Because I don’t have anything else intelligible left in me today, here’s a song titled “Barely Out of Tuesday” by Counting Crows that never fails to pull me inside out and then back again.

This is apparently the only recording of the song. I have the show at which it was played sitting in a CD case from back in my trading days. The girl that he mentions in the beginning is Courteney Cox I do believe. She appeared in “The Long December” music video.

I woke up Wednesday morning,
Sometime Wednesday evening,
Hoping for a piece of something easy to believe.
When you live out on the border
Of everything and nothing
There’s nothing but waking and dreaming.
I’m barely out of Tuesday.
There’s no one to receive me,
And nothing is changing.
Maybe you could leave a light on (leave a light on) for me.

This post is more to test a new plugin than anything else, but I may post some periodic song mash-ups as I see fit using the plugin. See here for more information.

Sweet. It works!

Sounds like a computer generated drum part underneath a lightly muted, upbeat clean guitar riff. An electric guitar riff follows.

You’ve got some nerve coming here. You’re so in awe. Give it back. Good morning, Mr. Magpie. How are we today?

Couldn’t make out the next lyrics. Wall of sound slowly creeps in midway through the first chorus and then fades. Back to mostly the guitar and drums, then to a Eraser-espue beat and some “ooohs” from Thom. This continues for awhile and gets markedly louder. Another verse follow accompanied by the muted guitar and second guitar.

You know you should. But you don’t.

The guitars are getting a little more driven as the second chorus ensues.

Good morning, Mr. Magpie. How are we today? They’ve stolen all my magic and took my melody.

The song ends with a sustained note that eventually fades to Little By Little.

Mellow, upbeat vibe with lots of ethereal sounds in the background.

Rating:

More to come later this weekend.

Enchanting brief opening dubbed over by a synth beat (a la “Eraser”), which is followed closely by some snares playing an almost march-like rhythm. Lyrics begin after about a minute. I won’t attempt to analyze the lyrics because I won’t be able to understand some of them. Heavy reverb on Thom’s voice. Various synth loops are playing over the vocals while the march beat continues.

Thom switches to falsetto in the next portion of the song, the melody of which seems to be mirrored by some more synth stuff. Multiple layers of Thom’s voice in the background. Enter a mellow horn part, which becomes layered with more horn sounds and concluding in a wash of high pitches and then back down.

Thom’s vocals continue shortly after. The march hasn’t stopped. Horns can be heard again in the background with heavy layering. At about 4:50, the song is winding down with more Eraser beats and echoed loops.

The soaring horn section in the middle seemed to nicely reflect the title of the song.

Rating:

12:15 a.m. (or thereabouts) Feb. 19

So, I’ve live-blogged a time or two on this site, most recently, New Year’s Eve 2011, but I’ve never live-blogged the first listen of a new music album. I thought it might be a good time.

Today just after midnight, I paid the $14 and downloaded Radiohead’s new release, “The King of Limbs” (available here).  I thought for a second about how to best convey my initial listening of the album, and posting a series of Twitter messages initially came to mind. But I figured, I do own this space, so might as well put it to good use, especially since live blogging seems all the rave these days. I think I’ll live blogging my dachshund’s bowel movements one day. That should draw a hit or two to the site (It’s late. I think I am allowed some levity here).

But back to the music. Radiohead is well known by now for their innovative and groundbreaking knack for making music. Their last release, “In Rainbows,” was — dare I keep up the imagery? — a kaleidoscope of warming sound, from the stripped bare and falsetto-esque, “Nude,” to the searching lyrics and lilting beats of “All I Need,” to the pulsating, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

While the music was grand, I actually thought “In Rainbows,” coming in at 10 tracks, was a bit short to hold up against “OK Computer” and “Hail to the Thief.”  That said, “Kid A” only featured 10 tracks as well, and it was nothing short of masterful.

Thus, as I look at the eight tracks presented to us on “The King of Limbs,” I’m admittedly a bit skeptic, for if the 10 tracks of Kid A made it a excellent album, an eight-song album had better arrest the listener’s soul with every tick of a second. Here is the track listing for The King of Limbs:”

1. Bloom
2. Morning Mr Magpie
3. Little By Little
4. Feral
5. Lotus Flower
6. Codex
7. Give Up The Ghost
8. Separator

And here is an article from The New York Times on the release.

Without further adieu and with headphones firmly in place, here we go.

Following is a new release from Coldplay called “Christmas Lights,” and in pure Coldplay fashion, we have a subdued introductory, buildup, soaring keyboards, lots of talk about things shining and, of course, an ever ascending vocal part.

It’s an agreeable enough song. I would like more rock acts write original Christmas songs. Of course, in parts, the new video is very similar to one of Coldplay’s newer tracks, “Life in Technicolor Part ii.” I think every subsequent Coldplay video should look like an elementary school production. I think they have a good theme going.

Here are both:

“Christmas Lights”

“Life in Technicolor ii”

I’m not always one to trumpet child, or even teenage, actors or musicians and the like, since they usually flame out well before their voice breaks, but this kid, Greyson Chance, manages to take a rather run-of-the-mill glam pop, dance track and actually puts some power and emotion behind it. After his recent appearance on The Ellen Degeneres Show, and one can only imagine, more upcoming appearances, he’s most certainly going to catch the eye of some producer with his cover of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi.” His vocal control and maturity at that age is absolutely remarkable. And the vocal thrust he puts toward the end was, to me, powerful and in a way, a little Thom Yorke-esque (If one listens to early performances of “Creep” from the early 90s), and far more musically intriguing than Lady Gaga’s version.

Here is the original video from a school talent show:

And here is the video from his recent appearance on The Ellen Degeneres Show, which I think may be even stronger than the prior performance. Do yourself a favor and skip the goofy dialogue at the beginning and forward to about the 5:30 minute mark.

While we’re on the subject, here’s a deliciously written commentary on Lady Gaga and pop itself by James Parker of The Atlantic, and in it, Parker writes that

Pop, real Pop, is a white-hot blank. It sizzles into materiality in the form of this body or that body, this voice or that voice; it drapes itself in allusions, symbols, trinkets, scraps of dazzlement. It can enter the world in triumph, with a bang, in a flash of beauty; or sordidly and crappily, filtering from the ceiling speakers of a Taco Bell or glimpsed on a screen through somebody’s lonely apartment window, a dismal flickering. It seeps into conversations, your everyday chitchat—“Did you hear …?” “Have you seen …?”—and you talk about it as if under a compulsion, like a sleepwalker, the syllables strange on your tongue. Plenty to say about Pop (although it repels intelligent commentary)—about its shapes and styles and so on. But always, always, at the core, an ecstatic and superheated Nothing.

The column, in itself, makes the case that Lady Gaga is at once, empowering and “eviscerating” the institution of pop (and herself?), that has, (my words here) grown ever more glamish, yet somehow disheveled, since the New Kids on the Block first belched those words, “Hangin’ Tough” in the 1980s. Like Gaga, Kurt Cobain, of course, was well aware of how the entertainment business had the potential, and his case, did, chew him up and spit him out. We get the foreshadowing in his “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which I would contend, single-handedly delivered the death of hard rock in its pre-alternative form:

And I forget just why I taste. Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile. I found it hard, it’s hard to find the will, whatever, nevermind.

Or, for Cobain, maybe it was the ever-gnawing stomach pains, or a combination of other ills, that precipitated his end.

Says Parker:

But should the fame make you really-truly famous—well, then you’ve got problems. Glare and shutter-whizz, the fan’s gaze weaponized: hiss the word … paparazzi. “Amidst all of these flashing lights,” moaned Gaga operatically at last year’s Video Music Awards, sprawled upon the stage, “I pray the fame won’t take my liiiiiife.” It was a prelude to her song “Paparazzi,” and within a few minutes she was spurting fake blood from her chest and being hoisted aloft in a mock hanging. In 1992, Kurt Cobain, amid much speculation about his mental and physical health, had himself wheeled onstage for Nirvana’s set at the Reading Festival, a hunched, averted figure in a white lab coat and platinum wig. Very Gaga, in retrospect. She too, in performance, will take to her wheelchair, or stagger along with a crutch—she has appropriated the arsenal of debility, of meltdown, train wreck, and personal disaster, as part of her style.

Parker, near the conclusion of the article then references Madonna, who was, or is, nothing if she isn’t a pop star. Yet, Gaga has gone a step further:

Gaga is post-Madonna and therefore freer: bandaged in yellow police tape or pounding at the piano with one leg up on the keyboard, she fears no trespass on her dignity. There’s nothing in Madonna’s videography comparable to the John Waters–esque sequence at the end of Telephone, in which a mass poisoning is perpetrated and fried food falls in lumps from people’s mouths. What does it mean, the image of an aproned Gaga turning a diner into a vomitorium? It means gaga, it means gagging, it means nothing. Or rather, right now, somehow, it means Pop. And who will be post-Gaga? Nobody. She’s finishing it off, each of her productions gleefully laying waste to another area of possibility. So let’s just say it: she’s the last Pop star. Après Gaga, the void.

Quite possibly Dave Matthews Band’s best album yet — Indeed, Rolling Stone awarded the record that distinction in June 2009 — Big Whiskey and The GrooGrux King is more or less a tribute album to the late LeRoi Moore, who died in August 2009 in an ATV wreck. Moore was DMB’s saxophonist. The album is also, more or less, the band’s most inward-looking project to date, the lyrics of which deal with questions of ultimate meaning. Matthews, in the past, has not shied away from talking about death and the big questions of life in other works. A few examples are worth mentioning. In “Lie In Our Graves,” he speaks of a person being content and resolved with one’s choices in life:

I can’t believe that we would
lie in our graves
Wondering if we had
spent our living days well
I can’t believe that we would
lie in our graves
Dreaming of things that we
might have been.

And in Gravedigger, Matthews recasts characters who either lived long, prosperous lives or who were cut short. The verses serve as vignettes of individuals, while the chorus reads:

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain

“Big Whiskey” (Lyrics to the album can be found here), however, offers the most sustained DMB look at life’s deepest questions, and the message seems to be that human existence, always with the Moore’s life as context, presents opportunities for far more exquisite joy, marvel and transcendence than any of the preachments offered by religion. GrooGrux, I should note, is either a nickname for Moore himself or for a group of various members of the band. After the introductory piece, a haunting and airy saxophone aria, in the second track, ”Shake Me Like a Monkey,” listeners are early on introduced to the direction the album will take:

The thing I like about you
Is the way you
The way that you do
The thing I like about you

God or the devil alone
Could not have made you up
The two must have worked as one together

So good just wanna eat you up
Nothing like the real thing
Lick your sticky fingers boy
And sing for your dinner sing

Come on pretty baby
Make me lose my mind
Everybody get together
Gonna make love shine

“Funny the Way It Is” was written with the same idea in mind as that of “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette. While not addressing religion directly, the DMB song does deal with the often perplexing idiosyncrasies of life in which, for example, a soldier may die serving overseas, while days or weeks later, his son or daughter is born fresh and anew in the States.

In “Lying in the Hands of God,” “God” is a metaphor for a beloved partner in love, in which the character in the song finds more heartening warmth, compassion and fulfillment in the soft touch of another, than in that of pronouncements coming from the faithful:

Save your sermons for someone that’s afraid to love
If you knew what I feel then you couldn’t be so sure
I’ll be right here lying in the hands of God

If you feel angels in your head
Teardrop of joy runs down your face
You will rise

Matthews has made no bones about describing the next tune, “Why I Am,” as being about death itself, with Moore as the implicit subject. I referenced the song in the introduction to this blog here. Matthews told Relix magazine:

This song is definitely about death. The whole thing of ‘When my ghost takes me from you, you will remember the fool that I am, so don’t cry, baby don’t cry.’ The urgency of living, I think, is very present in this song. We played it once in [the initial group improv sessions in] Charlottesville, and Roi said ‘I love that jam.’ The horns on that particular song are from that first time we ever played it, before it was really a song, before it had a chorus or any bridges; from that, we have Roi’s performance.

I believe this song to be the most crushing critique of religion on the album. It addresses the many contradictions in which humanity, particularly immature and frightened and unlearned humanity, first attempted to mount the heights from a stupified understanding of life, Earth and the cosmos to the evolution of religion and the many injustices it has heaped on humanity, slavery, the Crusades and the biblically-ordained burning of innocent women thought to be witches, being only a few among them. Here are a some excerpts from the song:

I grew from monkey into man
Then I crushed 15 million with a wave of my hand
I grew drunk on water turned into wine
‘Til I was slave and master at the same damn time

It’s why I am
It’s why I am
Why I am still here dancing with the GrooGrux King …

A king of men it makes no sense
When I bow to the priest
While I worship the witch

It’s why I am always the one to make you smile
It’s why I am still a snake in the woodpile
Why I am still here dancing with the GrooGrux King …

It’s why I am unlikely to agree
It’s why I am climbing out of my monkey tree
Why I am still here dancing with the Groogrux King
We’ll be drinking big whiskey while we dance and sing
And when my story ends it’s gonna end with him
Heaven or hell I’m going there with the Groogrux King

These lines seem to most heavily reference evolution and man’s ascension, or descension if we read Darwin, from lower forms of life. And I also get the sense that, at the same time, it’s summoning the Bible’s story about Adam and Eve in the garden with its “snake in the woodpile” line, since man, indeed, became cursed directly because of influence from the serpent in the garden. This assumes, of course, that we take the biblical story in Genesis to be literally true, which, of course, it’s not. But this does not mean, however, that we can’t look at the story in literary terms and draw analogies from it.

The next song, “Dive In,” presents a character that seems to be gripped by both the more ugly details of our reality, poverty, for instance, but yet glories in the simple and natural pleasures of melting ice and summer’s coming on:

Tell me everything will be OK
If I just stay on my knees and keep praying
Believing in something
Tell me everything is all taken care of
By those qualified to take care of it all

Wake up sleepy head I think the sun’s a little brighter today
Smile and watch the icicles melt away and see the waters rising
Summer’s here to stay and that sweet summer breeze will blow forever
Go down to the shore kick off your shoes dive in the empty ocean

One day do you think we’ll wake up
In a world on its way to getting better
And if so
Can you tell me
How

“Spaceman” again pits human traits, like the love of excess, and love itself against the other.

Not all bad but I’m a faithful sinner
I might get lost but I’ll be home for dinner
If God don’t like me he can send me to hell
But I love the way you love me girl
I love the way you move

I prayed to heaven to keep my place
But I looked in the mirror saw the devil’s face
I’d be a dog for a tail to chase
But I love the way you kiss me baby
I love the way you talk baby

All the freaks are on parade
I wanna fill my belly so I gotta get paid
Doesn’t everybody deserve to have the good life
But it don’t always work out
So cry cry baby if we must
But just remember
Just remember
I love the way you move baby

After the character says he’s a “faithful sinner,” which is another way of saying he’s wholly human, the third line pronounces, “If God don’t like me he can send me to hell, but I love the way you love me girl.” This is yet another way Matthews seems to always comes back to trumpeting the human experience over religious preachments. The line just mentioned, admittedly, is a simply-worded portrayal of the doctrine of eternal judgment, since doctrinally, God doesn’t send people to hell outright, but he does so implicitly by being both all-powerful and all-loving enough to see that not a single person is harmed, spiritually or otherwise, and yet does nothing to prevent it.

Sonically, “Squirm” appears to be the most ominous of them all, with its injunctions to

Don’t be dead before you die
Hunger ’til fed
Give love instead
And when it gets inside
Watch the dead man squirm
Above all things
If kindness is your king
Then heaven will be yours
Before you meet your end

“Alligator Pie” is a remembrance on the Hurricana Katrina tragedy in New Orleans, and it sheds light on religious announcements that commonly, predictably and contradictably claim the Lord should invariably be praised when living people are found among the drenched ruins, but the devil and our fallen world are to blame for those among the dead:

Storm went right on by
Thanked the Lord everybody’s alright
Don’t mean to throw off a second line
But the devil broke the levee and left us here to die

Nearly incessantly, in the most musically frenetic song on the album, “Time Bomb,” religious themes continue:

If Martians fell from the sky
What would that do to God
Would we put the weapon down
Or aim it up at the sky
No one would believe it except the fuckin’ nut jobs
They’d laugh and cry “we told you so!”

Baby when I get home
I wanna believe in Jesus
Hammer in the final nail
Help me pick up the pieces

With a beautiful and inspirational chorus, “You & me” continues the album’s ubiquitous conversation with Moore’s memory, as the band member’s friends, or alternatively, a beloved. I can only assume Moore was beloved by his bandmates as well, but it’s often difficult to determine, just from song lyrics, whether the meaning is toward love among best friends or love among romantic friends. Regardless, the final song seems to leave the religious diction altogether in order to focus on “you & me” traveling to see what marvels might lie at the end of the world. And, perhaps, the end of the world might imply the boundary at which our human experience or scientific discovery meets its endgame, thus touching, and coming full circle, to the unknowable, or if we insist, the eternal. We can only wonder as to the ultimate meaning, of course, but here are the final stanzas of the record:

You and I we’re not tied
To the ground
Not falling but rising
Like rolling around
Eyes closed above the
Rooftops eyes closed
We’re gonna
Spin through
The stars

Our arms wide as the
Sky we’re gonna ride
The blue all the way
To the end of the world
All the way to the
End of the world
Oh and when the kids
Are old enough we’re
Gonna teach them to fly

You and me together
We can do anything
Baby you and me
Together yes yes
The two of us together
We can do anything baby
You and me together
Yes yes

We can always look back
At what we did
Always the memory of
You and me baby
But right now it’s you
And me forever girl
You know we can do
Better than anything that
We did you know that you
And me we can do anything

You and me together
We can do anything baby
You and me together
Yes yes
The two of us together …

Ok, so Tuesday night, my computer seemingly went the way of the dodo. In short, the lesson learned is this: though I highly recommend the program, Ad-Aware, be careful when “cleaning” problems found on your computer. It will, apparently, assume you know what you are doing when you click “remove all” problems and allow you to toast your hard drive’s boot sector. I like to pretend I know what I’m doing some of the time when it comes to computers, but I made the mistake of lackadaisically clicking through to remove a certain number of files with issues. But on restart, the operating system did not come back up. The fans were running and the motherboard kicked on, but no boot.

Thus, begins my 2-3-hour-per-night journey inside the case, removing hardware, replugging, swiping the CMOS, replacing the power supply with another … all such annoying, tedious stuff. As frustration mounted, I finally posted the problem to fixya.com, and within a few minutes, I had a couple ideas of what could be the problem. One person suggested that Ad-Aware had (without warning me) deleted files in the boot partition, thus rendering the hard drive a nice, shiny rectangular object, but otherwise useless. For some reason, the BIOS, or anything for that matter, wouldn’t load using the current MOBO and set up, so I found an old computer I had laying around and stuck the hard drive in question in there.

I remembered I had an old EZ Install Boot Disk, and this other computer just so happened to be ancient enough to have a 3.5 floppy drive. So, after a couple ill-fated attempts, I finally managed to format the hard drive, insert the Windows XP CD (Yeah, from 2002) and start over. Once Windows was on the computer, I wanted to test the hard drive out in the newer machine.

Here is my ill-fallen machine on the right. The old one is pictured on the left.

Once sick computer, right, side-by-side the old, grizzled savior with entrails falling out

So I plugged the HD back in and nothing. I then guess that, while it could be a video card or MOBO problem, I really didn’t think so at this point (or at least hoped not). So, I tried changing out the power supplies in the two machines, and lo and behold, it started up like a charm. I then proceeded to insert my other hard drive, and that didn’t go as well. The computer recognizes the drive, but it currently says “access is denied” when I try to access the folder with all my stuff in it. This was the important drive with the mp3s and other documents that I don’t want to lose. So, I’m still working on that. Worse comes to worse, I’ll get a recovery application and break into the drive Cell Block C-style, but hopefully that won’t be necessary. Now, I have to download iTunes and try to get all my music back in listenable form. Luckily, before this happened, I had backed up my music library to an external drive, and it, hopefully, sits peacefully in waiting.