I bought my first iPod this past year and started using iTunes. I notice this has changed my buying habits for music. One of my first ventures was to get the Radiohead download of In Rainbows -- for which I paid, and apparently more than the median price they received. Can't say as I'm sorry, as I have to make it my favorite album of 2007. Apparently many people are now buying it in stores, and it's the top CD sale of last week according to the New York Times, reports Jeffrey Tucker. In fact, 122,000 of the CDs sold, says New York magazine.

Why favorite? I'm not sure. Perhaps Thom Yorke got some of his electronica jones from his solo "The Eraser" last year. (If you have iTunes, go get Skip Divided and The Clock. If you like them, buy the rest. My guess is you won't.) "In Rainbows" is really rock, not that anyone who isn't a fan of the band will give a damn about this.

Other CDs issued in 2007 that I liked plenty (no particular order):

• Van Morrison -- At the Movies: Soundtracks. Just loads of fun for a guy in his 50s; you know the songs, but you have to guess the movies. Several cuts are live, which is great if you are a Van Morrison fan.
• Sia -- Lady Croissant. Speaking of live: The singer of Zero 7 fame, this sounds like it should be a chillout album but it's not. All but one cut is live, and she sounds so different and very sexy. It sounds like a nightclub but it rocks. Good late night listening.
• Charmparticles -- Alive in the Hot Spell. LA pop kind of fills my Britpop desires. It is the most played album I have this year except for one...
• The Clash -- The Singles. Do I own most of these songs? Probably, if I wanted to dig out my vinyl and borrow someone's USB turntable. But now I do not need this. It is for this reason my car stereo goes to eleven.

Labels: music

Chatting with someone last night, we made one of those Man Law things: No watching bands that have tribute bands. For him it was Journey. For me, an old prog-rocker, it was Yes. Not too hard given most of the music had gone downhill the last fifteen years. But I thought, who has a Yes tribute band?

What a story this is. Not only is there one, but they end up getting to play with Steve Howe.

Following the recent highly successful tour of the UK, Belgium and Holland with Steve Howe of Yes, the founder members of Fragile have taken the decision to call time on any band activities for the immediate future. Steve Carney, Jon Bastable, Mitch Harwood and Tom Dawe (who established Fragile in 1998) intend to explore other musical ventures,...

“We view Fragile as a job done. Our recent tour with Steve Howe was a seminal moment that convinced each of us that anything after the tour with Steve would probably fall prey to the law of diminishing returns. We have nothing left to prove and the last show in Holland was a truly defining moment. We would like to extend our genuine thanks and best wishes to everyone who has supported Fragile over the last decade. ...

I'd like to know of other examples of this. They didn't just do it once, they played four shows with Howe, who hasn't been exactly lazing about. As I said to my friend, if you are in a tribute band and the guy you're tributing comes to play with you, isn't that like Costner in For the Love of the Game? Don't you just send the ball to the owner's box and ride off with Kelly Preston now?

Labels: music

Mitch writes about record stores.

I used to love the feeling you’d get when you’d talk the totally-wasted stoner behind the counter into playing some sample on the house stereo; sliding the record out, dropping the needle, the anticipation as the record rolled toward the start…

I don't even remember the name of the place in Manchester, NH, where I did this, but the manager of the place, who also became the first lead guitarist I played with in a band (first song on stage: "Just What I Needed" by The Cars; God his solo rift was perfect!), probably was the single most responsible person for broadening my horizons of music. Just in the C's besides the Cars I got to listen to the first Elvis Costello album and Chick Corea (why he wasn't sorted into jazz is beyond me), and the Clash.

And it avoided the one-hit wonders; we didn't even make it through the third song of "Get the Knack." Am I better off now for being able to buy My Sharona and nothing else? Well, that's a bad analogy because that song had a half-life about as long as the Vikings' Super Bowl hopes, but I think some bands need time to grow from one song to an album, and if they can sell a song or two on iTunes or promote band dates on MySpace, it may give them the time and finances to see if there's really a band there.

Not that I dislike record stores or albums. The concept album has died, but some albums just seem to flow from song to song, perhaps why I still prefer prog-rock later in my evenings. In economics dissertations the preference is now that everybody writes a set of essays, which become three separate journal articles sometimes even before the dissertation is completed. I think something is lost when a scholar does not connect the chapters of a dissertation into a single thesis, and I think disjointed songs on an album suffer the same fate.

And that is very hard to do. Thus the democratization of recording music -- which is the upshot of the digitization Mitch discusses -- means more and more people producing single songs that work but do not create a line of thought from song to song.

I'm quite devoted still to the Fetus, not least of which for the guy who's worked there forever who seems to talk any genre I'm interested that day. Is it as good as the cut-out and used bins at the Rhino Records in Claremont back in my grad school (and KSPC) days? No, not quite, but close, and that's still very good. And yes, they play samples.

Labels: Media, music