Live music coming up

Wow, we have another gig coming up.What are the chances?

As last year, we're playing a lunch time show at the Druid Hills Artist Market. This is a great opportunity to cut work, see some great visual art and listen to good music. There'll be a nice big shady tent and good food where you can relax and let the tunes wash over you.

Part of what makes this so much fun is the great cross-pollination of musicians. Coincidentally, the line up includes a bunch of people who know each other, so we end up sitting in together and creating some interesting collaborations. Last year Shelle was unavailable to sing, but John Willingham joined me on classical guitar. This year I'm going to play drums for my friends Bob Ballou and Sarah Dmitri-Carlton, who are on just before Shelle and I play. John follows us, so with any luck we'll talk him into joining us for a song or two.

Come out if you can and bring the party with you!

Druid Hills Artist Market
1410 Ponce de Leon Avenue
Friday April 16th 
11:30 am (PB to play percussion with friends)
12:15 Shelle and Patrick play

Invitation Only

People ask me "d'you ever play out anymore?" or "what's happening with your music?" or similar daggers to the heart. I tell them, "these days we really only play when we're asked." The truth is, practicing and playing are great fun and don't intrude too much on our very busy three kid/two career life. But the work of promoting music is a different story altogether! emailing, calling, visiting venues and asking if we can play there, and then promoting shows, printing and hanging posters, blogging, sending email, and all that to get people through the door. Now that's a lot of work! I'll venture it's virtually impossible to successfully write music, play and record music, and promote music while holding down a demanding job and being even remotely attentive as a husband and father. But I could be wrong: maybe I'm just lousy at it!

Unwilling to give up music (or our family or the means of providing for our family), Shelle and I have settled on a fairly meager compromise: when an opportunity to play comes along, we take it! But we rarely seek out opportunities. I have my guitar and a drumset and my son's upright bass sitting in our bedroom to remind me I'm a musician, and we'll be playing a lunchtime show at the Druid Hills Artist Market in April. But we don't have a plan beyond that. I guess we'll just take it as it comes!

Baptist Coffee House

We played a show last night at, of all places, the First Baptist Church in Macon, GA. They do a quarterly "Coffee House" event to raise money for Habitat for Humanity, and invited us to play a couple of short sets along with some poets and other musicians, all of whom were quite good.

The audience was warm and receptive, and the atmosphere was great! Good coffee, pizza and sodas, and nothing to remind you it was a church basement beyond the genuine friendliness of the folks and the earnestness of the cause. On the whole, I find I preferred this to an audience of sullen nihilists. But maybe I'm getting old. After all, I do require glasses now to see the lyric sheets. Which I require because my memory isn't what it once was.

Here's what we played:

I Didn't Feel
Moonshiner (traditional)
101 Degrees
Angel Band (Ralph Stanley)
Stay Close to Me
She Walked Away

New, Quick Work

I used to write songs quickly, then make quick and dirty recordings of them, then stick them up on my old blog with a little write up and just go with it. I guess the reason I stopped doing that was because I quit recording stuff quickly, then I quit writing quickly, then I sort of quit writing.

Last night I once again wrote and recorded a quick song, so I'm posting it. When I say quick, I mean less than an hour from concept to uploaded. I was playing around responding to a great flash story about breaking up with the comma -- a story with no commas in it at all. So I wrote a brief narrative about a blues song with no "C"s in it -- neither the letter nor the note. Once I'd gone to the trouble of writing the ultra simple lyric (which really doesn't have any "C"s), I decided to go ahead and put some music with it. I cheated on the key though: it's in G, which does, in fact, contain plenty of "C"s.

Well, without further fluff, here's "Break of Day":

[Break Of Day]

Live at the Attic

Back in April, Shelle, Matt and I had the pleasure of performing at Eddie's Attic in Decatur in support of the Atlanta chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I've used this space in the past to write about this cause and how important it is, and we were pleased to participate again this year.

As an added bonus this year, AFSP and the folks at the Attic teamed up to record the event, and the masters were passed along to me for editing. The bad news is, I've been really busy with all sorts of things, and I've only edited about half the performances. But the good news is, we were the first act and I started at the beginning. So our songs were among the first ones I finished. So while I work on the rest of the shows, I'm posting a link here to download the MP3 of our performance of "She Walked Away" from Eddie's Attic last month.

Enjoy!

Download She Walked Away

Promotion

I suck at promoting my own music. Always have. In fact, sometimes I think I have a self-sabotage thing going on.

Way back in college, me and some friends had a band called "Fits of Rage." We did not suck. In fact, given the mid-eighties college scene, we were pretty good. And with a little ambition, we might have done a thing or two. We kicked around and shared stages with kids who went on to play in very successful bands. And our drummer, Rob, was always sitting in with the best musicians and toured with some top acts after the F.O.R days. There were always some small-time industry people around, and folks would approach us after shows to talk about recording and that sort of thing. But we never even made a demo. We didn't return phone calls; we didn't re-print t-shirts when ours sold out; eventually, we petered out and went our separate ways.

In the mid-nineties, my folky acoustic group made a lo-fi recording in my apartment and got it on the air at the local college station. We gigged regularly in Athens and Atlanta, and we even got some decent press. The Atlanta Journal did a feature on open mike shows one night when we happened to play. The writer raved that we "gripped the audience with [our] tight . . . set"; while an Athens paper did an interview feature on the band, complete with photo layout and song (mis-)quotes. We drew crowds at the likes of Decatur's Eddie's Attic and Atlanta's Red Light Cafe, and people we didn't know knew who we were. So how did we capitalize on this momentum? We stopped playing in Athens altogether, cut back on the number of dates we played generally, and changed our name. How's that for guerilla marketing!?

So it should come as no surprise that in the age of the Interwebs, I have MyBook, SpaceFace, LiveBlogz, Twiggles, and all the rest, but I don't use these technologies for anything like a coordinated "promotional strategy." I have, however, started using a single tool to coordinate mailing list, press kit stuff, music downloads, and those sorts of things. It's called Reverb Nation, and it integrates with this page, with Facebook, and other services. I've had the account for some time, but they've been improving the service over the last year, and I've come to believe that the convenience of the thing outweighs my instinct to try to make everything "do it yourself" (an instinct that results in half-completed and abandoned projects).

So drop by the "Patrick and Shelle Bryant" profile on Reverb Nation and check out the downloads and the "be a fan" widget and whatever else is there. I'll be glad you did!

Nothing to Report

It's been over two months since my last post, and I don't think anything of musical note has happened since then. Oh, my mom gave us a Yamaha keyboard for Christmas. That's been fun. And I've touched base with our producer about getting the CD wrapped up. I have some great musicians lined up to play, but I still don't have drummer. The real challenge is the budget: we don't have one.

While I'm ruminating about nothing in particular, I'll brag about my kids. Their school had its annual "Peace Celebration" this weekend. Each class prepares and sings a song about peace in honor of MLK. Because it's Montessori, my boys (11 and 7) are in the same class. They sang "Dona Nobis Pacem," first in unison, then in a round. It was good. But the really amazing thing was, My 11-year-old son directed the class rather than the teacher. She had assigned him, along with a younger student, to learn the piece, teach it to the class, and conduct all the rehearsals. So when it came time for the performance she asked him to direct that as well. Needless to say, we were rather proud. And his little brother did a great job of singing too!

In the course of this rambling, I've thought of some actual things I want to write about. Which was sort of the point. So here's hoping I'll get off my duff and get back to being a music blogger this year!

-pb

Schola Cantorum

I don't think I've written here about choral singing and how much I love it, how much a part of my life it's been since I was a child. I always sang in church choirs as a child and youth, and I sang in the touring and chapel choirs in college. We (Shelle and I) even sang briefly with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus under Robert Shaw, way back before we were married. Since then, we've sung with the occasional community group, but mostly with church choir.

The Schola Cantorum of the medieval church was the trained cathedral choir, a group of choral scholars. Now it's a (frankly pretentious) name often used for a professional or semi-professional choir at a liturgical church. Our church is not a cathedral. We're a small in-town Episcopal church with a 40-50 voice choir that divides among two services. Sometimes I'm the only bass singer at the early service. But our choir is quite good, regardless of which service you attend and how many singers show up. A few weeks ago, our newly-formed evensong choir -- our "Schola Cantorum" -- met to record some songs we had learned over the course of just three rehearsals, including the recording session itself. The evensong choir is a smaller version of the main choir, and though we're the ones singing on this recording, we're certainly no better than the larger choir. But I wanted to post a sample of what a 20 voice volunteer choir can sound like on a spur-of-the-moment recording. Perhaps this will illustrate why choral singing is so important to me.

Click to download/stream This Shining Night

Pushing

I'm a bit overwhelmed this week. We have a show Friday night (that's tomorrow), and since we don't play more than once a month or so, we really need to prepare. This show involves additional musicians who will play sets before we go on, and whom I've asked to join us for a couple of songs and then all join in for a show closer, so that means even more planning and more rehearsal than usual.

None of this would be such a big deal: I've got the set list mapped out and have run through everything, and Shelle and I will do another quick run-through tonight while our oldest son is at his ballet class. This will probably be a typical family rehearsal, standing in the kitchen with supper on the stove and our little girl sitting on the counter while we do our best to muddle quickly through the set list by skipping intros and instrumentals. It'll be enough. The big complicating factor this week has been my own bone-headed over-commitment in the interest of pushing myself to do something new.

I am not a classical guitarist. Not by a long shot. But it's something I'd like to learn and something I've dabbled with. So when I was asked some time back to play a guitar part as accompaniment on a Walter Pelz piece for the choir Shelle and I sing with, I said "sure." I didn't realize it would fall the Sunday after this Friday night concert, and of course I waited until this week to start learning the music.

Learning a classical piece -- even a relatively easy one -- is for me a very painful process of working through the notes and fingerings one measure at a time. That's because I don't really read music for guitar: I have to think too much about where a particular note falls on the fingerboard. Imagine trying to play piano if you only knew where to find the E and A below middle C and a D, G, B, and E above it. You could find the other notes on the keyboard, it'd take you some time to read through anything. That's approximately where I started this week trying to read the piece I need to play Sunday. We rehearsed with the full choir and flute last night, and it wasn't a total disaster. I've got it down well enough to chug along alright, and the second time through I had almost mastered my nerves enough to stop randomly plucking the wrong strings. But it's been a lot of work during a week when I haven't had a lot of extra time.

So it's been a long week already, trying to squeeze these painstaking rehearsals in when I could while keeping up with a crazy work schedule and the usual stops on the kid shuttle and so forth. In the end, though, I have to admit it's kinda cool. I'm enjoying the challenge of doing something that just a week ago felt like it was beyond my reach. So I guess I'll keep pushing for a few more days, then take a little break. Then I'm going to start working through the Berklee Method for Guitar that my friend loaned me. And maybe one of these days I'll take some lessons.

Can't Always Get What You Want

When I was a kid, I saw a Paul Simon concert on TV where he ended by saying, "Have a sweet and peaceful evening, everyone!" He was so sincere that you could almost ignore the cavorting unicorns and rainbows that seemed to radiate through the sentiment. Sometimes, when I read back through the kind of write-ups I often do after shows, I think about that sign-off. I'm always on about how magical and perfect everything was.

Well it ain't all sweet and peaceful. My last show -- two weeks ago now -- was the sort I'd just as soon put behind me. Luckily, the folks who came out were very forgiving -- they even tipped well! But I didn't give 'em much to work with. I was late getting started because I had little league baseball practice first, and I was pretty tired for the same reason. But that's not really a good excuse. I owe it to folks to be energetic and prepared when they take the time to come hear me play. Certainly, it was not an unmitigated disaster, but my energy really dragged and I had a couple of rather big, obvious gaffes. At one point, I felt suddenly led to play Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," but I let my mind wander until I could hardly remember the lyrics or the chords. Another time I played a very soulful version of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U," only to get my fingers on the wrong string on the very last chord, ending in horrible, glaring dissonance. Everyone just laughed at that, 'cause what else could you do? I also talked too much, including telling an actual joke that bombed.

Even a lousy show has highlights though. I played "Fake Plastic Trees" for the first time in about two years, and it felt great. Oddly enough, barely anyone in the audience knew the song. I had to explain that it was a Radiohead song. I also played a mini-set of lullabies, because when I should have been preparing for the gig the night before I had been instead trying to put my 3-year-old to sleep. And there was a little girl at the show who was really sleepy, and who lay down on a bench while her mom rubbed her back. That went over pretty well, even if it was a pretty big departure.

In the end, the feedback was positive, and that speaks well of a patient and generous audience. But I definitely learned my lesson about trying to wing it at the last minute! No more cruising in late and unprepared for me. From now on, I'm going back to preparing a set list and rehearsing!

REM Follow Up

My pal Lis caught REM in Scotland this weekend at T In the Park. She writes about the festival here with her usual wit and flair. You should go read it.

On a side note, I don't believe Lis was born when "Pretty Persuasion" came out on Reckoning. Just a guess. I wonder if they played that like they did in ATL . . .

behind on everything

I'm sitting here eating cold, leftover chicken nuggetty things of some sort, nursing a killer headache, and trying to figure out where the first half of the Summer went. Actually, I know where it went: it's scattered among little league baseball parks around the state of Georgia. My eldest son's all star team won the Dizzy Dean 10 Year Old Division B State Championship last week, thus concluding a baseball Odyssey that really started in February when we began the regular Spring season. It was an incredible, fun, humbling experience to watch these kids build the trust and stamina and friendship it takes to convert individual skill into a state championship.

But baseball is not what I meant to write about here. There are a few things I've meant to blog about but just flat-out haven't. One was a show I did on June 28th at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany. If you were there, perhaps you will agree it was just one of those shows where something indescribable happens and the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. Mickey Harte talked about this phenomenon in his book Drumming at the Edge of Magic as if the performers and the audience get caught up in some sort of spiritual vortex, participating together in a transcendent experience that neither truly controls.

That's a bit of hyperbole for my little corner of the creative universe, but the night was nice, and there were two absolutely fabulous opening acts: Barbara and Brandon. And my new friend Ron sat in here and there with a slide guitar, and Barbara played Jembe on "101 Degrees," and I just played what I felt like playing, and everything just rolled along. It was the kind of show that makes you want to quit your day job and just throw your fate to the wind. Until you remember that house payment and how you still have to feed and clothe and educate those three kids!

Speaking of great shows, the week before, on 6/21, Shelle and I saw REM at Lakewood Amphitheater. Holy Rock and Roll, Batman! What a show! They played 28 songs for the hometown crowd, and it was just absolute pure energy from start to finish. We had great seats with a good view of center stage, and the show was so good we didn't even mind so much paying $10 for crappy beer. There was a great mix of material from recent albums and old records, including some kickin' cuts like "Driver 8," "Rockville," and "Pretty Persuasion." Highlights included a hugely amped up version of "Harbourcoat," "Fall on Me" with the ex-Smiths (now Modest Mouse) guitarist Johnny Marr, and a beautiful acoustic "Let Me In" with mandolin and three guitars as well as organ (perhaps I loved that as much for hearing Shelle next to me singing harmony as for the performance). Really, though, it was a show of highlights.

On the recording front: I got bupkis. Nada. We haven't done any because we've been too busy with baseball. I have, though, been working on some new songs and making some scratch demos using a neat little digital recorder I borrowed from my neighbor, Dennis. In that same vein, I'm excited to be collaborating a bit with a MySpace friend Heather Fowler. Heather is a very talented writer -- novelist, poet, short fiction author -- who made the "mistake" of expressing an interest in my songs and in songwriting. A couple of emails later, we were swapping melodies and lyrics on our way to a co-written song.

And finally, one more note: My good friend Bud Buckley has had a couple of songs at the top of the Internet charts in the UK. Man, that just blows me away! You can go vote for him here at the Loneboy store. Let's get him back in the #1 slot!

Nice Night at the Monkey

Look at me, writing a post about a show! I played solo last night at Java Monkey -- my musical home away from home -- and in spite of various harbingers of doom, it turned out to be a good night.

The signs things might not go well started with logistics. I had to miss my son's baseball game for the show, and we had some carefully scripted planning go awry when the auto shop called just before 5:00 to say the van wouldn't be available after all. We'd have to get a rental. When I dropped my PA gear off at Java Monkey, the stage temperature was about 85 degrees with 90% humidity. At least I wouldn't be cold! I went to park, keeping my guitar with me, and it dawned on me that I had not brought a microphone stand. Meanwhile, I drove around Decatur three or four times looking for parking, and finally ended up in the lower deck at the library (don't tell anyone). So I walked the three blocks or so back in the 90 degree heat carrying my guitar, and was pretty tired and grumpy by the time I was ready to start setting up.

But things turned around pretty quickly: some friends from college -- whom I haven't seen since college -- were there with their three kids. That was very cool, to say the least! And the always helpful JM staff set me up with a perfectly serviceable microphone stand, so I was able to get my rig set up and sound-checked without any further glitches. While I set up, more people I know filtered in so that, by the time I started playing, there was a nice audience out there on the patio.

Nothing to be done about the heat though. I just stood up there sweating, and I'm still a little dehydrated from it today. I started off with a John Hurt number, and I kicked it off in the wrong key (which I do about half the time). So I stopped and made some random dumb comments in an effort to cover my gaffe. When I started back -- in the right key -- I hoped no one would be the wiser. After the rocky start, seemed like things pinged along pretty well. I didn't really prepare a specific set list for the show. Instead, I recycled the list from when I played the Monkey last month, and I just kind of winged it as the mood struck. I played a couple of songs I haven't played in a long time, and I changed the order up a bit.

As often happens at Java Monkey, it felt more like a conversation than a "show." The room is small enough for me to go "off mic" a lot between songs and talk to folks, and we discussed the merits of murder ballads and the relative tameness of contemporary popular country music and such-like. I was bummed not to have Shelle with me, but it turned out to be a really fun night. I reckon I played for about an hour and a half. If you were there, thanks for coming!

School's Out For the Summer

Today is the last day of school for my kids. I was just thinking about how long it had been since I'd written anything here -- over a month. Wow. Well, I guess it's fair to say I'm in a bit of a Summer hiatus.

My original plan for the Summer was to take advantage of the slower schedule and really focus tightly on music. We had (have?) high hopes to get the record finished in June and try to play a lot of gigs. But two critical, path altering things have happened. One is, a really crucial server at work crashed, and the carefully devised disaster recovery plan seems to have been created by FEMA under the Bush administration. Which is to say, it might have been good at some things, but actually recovering from disaster wasn't one of them. As a result, everything I've done for a very long time was lost, and I'll be working for months just to get back to zero. Call it a really stressful form of job security.

The other thing is pretty fun: our oldest son asked for permission to try out for the all star baseball team for his birthday. We haven't let him in the past because we wanted to take a break from little league over the Summer. But this year we let him, and he made the team. And now we have baseball pretty much constantly. If we're not practicing or playing or driving to far-flung ballparks for tournaments, we're washing practice pants or uniforms or sliding shorts. Red Georgia dirt does really interesting things when layered with infield grass stains on thick, white polyester game pants.

But we do still find time for music. I'm playing a couple of gigs this month, and we played a really fun show in May at a big party. We were the last of a long line-up of bands to play, and darkness fell right as we took the stage, and a chill was settling in, and the sound system was great, and it was sort of a magical little set. It felt a little bit like the end of Spring.

So here's to Summer! To baseball and no school and crazy schedules. I may get into a music groove and write here a lot; I may hit another dry patch that lasts for weeks. Meanwhile, if you're in Atlanta, stop by JavaMonkey Thursday night and say hi!

Untouched by Suicide

We're playing a benefit for the Atlanta chapter of American Foundation for Suicide Prevention tomorrow night. Details here. Since signing on for that gig way back in December, I've been thinking about the subject of suicide and suicide survivors a lot. I wrote this essay some time back as a response to being asked to say something about why I was participating in the event.

---

Asked to say how I’ve been touched by suicide, I thought: I have not.

Unless you count Tommy when I went off to college. He sat alone in the cab of a friend’s pick-up back home, with his Remington and several boxes of ammo. While the cops closed in on him, he turned the gun around. It was a horrible death, and although I’d given him up with Tonka trucks, I wrote his mother how Tommy had been my hero once.

And before that there was Mr. Free from our church basketball league. Kevin came up to my house when his father, the pastor, had to go into the woods with Mrs. Free to claim her husband. Kevin guessed hanging, but it was a new shotgun from Service Merchandise and no note. Their oldest boy went running through the neighborhood all night shouting for his daddy, was what we heard.

Then there was Sarah, who showed up at Youth Group sometimes. Once I asked her out, and she smiled to say yes, but on second thought she made up some excuse. That was a week before she sat all night in the family station wagon, with the engine running and the garage door closed. Parents found her in the morning. After that they aged considerably, always trailing a sad happy-hour smell.

My friend Greg came home from college with me one weekend, and it turned out our dads had known each other at the same school. Dad was smiling graciously when he greeted us, but there was an edge to his joking, and you could just tell he and Greg’s dad hadn’t really been friends. Your daddy was the advisor on my hall in Winship. A real son-of-a-gun! Wrote me up just for having water in my sink. How is the old rascal?

Greg put on a smile and a bit more accent, just shy of sardonic. Why, I don’t rightly know. My daddy put a pistol in his mouth and shot the back of his head off when I was five.

Breaking an awkward silence, Greg went on. After that, my mom got us a puppy. Sometimes I’d throw it down the stairs, just so I could pick him up and comfort him.

People just hurled into shock and pain in the wake of this violence, and me thinking I’ve dodged that bullet. Well sure, I haven’t been hit hard like that dog thrown down the stairs. But by the simple calculus of the thing, I don’t suppose any of us can claim we’ve been untouched by suicide.

Good Old Days

Have you heard this radio commercial for ice cream? A brand that's supposed to "taste just like the good old days"? The ad consists entirely of a slick country song that starts out, "I remember our old country home. . . ." The song is in line with a lot of what's coming out of Nashville, what I've been hearing on commercial country radio when I listen. There's a great deal of misty nostalgia in these songs, and I gotta tell ya, a hell of a lot of it rings laughably false.

In the ice cream song, the speaker reminisces about "simpler times," and sets the bucolic scene with mama in the kitchen and the kids down by the swimming hole. At the climax of the song my family just laughs out loud: "Mama hollerin' through the screen / 'would you kids like some home made ice cream.'" Now, anyone who knows anything about home made ice cream, or the past, or mamas, should find this image comical in several ways. We've got the kids down in the creek while mama is supposed to be churning ice cream up at the house, presumably in the kitchen, just like she might bake a peach cobbler. And she's going to surprise our apple-cheeked kiddies with that yummy chilly goodness when it's all finished and ready to serve.

For starters, making ice cream is messy. Rock salt is dirty, and when you mix it generously with gobs of ice, you get a messy, corrosive run off. So you churn ice cream in the back yard, preferably on some patch of dirt where theres no grass to kill, or even better, where there are some weeds downhill you been meaning to get rid of anyway. And what's more, in the gauzy past of my youth, ice cream churns were mostly hand-cranked, so I'm sure that in this "simpler time and place" of the song, mama ain't got no fancy electric churn. If you've never taken a turn at hand-cranking an ice-cream churn, let me tell you something: it's bursitis-inducing, back-breaking, mama-pissing-off work. You get as many people over to help as possible and you take turns.

If mama had been busy up at the house making ice cream for the kids, we're talking about cooking up custard, wrestling ice, handling dirty rock salt, turning that ass-whupping crank, and dealing with the messy run off. After all that, she ain't fiddin to sally over to the screen wiping her hands on her apron like Aunt B and sing out a friendly, "you kids want some ice cream?"

On the contrary, mama is stomping out onto the porch, hands red and hair flying, and she's hollering, "If you kids want some of this ice cream I'm a-churnin', you better get your sorry butts up outa that water and come help me! You think I'm doing all this for my health? Tell your daddy to come in from that barn and bring me some more ice or this isn't gonna set up. And somebody's gotta take a turn at this crank! I'm up here sweating like your aunt Edna at a square dance, and y'all just playing in that mud like you don't have a care in the world!

Silly as it is, this song would be right at home alongside some big country hits. Why, I'm surprised there're any farmers left in the fields; to listen to country radio, you'd think they've all pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville. Every time I turn around there's some song about "I'm a farmer like my daddy and his daddy before that / And I love Jesus and the flag, and you can tell it by my hat." I heard this song yesterday that was all about how great it is to be a Southern man because of our traditions of farming and respect for women and family and love of Jesus and all that. And I was thinking, hmm. I'm a Southern man, and all the men in my family are Southern men, and I gotta tell you, I have to look pretty long and hard to find someone like the gentle, faithful character this song describes as the stereotype. Don't get me wrong: I love my family and I'm proud of my heritage, but you gotta take the crunchy with the smooth, folks. It's true that we southerners are not all a bunch of nine-fingered, cross-burning, wife beating hayseeds. It is also true that I have been to a family reunion where a man was wearing a klan t-shirt (not a blood relative), that I have heard shockingly bigoted statements uttered by people I love, that I have seen families torn apart by neglect and ignorance and even violence on the part of men who probably see themselves as good Christians. There's nothing especially southern about the flaws in the people I know, but for some reason Nashville has decided that the South needs it's own special brand of flawlessness.

Happy Birthday to Us

Shelle and I are turning 40 over the next couple of months. We're celebrating with box seats for REM. We just bought them with the help of a friend who (through some mysterious means) had access to advanced purchasing. The last time we saw REM they were touring Monster, and the acoustically dubious Atlanta Omni still existed as a rock venue. We waited in line before daylight at a Publix store out in the sticks with a bunch of friends to get a low lottery number, and still our seats sucked.

Of course, we'll have to sell the kids for scientific experiments to pay for them, but sacrifices must be made. Well, that will help with the babysitting, which will put the cost right over the top. Actually, our oldest will be jealous when he learns he's not going: he loves REM. Especially Document and Life's Rich Pageant. And the middle child loves their cover of "Superman." But alas, they will have to remain at home.

Speaking of concert costs and of the Omni, I remember paying $17 to see Van Halen when I was maybe 15 or 16, and we lamented then the rising cost of live music. Ha. These tix were >$80 each before all the usury fees. Well, we haven't had a big splurge show since Shelle bought Paul Simon tickets for me at double face value for the Surprise tour, which turned out to be worth every penny, so here's hoping!

Famous in China

OK, not really famous. Better to say "bootlegged in China," but I think this is kind of cool. Every now and then, I look at log files on the server where my mp3s reside to see if anyone is listening to the songs. Mind you, these aren't pretty charts or graphs; just raw server records that might look something like this:

xx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [17/Mar/2008:12:51:13 -0400] "GET /player/dep_noauto.xml 
HTTP/1.1" 200 1336 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; 
rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12"

Using my mad h4x0r skillz, I can write little scripts to parse these and look for things like "how many visitors downloaded an mp3 in the month of March"; or "what's the most commonly downloaded song on my site."

While doing just such an analysis recently, I noticed that one song was rather more popular than any other. And I don't mean five percent more popular; I'm talking about five times more popular. Hmm, that's strange. I mean, I like that song just fine, but it's not like "Stairway to Freebird" or something. This would require some investigation.

I scanned the logs manually, looking for any pattern that might provide a clue. I didn't need Velma and a box of Scooby Snacks to discover the regular repetition of a single URL where the referring server should be: http://music.soso.com.

I typed the URL into a browser and it brought up a Chinese site that seems to be some kind of music clearing house. I saw what looked like a search box (I couldn't be sure since all the text was Chinese) so I typed in my name and hit enter. Sure enough, there was a link to my song Shudder, along with the helpful (if totally inexplicable) title "Anniversary."

Of course, if my song were an actual Chinese hit, it would generate as many downloads in a few minutes as I'm seeing in a month. But it's still pretty interesting to see what a little bit of bootlegging can do for your stats. So here's what my friends in Kunming are raving about:

Download Shudder

Love to Hate Rhapsody

I've been a paying "Unlimited" subscriber to the Rhapsody music service for a couple of years now. And dammit, I hate Rhapsody. But I just can't give up the streaming access to all those hundreds of thousands of records.

Here's why I'm griping right now: I'm in the mood to listen to the Rolling Stones. Now, the Rhapsody music client is really, really slow on the old computer I run it on, so you've got one good shot at finding what you want before you get annoyed and give up. So I go to the search box (after slowly, painfully logging in for the fourteenth time; 'nother story). And I type "exile on main street" and select "Album" for the type of search. Then I hit "go" and walk away. I walk away because if I stand there I will get really mad and pull my hair out waiting for the search to come back. And I don't have the hair to spare. After doing some other things (work, like), I come back to find the message, "sorry, we couldn't find an album matching the search "exile on main street." Long story short, they had it cataloged under "st." rather than "street." That kind of thing drives me up the wall -- they can't implement abbreviation expansion in their search algorithm? Hell, they could just use proximity to come up with the right album.

So here are some other things that piss me off about Rhapsody, in no particular order:

1. When they have an outage and you contact customer service, they NEVER admit they've had an outage. They always refer you to a trouble shooting FAQ.

2. If you use the web client, you can stay logged in forever. It doesn't work very well and crashes your browser, but by golly those cookies persist like herpes! The real client? Forget it. Stop playing music for a few minutes and you're back into 30 second sample hell until you log in again.

3. Login from the desktop client is a pain in the ass and takes forever.

4. Playing a CD on your own damn machine contacts Rhapsody, logs you in (see number 3), and subjects you to occasional network stutters and other annoyances.

5. Sometimes the client just gets stuck between songs and keeps playing the last few seconds of a track. Man, I hate that. It even does it when you're listening to a CD. And each upgrade to a new version of the software preserves the old problems.

So why don't I cancel my account? Well, at the end of the day, $12 a month, or whatever it is, is a pretty fair price to pay for access to a gigantic catalog of music. And when it's working, it's pretty great. Like right now (I finally got what I want), I am listening to Exile, and after that I may dial up Bob Dylan's Live 1966, aka the "Royal Albert Hall" bootleg. A couple years ago, we put all our old stereo gear in storage and replaced with a laptop hooked up to a nice powered speaker/sub-woofer system and a high speed Internet connection. And for parties, I hook it up to a PA system out in the back yard. And Rhapsody employs some "editors" whose ears I've grown to trust and who put together rockin' play lists or "radio" stations.

So the library kicks, but the software . . . feh. I wish they'd just start over.

Bring Back Shuffletown

How come no one has ever heard of Shuffletown? I'm all the time mentioning it to music people as a record that had a big influence on me in the early 90s when I was struggling to find my voice as an acoustic musician after years of playing fast, hard, and loud, but I rarely meet anyone who even knows Joe Henry, let alone this great album.

It was originally released in 1990, but I didn't get it until 92 or 93 when a good friend gave me a cassette copy. Even thenI couldn't find the CD in the local record stores. And of course this was pre-Internet (at least in the shopping sense).

Evocative of The Trinity Sessions, Shuffletown was recorded live to 2-track tape and produced by T Bone Burnett. The sparse arrangements with instruments like mandolin and violin and muted trumpet draw you into the room and into the beautiful melodies in a way that make the words almost superfluous. But the lyrics are, by and large, pretty great too. Though occasionally vague, they're mostly vivid and compelling without being overly artsy or hifalutin. Shuffletown is easily in my top 10 or so records of the 1990s.

And yet the CD is out of print and I've lost my cassette copy! On the Internet, I can choose among a handful of used copies in varying conditions for about $30 (after shipping), or I can step up to a "collectible" copy pushing $50. There's no (legal) digital source anywhere that I can find. Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.fm . . . . Forget it. Every other Joe Henry album I can listen to on these services or order new, but not my favorite! So what gives?

It reminds me of when we bought a five-speed station wagon several years ago. We had to pay top dollar because it was such a rare car. Then when we tried to trade it in, the same dealer low-balled us because it was such an unusual car. Jeez.

(I know: don't tell me about specialized demand and how time-sensitivity creates an over-supply of exactly one when you've got an odd-ball item you need to move. I'm not looking for rational explanations; I want sympathy!)