The problem with last using Last.Fm is that it puts my obsessive music-listening habits out for the world to see. Then again, one could argue that I’m the one putting them up.. :)
I do love the service though – if my laptop got stolen/broken tomorrow and the hard drive got wiped, I’d love my music library. That’s not a massive problem, mind you – I back up my (admittedly small) music library on Dad’s external USB hard-drive pretty regularly.. but that doesn’t save play counts. In what I think is iTunes’ single greatest FAIL, play counts aren’t copied over when you move the files about the place. That’s why Last.FM is so useful for me – remote play counts.
As you can see from the picture – the soundtrack from the musical “Chess” is being listened to a lot in my library these days… the cast wakes me almost without fail most nights around 3am. I’ll get up and stretch my leg by walking to the kitchen for a drink of water before going back to sleep. When I do that I like to listen to music and C for Chess seems to always be selected in my blind mouse jerks in iTunes.
If you wanna connect on Last.FM; I’m TrustTommy on there too.
The sunlight was so brilliant that day, you could’ve cut it with a butter-knife. It was June, and I was in the car with John, driving home from a weekend with my cousins. We had just left when John turned on the radio, switching it to CD mode. “I made a new one” he called over the roar of the air passing outside the open windows. Without looking down, he adjusted the volume so that it could be heard. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having recently been introduced to The Blizzards, and not liking them.
Piano playing filled the car, but I quickly realized that this wasn’t a Debussy concert. Before long, drums entered with thunderous energy. The female’s vocals seemed jumpy and restless, but I was sold. The diehard drumming monkey inside of me loved this. The drums weren’t some refined background noise – this band (whoever they were) brought percussion to the forefront. From what I could make out, there were two people in the band – a woman and a man – drums and piano. Their style was incomparable to anything I’d heard before – they certainly weren’t gonna draw any ‘pff, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Green Day.. they all sound the same’ complaints from my corner. As I write this, over a year and a half later, I still can’t equate them to any band I know, and my music tastes would be a lot broader in 2010 than June, 2008. Then again, how many bands do you know whose genre (as I found out later) was ‘punk cabaret’?.
As we drove through Nenagh — stopping in Dromineer for icecream and a rare good look at Lough Derg — we played through the CD. While each song was different, an underlying style could be felt (rather than heard) throughout the album. Each one shared common elements that you only subconsciously registered. All through the journey, John refused to tell me who they were. I was dying to know – dying to get home, get onto my drums and try and accompany this drumming legend through some of the simpler songs — I could tell even without being near a pair of sticks that this was some of the most impressive drumming I’d ever heard. I made a desperate attempt upon getting into the car in Dromineer to find out the name of this mystery band that would have worked if John hadn’t threatened not to put any of the songs onto my laptop. A grievous threat, and one that made me withdraw my finger from the trigger (uh, CD eject button).
When we arrived home (which took longer than usual because we took the scenic route (for once, not a euphemism for getting lost) back from Dromineer), I badgered John until he copied some songs into my iTunes library. I found out that the band who had received my unrestricted love for the past two hours were none other than The Dresden Dolls.
I quickly set to work on learning the drums. I credit the band for being the single biggest influence on my style and also the one that’s taught me the most. Tommy’s Dresden Dolls addiction became fodder for family slagging (I ate, slept and breathed them) but in an ironic twist of fate, I’m the only one out of myself, John and Patrick never to have seen them perform live.
As with most of my obsessions, it fizzled out in the end — although it did last for a good 8 months. Through Spotify, I’ve become reacquainted with them over the last week or so, and they continue to bring forth fond memories from the depths of my subconscious. If you ever meet me and I seem to have a vacant smile on my face, I’m probably thinking about that afternoon in June, 2008.
Except that I was never the world’s number 1 fan of U2. Sure, they’re okay, but best band ever? Nah mate.
The song brings me back a few years to when we lived in Tipperary. During one summer, John got his first Apple desktop machine and I started with a new physio. Hardly a fair pairing but whatever :) This particular physio had an expansive music collection, and for the time that I saw her for the summer months once a day, I’d borrow a CD, copy it to iTunes on the iMac, which John had agreed to let me use. I build up a hefty music collection including most of U2’s stuff.
As I got older, I began realizing that I never listed to half of the music I’d copied over and started deleting this. This also coincided with me finding out my own music tastes and realizing that The Beegees weren’t a part of that. Sorry guys.
That was 5 years ago, and I’ve since been promoted to my own laptop. The iMac is still with us, albeit in a bad form. Someone thought deleting system files was the way forward, so not much works on it. I tried installing Snow Leopard on it but that didn’t work so I have to find a copy of Leopard.
Until that time, a time where any of us have use for it, and are willing to buy a new mouse for it, it resides in the Retirement Home that is the Study, cruelly-yet-humorously named Grandpa Simpson.
Well, because it’s the holidays, I just lose track of the days. When you’re doing nothing but drumming and playing cards, you can’t really differentiate which is a weekend day and which is a weekday. C’est impossible!
Yes, I’ve joined the Glee train, and this week’s song is Don’t Stop Believin’.
There’s a drumming video in the works but some of the intricacies are tripping me up, especially in the post-production, placing the song over the video. How I make them is relatively simple. Because the music is louder, I always drum to headphones rather than speakers. Using I movie on my MacBook, I record myself playing the piece through headphones, which leaves me with the drumming track, but no music. After that it’s a simple case of adding the song over the video and moving along the starting point of the song in iMovie until it’s at the same place as the starting point of the song through the headphones.
I’ll do a how-to video with screenshots and arrows and explanations of all processes involved soon. Stay tuned!
Here’s a new music recommendation for you. Pascal was in RENT and Civilian is his 3rd studio album, released in 2004. It appeals to all my musical senses because it has killer drums, smooth piano and powerful vocals. I think we all know though that only the first feature in that list is a necessity for an album to appeal to me :-)
Like most albums, there are songs I could take and some I could leave, but the proportion of good songs against bad ones is delightfully high.
I’ve showcased Beautiful Song before, and even though it’s slid in my rankings to #2 in the list of best songs. It’s still great though. It begins with a simple piano, accompanied by a didgeridoo, before the drums come crashing in as if to teach the unwary listener that falling asleep isn’t allowed.
The best song on the album, the ‘one to download’, if I encouraged such actions (which I don’t), is Book of Endings. It is one of the few songs that, when I’m downstairs doing something and it comes on iTunes, will make me get up and go upstairs to the drums and play it. The drum beat is one which I class to be very ‘drummable’, which is great. There is honestly nothing worse than a song with a great beat but one which I’m not able to drum along to. There’s this great sense of ‘gah! stop tormenting me!’.
Actually, Pascal’s album is great like that. I can drum along (and pretty close to the original studio drummer’s stylings) to every song, bar one.. but we don’t talk about that one :)
So I was thinking of getting some structure to posts, and since I love music to the wacky extent that I’d rather go blind than deaf I was thinking of maybe showcasing a number of albums each week – on a Saturday, I’m thinking, because people are too busy doing real-world stuff to bother doing a fully proper post. Reading over that it almost sounds bitter, but on the contrary, I’d love to be able to do real life stuff! But no, I’m stuck in this computer, destined to write 250 word posts daily for the rest of my days…
So, right, yes, enough moping. Album reviews. If I was doing this normally, I’d run out of albums to show off after maybe 10 or 12 weeks. Yup. I had a meagre 252 song iTunes library, which was actually wonderful. Syncing iPhones and iPods is so much easier when you can just sync the entire library – when the storage device in question has more space than there are songs. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, and there’s a simple way of doing it that I’m missing because I’m dumb like that. Very little visual awareness at times.
Do I have to do a Freedom-of-Information act as to where I got these? That could be interesting… :)
Uhm, right, yes, music:
First album is Gossip in the Grain by Ray LaMontagne.
Got this after hearing Sarah, track #4 on the (no relation, I don’t think) 4th episode of House, season 6.
Gossip categorized itself as ‘Folk Rock’ in my iTunes but I don’t see much folk inside it. There’s some lovely mellow guitaring, accompanied by Ray’s dulcet crooning. He switched to what I think is a banjo in Hey Me, Hey Mama, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s banjos. Thumbs down from me on that count.
Is it just me, or does crooning have negative, Daniel O’Donnell/Eoin McLove connotations? I mean it not in this fashion, I assure you.
Best Songs: Sarah, Gossip in the Grain Drummability: (Low, Medium or High): Low.
X & Y by Coldplay
FOI on this one – my mom and dad had friends over for dinner a few weeks back. One of them had an iPhone full of awesome music. I copied that music onto my laptop. Win.
I’ve always liked Coldplay – I got Clocks from John a good few years back, and it remains one of my favourite songs ever. I have expressed on numerous occasions that I would like nothing better than to kidnap Coldplay’s drummer and refuse to let go of his legs until he taught he the intricate sweeping melodies of the drums of his songs. As pointed out, we’d be there a good while. Actually, come to think about it, there are several bands I want to do the whole kidnapping to. Arctic Monkeys, Blink 182 and Offspring, you’re next.
See, now some band’s drummer is gonna go missing and very slowly, everyone’s head is gonna swivel round to me. Wasn’t me folks! You’ve to wait until the 10 posts in a row just containing YouTube videos to my new found drumming ninja-ness; that’s confirmation that Travis Barker’s been chained in my basement for 10 months.
Back to X & Y, it’s great. Some people accuse Coldplay of having one sound, but this usually gives me a chance to snort derisively (don’t get to do that often enough.. :P) when they quote Green Day or U2 as being ‘better bands’. Feck off and jump in a lake. While I’m on U2, how can *anyone* attempt to claim they’re the best band ever? Madness, Ted.
Best songs: Speed of Sound and Square One Drummability: High. One of the most drummable albums in my library.
A friend of mine is off to America for a while, and because of the unportable nature of this musical instrument (yes John, I did just call it that), he gave them to me to mind for the time that he’s gone.
So, we (Dad and I) collected them today, where they were ready and waiting:
Once we got them home, we put them in the hall so I could get my photo taken with the plethora of awesomeness:
that photo was taken from the upstairs landing looking down onto the hall – the same angle my Sunday Business Post article picture was taken
That’s my room after I removed my old drums and moved all the boxes into my room.
I honestly felt like a kid on Christmas morning opening this up. A massively awesome jumble of cymbal stands and other gizmos that come together to form…
… a musical instrument! :)
Look me in the eye and tell me that’s not made of win! :D
In May 2007, when I was 5th class in primary school, the school turned 25 years old, and we had a concert. At that concert, they hired a pianist and a drummer to accompany the various musical/drama scenes that each class put on. I remember being enthralled by the drums.
People can make music like that? With two, thin pieces of wood and some tom-toms and cymbals?
Now, I know John (and Dad, to an unfortunate extent) have snorted derisively at the notion I’m putting forward – that drums can be considered musical. Of course they can!
Anyway. I was infatuated with the thought of these drums, and spend a summer tapping away on whatever surface I found myself beside. My parents, worried about a relapse of my condition of taking-stuff-up-enthusiastically-and-then-not-sticking-to-it, were understandably (but annoyingly) wary about investing in my own kit. And so we compromised, by buying some sticks. I remember happily going home that day, clearing a space for myself at the kitchen table and raiding the shelves of an assortment of pots and pans, setting them up according to a picture of a kit I’d found on the net. I then proceeded to plug in my iPod and, if you’ll excuse the food pun, jam for a few hours.
By October, I was pretty sure I’d found eternal happiness in my jumble of kitchen utensils and was ready to move onto the real thing. My parents, being still wary, suggested I get lessons. I did, and for the next six weeks journeyed out to the other side of town and spent a happy hour learning how to play drums properly.
I got my first kit for Christmas, and continued to take lessons for a further 4 months. The kit itself is still the same, and this is 2 and a half years later. Well, the core of it is. I’ve replaced all the skins of the drums, and used all the birthdays and Christmases to get new cymbals when I needed them. I still have a stack of the two older cymbals at home actually. My dream is to one day have enough to hand them ornamentally from the back wall of my room.
Taking up drums has by far and away been the best thing I’ve ever taken up. I try to spend at least 20 minutes a night playing them. I’m not yet in a band, preferring to stick on headphones and tap along (oh, who am I kidding, smash and crash and BOOM! along) to whoever shows up in my shuffle stream.
The only problem with drums (John and Dad will disagree with the word ‘only’ being there but sherfeckim) is they aren’t portable. If you’re at a family gathering and you get asked if you play any musical instruments, you can say ‘drums’ but it’s kind of rude to raid their pots-and-pans shelf to prove it.
For this reason, I learnt two songs on piano, so I could perform when asked.
I think that everyone, for whatever reason, should take up a musical instrument. It’s rather brilliant :D
