Am I the one who finds themselves adopting phrases from films/books/TV/plays, even long after I’ve stopped watching that show or finished that book. Maybe it’s the quotes we take with us when we watch/read something; that’s how we remember it and maybe even subconsciously how we judge it.

Drumming.

Whatever about the annoyance of the cast, whatever about having to use a wheelchair at school, whatever about having decidedly less skin on my kneecap than before, whatever about not being able to go upstairs, whatever about having to get up around 3am every night like I’m the father of some newborn kid, there’s only one thing that really, really, really annoys me.

Not being able to drum.

When I first went into the cast I thought I might be able to continue drumming by swapping the bass pedal to my other, not-casted foot but it didn’t really work out because everything was backwards and confusing and it generally was about as successful as New Coke.

So when the Easter holidays roll around (cast comes off on April 1st) there’s only one thing I’ll be really looking forward to – getting home and taking out 6 weeks’ worth of anger and frustration and cold turkey and withdrawal symptoms to the rhythm of some Panic At the Disco or Blink 182 or Red Hot Chili Peppers…

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.

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.

Dresden Dolls Day, anyone?

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.

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!

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 :)

Once tried to learnt the piano intro.. did mighty well – got all of the first 3 chords learnt :)

Spirit of The West – Jonses

Pity I couldn’t find a non-live version. You know how I dislike concerts.

In any case, loving the fast paced lyrics:

They kept to themselves like two books upon a shelf.. the kind you judge by the cover and never take the time to read!

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.