Jeff Keen

This was surprisingly fascinating. This song’s roots are… Eleanor Rigby??

You’ve never got it down. It’s this fluid thing, music. I kind of like that. I wouldn’t like to be blasé or think, ‘Oh you know I know how to do this.’ In fact I teach a class at a the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — I do a little songwriting class with the students — and nearly always the first thing I go in and say [is], ’I don’t know how to do this. You would think I do, but it’s not one of these things you ever know how to do.

What a comfort. Nobody knows what they’re doing—they just do.

Further evidence that even idols are imperfect, self-doubting humans. Paul McCartney questioning one of the greatest albums of all time.

SWEET JESUS, where has this album been all my life? The answer is it’s been there—waiting—the whole time, because this album came out in 1963.

Discovering new old albums might just be my favorite feeling. This is an instant favorite. I’d only heard Little Red Rooster before, but the entire album is awesome. Give this a spin for a night time chill time. The last half is best.

My parents kept a notebook I had for piano lessons when I was 5, and there’s this revealing apology written by my dear mother to my teacher.

So different from Roger.

SORRY

Story of my life as the youngest child, disappointing teachers year after year when they expected a rule follower and got a smartass.

SORRY

Prince being Prince and just nailing this guitar solo at George Harrison’s tribute concert.

Also worth watching: Prince’s amazing superbowl half-time show. Playing Purple Rain in the pouring rain? C’mon.

There was a great exchange on Facebook between two of my friends when Prince died:

Mark: I’ve never been so sad that a musician has died. I’m even sadder today than yesterday. I can’t put my finger on the reason why–I’m not even a ‪#‎prince‬ superfan.

Tony: I think there’s so much bullshit in the world, and then you have a guy like Prince. Gifted, creative…an icon. A guy who always did things the way he wanted to do them. It seemed like he was all about giving his music and his vibes to the world… It sucks that a guy like that suddenly disappears

Mark: Beautifully said. Prince was 100% Prince and 0% bullshit¹.

In the Spring of ‘93 I was in sixth grade, and I vividly remember riding my black Raleigh 21 speed mountain bike across my hometown of Mankato, Minnesota to meet a girl I just started seeing. It was a beautiful crisp spring Saturday, and I was looking sharp in my black windbreaker pants, and matching black, white and bright blue windbreaker jacket. Most importantly though, I had my walkman strapped to me and my headphones on with Prince’s “7” blasting on repeat while I made the 2.5 mile ride.

Those harmonies got me then, and they still get me today.

There was a pretty cool reddit story the other day about an internet stranger casually solving a huge song mystery for another redditor. After a year of the mystery lingering, one day a stranger sent a link to the song, and it blew the original searcher’s mind.

Oh my god. Oh my fucking god. I’m actually freaking out.

Who are you? How did you know? WHAT IS GOING ON?

Thank you so much. But also, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON

And the kind stranger just responded with:

Shh bby is ok

And, just like that, a meme is born. The internet is amazing, sometimes.

But I can totally relate to the poster’s original excitement. Sometimes a song just gets under your skin, and you’ll do anything to find it. Before the modern internet, finally locating a song felt just as satisfying, and I remember distinctly trying to hunt down the following songs in the following ways, and feeling just as excited once each of them was in my possession.

###1989

“Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”, by Milli Vanilli. I’d hear this on the radio, and the melody line in the chorus (1m 24s) rocked my little 8 year old heart so much I just had to find the geniuses who created it.

I called up the local radio station and hummed the melody on the phone in order to figure out what it was. I was gifted the tape by a family friend shortly afterwards.

(And listen, I realized the error in my ways regarding Milli Vanilli not much later. We all did. We all did.)

###1997

“Incense and Peppermints” by The Strawberry Alarm Clock. I heard this song in Austin Powers, and it blew my teenaged mind. I wanted more. More Strawberry Alarm Clock.

I searched far and wide for a recording of this song during Christmas break of ‘97, and had to go up to the Sam Goody in The Mall Of America in order to finally find the truth: that there was no available back catalog of Strawberry Alarm Clock, that they were basically a one hit wonder, and I’d have to settle for the Austin Power’s soundtrack. Which I did.

###1998

I heard this song every so often on the radio for months and months and months, and it would haunt me. I wanted it. But every time, the DJ would say nothing about it. I delayed plans and waited patiently in my Mom’s 1995 Dodge Neon for a song set to end, hoping to get a clue about the song that had been captivating me.

I tried to savor every second the song was playing, knowing it might be weeks before hearing it again. At night after getting back on the 1998 internet in my parent’s basement, I’d Altavista the shit out of the lyrics that I scribbled down earlier in my pocket-sized memo pad.

I don’t even remember exactly how I ended up finding the song, but I do remember that when I finally did locate the MP3, it was named incorrectly. I went around for years afterwards thinking the song was called something else, but I was also thrilled to have it.

###2015

Yesterday, I held up my phone up for a few seconds and it identified a Barbara Lynn song from 1963 that was playing on the radio.

I was satisfied.

Along the same lines as my last post, some amazing human saved K-Mart store music tapes between 1989 and 1993, and recently put them on the internet. Put this in your ears, and remember the time when K-Mart was peaking.

Mark Davis, the aforementioned amazing human, writes:

I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection.

Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was intoduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether.

BUT NOW WE HAVE THEM, INTERNET

There are some gems in here. The one I linked above, even. If you wait long enough, you’ll hear an in-store ad, which might be my favorite part of the deal. ATTENTION, KMART SHOPPERS!

https://archive.org/details/attentionkmartshoppers

These guys are pretty awesome. Makes me want a looping setup. Looks like fun. And those harmonies the two of them do are preeettty killer.

I found this where I find everything: Reddit. They were really into the part at 4:25 where it sounds like he’s making random sounds, but with the looping pedal it all comes together in awesome way. These guys are great.

I think I made this in 2001. It was around the time prank calls using Arnold soundboards were really popular (I’ve got some of those, too), and I can’t remember if I made this at my parents place, or at the house I lived at for that one year in college.

Because, yes, in college, I mostly lived with my parents. Or as I liked to say at the time, “with an elderly couple”.

I’d tell people “I take the trash out, and do other things around the house for them, and they let me stay in their basement practically rent free. They’re really nice people. Sometimes they’ll even cook me dinner.”

It was a pretty good deal, and some people I told about it were amazed, and wished that they too could live with their parents an elderly couple.

And when that nice elderly couple found out what I was telling people, I feared the worst: that they’d be heartbroken, or angry. But they weren’t. They thought it was hilarious.

Because hey, you gotta do what you gotta do when you’re a nerdy 21-year-old Electrical Engineering major who works at a computer store and lives with his parents and still wants a hope in hell of meeting a lady who’d be willing to take her clothes off. So I lived with an elderly couple. I worked on campus. What major? Can we change the subject? Let me tell you about this elderly couple I live with.

Obviously this strategy worked wonders, and I had zero free time around the difficult and retrospectively useless classes I was taking to do silly creative projects such as this Who/Arnold mashup.

I’m not usually one to lament about how technology has changed our lives, and what life was like before [something] changed everything. “We used to have to get up and change the channel on the TV, and we liked it!”. I don’t miss that.

But what I do miss, in some ways, is how I used to enjoy my music. I used to like browsing used music stores, and if I happened to stumble upon something I’d been looking for, I’d buy it, take it home, put it in the CD player, and enjoy it while admiring the cover of the album and reading the liner notes.

When just casually wanting to put on some music I used to open up my CD cabinet and scan my collection until something caught my eye. If I filled my 5 disc CD player I’d get around 5 or 6 hours of music without any repeated songs.

On one hand, I don’t miss driving around town trying to find obscure albums and love the fact that now I can go from thinking about how I want to hear a song to owning that song in less than 30 seconds, without ever leaving my chair.

But on the other hand, I sorely miss the once-clear definition between an album and a mix tape. Listening to albums used to the norm for me, while listening to a mix tape was more of an unusual occurrence. When I thought about listening to music, I didn’t think “I want to hear this song”, I thought, “I want to hear this album”. iTunes Party Shuffle completely reversed my thinking, and I guess I just sat back and let it.

And I’m a little bitter about it.

Party Shuffle is easy. It seems like a great idea to just select my top rated songs smart playlist, and shuffle away. There are problems with this, though. First, shuffle is surprisingly poor at really shuffling songs, and as a result is very good at making you sick to death of a few songs, or artists. Tragically, I had to unrate the Who because of this. As much as I love them, I need to take a long break before I can really enjoy them again.

This burn-out shuffle problem can be alleviated somewhat by creating a smart playlist with the much needed “has not been played in the last week”, I found out, but really, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

I really wanted to start listening to Albums again, but when browsing through a Library of 706 artists, and 1129 Albums, it was hard to scan through my choices, as I used to with my CD collection. Maybe it’s just me, but if I don’t see the cover of Tonight’s The Night, I sometimes forget it exists and will go months without ever considering it as a listening choice.

What would be great is if iTunes would actually comprehend the fact that music is not just a library of singles, but rather a library of complete and incomplete albums, with some singles thrown in. Albums should be considered their own entity, if specified, meaning Albums could have ratings, play counts, and all the rest of the data songs have.

On that same path of thought, ratings need to be much much smarter. I want the ability to find all the albums that contain at least 4 songs I’ve rated higher than 3 stars, that I haven’t listened to in the last 2 months. I want to be able to find the songs whose ratings have increased in the last week, which would be extremely useful for figuring out what my current favorites are. Give me something I can work with, Apple. I’ve been wanting to write a better ratings plugin for a long time now, but the hurdle of figuring out how to do that is a little daunting. It’s on the list, though.

I made a small step in returning to my previous listening style last week, when I spent some time going through my library and adding “[Album]” to the “Grouping” field of all songs that were part of a full album. I then made a smart playlist showing only those songs, and also made sure that every album in that list had Album art (which is much easier than making sure my entire library, with lots of singles and incomplete albums has album art). Now, using CoverFlow, or List view, I can browse my albums with an ease I never experienced before in iTunes.

It’s a long way from ideal, but it’s a start.