Despite periodic threats to the contrary, I’ve never had the patience to learn an instrument. I can’t read music, and I don’t know the first thing about how to speak the musician’s lingo; as my former producer once told me, “you approach music from a fan’s perspective.”

That perspective is what’s fueled my lifelong orbit around the stuff — as a writer, as a label owner, as a publisher, as a quote-unquote recording artist — but because I try to know my limits, and probably couldn’t tell an A from a G if you pointed a pistol at my head, jazz is one area I’ve always tended to avoid. I review the occasional new record, but nothing too in depth; it’s hard enough to do justice in writing to the stuff I am qualified to write about.

Still, much to my wife’s chagrin, there are a handful of jazz artists whose work moves me on a fundamental level despite my crippling ignorance of form and theory. The wiry tangle of pre- and postmodern guitar that Bill Frisell churns out at blinding speed, for instance, or the deceptively smooth fusion of Mike Stern. The astoundingly accessible innovations of early Brubeck. The soul-shattering beauty of a Stan Getz solo (although, heretic that I am, I prefer not to listen to the Gilberto stuff). And, maybe most of all, the seemingly effortless perfection of Toots Thielemans’ harmonica.

Born in Brussels in 1922, Toots Thielemans actually got something of a late start; it wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that he made his mark — primarily as a guitarist — during stints with Benny Goodman and George Shearing. In time, he became known as the best harmonica player — and first to legitimize it as a serious jazz instrument — since Larry Adler; for quite a few years, though, he was a sideman in the States and a sort of elevated novelty-tune writer in Europe, where he was famous for cutting sides that blended his guitar playing with his whistling. (Thieleman’s whistling skills earned him some American gigs, too — arguably the most notable being the long-running Old Spice commercials that you probably don’t remember because you’re too young, you little shit.) (more…)

Bruce Hornsby - The Show Goes On (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Gonna Be Some Changes Made/Brick House (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Swan Song (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Tangled Up in Blue (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Dear Mr. Fantasy (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Every Little Kiss (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Harbor Lights (live)
Bruce Hornsby - I Will Walk With You (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Imagine (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Man Smart, Woman Smarter (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Terrapin Station (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Dreamland (live)
Bruce Hornsby - The Boxer (live)
Bruce Hornsby - My Foolish Heart (live)
Bruce Hornsby - Mandolin Rain (live solo)
Bruce Hornsby - We’ll Be Together Again (live)

Webb Wilder - Everyday (I Kick Myself) from Doo Dad (1991)
Little Village - Solar Sex Panel from Little Village (1992)
Ken Shane - Summer and Smoke from South Ridgeway Avenue (2003)
XTC - My Bird Performs from Nonsuch (1992)
Todd Rundgren - Mighty Love from A Cappella (1985)
The Outfield - Winning It All from Rockeye (1992)
The Time - Gigolos Get Lonely Too from What Time Is It? (1982)
Television - Marquee Moon from Marquee Moon (1977)
Living Colour - Should I Stay or Should I Go from Type (single) (1990)
Loudon Wainwright III - Living Alone from Last Man on Earth (2001)
Kay Hanley - Stay Stay from Baby Doll (2004)
T’Pau - The Promise from The Promise (1991)
King Khan And The Shrines - Torture from The Supreme Genius Of (2007)
The Vaughan Brothers - Hard To Be from Family Style (1990)
Jude Cole - Baby, It’s Tonight from A View from 3rd Street (1990)
Lost Causes - Bittersweet from Happy Trails (2000)

Scientists discovered that eating blueberries and having friends are good for the memory and that pregnancy and smoking are bad for it. Nautiluses can remember useful things, but only for a day, whereas cuttlefish, which are much more sophisticated cephalopods, observe and form preferences for their future prey when they are still embryos. (Robert Plant, “Memory Song” [download])

Swiss biologists determined that stupid flies live longer than smart flies because intelligence wears out flies’ brains, and Canadian researchers said that straining to recall information on the tip of the tongue makes us learn our mistaken guesses rather than the correct answers we eventually remember. (Paul Carrack, “Tip of My Tongue” [download])

Strokes were found to generate depolarization waves that spread outward from the affected area and damage other parts of the brain. Geologists reported that large earthquakes often trigger other seismic events in distant parts of the world; a Franco-Turkish team of seismologists found that the hypersonic energy pulses unleashed by supershear earthquakes may awaken dormant faults nearby; and massive-slow-motion ice-quakes were shaking the West Antarctic Ice Sheet twice a day. (The Grateful Dead, “Ripple” [download]) (more…)

The Popdose staff was sitting around the other day, doing what we do best — namely, talking about records that most people wish they didn’t remember — when a discussion about the Moody Blues’ “Your Wildest Dreams” somehow led into some heavy-duty reminiscing about the records we all listened to when we were kids — and how those records were more or less culled from the Top 40 hits of the day, hits that our parents, as often as not, listened to along with us.

So, we wondered, who’s making music these days that impressionable preteens and their parents enjoy? Top 40 radio is pretty much dead, and the lines between Radio Disney, MTV, and whatever the hell it is that the over-30 crowd is listening to these days have been drawn depressingly deep. Look, it isn’t just that we think the Jonas Brothers and Lil Wayne aren’t all that great; it’s that some of us can remember enjoying the latest hits from the Spinners, the Bangles, or Cheap Trick right alongside our parents.

Current music is still a multigenerational thing, but not the way it used to be — so here, without further ado, is a list (with downloads, natch) of some of the stuff your faithful Popdosers were listening to in their formative preteen years. Pull up a chair and a set of headphones, and give in to Tweener Mixtape Madness! (more…)

Jonatha Brooke - Forgiven from Careful What You Wish For (2007)
The Tender Idols - See How She Runs from Step On Over (2000)
Rembrandts - Maybe It’s You from Greatest Hits (2006)
Blackalicious - Lotus Flower from The Craft (2005)
A Tribe Called Quest - Motivators from Beats Rhymes & Life (1996)
Ry Cooder - Big Bad Bill Is Sweet William Now from Jazz (1978)
Buffalo Tom - Your Stripes from Sleepy Eyed (1995)
Peter Cetera - Save Me from One More Story (1988)
Tom Waits - House Where Nobody Lives from Mule Variations (1999)
John Vanderslice - When It Hits My Blood from Cellar Door (2004)
NRBQ - Get Rhythm from God Bless Us All (1987)
Pete Seeger - Roll On, Columbia from The Essential (1978)
Difford & Tilbrook - The Apple Tree from Difford & Tilbrook (2006)
Allen Toussaint - Soul Sister from The Complete Warner Recordings (2005)
Bruce Hornsby - Love Me Still from Intersections: 1985-2005 (2006)
Stevie Wonder - Fingertips (live) from The 12-Year-Old Genius (1963)

David Medsker: I love Paul Carrack as much as the next guy, but is what I refer to as a non-song. Not a whole lot of meat on these bones.

Jeff Giles: An odd little hit from an odd little record. People remember Paul Carrack and Paul Young (no, the other Paul Young) as Mike +/& the Mechanics’ singers, but this album featured lead vocals from two other guys. I can’t remember either of their names, but I do remember that I like “Taken In” more than “Silent Running” or “All I Need Is a Miracle.”

Jon Cummings: If I remember correctly, M+M albums were packaged with drool cups. Or did I just dream that during the 48-hour nap that was induced by my one and only full hearing of this song? Even 23 years on, it’s extraordinary that a nuclear war/Terminator/whatever prog-rock “epic” could be so abysmally boring. (Compared to this oblique blather, Sting’s contemporaneous “Russians” was a Tolstoy novel.) It’s also extraordinary that Carrack’s voice could be so thoroughly wasted. His M+M work is so pulse-deadening that it calls into question everything he did before. (Was “How Long” really that good? Doesn’t Glenn Tilbrook sing “Tempted” just as well in concert as Carrack did on record?) God, I hated this band.

Dw. Dunphy: Mike + the Mechanics got off to a good start, didn’t they? Big hit, nice synth-y melody, Paul Carrack — but it’s all for naught. I don’t understand a whit of this song. It sounds like the theme to some really bad syndicated sci-fi show. If you don’t pay too much attention to it, perfectly pleasant.

Scott Malchus: I often wonder what songs from the ’80s, with all of the lame electronic drums and synths, would sound like with real instruments. This song holds up okay. I guess I always expected more from Mike Rutherford since he was the lead guitarist from Genesis (and, before that, the bassist). All of the Mike + the Mechanics songs sound very “lite rock” compared to what he did in the ’70s. Then again, look at Phil Collins’s solo output. Worse, look what Genesis had become by the end of the ’80s. How is it that only Peter Gabriel was able to maintain his artistic integrity after he quit the band?

(more…)

Paddy Casey - Fear from Addicted to Company (2008)
Michael McDonald - You Show Me from Take It to Heart (1990)
Moe. - Deep This Time from Sticks and Stones (2008)
Peter Gabriel - Sky Blue from Up (2002)
Tommy Keene - Time To Say Goodbye from Drowning: A Tommy Keene Miscellany (2004)
The Neville Brothers - Voo Doo from Yellow Moon (1989)
Negativland - A Most Successful Formula from Dispepsi (1997)
Flies On Fire - C’mon from Flies On Fire (1989)
NRBQ - 12 Bar Blues from Peek-A-Boo (1990)
Edie Brickell & New Bohemians - Circle from Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars (1988)
The Clumsy Lovers - If I Should Fall From Grace With God from Under the Covers (2002)
Deacon Blue - Willin’ from 2 Meter Sessies (1990)
Paul Young - The Boys Of Summer from Rock Swings (2006)
Charlie Sexton - Bring It Home Again from Cruel and Gentle Things (2005)
Jukebox The Ghost - My Heart’s The Same from Let Live and Let Ghosts (2008)
Funky Butt - Juba’s Groove from Whoopin (2001)

Brian Vogan - Little Songs (2008)
purchase this album (CD Baby)

I didn’t mean for it to be this way — and every time I review one of these, I grow more afraid that Mrs. Davis is going to kneecap me for horning in on her territory — but I seem to have become the kids’ music guy at Popdose. It’s hard to complain about this too much, though, because I keep ending up with free copies of CDs that my daughter loves — and the latest, Brian Vogan’s Little Songs, is the best yet.

Seriously, you guys. Seriously. Even if you don’t have kids, don’t want kids, hate kids, you might want to pick yourself up a copy of Little Songs — it’s smart, funny, well-produced, and charming as all get-out. Vogan, a former pre-K teacher, used his job as an early childhood music educator to craft the songs on the album, introducing them to his classes as projects that they all worked on together, week by week. You wouldn’t think that songwriting with a committee of toddlers would result in songs as immediately appealing as “Racecar” or “Animal ABCs” (download), but the evidence suggests otherwise.

The album isn’t without its low points — “Chess” aims for TMBG-style whimsy, but will leave you aiming for the “skip” button, and “Spring” lacks the irresistible energy of the rest of the record — but trust me when I tell you that the young ones in your life will be won over immediately by Brian Vogan’s Little Songs, and listening to it repeatedly (as I’ve done for the last week and a half or so) won’t drive you crazy either. What else could you ask for?

Various Artists - Ten Out of Tenn, Volume 2 (2008)

Way back in the Paleolithic, when I still fancied myself a recording artist/label owner, I spent some time in Nashville writing songs for one of my albums. It wasn’t my first visit to the city, but it was the first time I’d spent more than a few hours hanging around there — and the first time I’d been there as a “songwriter.” Out for dinner with a writing partner one night, I had my first defining Nashville experience — being waited on by a guy who, when he found out why I was in town, tried to get me to take his demo tape with the check.

A few years later, I had my second defining Nashville experience during a night that started at dinner alongside an early ’90s one-hit wonder and the publishing magnate ex-husband of a country megastar, and culminated with a concert featuring David Mead, Joe Pisapia, and Daniel Tashian. My point is that you can’t break wind in Nashville without reaching the nostrils of a songwriter, and even if releasing a 10-track compilation of songs from the city’s unsigned artists is a bit like using a butterfly net to try and catch your favorite raindrops in a hurricane, that compilation is still bound to contain a fair bit of worthwhile music.

Such is the case with Ten Out of Tenn, Volume 2, which follows up on 2005’s Volume 1 — and is actually more than a CD; it’s a tour, one that kicked off in (duh) Nashville over the weekend. It’s a great idea, and one that should be particularly appealing to fans of the Awarestore-flavored singer/songwriter fare that the city has become known for over the last decade or so. This is another way of saying that yes, there is no pedal steel anywhere on this record — but there are plenty of artists whose work has been featured on shows such as One Tree Hill, October Road, The Hills, and Grey’s Anatomy. If you’re into Josh Rouse and/or Colbie Caillat, in other words, these songs should float your boat nicely.

A number of them are previously released — Griffin House’s “The Guy That Says Goodbye” has been around for at least a year — but unless you’re a hardcore fan of the genre, odds are you haven’t heard most of it. And the new material, such as Erin McCarley’s “Pony (Go On)” (download), is pretty great.

I’m unable to find purchase information for this CD, but that shouldn’t stop you from heading over to the Ten Out of Tenn MySpace page, or catching them on tour if you’re lucky enough to live between Indianapolis and New York.