Do beards write better songs?

Posted on | January 26, 2010 | Comments Off on Do beards write better songs?

So many good male singer-songwriters are bearded. And I’ve noticed that there seems to be a correlation between the type of music one performs and the amount of hair on one’s face.

Bearded songwriters include:

  • Ray LaMontagne
  • Samuel Beam (Iron & Wine)
  • Andy Hull (Manchester Orchestra, Right Away Great Captain)
  • Bon Iver

Bearded men write more peaceful, lyrical, soulful songs, while the shaven men tend to write more clever, melodic or pop-friendly songs. Or maybe the beards force you to write music this way.

Unbearded songwriters:

  • Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie, Postal Service)
  • Andrew Bird
  • Ben Folds
  • Conor Oberst
  • Every female songwriter except Madonna

Beards are gross. I don’t even know why I brought this up.

Category: Uncategorized
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Stetson_Live at Tommy Doyle's Harvard Square

Posted on | January 26, 2010 | Comments Off on Stetson_Live at Tommy Doyle's Harvard Square

Tommy Doyle’s Acoustic Showcase

Solo show.

Also appearing: ??Craig Peura

RSVP on Facebook

Category: Performance
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It's Dead, You Killed It: The Post-Punk Revival

Posted on | January 21, 2010 | Comments Off on It's Dead, You Killed It: The Post-Punk Revival

I declare the post-punk revival official over. It probably was already. But if you weren’t sure, this is me poking it in the eye with a stick just to be sure: a shitty manufactured band out of Australia called the Cassette Kids. I’ve looked all over for a biography and there is none to be found, which means they were probably assembled. And if they weren’t assembled, how completely embarrassing for them.

Cassette Kids – Lying Around

When a sound can be stamped out in a factory, when it can be manufactured for profit by labels and producers instead of by artists, when it no longer contributes anything to the artistry of music, the sound is dead. You killed it.

Category: It's Dead

Fuck Austin

Posted on | January 20, 2010 | Comments Off on Fuck Austin

There, I said it.

FUCK  ’em! It’s TEXAS!

Category: Fuck 'Em

A Core Ethic

Posted on | January 14, 2010 | Comments Off on A Core Ethic

The Thinker“What if everything you knew about yourself, and your temperament, and your motivations, and your core ethic, turned out to be wrong?”

This was something I was wondering last night as I went to bed.

I have always considered myself fundamentally good and kind, albeit entirely human — occasionally given to nefarious thoughts and behavior. But my behavior and thoughts of late have caused me to reconsider this. What if, in fact, I have a core of hostility and cynicism, that is densely overlaid with a sort of gentle humanity acquired late?

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, as it so often is. Perhaps there is no core ethic. Perhaps there are in fact competing ethics that battle moment to moment to rise out of the subconscious into our conscious motivations and behaviors.  This would easily complement my “spiritual dialectic” theory of mind:

The concept of the rational actor is a fiction; human beings are instead products of a dense tapestry of traumas and triumphs that create a mind laden with contradictions endlessly vying for action and attention – a psychological and spiritual dialectic.

We are neither good nor bad (forget for a moment that these are perhaps human inventions anyway) but are instead loaded with a multitude of experiences, the most powerful of which took place in infancy before we even had memories, that lead us to react on the fly based on some arcane pattern recognition. Monkey see, monkey do (or here, monkey see, monkey act like a dick). It’s only through maturation and emotional-spiritual growth that we’re able to gradually take control of these devices and choose a path of goodness or nefariousness. Here’s the rest of that self-quote:

In a world with no god and no meaning, we are living on a blank white canvas and so have the opportunity to create the meaning we choose for humanity. This is perhaps the greatest gift we as humans have, and simultaneously our greatest vulnerability.

What’s really scary is when you start to consider the possibility that you are, in fact, a totally selfish dick, but that maybe this doesn’t actually bother you, at all.  At that point I think you transcend dickishness into sociopathy, or at least double-dickishness.

Or is this not at all a question of ethics but the final showdown with my own humanness? Isn’t some dickishness completely necessary, to maintain a sense of honesty? If we are always good and nice, never considering negativity or actions that may harm others, we aren’t human, we are robots.

I want to be a human. I don’t want to be a robot.

Category: Personal Thoughts
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STETSON_LIVE tonight at Bloc 11 Somerville

Posted on | January 13, 2010 | Comments Off on STETSON_LIVE tonight at Bloc 11 Somerville

7:00 — w/Abbie Barrett
No cover

11 Bow St.
Somerville

Google Maps

Facebook event.

Category: Performance

When my music plays in department stores, I quit

Posted on | January 12, 2010 | Comments Off on When my music plays in department stores, I quit

HearYa has a post about the Avett Brothers, noting that he heard one of their songs in a furniture store.

If I am ever out, say at a Home Depot, or a Walgreens, or a JC Penny, and I hear one of my own songs, I’m pretty sure that would be the end of the line for me. If my music can be so meaninglessly inoffensive as to be played in the blandest, most meaninglessly inoffensive places, then you have either:

  1. royally FUCKED it as an artist
  2. made so much money that you don’t care about art anymore

Of course, if the latter, then you wouldn’t actually be walking around in a JC Penny anyway, unless you were looking to buy the place to turn into an indoor golf course, like the kind they would have built in Dubai if they hadn’t run out of money. So I think it still works.

“Dear Jesus who I love so much, please give me the strength to say ‘cuntsucking fuckhole’ in every song I ever write again, so I don’t have to ever hear my music played to the spineless masses that pass every day through the Dress Barn.”

Category: Art, Money

Art Rape -or- What money does to good musicians: Ellie Goulding

Posted on | January 11, 2010 | Comments Off on Art Rape -or- What money does to good musicians: Ellie Goulding

Ellie Goulding is unfuckingbelievable. Her voice is so magnetic and from what I can tell, she writes her own stuff, although once a songwriter pairs up with producers, god knows what actually happens. Regardless, this girl is for reals:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

She’s like a more-accessible, better-singing, more understandable Joanna Newsome. She’s even a little better-looking. That’s money in the bank, right? Why fix it if it isn’t broken?

So what the fuck is this horseshit?

Ellie Goulding, “Under The Sheets” from Neon Gold Records on Vimeo.

This recording, and the video that accompanies it, is beyond execrable for a musician of her calibre. You take a beautiful, stylized voice, filter the shit out of it, throw in some auto-tune (because that’s what the kids like, right?), and then shoot this sucky, drivel and cliche-filled video. This is art-rape and I won’t stand for it.

And it’s not like she can’t sing this song well anyway. Look at this live performance: Under The Sheets. It’s a good song without all the crap! And meaningful!

Now Ellie Goulding has been working with electronic producers for years, according to her bio. As a house-head, breakbeat junkie, and electronic music fan going back to “before it was cool” I have no objection to making dance tunes. Her dreamy, high-toned voice fits dance music wonderfully. (Listen to this recording of “Guns and Horses” The production kind of takes over the words but it’s still entertaining, at least.) There’s nothing wrong with getting rich off your talent, but you won’t see me buying her album after watching this music video.

Should I expect less of 22-year-olds?

I do hope she makes a LOT of money because when you do shit like this, you lose a lot of credibility with your fanbase (it is honestly hard for me to take her seriously when I think of “Kei$ha” when I see her video). And when the pendulum swings and nobody wants to hear auto-tune and this kind of music anymore, she’s going to need all that money to keep herself fed.

:p

Category: Art-Rape, Music I Hate, Playlist
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Songs that make the ladies' knees go all rubbery

Posted on | January 7, 2010 | Comments Off on Songs that make the ladies' knees go all rubbery

This is an actual graph from Jango describing gender and age preference for my song, “Eyes and Hands” (available in the player on this page). In these graphs, pink is used to enumerate females (*rolls eyes*) and blue enumerates males:

While I’m not writing songs in the interest of getting laid (“I was getting laid BEFORE I was cool”), it is certainly not lost on me that a song I wrote is STRONGLY PREFERRED by women ages 18-34. When I first saw this my assumption was that most Jango listeners are themselves ages 18-34, so the age range can be discounted. But then I saw this other graph for my song, “Colorful Kid” (also available in the player on this page).

Strongly preferred by old men and really young men.

What this means is that if I’m playing out, and I’m really REALLY horny and concurrently really REALLY desperate (these two often coincide), I should stick with the romantic stuff (Eyes and Hands) and not the more rock-friendly stuff (Colorful Kid), unless I’m horny for penis, which so far has never happened but anything is possible. Although, if and when I want old man cock, it’s MINE.

Category: Statistics
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Surprise! Green Day has fans!

Posted on | January 7, 2010 | Comments Off on Surprise! Green Day has fans!

Rolling Stone’s “Decade-End Reader’s Poll” has GREEN DAY as the “Top Artist of the Decade”.

Stop cutting your wrists. Stop punching that baby. And the OTHER ONE.

I’m mad too. But these things happen when you poll readers, whose loyalties are easily exploited for profit, particularly the younger ones. It’s not all that meaningful. I mean, they have an Avril Lavigne album as #4 for the decade.

Put down the gun. Stop hitting your mother. It is a READER’S POLL, for fuck’s sake. 30-year-olds with jobs and a conscience don’t take this poll, 15-year-olds with nothing but free time and disposable income do. So relax, it’s not that big a deal, and nobody’s claiming it’s even as fair as a Florida election.

It’s still surprising, though, when you consider that a LOT of people voted in this, and unless some programmer designed a bot to vote automatically, this means that a LOT of people still like Green Day. I didn’t know that.

I saw Green Day in concert once. It was in 1994, right after Dookie came out. I was 15. It was the second concert I’d ever been to (the first was Soundgarden). It was a great show, and the first place I ever smelled pot. But it makes me wonder, wouldn’t Green Day be more appropriate on a list for LAST decade?

So let’s just all do our collective “Huh!” and get back to the real world where Green Day is shitty.

Category: Bands
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