Well, some more changes around the Friends Recommends parts. Our good friend and beloved blogger TJ Huff has resigned his duty as our Thursday blogger. I hold this against him in no way because I have often thought of resigning my blogging duties as well. I guess I pretty much resigned my blogging duties (at least a good portion of them) when I enlisted the help of TJ, thechristophermyers, and Mike Ward (help which I am very grateful for). Anyway, I am certain that TJ will still be around in the comments section, happy to be relieved of his blogging responsibilities. Although, I am very interested in a blog about Radiolab, so maybe he can give us a guest blog on that when the time is right. For now watch out for our good friend Ricky B to take over Thursday blogging. He has admitted to having no idea what he is going to do with it but I'm sure it will be entertaining to most people (especially Erichop).
I had hoped to have another Jenny recommends for today, but when I went to Netflix to watch one of her movies (I've never seen Clue!) none of them were view instantly. More of those are coming soon...I promise. She has invited all of us to go Letterboxing with her sometime. I'm sure she would regret this as soon as it happened.
I'm positive nearly everyone who reads this has at least heard that a new Wilco album titled "Wilco (The Album)" is coming out at the end of June. I'm sure most of you know that it is streaming in it's entirety HERE and I'm sure at least some of you have listened to it. I heard the first half two days ago, and this afternoon when I sat down to do computer things I found that I heard the whole album all the way through. I'm listening to it again right now and I really love it. I want to have it in CD form so I can listen to it while I drive. I am already anticipating this being a wonderful thing. I don't have too many thoughts about the album yet, this being only the second time I've really heard it all. I can tell you that I think the songwriting is solid, Jeff Tweedy sounds GREAT, and as always the guitar work of Nels Cline doesn't disappoint. I still haven't checked out Sky Blue Sky and although it has received very mixed reviews from friends I still intend to buy it. I really love A Ghost Is Born and Summerteeth, but for totally different reasons. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of my favorite albums ever, so I guess I compare all Wilco albums to it. Wilco (The Album), at least so far seems to lean back towards Summerteeth in it's feel-good rockiness, and away from the experimentation/drony/soundiness of A Ghost Is Born (which I also love). And although I can't give a total impression just yet, I can say that as soon as this album is released on June 30 I am going to buy it. It is certain to at least be an album that I really like, and will listen to obsessively for a week or two. It will at least be that for me, with a strong chance for more. Good job, guys. I recommend you listen to the first song (Wilco (The Song)) and see how it hits you...it gives a pretty good impression of what else is coming, but by no means tells the full story. Those of you who have listened, what do you think so far?
Lastly, there have been rumblings around here of people interested in posting some of their favorite recipes. This will have to be more than just posting a recipe, but I am willing to give another week in the blogsphere to this idea somewhere down the line if people actually want to do this. I don't know how to turn on an oven, so I am out for this one. But if everyone is dying for the recipe to Ricky's mashed beer potatoes coupled with some hilarious anecdote then I will not try to stand in the way.
Like I told Adam the other day, I didn’t grow up suckling on my mother’s musical teat like some of you guys so these are all songs that I’ve loved since high school or later. Ironically all of these songs are about a man’s love for his mother.
It’s Your Thing – The Isley Brothers
This song is about the many Isley Brothers and how much they all love their shared mother. They love mum so much that they declare that they have no right to tell her whom she can or cannot “sock it to” (whatever that means). Presumably the boys mean that only she, their highly revered mother, has the right to chose whose feet she dresses with socks.
Let's Spend the Night Together – The Rolling Stones
What nice little boys, those Rolling Stones. It’s admiring how much they just want to spend some more time with their mums. In this lovely little number, they urge their mothers to come over to their homes and have a sleepover party. Any good boys will be sure to have plenty of tea and biscuits ready for their hungry mums.
This Time Tomorrow – The Kinks
This one’s a bit depressing, but The Kinks are realists. They imagine a world (a very real one at that) in which their mothers may some day pass on. Two brothers ponder what life will be like without their dear mother, and they realize that life will be sad. Very sad, indeed.
I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend – The Ramones
Now here are nice young men who know the true value of a good mother. They admire and respect their mothers so much that they profess to wish that all young women were just like their own mothers. They plead “do you love me, babe?” because they know that the perfect women will love them just as much as their mothers do.
Don’t Worry Baby – The Beach Boys
These young fellows prove that in order to make a great song, you need to be in a band with you brothers and your band name needs to start with “The”. Don’t worry baby is a very touching yet sad song because The Beach Boys had no mother. She was poisoned by some rancid meat and died when the boys were just three (all of The Beach Boys are twins, or quintuples or what have you). This song imagines what would life had been like if she hadn’t been tragically killed, a sweat counterpoint to This Time Tomorrow.
I truly do love these songs, but I left one out that I love more than all of them because I didn’t want to (further) insult a good friend. However, one of my all time favorite songs is Chris Myers’ My Drug Addiction. I thought about including a full review of the song, but I think I’ll save that for a full album review later on.
Hello everyone. I am going to write Adam's blog today. [editor's note: If I was Stephen King, I would say, "Uncle Stevie's gonna be your driver today, kiddies!"]
Who I really am is Chris Myers, sometimes known as The Christopher Myers around these parts. I would previously ramble at The French Inhaler blog, but that quickly turned into a dream diary or something. I'm not sure when I met Adam Hopkins. The first time I remember seeing him was in high school when I noticed that he was part of some weird cult that sat in a hallway all the day long and refused to go to class. And in the odd chance that they weren't sitting in this hallway, you could tell they were part of this cult because they had "Mr. Belvadere" [sic] written in white-out on their backpacks. To this day, I don't understand how he, like I the year before him, won the "Dumb Kids Math Award" by just sitting in that hallway all day. Because of that, I would argue that I haven't met the real Adam Hopkins, yet.
For my first post, in true Friends Recommend fashion, I'm going to ramble on about a Recommend that was already very near and dear to my heart. This one was mentioned on my good friend Ricky B's list:
I wouldn't say that I hated country music growing up. I sorta appreciated the Dan Seals Greatest Hits tape that my mom would play in the car. And there were worse things than the early-nineties WPOC that my dad would play in his truck. But I wouldn't say that I loved it.
In late 2000, I finally bought a two-fer of Gram Parson's "GP/Grievous Angel." From what I could gather, the style of music that I loved [Wilco, Evan Dando...] was an amalgamation of Big Star and Gram Parsons. Having gotten into Big Star [the pop side of things] a few years earlier, the time had finally come for me to take the leap and explore the more country side of the equation. Spend a week with GP, and you'll never again be fearful of the classic country drawl.
Fast forward six months and I owned everything that Gram Parsons had ever recorded. I had a girlfriend from Texas that introduced to me a few great Kenny Rogers songs and I rediscovered my love for this one:
Having never seen that video before until a few minutes ago, I can now safely declare Dan Seals as being my left-handed role model. I might discuss this video in full in a future blog. One of you needs to recommend it first, so please do it now!
At this point, it was debatable whether or not I knew precisely what Country Music was.
Then came July 12th, 2001: the fateful night when I first saw this beautifully-voiced Laura Cantrell perform. It says a lot about her performance that although I went to the show to see the headliner, my all-time favorite Teenage Fanclub, I found myself humming her "Not The Tremblin' Kind" and "Pile of Woe" on the drive home instead.
Over the course of the next month, I purchased both of her albums, "Not The Tremblin' Kind" and the apple of Ricky's eye, "When The Roses Bloom Again."
I agree with Ricky. This is a Top-5 album. It has usurped the Teenage Fanclub. The Gram Parsons. The Big Star. The Wilco. The Evan Dando.
It was the true impetus for me falling in love with Dolly Parton, discovering the Louvin Brothers and learning how to look past Lucinda Williams' crazy-ass voice [and to delete all of her self-indulgent/bluesy stuff from my iTunes].
The title track, coincidentally, was arranged by Wilco during the Mermaid Avenue sessions. They also recorded a version for the Chelsea Walls soundtrack, but LC's is truly the definitive version.
Recently, my fellow FR poster Michael Ward spearheaded a project where I was asked to make a CD of my Top 60 Minutes of music - songs that I could listen to at any time, any place and never tire of. The majority of the songs were released before I was born. The opening track to this album, "Too Late For Tonight," was the most modern song on the disc. The song is disturbing absent from the internet, but it is 2.5 minutes of pure country-pop magic. A beautifully weaved representation of how it feels to be apart from your true love:
I've been sittin' all night, Listenin' to my records, Makin' up my mind. I'd call you up, But I'm never on time, And it's too late for tonight.
If you weren't so far away, I'd just ring you up: Got a lot to say. But the city sky, Soon will see it's first light. And it's too late for tonight.
You brought me home one night and left me, Standing on your stairs. Turned around to lock your door, But I wasn't even there.
That was a long time ago, I'm thinkin', laughing: An' I miss you so. An' I'm all right, But I can't close my eyes, An' it's too late for tonight.
The hours are long and quiet, An' it's drifting through my mind. Some sweet, sultry night, You'll be by my side.
I can see the sky so clearly now, The silver an' fiery moon. Oh, the record player humming so dearly, In the other room.
Was it BJ, 1972? He's wishin', he's hopin', And he's feelin' blue. An' I'm floating, On a sweet lullaby, An' it's too late for tonight.
Oh, goodnight, my dear, goodnight.
I'm sure you enjoyed having to scroll quickly past those lyrics. I don't know why I posted them. One of the greatest tips I can give to any sort of reader is to ignore anything that's indented or italicized. Its always tangential. Let's call that the "Rule of I."
Like a lot of great country singers, Cantrell only had a hand in writing 1/3 of the songs on the album, but has such an amazing ability to choose cover songs that she easily fools you into thinking that she wrote it all. She owns everything she sings. This album and its predecessor are perfectly crafted albums. "Yonder Comes A Freight Train" is the only hiccup on this one, but relatively speaking to some other singers, its hardly an atrocity.
Ricky's favorite song on the album, "Early Years," is also not easily represented on the internets. When I'm asked to do my top 120 minutes of music, this one would easily make the cut, along with a couple others from this album..."Mountain Fern," "Oh So Many Years," "Vaguest Idea." Holy crap, this is a great album.
I'm glad that I have Ricky to talk with about LC. We've driven to Philadelphia twice with the intention of seeing her perfom. Unfortunately, we only saw her once, because the first time, we accidentally got to the venue about a day too late. My bad. When we did actually get our act together to show up at the right place and time, it was to our disappointment that she was opening for some non-descript singer and was relegated to only a 40 minute set or so. That didn't stop her from absolutely wowwing us, regardless. Afterwards, we found Laura at the bar and told her how much we loved her and she made us feel like we were the greatest guys in the world. Oh man, that lady.
OK, we're back from a brief hiatus. Sort of. I am beginning to realize that my attempt at daily posting on this blog was a little bold, and I am pretty amazed that I was able to keep it going for this long. So as an act of quality control and time control I'm going to have to scale it back slightly. We'll still have our weekly updated lists on Friday, and if there isn't a list to post then there will still definitely be a Friday post always. Tomorrow we have a great list from Megan that will go up, and will blow your mind. Still a lot to cover from this Ricky list, but I'm really going to have to get ahold of some of the stuff because I don't have any of it. I don't think I'm going to set a schedule of posting, like Monday, Weds, Friday unless that is something you really want to see. It will still definitely be about 3 times a week. Then once we have the Megan post we'll go back and start getting into some of these old lists. Still waiting on a Matthayes, and TJ has already started his Recommends list number 2. Don't let him lap you...you should make a second as well. Anyone make one of these Gittings recipes yet? I could really go for some curry right now.
I'm pretty sure most of the readers of this blog already know about Bon Iver. This comes from the Gittings list and he strongly urges you to check out For Emma, Forever Ago. He also recently released an EP called Blood Bank which is good, but not quite as good as Emma. I stand behind both of these picks. Here is his website to check out, and a pretty comprehensive Wikipedia entry (the part about For Emma, Forever Ago is particularly interesting). The album is pretty soft and contemplative, mostly (if not all) acoustic. But the arrangements are very thick, with layers and layers and layers of vocals that sort of remind me of Dinosaur Jr's "Feel the Pain" where whatshisname sings in octaves. I was curious how he recreated it live and according the wiki entry he depends on his audience to sing along to achieve the vocal layering of the record. This youtube clip is him performing by himself, but I really recommend you check out the album. Oh, and not suprisingly it is available from (the awesome) emusic.com. Here is Flume from For Emma, Forever Ago:
The two recommendeerers of the Ambulance LTD album hated the video I posted. It's not very good, is it? Anyway, here is Ricky's song suggestion from the album. Hopefully this hits you a little better. Ambulance LTD's Anecdote:
Friends Recommends is going out of town for a couple of days. We'll be back in action on Thursday. My goal was to have three posts all ready to go and set them to automatically post each morning, but that was totally unrealistic. Something about hindsight and 20/20 vision.
New lists have started to come in. After this week with Ricky B. we have a brand new Megan list that is going to knock your socks off. And we're still waiting for that slacker Matthayes...
Anyway, I think there is some great stuff on this Ricky list, but I admit that I am pretty unfamiliar with all of it (minus Inherit the Wind) so it's going to take a little bit of time. I am especially interested in his book picks, but seeing as they are books they are going to take me a lot of time. The Ambulance LTD self-titled LP pick came to Ricky via Mike Gittings recommend. I don't know this band, but here is a video anyway. This is from the recommended LP. I'm not quite sure how I feel about these guys yet. This is Primitive (The Way I Treat You):
Ricky B is another of my friends that was made via my brother. They went to high school together, and little by little I started to consider Ricky a friend of my own. After giving a joint speech together at my brother's wedding I now consider him a close friend. It wasn't so much the actual giving of the speech next to him, or holding his hand while he cried, but more in the preparation of this speech that I felt like I grew closer to Ricky. Eric and Jessica got married on Friday May 2 which Agora employees will recognize the day after a First Thursday. For non-Balitmore friends this is an event hosted by a company that employs at least half of my friends, and the free beer flows for two or so hours after work. Anyway, in the days leading up to this Ricky and I kept talking about getting together to decide how we were going to lay out this speech since we were both saying something. He had one of those typically-Ricky crazy work weeks, and couldn't make it happen before Thursday night. So, we all went to First Thursday and then Ricky and I broke off at 7 to get down to business. We sat in Mount Vernon Stable until (at least) midnight talking about all kinds of things, many centered around my brother and Jessica. But after 5 hours of talking still had no real basis for this speech, no starting point, no appropriate jokes, and no way of putting our love for these two people into words. Come game time I decided to tell jokes and call Ricky gay, and he decided to cry. I don't think it could have been any better.
To sum up Ricky B, I honestly think he is one of the most genuinely good people that I have ever met. Just check out what he does for a living and you can see his dedication to making things better for people. And I don't think a person could ask for a better friend. Within minutes of me talking about the collapse of this blog he sent me a list so we'll keep it alive for a little longer. And here we go. Everything from this point on is Ricky speaking:
This is a very thrown-together list. I wasn’t even going to submit one, but Adam is running out of lists and I would hate for the blog to die so soon. These are not items that are my all time favorites, just things that I have enjoyed and I think are worth checking out.
Music:
Laura Cantrell – When the Roses Bloom Again --Top five? Quite possibly. Contains one of my favorite songs of all time. She also puts on a hell of a live show.
Ambulance LTD – Self Title LP --This was a Gittings Recommend. Thanks Mike! I love it.
Antony and the Johnsons – I am a bird now --Great winter album
Tilly and the Wall – Bottoms of Barrels
Ingrid Michaelson – Girls and Boys --This was going to be on a list of things that my mom and I both like, but it turns out that this is the only thing.
Apples in Stereo – New Magnetic Wonder --Great. I don’t know what critics were thinking, this album is f*cking great.
The Minders- It’s a Bright Guilty World
Movies:
--Some fun movies that might have not hit your radar Angel A Brick CQ Dear Wendy Guatemalan Handshake Cashback Jonestown: The Life…of People’s Temple In Bruges
Books:
These Five Books were all interesting reads, not necessarily among my favorites, and one of them is completely off the wall and unbelievable. The five of these books however, reinforce the idea that we (living creatures, as well as everything else in the universe) are all connected and also shed light on how manufactured and controlled our world is compared to just a few decades ago. Maybe I’m crazy, but I felt like all five books shared common sentiments, if not themes, and thoroughly enjoyed them all.
The Holographic Universe-–Michael Talbot Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind--David Berreby (Highly recommended) Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming-–Paul Hawken Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression-–Mildred Kalish Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life–-Barbara Kingsolver
Other Books:
V.--Thomas Pynchon --Go to this Wikipedia article This is one dense and confusing book. It’s the kind of book that you can read over and over and discover something new every time. There are so many layers to this book, and everything is interwoven.
Inherit the Wind – Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee --One of my all-time favorites. It’s a play and a book. You can’t beat a two for the price of one deal.
Miscellaneous:
Community Mediation -Changed my life from office lackey who hated being alive, to overworked volunteer coordinator who often works 60 hours a week and once went a month without pay because I loved my job so much. -www.communitymediation.org – don’t go to this website with Firefox, use Internet explorer. -www.marylandmediation.org
