Category: Music

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...And Little E Makes 3 Music

Into the mouths of babes

Peekaboo
Nobody under here but me and my binky!

Luke Skywalker demonstrates the Evan ManeuverEvan’s latest thing is to grab any blanket, washcloth, or burp rag within reach…and cover himself with it to play peekaboo with whoever happens to be around, two-legged or four-legged. Of course, when he’s pulling that stunt, you have to make sure he hasn’t hooked his binky with one finger and yanked it out – if so, there’s a better-than-even chance that he’s sticking his fist into his mouth and trying to massage his sore gums that way, i.e. not the way we want him to (see informative demonstration diagram at right). We’ve bought him orthodontic binkies, he loves ’em, but he also can’t resist the urge to shove his whole fist in there (or hurt himself trying). At best, it’s not a habit he needs to be forming; at worst, he’s going to wind up with some very misguided ideas about the sport of boxing. (Insert obligatory Mike-Tyson-biting-off-body-parts joke here.)

Other than that I’m not sure I’ve been doing much in the past few days that’s blogworthy, other than inventing the word “blogworthy”. I listened to quite a bit of music on Sunday while doing the farm thing (Evan was hanging out with his grandparents, while his mom was out of town, but the inaugrual Great Saturday Night Baby Sleepover didn’t happen for a variety of reasons…which was actually okay with me). I’ll see if I can sum up the stuff I listened to in five words or less each:

Sara Bareilles (or however one spells it – I just mentally call her “Vedek Bariel” and be done with it): strong start, very average later.
E.S. Posthumus’ new double album Cartographer: need to listen to more.
The Best of Meco: surprisingly good – original recordings, yay!
Liam Finn’s I’ll Be Lightning: damned good – best apprenticeship ever.
Split Enz’s Rootin’ Tootin’ Luton Tapes: intersting alternates, mixed bag outtakes.

Man, why do I even need a music review section around here? Oh yeah…because the above makes almost no sense.

I cooked steaks and veggies for dinner tonight, and in the space of 30 minutes it curiously went from “delicious” to “I didn’t like it”. I’m still scratching my head on that one. Ah well, more for me.

Out of nowhere today I had a bit of a revelation about a song I’ve been writing the music to in my head for a year or four, and it was one of those things where, when you hear it in your mind’s eye (ear?), it instantly turns the corner from “vague idea for a tune” into “a real song”. Again, getting back to my goal of starting to record some of this stuff before the year is out, I realize that me talking about that does absolutely nothing for anybody without being able to hear it. I think the guitar’s going to be coming out of the case pretty soon. Betcha Evan’s gonna love that.… Read more

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Music

Earl’s Best Of 2007 Mix

Everyone seemed to love it last year, so here we go again:

[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/mix2007.mp3]

This year I decided to take the bizarre step of mixing soundtrack and non-soundtrack music together, so get ready for a wild ride. The track list (and links to the relevant CD reviews where applicable) are as follows – but don’t read the list until you’ve listened to the whole track! … Read more

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Music

Fun with music

Despite being exhausted, I haven’t been able to sleep yet tonight because my brain is pounding on the inside of its container begging me to use it to do something. So on the spur of the moment, I started and completed work on this year’s Scribblings Music Mix. You may remember this feature from last year – I assembled “best of 2006 soundtracks” and a “best of 2006 not-soundtracks” mixes that you could stream from the blog, and man, was that popular. I got as many e-mails as comments on it. This year, I decided to really screw with everyone’s head and put both the soundtrack and non-soundtrack pieces all in one mix, and did my best to make them all sound like they went together, joining stuff that ended in a particular key to other stuff than began in the same key – where possible. I tried to keep “full stops” and clumsy edits to an absolute minimum. Only stuff with a 2007 street date was allowable, though some of the absolute best stuff to street in 2007 (IMHO) was bonus material on catalogue reissues, or music from the vaults that just hadn’t been released until now. It’s all about 15 minutes long, and in listening back to it, I’m hearing thematic links that I didn’t know were there – sort of like my subconscious was in on the song selection. In some places it’s a little bizarre, so I don’t know if everyone who really dug last year’s mixes will like this one as much with the whiplash-inducing (and yet disturbingly tuneful) gear shifts. As with last year’s, the mix will only be up for a limited time, probably with the nifty Christmas Eve update, which also includes a dandy Toybox article from Flack which will finally answer the question “Who in the world were those space-type guys?”

Heck, I might put last year’s mixes up too, just for laughs. For those waiting for me to put up or shut up about what kind of radio show or music podcast I would inflict on the world, you will soon have the answer. 😆… Read more

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Home Base Music

Crash (minus time)

Reset the clock at 33 minutesIt finally happened to me tonight. The crash. My sister-in-law has been gleefully predicting it, oh, since about the time I started staying home with Evan while my wife went back to work. I suppose I had to know it was coming too. But it finally hit me this evening like a bag of bricks once my wife got home from work a bit later than usual. She came home after I’d been sitting on the toilet for a few minutes (and believe me, I wouldn’t belabor you with that detail if it wasn’t important to the story), a few minutes during which Evan had started getting fussy (see, I told you). He was at a full-bore wail by the time she walked in the door, and I wasn’t exactly in a position to get up and fix the problem; she immediately went to get him and determined that he and I were suffering from exactly the same problem at the same time! 😆 Anyway, I told her that I hadn’t gotten any nap time in, at all, and had only gotten a couple of hours sleep on Sunday night due to assorted fussiness and a full-blast crying fit, so I needed to take a nap.

For the first time since Evan was born, I woke up exactly eight hours later. My wife has evidently taken Evan, Olivia and Oberon to the master bedroom and closed the door. I’m assuming that I’m in the doghouse now, since I didn’t stay awake to prepare a meal or do the other stuff I usually do in the evenings.

The last thing I remember is looking into the living room from the bed in the nursery – things are lined up such that I can look through two doorways and see what my wife is doing on the couch – because Evan started crying while trying to nurse. I asked her what the problem was, and she said “[Arkansas football coach] Houston Nutt just quit! Didn’t even stay for the bowl game!” Now, I know, and I know that I said out loud, that no son of mine would be upset over that, and she said I needed to come in there and watch the news. And that’s the last thing I remember. My head hit the pillow with a resounding thud and I woke up almost exactly eight hours later with only Othello for company.

The problem has been that my body clock hasn’t so much been “rewired” by the baby as “dropped into a bathtub while still plugged into the wall outlet and short-circuited”. I’m taking care of him on an average 18-20 hours a day, with Sundays and Tuesdays as my only break. Sundays are still “work my ass off on the farm” days, so let me tell you, that’s not much of a break. The rest of the time, if I’m not already wide awake, my body expects to be woken up at three-hour intervals by the high-pitched announcement that I need to mix up a bottle of yum for my little buddy’s tum. (Yes, it’s official. With almost no one-on-one contact with the outside world, I have, in fact, descended into BabySpeak.) My wife will take the baby to sleep with her a couple of times a week, but even then, I wake up three hours after “I’m doing this so you can catch up on your rest” begins, and I cannot get back to sleep. It’s not because I get up and get on the internet or play games or watch TV; I think it’s become blazingly obvious that my internet presence has diminished tremendously over the past few weeks, often because the three-hours-of-sleep-at-a-time thing doesn’t do much for my clarity of thought for writing purposes either.

It’s like having a battery that you charge to only 1/4 of its capacity, and then you take it off the charger and use it in your camera, phone, iPod, laptop, what have you. Sure, it gets stuff done for a little bit. But you have to put it back on the charger sooner rather than later, and eventually it can’t hold a charge at all. And that was me tonight.

Please don’t think that this is in any way a complaint on my part about looking after my son. I chose this. This territory that’s usually thought of as housewife stuff, I chose it. My wife and I discussed this beforehand, and of the available options, I chose this. I wouldn’t miss this time with him for the world. As tired and cranky as I am when he wakes me up for a feeding, I can forgive anything in the world for the smile on that baby boy’s face the first time he sees me holding a bottle. Sometimes he smiles if I show up without it in hand. He doesn’t just have a bottle of formula in his pocket – he’s happy to see me. If you haven’t experienced it, there’s no way for me to describe what seeing that smile does to you. If you have, you know what I’m talking about, and you’re already preparing to laugh at me when that smiling infant turns into a cynical, sullen teenager someday.

I just need to figure something out about recharging the battery.

Complete, strip-the-gears non-sequitur here: there’s an interesting article on CNN about the one guy at the Weather Channel who picks out their local forecast music. Man, I remember when they used to play some really interesting stuff, back in the late ’80s when you’d hear some Jarre or Terry Riley stuff on there. The first thought that occurred to me upon reading that article was that I should send this guy a sampling of my own music, of which there are more than a few laid-back tracks, but the thought that occurred to me next was that, now that he’s been name-checked on the internet, something tells me he’s going to be getting more than 80 free samplers per month now. 😆

Also, it’s come to my attention that some portions of theLogBook are generating a virus warning from Sophos. There is no virus here. What’s triggering that is a WordPress add-on script to prevent right-click-and-save plagiarism and image theft, which is a bit of a hot-button thing with me (as anyone who was around me a couple of years ago will attest). I’m looking for other solutions in that area, but for now, I will begin shutting down the anti-right-click script in most areas of the site. Phosphor Dot Fossils, Pixel Fiction and Toybox will likely still be affected, since according to my site stats reports, that’s where most of the hotlinking takes place. But there’s no virus in those sections either. C’mon, folks, I run a cleaner ship than that. 😉… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Music Television & Movies

Time Crash. Awesomeness.

David Tennant + Peter Davison? Sign me the heck up. Already got a DVD cover on hot standby:

Time Crash DVD cover

Grab your own copy of the cover here if you’re so inclined (or just want to gawk at my insomnia-and-E.S.-Posthumus-fueled Paint Shop Pro dabblings). I literally used the only still photo the BBC has provided so far (and then that one from the Sun too), so design greatness it ain’t, but it’s just a tad more epic than the original “two guys standing there” publicity shot. 😆 I’m really looking forward to this. If they’d managed to shoehorn Sylvester McCoy into the same little special, I’d be happy beyond belief. But this’ll do nicely. Davison and McCoy were my favorites among the original Doctors, and I don’t care if he has put on a bit of weight, Davison looks great. (I wish that when people looked at me and said “you’ve put on a bit of weight,” I was looking like that guy instead of the fella in the mirror.)

It’s official: despite the glut of CDs I’ve played for him, from Scott Joplin to Vangelis to Moody Blues, Evan’s officially approved darn-near-guaranteed-to-work sleepytime CD is a “baby mix” I assembled for him, whose playlist goes thusly:

  1. “Lullaby” – Raymond Scott
  2. “Radio Sheffield” – BBC Radiophonic Workshop
  3. “Popcorn” – Hot Butter
  4. “Sleepy Time” – Raymond Scott
  5. “Sea Sports” – BBC Radiophonic Workshop
  6. “Apache” – Hot Butter
  7. “The Music Box” – Raymond Scott
  8. “Milky Way” – BBC Radiophonic Workshop
  9. “Telstar” – Hot Butter
  10. “Nursery Rhyme” – Raymond Scott
  11. “P.I.G.S.” – BBC Radiophonic Workshop
  12. “Syncopated Clock” – Hot Butter
  13. “Tic Toc” – Raymond Scott
  14. “Wheels” – Hot Butter
  15. “Summer Intro” – Neil Finn

(The Raymond Scott tracks are basically the entirety of Soothing Sounds For Baby Volume 1, the Hot Butter tracks are all from Popcorn, and the Radiophonic Workshop stuff is all from BBC Radiophonic Music. The Neil Finn track is from the Rain soundtrack.)

So…in other words…Evan’s got a thing for kinda trippy experimental electronic music from the 1960s and ’70s. But man, does that mix knock him out like a tranquilizer dart. Now, I know that he’s not gonna remember any of this stuff, and that these early “preferences” of his will wind up in my memory only, but that music is now inextricably linked with my son in my mind. I also donated the little light apparatus to his room that once powered my glowin’ Dalek; it simply projects its patterns straight onto the ceiling above his crib now. And he seems to dig it – until the colors shifting and the music lull him to sleep.

If he was older than, say, a month, I’d say it’s time to break out some Floyd.… Read more

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Music

Random soundtrack notes

Doctor Who Series 3 soundtrackAs noted in the site’s news section today, a new CD of music from the third season of Doctor Who is due in about a month. Now, as much as I’m looking forward to that, I had to fess up that the music was yet another aspect of season 3 that just underwhelmed me a bit. It seemed to me like about 3 pieces of action music were written, and a few variations on Martha’s theme, and some other bits…and then all of the above were recycled relentlessly throughout the season. I’ll still be happy to pick up the CD, because at least all of this stuff was decent music, but on the tenth reiteration, it loses a little something. At this point, it’s almost like the more recognizable music from the original Star Trek – it’s kinda like “cue the Corbomite Maneuver cube music, there’s something sinister out there!” I love that they’ve got a whole orchestra on this show, but I am starting to wonder if perhaps Murray Gold shouldn’t rotate with someone else to do the writing. Even Dudley Simpson took a break once in a blue moon.

Speaking of TV composers who did a Ton Of Stuff, just got these the other day from the fine folks at Dennismccarthy.com:
Dennis McCarthy CDs
Nifty stuff on each one. I’m still hoping that maybe we’ll actually see some real live Trek TV music sneak out the door this way, but I’m not holding my breath. Speaking of Trek music, I’ve finally reposted the Dennis McCarthy interview in the news archives here, and as a treat – well, I don’t know if you’ll think it’s much of a treat – I’ve included the original telephone recording of the interview from 1993. Some things to keep in mind about that interview include: (A) the fact that I was 20, and (B) I was at the height of my Trek geekdom. If I had the chance to redo that interview – and don’t think that I haven’t approached him about doing a new one – I’d be a little more even-handed about it. There are some somewhat insinuating questions in there on my part – oh, so the producers tell you when to wipe your butt, do they? – that come across as someone who’d read a few Film Score Monthly editorials too many. And, call it perverse, I know so much more about the other, non-soundtrack music he’s done that I would broaden the line of questioning, though I still chuckle at catching him off guard with that Tommy Flander thing and still getting a pretty in-depth response about it. (I think that’s actually my favorite part of the whole thing, actually!) And of course, these days, there’d be questions to ask like his feelings on only getting to do one of the Trek movies (which I think was, musically, one of the best ones of the whole series, though I’m not sure anyone else will ever give it that due), the Enterprise budget cuts that forced him to “go synth” for much of the final season, and stuff like Sliders and Stargate SG-1, among others. When I first got a CD burner – the stereo component kind, mind you, not the computer drive – that interview, which I’d kept on cassette for about 6 years at the time, was one of the very first things I burned to CD-R, and that CD-R turned up during housecleaning not so long ago. So there it is, an interesting little time capsule from my past. (At the time, the interview originally appeared in a text file called “the LogBook Master Index of Soundtracks” which was bundled up with a distribution ZIP file and sent across the pre-internet BBS file-forwarding networks.)

I really wish I had the chance to do more interviews for the site. Maybe someday – for right now, the only podcasts you’re likely to get out of me anytime real soon will probably be diaper changes, which technically should really be poocasts. 😆… Read more

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Music

BlogPlug

Just wanted to drop a brief mention of Gapporin’s new music blog, daysarenumbers, over at LiveJournal. Even though I keep going on and on about the “eclectic” vinyl collection I bequeathed to him during housecleaning, I have a feeling this guy lives and breathes and listens “eclectic” with or without me. He’s a regular eclectic light orchestra. (Fair warning: since ubik and I have both started commenting, it threatens to turn into an ELO geek-out, but you can help prevent that particular forest fire.)

Head on over there and take a look.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Music

Wow, a tuba would sound great here. Or a xylophone.

Click here for a big honkin’ Jeff Lynne interview in Yamaha All Access – it’s a nifty little magazine that you can read online or print to read at your leisure (even though I’d have to imagine that this sucker would eat a whole print cartridge). Great pictures – it’s like the man just doesn’t age. What a freakin’ house that guy has too! (Paid for in part, no doubt, by the gazillion copies of each one of his albums that I own; fortunately, thanks to Gapporin’s visit a few weeks ago, I think I’m down to just one copy of each album on vinyl, and I no longer own a vinyl copy of “Doin’ That Crazy Thang”…which may well be cause to rejoice.) It’s not the most insightful interview I’ve ever read with him, but hey, I’m happy to see him saying something about writing songs. You know, as opposed to, say, recycling “Mr. Blue Sky” for the highest bidder once a year. But I have to disagree with him on one front: there’ll always be room for the classic ELO sound. I think now it’s just going to be a matter of who’s delivering it – L.E.O., Jason Falkner, Roger Manning, Ben Folds, Paul Melancon, or even Jeff’s former bandmates still touring as The Orchestra. As much as I give him credit for writing incredible songs, he says it himself – the arrangements arrived at the same time as the songs when he wrote them, and they hit our ears the same way. Now, that first ELO Part II album in 1990 proved adequately that you can’t just arrange something like an ELO song and get the same effect, but it’s worth remembering that, as far as we the audience are concerned, we met song and arrangement at the same time, and loved it.

Still no baby news. And you know what? I’m not surprised. My wife is getting tired of hauling the little guy around, but I’m not even remotely surprised by his reluctance to come outta there. This is my son we’re talking about. I don’t like to get out of bed in the morning. You think any kid of mine is going to be eager to leave a nice comfy womb where he’s warm and cozy and doesn’t have to worry about a thing? Hell no. Just like his old man, the little guy’s just going to have to be prodded. Persistently. With a Nerf sledgehammer.

I think he and I will get along too fine. (And, in so doing, will probably get on his mom’s nerves a lot.)

EDIT: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I found out about this article from the Showdown mailing list, covering all things ELO and Lynne. You can find the subscription details here.

… Read more
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Music

A request for soundtrack gurus out there

This is kind of a bizarre one, but at least I can do ya better than “it sounds like…”. I’ll provide you with an actual clip! (Though you’ll have to have Flash installed.)

Go to this page and watch the video of the 1982 arcade game Fantasy. Pay close attention to the music playing in the background of the second “level” – the first one where our hero is on foot, dispatching alarmingly cute natives with his sword as cannonballs whiz past everyone’s head. I later heard that music, fully orchestrated of course 😆 , as the opening title music to a WWII movie whose title I can’t remember for the life of me.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: name the movie that the music in question comes from.

Feel free to repost this request on any music/soundtrack blogs or forums you frequent (provided that it’s not done in a spammy manner, of course – I wouldn’t have that here and I certainly wouldn’t want it done in my name elsewhere). This isn’t a weird midnight music craving like the Van Halen thing the other night, by the way – I’ve been meaning to post this for months. Years if you want to know the truth. Whatever that movie is, it’s a soundtrack I definitely want to find.… Read more