This video is wonderful, I had never heard of Hymn For Her but this video (a Led Zeppelin cover, needless to say) got me hooked on them and their albums even moreso. Can’t wait until they play the Bay Area, must see them live!
Yet another married couple duo to like. Via No Depression
In the mid 90’s, I asked one of my music writer friends to recommend five artists that I had never heard of. I ended up getting a bunch of great recommendations including Beck — I had ignored “Loser” but Odelay had just come out and I was blown away. Three others have been lost to time but were also decent. But by far the best of the bunch was Gillian Welch, who had just come out with her first album, Revival. Renée and I have been fanatic fans ever since. If you’re not, you are missing something special.
Gillian Welch is a person but in this context is really a duo made up of Gillian the person and her husband David Rawlings. Their best music is just the two of them: she on lead vocals and guitar or banjo, he on harmony vocals and lead guitar. But quite frankly, when they start playing it’s pretty hard to tell who is playing or singing which part as they harmonize like a couple who has been playing together non-stop for 20 years.
They’re on tour now for their new album, The Harrow & The Harvest, which is a great place to start if you've never heard them. They just played the Bay Area a few weeks ago but will be back (as they usually are) for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in the fall. Trust me, even if the word bluegrass scares you off, give this album a shot. There is no better Saturday or Sunday morning music to have playing on the music box.
If you already know and like them, check out this interview. If you don’t and want a taste, here’s their recent performance on Conan.
I’m finding my way back into blogging after an extended, mostly forced break. We’ve been renovating our house for the last 3 months and spent most of the last 3 weeks in hotels. Without anything approaching a daily routine (or day job — more on that in a future post) I’ve been lazily doing nothing remotely serious. A nice break for a bit, but time to ramp back up...
...with music videos! Using my iPad as my main computer for the last few weeks has meant far more consumption than creation. Among others, I’m really into AV Club’s covers series. The conceit is that they make a list of songs, invite indie bands in to cover a song from the list and once a song is covered, it’s off the list. I first saw Baths cover LCD Soundsystem and started tracking the series. I had to post Of Montreal covering The White Stripes:
I was originally going to link to the video of Weezer covering Radiohead’s Paranoid Android from Pitchfork but I sat on that one too long and Jason Kottke beat me to it. Yes seriously, I saw something before Jason did! That’s just how much reading/viewing I’ve been doing.
Over a decade post-Napster, I was amazed at the incongruity of the following stories that came over my news feeds this morning. For your reading pleasure — although you barely have to read the actual stories, the headlines paint the picture quite nicely:
I’ve always been into word games and as a kid got so into crossword puzzles that I started creating them myself. Not that you need to hear my story of woe, but this was in the days before computers and the internet (at least for a 13-year old living in Pennsylvania) when writing a puzzle meant graph paper, pencil and a bunch of dictionaries. I eventually found a reference book that was meant to help you solve/cheat puzzles by listing every word with a certain two letters in it — for instance all words with the pattern *s**e. It was a great help in building them too except it only went up to six letter words, meaning that most of my puzzles ended up with very few words longer than six letters.
I haven’t created a puzzle from scratch in 30 years and have been meaning to play around with software that I know is available to help build puzzles. Added to the list of things to do with my copious free time.
All of which is a long winded intro to this story of crossword puzzling genius and the intersection of four of my favorite things: technology, music, baseball and puzzles:
Never mind the valley’s beautiful weather, cutting-edge companies, mega-wealthy moguls. The valley’s latest claim to fame is that among the tech wizards who immerse themselves in WYSIWYG, HTML and SCSI is a strong cadre of crossword constructors able to build ambitious puzzles whose up and down letters vex even those well-skilled at filling in the blanks.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done the Times crossword puzzle regularly although this article has made me want to start again.
As I head off to gum surgery later today, no media punditry. Instead, two videos for your morning enjoyment. So different, yet both so much fun. The first is from Lawrence Welk via No Depression:
The second, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, is clearly a sign of Billie Joe’s future solo career:
Wow... I missed this from a few days ago. Not a huge surprise given all of Jack White's new projects and Meg's seeming lack of interest in performing live but still a bummer. At least I got to see them live once. The other time they canceled on me.
Still, they're probably right. Better to just have the memories. There's only so far some bands can go.