I've been a Minutemen fan since I was 15 (two years after D. Boon died)

...and once again buffistas.org makes me feel really, really old.

Me too.

Damn.

I was lucky enough to see the Minutemen on that last tour -- what an excellent band. On their own and opening up for R.E.M.

Mike Watt is one of the most genuinely nice guys in music

That's for damn sure. Another interesting side of the movie is the extra where Thurston Moore talks about meeting Watt for the first time back in the 80s: Watt was boisterous, like I've known him to be in real life. However, in the movie (which is all after his recovery from the near-death experience), he's very subdued the whole time. Some of the footage is from very soon after his recovery (when he was sporting the 'stache and weighed about 86 lbs) and he looks frighteningly close to death.

I swear to god, I am only going to play this heartbreaking, wonderful song forty or fifty more times before I go to bed tonight.

It's a song called "Dream On" by a producer named Christian Falk and has someone I've never heard of named Robyn singing, and apparently isn't available to download anywhere but Swedish iTunes. And it is been filling my apartment for the last several hours.

I discovered it from a friend's music blog: Inquisitive Garments. Beware that so far he's only written about a couple rap videos, the parallels between Mark E. Smith and Mike Skinner and his frightening obsession with the Fall Out Boy song "Sugar, We're Going Down." But I expect great things.

Performance and hilarious interview with Tom Waits on the Mike Douglas show in 1976: [link]

It's a song called "Dream On" by a producer named Christian Falk and has someone I've never heard of named Robyn singing, and apparently isn't available to download anywhere but Swedish iTunes.

I think it only exists as a CDS right now since it's a pretty new release. Considering the airplay it gets though, I wouldn't be surprised if it spreads outwards soonish. (But please, don't take my word for it. I've been wrong about these things before.)

Sloan have a new album coming out, 30 tracks!: [link]

Thirty tracks - I'll have to figure they all wrote on this one again.

When I did the bubblegum book I wound up listening to a lot of Townes Van Zandt and Miles Davis to clear my palate. As much as I love the perdurable pop song, it just got to be too much of one thing.

As I've been working on Tom Waits lately and listening to lots of Tom, my tonic has been Kate Bush.

But that just makes me notice the parallels. Both extremely quirky and out of sync with their eras. Both piano based songwriters with a gift for melody so profluent they spend half their careers running away from it. Both turning to more rhythmic influences in their songwriting as they get older. Both very theatrical, and also cinematic (particularly in their inspirations). Both starting as sui generis, and then becoming their own sort of genre that other artists draw from.

And when they're gone for a long time, their re-emergence inspires a lost longing for them. You miss the singularity of their voice and vision when they're not recording.

Kate duetting with Rowan Atkinson

For Jilli, a rare video of Kate's Efteling Gardens TV special in 1978 Video quality is wobbly but watchable. Etefling Gardens is sort of a gothy fairyland in The Netherlands.

There's some discussion that maybe the colour coding on this picture might mean who wrote each song.

[link]

This is one person's (I'm not sure how informed) take on it:

Red = Chris songs

Blue = Andrew

Yellow = Jay

Green = Patrick

If that's true, then there's only four Patrick songs. Verrry interesting.

For Jilli, a rare video of Kate's Efteling Gardens TV special in 1978 Video quality is wobbly but watchable. Etefling Gardens is sort of a gothy fairyland in The Netherlands.

Oooh. Marked to watch later, when I'm done with today's batch of very vexing editing work.