lady Gaga's new album sucks.  That is all I have to say while I am sitting here typing with my bottom lip protruding into a pout.  Not gonna talk about any songs, not gonna talk about any words.

I am so irritated.  We'll try again tomorrow.

Inertia

I should be sleeping right now, but I am writing instead.  I have these words swirling through my mind:

My true love died in a dirty ol' pan of oil that did run from the block,

of a Falcon Sedan 1969, the paper said '75.

There were no survivors, none found alive...

So, first the words distract me, then I hear the melody that belongs to these words creep into my mind and finally I begin to hum.  Of course, what else but a song can get me this worked up?  I have this amazing ability to hear the composition replayed in my head just as I would hear it on the record.  The only problem is that after it loops in my brain for awhile, I want to listen out loud and sing along.  Talk about a HUGE distraction from sleeping.

For those of you who don't know me well, and for those of you who do...  I am usually a good, no, GREAT sleeper.  Typically I can sleep when and where that I choose.  I could literally curl up in a ball on most floors (as long as they are clean), and fall asleep if I want to.  So tonight, what song is distracting me from my blessed slumber?  What minstrel wrote words and music that so distract me?

Neko Case.  Who else?

Fox Confessor Brings The Flood is a rare and perfect album that Neko Case released in 2006 and it still mesmerizes me to distraction.  Even the one song on the album that would typically annoy me can convince me to listen to it.   Strange because I am good at skipping through what I deem to be the "fluff" on most albums.  Even Neko Case's fluff is not fluff.

Once I started humming the afore mentioned song, I just had to keep going through the remainder of the album.

There are moments in a musician's career or life where magic happens.  Moments.  Neko Case had an entire album full to the brim of these moments.  How?  I don't know.  Her next album, Middle Cyclone was released in 2009 and was better than good for sure, but to me it still pales in comparison to the 2006 release.  How does one recreate such perfection?  Maybe she will figure it out and amaze me again.  All I know is that five years later, I still catch myself visiting that album with just my mind and then needing to listen to it after I touch on it in thought.  I can't even pick a song highlight for you because they all hold such power over me that to pick one over the other is too traumatic.

You can say that I am melodramatic if you like, and I am for great music, but listen to this album as soon as possible and then just try to tell me that I am wrong.   

Photo Journals and Airbending

Are photo journals really the thing?  I looked on the list of noteworthy blogs and most of the top blogs are photo oriented.  Perhaps I am the only one left obsessed with words???  I am so enthralled with them that I have approximately ten Words With Friends going at a time.  I think about the way words are shaped, the way they sound, the way I say them, the way others say them...  ah well, you get the point.  Am I the only person left with this obsession on my mind?  Is everyone else that much more visual than me?

Well, there is another thing here that I am a fan of, despite everyone else's opinion: The Last Airbender.  This film was the latest by M. Night Shyamalan and was really unpopular.  It is a children's movie and is incredibly well done so that an intelligent adult may just find that they like it too.  There are a few spots of C.G. here and there that weren't executed perfectly, but that's not the reason that no one saw the film.  Apparently it wasn't Asian enough.  Yes, I just said that.  Since The Last Airbender was an anime, moviegoers were upset that there weren't any Asian characters in the movie.  What they did not take into consideration was the fact that this series was an American made franchise, thus it makes complete sense that the characters were a complete mix of ethnicities.  America is the "melting pot" of the world, is she not?  I would beseech fans of good sci fi/fantasy to view this film without bias and consider the magic it presents to us.  After all, it is a tale of balance in the world.  It tells the story of our planet missing some of it's elements and how to fight against that imbalance.  Ah, perhaps that is why American's didn't love it... it tells the tale of making sacrifices for the better of the earth, rather than letting her flounder in our disruption.  Simple enough answer?  Or am I paranoid as well as strange?

There, I added a photo for good measure...

Really, M. Night did a fantastic job.  The music is that he added is a vital part of the film, it ties everything together.  The script is simple enough for the target audience but not dumbed down so that the more mature audience can't enjoy it if they are intereted.  Today, I saw it for the second time, and I marveled at the beautiful set construction, elemental themes and wardrobe.

If you have kids, let them watch this movie... also, feel free to sit yourself down while they view it and get lost in the fantasy.