Friday, April 11, 2008

All roads lead to Thriller.

I started using Last.fm as of yesterday. It's pretty fascinating so far, to be able to type in an artist and see what comes up as a "similar artist." Of course, the first thing i did was type So Many Dynamos into the search bar and luckily I like all the bands that it came up with! Lots of contemporaries like Cinemechanica and Enon, and lots of older 90's emo stuff like Cap'n Jazz and Piebald. Rad.

Our recent tour was great but plagued with a lack of internet access, which directly relates to the lack of blog entries through its duration. It feels like everything that we could say about the tour would be redundant: "we're having an awesome time!" "we just played a really fun house show!" "South By Southwest is crazy!" blah blah blah. I will say it's getting easier and easier to go on tour, and morale has been staying high. I think tour morale is directly related to food intake, and we've been eating wellllll.

I put Michael Jackson into Last.fm and "It's Not Right But It's Okay" by Whitney Houston came up. This song destroys! I never noticed it's built around a thumb piano sample. I have a soft spot for thumb pianos.

So what's new? As far as our record goes, we're going to mix our last track on May 8 and 9 in New York with Sir Alex Newport. After that, it's SERIOUSLY done, even though I've claimed it's done a million times before on this blog. We just have to name it and come up with artwork! Anybody who's ever made a record knows how painless THAT is.

Last.fm has now auto-suggested "Cream" by Prince. I really really want to like Prince but it's just never clicked for me. I always get sick of the snare drum sound and the lyrics always seem, well, gross. What am I missing here?

We're doing another tour in a few weeks, which is creeping up. We were offered to play the Over The Top Fest in Toronto, ON so we booked a tour around it. Luckily, we're playing with every band I nerded out about after SXSW (except the Weakerthans). We're playing with Ra Ra Riot, Tera Melos, and Meneguar. How sweet is that!?

No I'm on "Past-Time Paradise" by Stevie Wonder. It's so hard to listen to this song in context since it was sampled into "Gangsta's Paradise" by Coolio, and I essentially grew up with that song. It's always difficult to separate the original song of the previous generation of music listeners from the bastardized sampled song from my generation.

That reminds me: We played in Iowa City last week. The sound-guy showed up 40 minutes late for our soundcheck, then told us just to backline our amps instead. Then he put on the edited Walmart version of the second Coolio record over the PA very loudly and disappeared for an hour. He also wore a tuxedo shirt. I think he might qualify as being advanced.

What?! Instrumental music from the score to the VH-1 original movie "The Jacksons"? Seriously? That's it, I'm typing Cinemechanica into here. "The Peter Criss Jazz" by Don Caballero. That's better.

That's all for now. Now read this.

3 comments:

stlwazzy said...

'All Roads Lead to Thriller'=
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

ididnot said...

I don't think you are missing anything when it comes to Prince! I don't like him either!! But...I do like the story Charlie Murphy tells about him.

Anonymous said...

I'm really interested in this whole "advanced" thing you guys have going. tell me, what makes something or someone
advanced"?