Recently in music

For the past couple years I've been meaning to write a roundup of music that I've been listening to and particularly enjoy, but as is painfully clear, I never got around to it. So, instead of coming up with a huge list, I thought I'd post little bite-size morsels.

The first musician in my series of "Music I Like" is Josh Rouse. I've never met a Josh Rouse album that I didn't like, but my favorites are "Nashville" and "Subtitulo." He's an amazing songwriter with a smooth voice and pop hooks that are extraordinary for how close they come to being cheesy without crossing that line.

Here are the Josh Rouse albums I listen to regularly, in rough order of preference:

This excerpt from a Wired.com article is the funniest thing I've read in a long time, especially because it wasn't, as far as I can tell, supposed to be funny:

"The prospect of having fans understand what I'm saying and repeat it in their language (drew me to) the company," said [rapper] Prodigy in a phone interview just before he began a jail term for illegal gun possession.

The rest of the article is pretty interesting, too. Apparently, some company has figured out a way to layer Prodigy's vocal characteristics onto his lyrics after they have been translated into any of 1,500 other languages and spoken by a third party. The result is a song with all the instruments, synthesizers, and so on, accompanied by what sounds like Prodigy rapping in Urdu or Swahili or Mandarin. While some of the comments below the article suggest that this technology is not quite ready for prime time, it'll be fun to see where it goes in the next few years.

You can read the full article at Wired.com: "Software Morphs Rapper Prodigy Into Global Cipher"

Sara and I went to see Jonathan Coulton perform at the Intersection last week, and we absolutely loved it. I've been listening to his music for a few months now, ever since a friend at work introduced me to the geek anthem, "Code Monkey." So, when the same friend told me that Jonathan Coulton was coming to town, I jumped at the chance to see him.

Jonathan Coulton is a former software programmer who quit his day job to make music. His geek cred comes through not only in some of his songs' lyrics, but also in the way he has chosen to promote his music. About a year and a half ago, he put up a web site, jonathancoulton.com, and started offering a new song each week for 52 straight weeks, all available via his "Thing a Week" podcast. He regularly updates his blog, licenses all of his work through Creative Commons, and sidelines for Popular Science as Contributing Troubadour. This guy is geeky in the coolest way.

He's also a brilliant songwriter. Unlike some humorous musicians whose songs wear thin after the first few listens, Coulton crafts catchy pop hooks with accessible melodies that age well.

Although most of his music is still available for free through the podcast, I recommend buying a CD or two, or maybe just downloading a few songs at first to see what you think. Some of my favorite songs are Millionaire Girlfriend ("She’s my millionaire girlfriend and she’s my life / Once I finally find her I’ll get permission from the wife / We will all live in our castle high / My beloved and my millionaire girlfriend and I"), Ikea ("Ikea: just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen / Ikea: selling furniture for college kids and divorced men / Everyone has a home / But if you don’t have a home you can buy one there"), and Re Your Brains ("All we want to do is eat your brains / We’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes / All we want to do is eat your brains / We’re at an impasse here, maybe we should compromise: / If you open up the doors / We’ll all come inside and eat your brains").

If you like Jonathan Coulton's music, especially if you're listening to it for free, why not drop some change in the tip jar? His music is the kind that's worth supporting.

Last year I wrote about a cool web-based tool called Chord Guide. Well, recently I stumbled upon an even cooler tool of the same ilk — this one called chordbook.com. You can choose a base chord or any of its variations and then press the strum button to listen to the chord ring out on your computer. I would have loved this back when I played the guitar (for more information, read about my previous life as a musician).

You can also change the strum speed, save a sequence of chords and play them back, change the guitar's tuning, and tweak a wide range of other settings. It tells you where to put your fingers and which strings to mute. The site looks like it could be helpful to any guitarist, from the beginner to the rock star. If you play the guitar, or want to learn, check out this site.

Over the past year, I've listened to a lot of new music, most of which, regrettably, I haven't liked very much. Because I have my headphones on during much of the day at work, I burn through music pretty quickly. Even though by now I should be content with the music I have, sometimes nothing in my library will do. So I get suggestions from friends, scour the list of new albums at metacritic.com, read Paste Magazine, download the podcast of All Songs Considered, and look out for "best of" lists at the end of the year. Here are a few of the albums that rose to the top of my personal playlist.

• Kelly Clarkson, Break Away: What can I say? I'm a sucker for this American Idol. She can really belt out a good tune, and her songs have major power-pop hooks. While my musical taste usually runs counter to the top-40 trends, this time I was riding the wave, listening to this album more times than I'd like to admit.
• Keane, Hopes and Fears: This band's music is like sugar to my eahttp://www.englishrules.com/cgi-bin/mt32/mt.cgi#rs. Not literally. They're a Brit-pop band in the same vein as Coldplay, but their songs are even catchier, especially moreso than Coldplay's latest offering, which to me at least was a little disappointing.
• Imogen Heap, Speak for Yourself: From the frontwoman of Frou Frou, this solo album mixes smooth vocals, laid-back rhythms, and electronic infusions. In "Hide and Seek," which I first heard on All Songs Considered, Heap sings the entire song through a Vocoder. Cool.
• Sufjan Stevens, Come on Feel the Illinoise!: Now every critic's darling, Stevens once went to Hope College and played in a local band at a humble little coffeehouse in Grand Rapids. This album continues his special brand of delicate and wispy vocals, goofy yet poignant lyrics, and intricate and multi-layered instrumentation. It's hard not to love a musician with a song called "A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Very Good Reasons."
• My Morning Jacket, Z: A great album from a straight-ahead rock and roll band with lots of reverb.
• Sigur Ros, Takk...: Out of every band on the planet, this is the one that I'd most like to have with me if I were trapped inside a cocoon. Their music leaves me breathless and bedazzled with its sweeping orchestrations of shameless grandiosity. They kind of open up the universe.
• CocoRosie, Noah's Ark: These two sisters produce a folktronica sound with startling, operatic vocals and unpredictable melodies. Just the way I like them.

Now that leaves three albums that I've listened to a lot and love, but don't feel I can put in the same list as the others, because of my personal connection with the musicians.

• Peter LaGrand, Falling Down in Place: If ones and zeros could wear out, these songs would be more weathered than my favorite pair of jeans. Read my review.
• Jason Harrod, Bright As You: When he's on, he's really, really on. Read my review.
• Over the Rhine, Drunkard's Prayer: I'll never figure out why these guys haven't become insanely famous.

So, what are your favorite albums of the past year?

One of my greatest joys in life is discovering new things about old friends. I made just such a discovery (and felt the joy) two weeks ago when Peter LaGrand came over for dinner with his new CD in hand.

When I first met Peter, I was a college student and he was a 10-year-old skaterat with long blonde hair covering his eyes. He taught me some inline-skating moves, and I taught him…well, I didn't teach him anything. Since I was good friends with his older brothers (and still am), I would see him from time to time when his family gathered at their cottage on Lake Michigan. Peter has since become a good friend of our family and always takes the time to visit and catch up and play with our kids when he's in town.

Now Peter is in his late twenties and residing in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he attends Regent College, works at a coffeehouse, and performs music. He has mentioned that he was playing a few gigs here and there and writing a few songs, but I had no idea what a talented singer/songwriter he had become.

Peter's new album, Falling Down in Place, is a gorgeous piece of work. The unique blend of instruments— from glockenspiel and melodica to dobro and violin—is a perfect complement to Peter's rich and raspy baritone vocals. The songs, many of which are about longing and escape, creep up on you with their gentle rhythms that belie the intense emotions and their evocative lyrics that defy cliché. I must have listened to the album at least 12 times in the past two weeks, and I've been enjoying it more and more each time.

Peter has graciously given me permission to offer a couple of his songs for download:
When the Colors Die (3.6MB MP3)
The Escape (5.2MB MP3)

If you like the songs, check out Peter's website and buy the whole album

Also, if you live near Grand Rapids, Michigan, you can hear Peter perform tonight at Calvin College in the "Fish House." The concert starts at 8pm, and it's free.

Inspired by my friend Drew's suggestion in a recent comment, I've put together a little list of songs that I really enjoy despite my better judgment. These are songs that are too trendy or too goofy or too something for any "serious-minded" music fan to admire. But I like them anyway, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Maybe just a little embarrassed. But, hey, no more caveats from me. Here they are, my musical guilty pleasures, along with explanations of why they are "pleasures," and why they are "guilty":

Now it's your turn. What songs do you secretly groove to behind closed doors, when nobody else is watching?

Musical taste is an inscrutable thing. Some songs are immediately pleasing to the ear, while others demand a lot of work and repeated listens. Some are hailed by critics and spurned by the public, while others are panned by critics as they ascend to the top of the charts. On a much smaller scale, two people could have the same reaction to nine bands, but then diverge greatly on the tenth.

There are a number of bands that I have failed to like, even though I have tried quite hard to like them, and even though the critics adore them—even though my friends whose musical tastes I respect have recommended them. At the risk of disappointing some of my friends (Michael), here are a few of the acclaimed bands and musicians that I want to like but somehow can't:

1. The Arcade Fire
2. Bright Eyes
3. Elliott Smith
4. The Rolling Stones
5. Ryan Adams
6. Wilco
7. The White Stripes

It all makes me wonder, can we really recommend music to others with any degree of confidence? Can we say, "if you like this, you'll love that"? What determines what we like anyway? Certainly cultural forces are at work. Familiarity must help, too, as long as it doesn't turn into over-saturation. A little peer influence may nudge us in a certain direction, but it can only take us so far. Genetics? Who knows.

Some companies think they have it all figured out. Siren Systems Inc. has a website called Soundflavor that "marries objective (and unbiased) metadata, artificial intelligence, and listener ratings to yield unparalleled accuracy" in recommending songs that match a user's individual tastes. Polyphonic HMI claims to have "developed proprietary music analysis technologies capable of identifying music preferences of a user or the whole current recorded music market and intelligently selecting music to recommend to the user or to release as a single."

A few weeks ago on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, Scott Simon interviewed the founder of Savage Beast Technologies. The company has created the Music Genome Project, "an effort to break music down to its most elemental forms, using a computer program that evaluates each song by 400 distinct musical attributes." Another company, calling itself MusicGenome, apparently has the same idea.

Audioscrobbler is a community-based website that matches users with others who have similar musical interests. It also has a streaming music feature, in collaboration with LastFM, that lets people listen to a personalized online radio station of sorts based on a user's profile. I use it occasionally at work, and it works quite well.

It'll be interesting to see how these music recommendation programs develop over the next few years as the demand from music conglomerates for sophisticated analytical tools increases. After all, the chief goal of the record companies is to remove all risk—and spontaneity—from the business of selling music. Makes for happy shareholders.

With the release of "Bright as You," his second solo effort, Jason Harrod has clearly come into his own as a songwriter and as a musician. The album is a sweeping landscape of shadows and light, with richly textured melodies capturing moments of sorrow and exuberance. On "Messed Up Everywhere Blues," which isn't a blues song at all, Harrod in his raspy tenor one-ups just about every other song of lost love when he sings:

Unlike other folksy singer-songwriter types, though, Harrod is not one to get mired in the depths of woe to the point of self-indulgence. In "Good Night Sunshine" he breaks the spell of despondency: "I'm a messed up man, but I'm full of love." In "Kickin Mule," he leaps to the height of bravado, rocking it out with Southern-fried goodness :

Other songs on the album range from the jazz-inflected ("Voyeurs") to the Beatlesque ("Bright as You"), but they all retain Harrod's signature phrasing, deft guitar work, and poetic lyrics. Producer Phil Madeira and a raft of studio musicians round out the sound with some top-notch session work.

In the interest of full disclosure and all that, I suppose I should mention that Jason is a friend of mine. So, I might be a little biased.

Free Songs

Jason Harrod's new album is fantastic. But don't take my word for it. Jason has given me permission to offer the full version of two songs. Download them here, have a listen, and then let me know what you think.

• Kickin Mule (5.4MB mp3)
• When I Fly Away - mp3 (4.6MB mp3)

Also, check out the Jason Harrod website for tour information. If you live near Grand Rapids, Michigan, you can catch him at Four Friends Coffeehouse on Thursday, May 5.

There is a great tradition of visual artists using "found" objects to create new masterpieces, be they sculpture, collage, or mixed media. Musicians, too, have mixed a variety of elements into new compositions—bird songs, environmental noise, samples of other recordings. Now, someone who goes by the name Clown Staples has created a song using only the very basic Sound Recorder that comes pre-installed with Windows and the collection of generic sounds that play when users perform certain actions on their Windows computers. You can watch a Flash animation of Clown playing the tune: Windows Noises. (hat tip: Robin Good)

While I'm not crazy about the song itself, I admire Staples's decision to limit himself to a rudimentary tool and a discrete sound source—a great example of how limits can actually foster creative expression. It reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who chose to write many of her poems in sonnet form long after the rise of free verse, or Richard Wilbur, who is still churning out verse with complex rhyme schemes and rigid meter. Maybe, at least when it comes to art, there is such a thing as too much freedom.

Unlike most 2004 music lists, this one isn't limited to albums that were released during the year. Instead, it's merely a list of the albums I listened to the most, the tunes that got me through my days, the songs that accompanied me on the bus ride home from work. I wouldn't even call these the "best" albums of the year—just the ones that hit me the right way at the right time.

• Broken Social Scene - Feel Good Lost (2004): melodious, discordant, evocative
• Hem - Rabbit Songs (2002): western, orchestral, breezy
• Mindy Smith - One Moment More (2004): reflective, elegant, cagey
• Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans (2004): folky, quirky, unpredictable
• Tresspassers William - Different Stars (2002): slow, brooding, haunting
• Teitur - Poetry & Aeroplanes (2003): catchy, infectious, mellow
• Ric Hordinski - When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (2004): ambient, hypnotic, virtuosic
• The Polyphonic Spree - The Beginning Stages Of… (2004): exuberant, giddy, trippy
• Jem - Finally Woken (2004): fun, fun, fun

So that's it—my very personal, highly subjective top nine list. Why only nine? Because I'm lazy. Tell me your favorites?

Bill Mallonee—singer, songwriter, poet, prophet, and former frontman for Vigilantes of Love—turns 50 today. Even though he started his music career about 15 years later than most other popular musicians, he has pursued it with such intensity and integrity that he has managed to release at least fifteen albums and has amassed a substantial cult following, all with little or no marketing assistance from the various labels that promised to back him along the way.

Bill is a tireless performer, playing shows all over the U.S. and the U.K. for at least half of each year. Given his schedule, it's truly amazing that he is also a devoted husband and a committed father of two well-adjusted young men.

If you've never heard Bill Mallonee before, you should really check out one of his live shows. In the meantime, though, you can (legally) download the following songs:

• With Any Luck At All (mp3) from the as-yet-unreleased Friendly Fire
• Life On Other Planets (mp3) from Perfumed Letter
• Extraordinary Girl (mp3) from Perfumed Letter
• Double Cure (mp3) early acoustic version from My Year in Review
• You Know That (mp3) from Summershine
• Galaxy (mp3) from Sunnershine

Happy birthday, Bill. And Happy New Year, everyone. May you all have many more.

For more information about Bill Mallonee and his music, visit billmallonee.com.

My new favorite album is One Moment More, the debut effort of Mindy Smith, a countryish, folkish singer/songwriter currently living in Nashville, where it seems just about every country artist and folk singer and even the stray electronica/dance/pop band (e.g. Venus Hum) winds up if they want to "make it" in the music biz.

It's a wonderful collection of sweet and lovely songs with a fireball or two thrown in for good measure. Her voice has a tender yet unpredictable quality that keeps me guessing. She'll float a few long, plain notes out there and then, just when it might get boring, drop in a curlicue or a sigh that propels the song forward. It's the kind of music that makes me want to curl up in the living room and listen all Sunday afternoon.

Last week's iTunes update included a recording by the rapper Lil Wayne. The name got me wondering: How many other Lil' Rappers are there out there?

By doing a simple artist search in the iTunes store, I came up with this lil' list:

Soon there will be a new one to add to the list: Lil' Swede is being groomed to take the rap world by storm.

In a surprising display of street sensibility and hip-hop mentality, Andy "Grampa" DeBoer proposed the Lil' Swede moniker for the artist commonly known as Ben. Then, to capitalize on the buzz generated by the sobriquet—and to test-market the young rapper's revolutionary new style—Karl "Big Daddy" Swedberg released Lil' Swede's first single in May, 2004 (cf. Ben and Dad Sing "Good Night").

Fans/parents of Lil' Swede, who was recently spotted wearing his first Swedish shirt, gave the rising star not only a "shout out" but also "mad props." Meanwhile, player haters have been put on notice. Whatever that means.

I just stumbled upon the coolest a cool site for anyone who likes to bang around on a guitar: chordguide.com. You just click on the root note to get a list of chords. You can make your own list of chords, with fretboard images showing the finger positioning, and click on a chord's name to get variations. It's so easy that it almost makes me want to dust off my old guitar and hear what all those funky chords sound like.

Update:For an even cooler site, check out Chordbook.com

Kim Taylor performed at Four Friends Coffeehouse on Thursday, April 22. I must say, it was one of the best concerts I have ever seen—and I've seen hundreds.

It's a shame there were only eight people there to witness such greatness. A confluence of bad circumstances made for a terribly weak attendance, but the band played as if there was a crowd of a thousand.
Kim has a couple songs for free download at Paste Music. Check them out; I think you'll like them.