Negative Space: music
- Almost Famous
-
This is the best DVD I’ve seen yet. It has not one, not two, but three discs: the third disc is a CD with music by Stillwater, including the Led Zeppelin-like “Fever Dogs”. Thought the snippets of that song was cool, it was too bad they didn’t write the whole thing? Fret no more, they did write the whole thing, and at least five other songs, all on the CD.
- Along came Ray
- Ray Stevens takes on the health care takeover!
- Amazing Grace (Common Melody)
- Amazing Grace, by John Newton, with melody by Edwin O. Excell, 1900. This is the commonly-known melody for Amazing Grace.
- Amazing Grace (Uncommon Melody)
-
Amazing Grace, by John Newton, with melody by C.H. Warwick. This was apparently once a common melody for the song but is rarely heard now.
- Behind the crime: Is it murder if they’re Yankees?
-
Musings on writing the epic novel It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees, and its relation to current events in publishing, entertainment, and politics.
- Don’t be afraid of your Blue Period
- Repeat yourself. When you do something great, do it again. Repeat your best work until you know why it’s best.
- Face the Music
- MP3s are not the cause of the recording industry’s decline, they are the reason the recording industry remains afloat. The more successful the industry is in blocking open audio formats, the more the industry will decline in the long-term.
- Importing vinyl into iTunes
-
This script takes songs split by marker from SoundStudio and converts them directly into iTunes, setting track number, track total, and album name along with the song title.
- iTunes Alarm
-
Set up iTunes to start playing at a specified time, but to not play if you are on vacation and want to sleep in.
- Listen to the Music
- Apple’s new music store is a great step forward for music lovers, but it’s still a long ways from making music downloads as useful as buying a CD.
- M-Audio FireWire Audiophile
-
M-Audio’s FireWire Audiophile is a neat little device that adds high quality audio in and out via FireWire.
- MP3tunes.com: consumer-friendly music
- A new music download site from MP3.com founder Michael Robertson promises restriction-free, consumer-friendly music and more money for artists.
- Music
- Are you ready for that? Driving your car down a desert highway listening to the seventies and eighties rise like zombies from the rippling sand? I hope so.
- The music industry vs. itself
- Yet again, music industry executives are complaining that Apple, by making the iPod easy to use and by complying with the industry’s demand for restricting music, is standing in the way of progress.
- Napster on owning music vs. renting music
- Napster president Brad Duea says that owning music isn’t the point, we should just be happy for the experience of being around music.
- Pac-Man Fever
-
I was wandering around the record stores a couple of years ago when I saw a full-length album called “Pac-Man Fever”. I vaguely recognized the title, but knew it only as a single. Could I resist buying an album of songs about eighties arcade games? Of course not.
- Piano notation reference sheet
-
The “piano” script from 42 Astounding Scripts has several options. You can see them via the --help argument, of course, but here’s a cheat sheet you can print to card stock for easy reference.
- A Song of Thanksgiving: America, the Beautiful
-
America, the Beautiful, by Katharine Lee Bates, with melody by Samuel A. Ward.
- That you may not be the martyred slaves of time
- That you may not be the martyred slaves of time, get drunk. Get drunk and never pause for rest. And listen to the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem.
More Information
- Billion Dollar Babies•
-
It’s difficult to say that an Alice Cooper album is “best” because they’re all so good, but Billion Dollar Babies probably comes closest. This album remasters it and comes with a second disc filled with live versions and outtakes.
- City Nights/Frequency• (CD)
-
Some amazing new wave songs here; Nick Gilder was a unique bit of the end of the seventies and these are his two best albums as far as I’m concerned. If you were around in the seventies, you’ve heard Hot Child in the City from City Nights, but the real highlights are the retro-futuristic songs from the rest of the album, which continued into Frequency. “I’m not clinging to my yesterdays. Tomorrow waits with a hungry gaze. It goes by like a trick of the eye. Still alive to take our chances as we go on into the eighties.” (Nick Gilder)
- Rip. Mix. Burn
-
“It’s your music. Burn it on a Mac. Dig?”
- The Undocumented Mark Steyn•
-
This is a great collection of Steyn’s writings from 1987 to 2014. Which means it references everything from books (Salman Rushdie, 1990) to politics (most of the book) and back to music (Stephen Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer, Steyn’s 2014 song of the week).
- Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video
-
You probably have to remember this song when it originally came out to truly enjoy this spoof, but I have been watching it over and over again for the last two days. It is just amazingly funny. Most of the “literal videos” I’ve seen afterwards are too literal; but Total Eclipse doesn’t just describe, it penetrates to the evil heart of the eighties. A lot of music videos used dream sequences, apparently out of the belief that things don’t have to be coherent in dream sequences. After a while videos dropped the dream sequence pretense because incoherence was the norm. At least this one didn’t have the band randomly pop up with their…
- rites of passage• (CD)
-
The best Indigo Girls album, because it was the first one I listened to. “Galileo’s head was on the block. His crime was looking up the truth.” (Indigo Girls)
