Telecosm - Ike Elliott

Music: Before Coldplay, There Was The Verve

British alternative rock band Coldplay released their new album, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, this week, to great acclaim.  Reviewers are calling it amazing, thrilling, and winning.  I like what I have heard of it, too...it is a worthy addition to the band's growing collection.

However, I'm not going to do a big review of the new Coldplay album today.  Instead, I'm highlighting one of my older favorites: a band that I believe had a great deal of influence on Coldplay.  In fact, Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin has called this band's lead singer "the best singer in the world."  Which band am I talking about?

The band is The Verve, and the album is the outstanding Urban Hymns, released in 1997, the same year that Coldplay was formed.  I don't think The Verve gets enough credit for this groundbreaking album, the best of their collection.  Yes, lots of poeple have heard the super-hit, "Bitter Sweet Symphony," but most didn't really explore the album further, and the entire album is full of fantastic songs.  Some of my favorites are "The Drugs Don't Work,"  "Lucky Man," and the 15-minute marathon song, "Come On."

One interesting detail that a lot of people don't know about "Bitter Sweet Symphony":  the song used an Andrew Oldham Orchestra sample from the Rolling Stones' 1965 tune, "The Last Time", as the foundation for the song.  As a result, The Verve ended up having to give songwriting credit to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, in addition to the credit for the lyrics to Richard Ashcroft, The Verve's lead singer and main songwriter. The Verve ended up having to give all of their royalties for the song to the company that owns the copyright for "The Last Time," so The Verve didn't really have a financial benefit from their mega-hit.  The band split up shortly after that. 

The band did re-form, though, and they were back in the studio working on a new album late last year, so we are expecting a new release from them.  Here's to a great comeback!

I highly recommend Urban Hymns, it gets five stars from me.  Check it out!

New Music: St. Germain

Okay, so I have paused my repetitive listening to Pinback's exquisite Summer in Abaddon CD long enough to listen to something else this morning, on the advice of my friend Bob Paulsen (CEO of Unity Business Networks).   Bob says I need to broaden my musical horizons into his favorite genre: jazz electronica, and his favorite example, St. Germain.

So, I did, and though I hate to admit it, Bob's right, this music is fantastic.  Start with "So Flute."  You'll want more.  Then try "La Goutte D'Or,"  and the hook will be set.  Both of these songs are on St. Germain's 2000 release, Tourist, which is a great place to start.  Another good song from that album:  "Sure Thing". 

How to describe the music?  A lot of blues-tinged jazz grooves, with tasty guitar, horn, or flute leads, sometimes mixed with interesting sampled vocals.  Kind of a cooler form of Moby. 

As usual, this "new music" pick is new only to me...St. Germain has been releasing music since 1995.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, St. Germain's real name is Ludovic Navarre, and he is a French jazz musician who has released music under a bunch of aliases, including Deepside, LN's, Modus Vivendi, Nuages and Soofle. 

Try it!  You won't be disappointed.

New Music: Phil Stacey

My colleague Greg Menard (CTO of Unity Business Networks) turned me on to a new CD by Phil Stacey that is excellent.  Phil Stacey was one of the finalists on American Idol last year, so you may know about him already.  His self-titled release is in the country genre, yes, but not over-the-top country like the kind that keeps me from listening to country stations.  He's got a great voice that could sing other styles, and the arrangements are the kind of "barely country" arrangements that without the slide guitar you might not know were country. 

Anyway, believe it or not, I have never watched an episode of American Idol, and I usually avoid country music like I avoid house cleaning, but there are some really good songs on this CD.  I especially liked "If You Didn't Love Me", "You Are Mine", and "Identity".   It's hard for me to say it, but I guess I do like some country music.

A Day In The Studio

I took the day off from blogging yesterday, choosing instead to spend the entire day at Derryberry Audio, a recording studio in Westminster, Colorado, and it was a blast.  It was a day of great fun, and sometimes exhaustion, as a fantastic group of volunteer musicians came together to lay the foundation tracks for seven songs. 

It was my first time in the studio since my college band recorded a song for a James Madison University compilation album back in 1985.  Yesterday's recording session was much more intense.  Back in 1985 it only one song and it was lead guitar player John Romeo's music.  This time, it was seven of my own compositions.

A couple of years ago I started to write music, which has been a life-long dream but a dream that I had never really pursued...so I decided to change that, and got some rudimentary recording gear and started to put together some ideas.  Over the past two years I have written about 15 songs, and I worked with a bunch of local musicians from my church and the surrounding area to put together a low-budget plan to record seven of the songs, market them on iTunes, and donate all of the proceeds to charity.  We hope to have the songs finished and ready for sale by the end of the summer.

I am thrilled with the musicians who have donated their time and talents to the project so far...they are incredible.  I want to thank them personally here:

Electric Guitar: Mitchell Ashley
Acoustic and Electric Guitar: Gordon Clouse
Piano: Jeremiah Horner
Bass: Skye Perry
Drums: Rich Guess
Production and Engineering: Jeremiah Horner

Jeremiah did a fantastic job in the production role, it was a pleasure working with him.  Also, I want to especially thank our sponsor, Tim Draughon, for making this project possible, and also thank Mark Derryberry, owner of the studio where we recorded and enjoyed fantastic hospitality. 

I think everybody is having a great time with the project and we are looking forward to our next studio session.  I'll keep you posted on our progress!

Pandora: A Power Tool For New Music Discovery

This blog is primarily a technology blog, and I like to focus on IP multimedia applications, but now and then, mostly on weekends, I get the urge to blog about other stuff that is important to me, like MUSIC.  I am a fool for good music, and I'm really not constrained by genre.  Mostly, I just like discovering new artists and get a thrill from enjoying their music for a few years before anybody else has discovered them.  That's why when my friend and colleague Bob Paulsen, President of Unity Business Networks, showed me Pandora, I was all over it.  And the cool thing is that it is an IP multimedia application, so I don't have to feel like I am going off-topic when I blog about it.

Put simply, Pandora is a tool for customizing your own Internet radio stations.  You can create a new radio station just by entering the name of an artist you like, or the name of a song you like, and Pandora plays song after song after song that are similar to the song or artist that you used to seed your radio station.  For example, I created a Dave Matthews Band station the other day and listened to it all day long, and Pandora played a lot of live versions of DMB songs that I knew, and also played a lot of U2, Pink Floyd, Jack Johnson, O.A.R., Pearl Jam, Ben Harper, even some Stealers Wheel.  As I write this post I am listening to my DMB radio station, and a song from their Live at Radio City Music Hall album, Eh Hee, came on...its one of the few DMB albums I don't own and I had never heard the song before.  Pretty awesome song.

Being smart about selecting which songs to play is part of the secret that makes Pandora special.  The algorithm relies on data from the Music Genome Project, which has captured hundreds of attributes about just about every song out there.  The algorithm starts out selecting songs based on the seed song or artist name, and then you "tune" the algorithm by telling it which songs you like and which ones you didn't.  You can also add new seed songs or artists to existing stations. 

Other things that make Pandora special: 

• It is really easy to use
• It is free! (there are options for paid subscriptions that remove the advertising).

Pandora does have some other limitations.  There is a limit to the number of different radio stations you can create, but it is a really high limit, so I haven't found it to be a problem.  Also, you can't force Pandora to play only the artist that you selected...you have to let it play what it wants to play, just like a radio station.  However, you can skip songs, which is better than a radio station...there is just a limit of 6 skips per station per hour. 

I am finding Pandora to be a fabulous tool for discovering new music.  I now have a Pinback station and a Le Loup station, for two of the bands I have recently discovered.

I encourage you to try it out.

New Music: Pinback

Telecosm reader Chris Jensen commented on last week's New Music post on Le Loup with a few suggestions for my listening enjoyment, including The Mars Volta, Pinkback, and The Sim Redmond Band.  I've listened to all three this week, and really enjoyed exploring the music of these bands, but have to say that San Diego-based Pinback is the real standout among these three.

I was playing some Pinback on Pandora while writing this post (more on Pandora next week), and my fifteen-year-old son Ben says "It's kind of loud."  I smiled and said "Yeah!" (with relish), and he asked if I could turn it down and I refused, of course.  I think in most families this Dad-to-teenager relationship is usually reversed.

I don't mean that Pinback is headbangin' metal music...they are anything but that.  This band makes "some of the most complex, postmodern indie pop happening on the West Coast."  They do some fascinating things with song structure and melody that keep my ear from getting bored.  The innovation with song structure reminds me of some of cooler songs by The Shins, but they don't sound like The Shins, really.  A good mix of mostly mellow electric guitar, synth, drums, with punk influences, and a relaxed vocal duet sound. I haven't heard a Pinback song I don't like.

Some of the songs that have caught my ear: Tripoli, Charborg, The Yellow Ones, and Offcell. 

The band isn't exactly new, having been around for about ten years.  They're just new to me! 

Thanks, Chris, for the recommendation...I'm going to enjoy exploring the rest of Pinback's music.

New Music: Le Loup

I'm starting a new feature on this blog, to follow a passion of mine: discovering new music.  I like to explore new artists and recent releases, and one of the coolest things about the Internet is that is makes it easier to do this exploration than ever. 

So, for the inaugural episode of the new music spotlight, I'm giving four thumbs up to Le Loup, a Washington D.C. based band that is making some waves.  They have an experimental, ethereal sound that is kind of a cross between Broken Social Scene and Robert Fripp.  I know, it sounds weird, but it works. 

Check out some of their songs on their Myspace page, here.  I particularly like Outside Of This Car, and you simply have to check out We Are Gods! We Are Wolves!

It's a refreshing and innovative new sound.  Kudos to Le Loup.