SXSW reflections: Music is alive and well

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I’m back from my first trip to Austin, Texas, and my first ever South By Southwest conference/festival. It was an amazing, overwhelming experience. I’m not sure I have the distance from the event to be too coherent about it yet, …

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Music on the brain can keep it working longer and better

We all knew that music education is good for us. And those of us who are musicians know that if it’s “in our blood,” we end up thinking like a musician. We often see life as a “soundscape” and look …

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Tim Minchin’s Christmas Song

Are you familiar with the British comedy songwriter Tim Minchin? He’s very clever and funny and some of his songs aren’t just intelligent and thoughtful but very moving (see White Wine in the Sun). He wrote a Christmas song for …

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See Spot(ify) Run

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I recently spent some time with Spotify, the “subscription” service that let’s you play any song in their library as many times as you want for a fee. The used quotes above because if you’re willing to accept advertisements, and …

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Ready Your (Project) Pitchfork

I was a big fan of the German Industrial/EBM band Project Pitchfork “in the day.” I never stopped liking them, but I just lost track of them after their 2001 album Daimonion (which I liked a lot). Well, it turns …

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Great GarageBand for iPad jam

This is really impressive. This would sound good no matter how it was created, and to think that it was all done on a tablet rather than a full desktop computer is even more impressive!

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Proud of the BBC

I’ve got mixed feelings about the BBC, but I’ll certainly say this for it: I can’t imagine an American musician would bother writing a song like this to try to save the budget of any American TV station. And the …

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Neil Young Angry World

There is something about Neil Young, when he straps on an electric guitar and makes his heavily distorted, wild noises, that just feels right to me. I’ve always appreciated his talent as a lyricist, and I think the sort of …

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An Addendum to my DRM rant

You can consider this post an addendum to the Turning purchasers into pirates blog entry from a few days ago. And this also involves  Doctor Who. Yesterday, I saw a wonderful video on YouTube from Glastenbury: at the close of …

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Beyond the lighted stage…

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Canadian rockers Rush. They were one of the first rock bands I ever got into. Back in the early 80s, they were all over Southern California radio with Tom …

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