Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Back from vacation
I do believe a week away was exactly what I needed, and now I’m back. 
I’ll try to discipline myself over the next week or so to actually write about what I did while I was away. To start with though, here’s a quickie for you.
While we were in the “Sky Church” at the Experience Music Project, I started hearing a song that I immediately started humming along with but didn’t immediately place. Turns out it was an artist named Petra Haden doing an almost completely a cappella remake of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Belivein’”. Turns out there was a competition for creating videos to go with that song and the others on the same compilation album, and YouTube has the video for this one. I don’t particularly like the spoken word portion. It doesn’t fit with the hyper-accuracy of the rest of the song, but I forgive it anyway.
P.S.
This song was recorded for an album full of “guilty pleasure” songs. Bonus points for the first person to recognize and comment on the other guilty pleasure song reference in this one.
Dipping into the well again
Let’s say your band was one of the biggest hitmakers of the late 70s and 80s. You went through your requisite Lead Singer Is a Megalomaniac Crisis(tm) and went on hiatus for eight years or so. You managed to scrape everyone back together, record an album of totally new material, get nominated for a Grammy, and gear up to promote the album on tour. Then, just when everything looked like it was about to crank up again, your lead singer has a medical crisis, and it all hits the ground with a resounding THUD. What do you do?
Well, you fire your lead singer (who happens to have one of the most recognizable voices in power ballad history) and look for a new one. Lo and behold, out of the woodwork comes someone who sounds mostly like your old lead singer, and he even has the same first name. What luck! You get to tour again! So, back out on the road for another 8 years or so. Flog the old hits, record yet another new album of new material, etc. Things are going great… until your lead singer has a medical crisis and has to leave the band. What do you do?
Well, if you’re Journey, you look on YouTube and find this video of a bar band in the Philippines. After picking your jaw up off the floor and recovering from the brain explosion, you call the guy (named Arnel Pineda) and offer him a job. Next thing you know, you’re on stage in Chile performing to another screaming horde.
I have to think that Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain are SO TIRED of still playing those same songs 25 years later. I hope I’m wrong. I hope they’re still having a blast. Here’s to tenacity and the luck of the Irish!
Huntsville Master Chorale web site
Well, after lots of time making sure the design was okay and more time building the back end and more time getting enough content to reach “critical mass”, the Huntsville Master Chorale web site is now open for business.
There’s not much there yet, but there’s enough to get started, and I don’t want to grow things too quickly. I’d rather start slowly and keep our hands around it then lose our grip.
Kudos to my lovely wife for the site design and for setting up the back end (running Drupal).
And thanks to Misty for redrawing the Chorale logo in vector format! *hug*
More song quickies
My brain snagged on another music connection the other day. This one I think is a little too close to be coincidence. What do you think? Did this one take just a little too much from this one?
More shared musical DNA
Another quickie for everyone. This one’s another example of the way my brain looks for connections (and this time probably where no intentional connection exists). Listen to snippet 1, then see if you hear the connection my brain made to snippet 2.