Phish’s “Backwards Down The Number Line” is now available on iTunes. I can’t get enough of this song. I absolutely love the sentiment here, especially considering the past few years in their lives. I also dig the look of the art for the single.
4334 Sunset
A few words I wrote about music and Elliott Smith and other stuff over at Selectism.
Wilco: The Stream
The stream of the album of one of the best bands in the world. Cheers to them for jumping on the shitty, but seemingly inevitable leak, of their album (which comes out June 30). To my ears, it doesn’t get much better than Wilco.
The Great CD Import of Spring 2009
About a week into my project of importing all of my music into Apple lossless, this this is how much I have gotten done.
That’s about 200 CDs, which is a bit over 70 GB. The problem is, those are just the random CDs that were stacked next to my desk. I have about 3,000 or so more in storage in my basement.
Setting up a dedicated machine and hard drive to do this has helped. I have the MacBook sitting on the side of my desk, and I’m basically just loading discs into it all day (there is no doubt the disc drive has gotten more work in the past week than during the entire life of the machine). Setting iTunes to automatically start importing when a CD is inserted is a big help. I don’t need to even touch the keyboard. Just pop the disc in and it imports, and them ejects it when it’s done.
Still, 200 down, 3,000 to go. I’m clearly going to need to start being more selective about what I import. The idea is to keep anything that there is a remote chance I may want to listen to or reference at some point in the future, but that should still leave a decent chunk of stuff that doesn’t fall within those perimeters.
The idea is that when it’s all done, the music will live on one drive, and be backed up to the Drobo as well. After that’s all done, at some point I’ll have to tackle how it integrates with my primary iTunes library. Right now it’s separate, and I want to keep it that way for now. Wish me luck, I’m curious if and when I’ll finally finish this all.
Jerry Garcia with an old, black Nikon F2. Grabbed from the fantastic Egypt 1978 release.
Digg Dialog with Trent Reznor. Really impressive and worth watching. Makes me kinda wish I liked NIN music more, but I have never really gotten into it.
Bob Dylan on Barack Obama.
The whole Times UK interview is worth a read.
Music for the morning: Shady Grove
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Grateful Dead fan or not, this is simply an amazing album. Soulful Americana bluegrass banjo mandolin goodness. I can’t believe this came out 12+ years ago. What a release. It’s been far too long since I’ve listened to it. And if for some reason you think of Jerry Garcia only as an old hippie that noodled on his guitar and sang “Truckin’,” well, you should really give this a listen. Beautiful music.
New video from Lily Allen, which I dig. Funny thing is I remember her tweetering photos from the set when it was being shot, and it makes a lot more sense now.
NYT on the Phish reunion
“For people in hard times, we can play long shows of pure physical pleasure,” Mr. Anastasio said. “They come to dance and forget their troubles. It’s like a service commitment.”
Windfall by Son Volt
switching it over to A.M.
searching for a truer sound
can’t recall the call letters
steel guitar and settle down
catching an all night station
somewhere in Louisiana
sounds like 1963
but for now
it sounds like heaven
This song is so good it actually hurts.
“Murder in the City” by Avett Brothers
I was first turned onto this song over on Merlin Mann’s Most Days video site*. I’ve listened to it a bunch and it’s really great. Highly recommended, and the type of song that is making me dig deeper into what these guys are all about. One of those songs that ends and I just want to start over immediately. I love tracks like that.
*most days, except maybe February eh?
