Let's make happy
Listened Things
iTunes to the Rescue
Sep 23rd
My favorite person this week is Ryan, a support person for the iTunes Store. He helped me re-download all the music I’d ever purchased from them and lost when my hard drive crashed last month. That’s a ton of music!
I have 99 songs (5.8 hours worth) with the word “love” in the title!
It’s funny, I get emails pretty frequently from people who have lost patterns they downloaded from my shop, and I’m always happy to send the patterns to them again. But it hadn’t occurred to me that Apple would do the same for their customers. They do!
After contacting their support via this page, I got a detailed email from Ryan explaining how I could download my music again. Then he followed up again the next day just to make sure I understood how to do it. It was easy and very fast. Thank you Ryan! (In case Ryan isn’t an avid reader of my blog, I also sent him an email thanking him.)
Neutral Milk Hotel, Revisited
Sep 10th
I found out yesterday that my unhappy hard drive, which was being tinkered with by the second set of professionals, is not recoverable after all, and I’ve lost about a year’s worth of data. Fun!
It’s fine really—when I finally accessed what I actually lost, there’s little that cannot be replaced or forgotten about. I now have my computer back with a new hard drive, and one of the first things did was go back through my old CDs so that I could have something to listen to after three music-less weeks.
Going through my college-era albums, I realized that I hadn’t had Neutral Milk Hotel on my computer in a long time. Remember them? If you kind of do, it’s a good time for a re-listen. And if you don’t remember them, you should get the CD (or download from iTunes and back it up for goodness’ sake). In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is a beautiful listen, with trumpets, lo-fi noise, and references to The Diary of Anne Frank. Hearing it now makes me think of it as a precursor to some of The Decemberists’ better songs—it’s thoroughly situated in the late 1990s (Neutral Milk Hotel was part of the Elephant Six collective), but the sad and touching images it evokes are from an earlier era.
I’m not the first person to revisit In the Aeroplane Over the Sea this year—Taylor Clark wrote about Jeff Magnum in a Slate article on the 10th anniversary of the album back in February. Clark wrote about how Magnum bowed out of the music scene after releasing Aeroplane, with no signs of returning. All the more reason to appreciate this album.
Oh! AU
Jul 1st
New music! Verbs is the just-released album by the Portland group AU, and it’s pretty delightful.
The album is a nice mix of big, high-energy orchestrations and quieter songs, with equal weight given to vocals and instruments. I’d say the sound of Verbs lands somewhere between Sufjan Stevens and Animal Collective, which is just fine by me.
You can hear a happy song from the album, “rr. Vs. D” on the Aagoo Records website.
Copy That
Jun 5th
I usually seem to catch up with new music about 1-2 years after it’s released, so I’m happy to have found a great album a mere two months after its debut.
Listening to Cut Copy’s new album In Ghost Colours feels kind of like cheating, it’s so listenable. It makes me think of a tree somewhere that grows songs, and Cut Copy just went and picked their favorites before anyone else got to them.
If you, like so many of us, are a sucker for the retro 80s vibe, you should pick this one up. That is, if you haven’t already in the past two months.
Songs About Birds
Mar 13th
My sister and I got my mom an iPod shuffle for her birthday last year. She was mildly appalled when I showed her the iTunes store, where you have to buy music? I thought you kids all got it for free on Napster, which is illegal and wrong, by the way!
I asked her what song I should find on iTunes for her, and her immediate request was “Legendary Chicken Fairy,” the most psychedelic song title I’d ever heard. It turned out to be an actual song, by country duo Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan, who wrote songs mostly about birds in the ’70s. My mom started signing along to the iTunes clip:
Chicken fairy in the sky
Mother Goose’s butterfly
Do whatsever’s necessary
Legendary chicken fairy
Sing a song that’s sanitary
Take my wish o big canary
Legendary chicken fairy…
Then my dad joined in from the kitchen. It was weird and kind of cute. But once the moment passed, my mom refused to pay money for the music by these people who apparently had some part in my parents’ courtship. (“Where’s all that free music I’ve heard about?”) We found some NPR podcasts instead. So for Christmas last year I gave my parents Life and Death (And Almost Everything Else), which includes “The Legendary Chicken Fairy” among its 29 tracks. It got a laugh, if not a long listen.
But it’s actually an impressive collection of songs. (I had bought the album for myself before getting another one for my parents.) Most of them are clever and melodic, and some are rather beautiful. A lot of them are about birds. I would recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor, and maybe kids.
