What an awesome term.

Click this link.

OK, who wants to go see her with me on Friday?

Game 6.

Was totallyfreakingawesome. See?

Then you take the recycling out. That's not part of it, but still very important.

So I've decided this week I'm putting my studio back to work. I have too much nice stuff to never use it and while I love my job at NPR it's not exactly stirring the creative impulses in me very much. I'm gonna start by recording some local people for free and see if I can't get a little bit of business underway.

"It's bizness, it's bizness time... you know what I'm talking about it's the time we do the bizness."

It's hard.

I'm used to blogging at night. But the new schedule has me kinda backwards. The morning is now the time that I am most present of mind. I'll have to start making time to hit this puppy in the morning or the blog might disappear entirely.

I feel like I should blog.

So I will. Not much to say. Had a cool date this weekend. Sometimes it's just nice to have a good one even if it doesn't lead anywhere... restores faith in the process when (let's face it), at times, there is precious little.

I also am enjoying work quite a bit. We're fundraising now, which if anybody knows about public radio, is a pretty crucial time of year. If you've never given to public broadcasting you should... from 7-9am on Monday some very generous donors will even match your pledge dollar for dollar, and you can pledge as much or little as you want. See WBUR.ORG for details. You can listen to 90.9FM this week too for all kinds of cool giveaways encouraging donations. The government's support of public radio amounts to less than 7% of annual operating costs, so they really do depend on listeners quite a bit.

Otherwise, I've had an uneventful week. My music listening has been sort of bizarre this week though. Erasure, Garth Brooks, Peter Gabriel, James Taylor, tomorrow I think I'll go with Talking Heads or Rancid... or Rammstein, yes, Rammstein.

Du. Du Hast.

This morning at 6:12AM

My body took its revenge for the way I've treated it for the past 3 weeks.

If you suddenly take your body from comparative normalcy to very late nights, long shifts, long periods of no food followed by rapid ingestions of burger king, when your system is not used to fast food, and throw in a harried and inconsistent schedule of taking your medication... your body will respond with:

6 or 7 minutes of violent nausea.
10 minutes of painful dry heaving.
Throbbing headache behind your right eyeball.
Coma until noon, at which point you realize you somehow slept through church.

Sorry body.
I'll be better to you this week. I actually bought groceries.

I'm sixes.

6 things I especially love right now.
Being employed again.
All the new stuff for the iPhone.
John Lennon.
Weeds. (I know, I'm evil, but it's funny)
The Ewok Movies.

6 things I don't especially love right now.
Working nights.
Migraines.
Having less free time.
Not sleeping well.
Summer ending.

This made me chuckle today...

I was reading a movie review on NYTimes.com and laughed when I saw the correction...

P.S. Arizona is great. Nieces/Nephews cute as ever. Little bro gets home Friday. Funnily enough, he has a P.P.I. with my mission president who is my home stake's Area Authority, so I should get to see him too Friday. Better shave huh?

What do you call the beautiful girl on a banjo player's arm?

A tattoo. This was one of at least 20 banjo player jokes I heard the car talk guys spout off today while I was waiting for my production department trainer to arrive. WBUR Boston's NPR station should be an interesting place to work. First day went well. They had me edit some shows together from script which I apparently did pretty well at. I also got an explanation of how the different studios route their audio and how we integrate other stations like the BBC and NPR National into the broadcast.

No, I'm not done.

I've been without my computer. I have it back and will continue my "favorite albums" thread for a while. But I hereby call on Kristy Williams, Lora Fisher, and Jasmine Ewing to blog. You slackers.

III- Led Zeppelin

While the first 4 Led Zeppelin albums were all technically unnamed, the 2nd and 3rd records actually use publish the numerical value on the sleeve. So I think it’s safe to call this album Three. One and Two were fine and all, but Three was a really incredible record. It opens with “The Immigrant Song” which if you don’t recognize by name you would certainly recognize by the first vocal. This track is widely regarded as one of the most hard-rockingest songs in history. I particularly love the live performance of it on BBC television. The songs on Three are the strongest of any of Zeppelin’s previous records, which might be accurately described as just jamming with a central idea. The most free-form song seems to be the slow blues jam “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, but even here it seems like there’s more of an arrangement. “Gallows Pole” features Jimmy Page on the hurdy-gurdy which makes this record cool all by itself. If you don’t know what a hurdy-gurdy is, you should. If you’ve never heard the climax of Gallows Pole either, you need to before you die. “That’s the Way” is probably tied with “Going to California” for Led Zepellin’s most beautiful song, especially in the BBC arrangement where mandolin is substituted for the slide guitar. “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” is some seriously cool bluegrass turned rock action. And the closer, “Hats Off To Harper” is a really cool study in slide guitar. I looked all over You-Tube unsuccessfully for video of Union Station’s Jerry Douglas playing it on Dobro at a bluegrass festival.

The Unforgettable Fire- U2

The Unforgettable Fire is proof that the Irish band called U2 used to be cool. This album was made in 1984, 2 years before “The Joshua Tree”, which exploded U2 into the kind of international success that few bands ever experience. For those who don’t know, U2’s guitarist calls himself “The Edge”, and he’s at least 62% of the reason U2 sounds good. That holds true on this album but at a higher percentage. The other guys are all great players. Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton Jr. are one of the most solid drum/bass combos in all of rock. And Bono legitimately had some pipes to be reckoned with for most of his career. To his everlasting credit, his voice is shot nowadays mostly because of the gutsy way he sang from 1982-1992 (plus all the drinking and smoking). But it’s Edge that takes the songs to sonic heights. An early pioneer of all things echo, he plugs his guitar into so much delay and reverb on this record he sounds like 20 guitarists. And it’s not a cover, he is really a fantastic guitarist with great tone and real chops. This is also the album he started playing Vox AC-30’s on, bespeaking his excellent taste in amplifiers (I play the same amp).

This is the first of 4 U2 albums produced by Brian Eno with or without Steve Lilliwhite (this one without). And his excellent string arrangements are all over it. The record is very dynamic and honestly the first digital mastering of it robbed it of a lot of it’s magic. It was made in Dublin on the only 24-track tape machine in the country. For bigger songs like “Wire” and “Indian Summer Sky”, several downmixes of Edge’s guitars had to be made to allow room for the strings and vocals. Later collaborator Daniel Lanois called this U2’s last “rebellious record” coming after “Boy”, “October”, and “War” all steeped in lots of things to say about nuclear proliferation, the refugee situation in Africa and the South Pacific, apartheid and obviously, the Irish-British tensions at home. Bono characterized it differently, saying this is when they “stopped bitching and started preaching” and describes the songs on this record as celebrations of the few people who refuse to accept the situation. That’s not to say it lacks angst. As Bono ends “Wire” with the dismissive “Here’s the rope, here’s the rope... now swing on it”.

I like it cause it’s messy. Messier than U2 ever allowed another record to be. Edge’s guitars bleed into everything, Larry’s drums are not locked into a tempo, in fact, they’re all over the place, and the others just go with the feel, but that’s what music is supposed to be like. Bono belts himself horse and even out of tune, and he keeps belting. It’s really kind of beautiful. I think U2 got kinda sterile over time, and I generally say “Achtung Baby” was their last good record. But when they play these songs, and it’s pretty rare, except for “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Bad”, they’re still raw, cause they never subjected them to the critical process of everything after. That’s the U2 I love, and since I’m never gonna pay over $100 to see them again, I’m probably never gonna see them again.

The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner- Ben Folds Five

It’s possible that the most interesting thing about this very interesting record is its name. Ben Folds Five drummer Darren Jesse says “Reinhold Messner” is the name he and several high school buddies used on their fake ID’s to get into bars. A friend had a posterboard of an AZ drivers license with that name and they all took their picture standing in front of it. Once Darren was arrested after being beat up, and the cop called in the whole name before realizing the 17 year old in front of him claimed to be 34. It turns out Reinhold Messner is also the name of a famous mountaineer. And the name of the album had to be changed from “The Biography of Reinhold Messner”.

This was Ben Folds Five’s 3rd and final full length album, made following the explosive and unanticipated success of the single “Brick” from their previous album, “Whatever and Ever Amen”. While the first two ‘BFF’ records were made in the trio’s home studio in a very expeditious all at once method with little in the way of overdubs and touch ups, Unauthorized Biography was made over the course of several months in 4 of Sony’s largest US studios including most initial tracking at Sound City in Los Angeles and RPM in New York. The album was produced by Caleb Southern and mixed by Andy Wallace, both personal friends of the band and players on the album. The trio didn’t just step up into big studios, they beefed up the instrumentation to include extensive arrangements for Strings and Horns, orchestral tympani, Moog Synthesizer Bass, Fender Rhodes, and huge vocal passages reminiscent of Queen.

The album opens with an incredibly dynamic wake up track called “Narcolepsy”. Leading into the first single “Don’t Change Your Plans” where Ben’s lyric indicates for the first time a fatal disease. The theme of death and references to disease reoccur throughout the album (which honestly has as many ups as downs), and consequently many fans began to circulate rumors that Ben was dying, citing evidence that he had recently married for the first time in his life and had a kid. It turns out, rather that Ben and the boys had actually written a sort of concept album. Inspired by the diagnosis with Leukemia of a fairly regular muse of his, a man named Fred Jones, Ben wrote Don’t Change Your Plans, Hospital Song, Regrets, Jane, and Mess. Darren wrote the most haunting track of the album, “Magic” (a song I love dearly) about his recently deceased mother. And Ben’s dad left an odd answering machine message that turned into the ethereal “Your Most Valuable Possession”. But then there’s the moments of sheer stupidity and bliss like the second single “Army” that you listen to BFF for, that don’t fit nicely into the concept album formula. “Grew a mustache and a mullet. Got a job at Chic-fil-a.” I love the album because it represents what Ben had never done before (or since), and that’s really get down to the business or recording his phenomenally good music phenomenally well. I love his raw aesthetic, but it is a beautiful and rare pleasure to hear his music polished and clean. This is a meticulously arranged and recorded album, and a stunning one at that.

Violator- Depeche Mode

While Depeche Mode had written a lot of really successful and amazing music, their first defining album for me, was “Violator”. My sister had it on cassette along with Erasure’s “The Innocents”. I stole them both and ran the tape ragged. I’d never heard something as blissfully dark as “The World In My Eyes” or as singable as “Enjoy The Silence”. “Halo” and “Policy of Truth” were similarly somber, yet begged to be sung along with. This very idea of melancholy, foreboding pop was so infectious. Of course I soon discovered The Cure and The Smiths and a love affair kinda set in with this kind of music. That first experience with Violator though, has never left me.

It’s one of those special records made when digital recording was just starting to emerge, made with a number of digital synthesizers and drum machines (although using some analog synths like ARPs and Oberheims) but still recorded on analog tape. More and more records in the 80’s were recorded on Digital as the decade went on and there’s a general sterility that can sort of be felt on a lot of the music from that time. The digital technology was young and higher sample rates/bit depths weren’t an option on most equipment, so recordings lost some of the fullness and intimacy they could have had. Not Violator though. If there’s two things it definitively is, it’s big and intimate. You should honestly buy this album if you don’t already have it and play it loud over some decent speakers and feel it’s seriousness. This is pop music that is not playing around.

St. Elsewhere- Gnarls Barkley

One of my favorite recordings of this past year is Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 debut, St. Elsewhere. Gnarls is the collaborative effort of eccentric but introverted ‘hip-hop’ producer Brian Burton (known as Danger Mouse) and Atlanta rapper/singer Cee-Lo Green (named Thomas Calloway, and hardly an introvert himself). Danger Mouse became famous the new fashioned way, via the internet. He got the idea to attempt a mash up of an ‘a capella’ mix of Jay-Z’s Black Album with the historic Beatles’ LP commonly referred to as “the white album”. A purist at heart, Danger Mouse made certain every single sound in the album is sampled from the Beatles’ album. After discovering he made a pretty cool mashup of "Helter Skelter" and "99 Problems", he decided to see if he could pull off the whole thing. After successfully completing the project, he sent it to some friends and before you know it was all over the internet, popularly coined the Grey Album. Danger Mouse gained an overnight reputation as a sampling phenom. He finished an album with Jemini and teamed with M.F. Doom to produce the DangerDoom project “The Mouse and the Mask”.

While the range of his beat-making skill was being appreciated on those projects, he blew the doors open with St. Elsewhere, sampling from a huge range of musical styles(including Peruvian music and Silent Film scores) and incorporating a healthy amount of live instrumentation. Cee-Lo’s incredibly versatile vocal abilities helped take these songs to interesting new places. The influences of gospel, rock and roll, Mo-town, soul, funk, punk, new wave, and hip hop of the old and new school are clearly evident in this unique musical hybrid. They released the single "Crazy" in the UK and made history as the first single to be certified number one from downloads alone. It evidently caught just as quickly in the US as at their American debut show at the Coachella Valley Music Festival, nearly everyone in the audience sang along to "Crazy". I know, I was there. Their live show is an awesome, nutty party which I took part in 3 times on the first US tour alone. Highlights of the record for me are the opener "Go-Go Gadget Gospel", shortie "Feng Shui", the drum heavy "Just A Thought", schizophrenic "Transformer", and epic "Storm Coming".

I actually understand very little about the process of producing and engineering records like this, and that’s part of the reason on so impressed by people who can do it so well. Positively no one could have made this record like Danger Mouse, which pretty rad if you think about it.

Continuum- John Mayer

You either like John Mayer or you don’t, but you pretty much can’t ignore Continuum. In speaking of the change in his music recently, Mayer said “I’m growing up, and I wanted my music to be relevant 20 years from now like the music I love. Pop music is so easily dated.” Last year John decided to leave Grammys and chart positions behind in favor of making the music that he loved. (Ironically gaining him higher chart positions and more Grammys than before) He teamed with Springsteen’s drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino for a brief run as the John Mayer trio. Then they went into Manhattan’s Avatar Studios to record Continuum. I was working at Avatar at the time but didn’t work on the album at all because my supervising engineer was working with Billy Joel. It’s fun to know I was nearby though, and probably broke down mics on some of these sessions.

While Mayer calls the music on Continuum “blues” generically, it embraces the R&B and Soul styles of many popular artists of the 60’s and 70’s and legitimately forges some new territory of its own. As a guitarist, I love the tones he gets on this album. I’m pretty sure it’s all Stratocaster guitar-wise, but man I want to know what some of those amps are. Some musical highlights for me are the ‘guitar, then rhodes, then hammond’ solo sequence in the falsetto-full “Vultures”; the muted trumpet sound he gets out of his guitar on “I Don’t Trust Myself With Loving You”; the hugely wet spring reverb of the Fender Vibrolux on “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” or the Claptonesque main theme of the same song, or its overdriven Princeton solo.

As a piece of recording art it’s interesting because they went for the almost reverbless sound of Motown records. Even the drums are very dry which is interesting considering Avatar probably has the best big drum room in the country. The one notable exception to this is the Steinway B in “Dreaming With a Broken Heart” which sounds as huge as John Lennon’s piano in Imagine. The album was recorded on the sonically rich medium of analog tape, which I’m happy to say is making a major comeback these days. He sings into a Neumann U-67 And the SA-CD mix comes right off the repro head of the Spitz Modded 1/2” Ampex. (That little tech moment was for Jason) Translated, it’s beautiful because it’s not trying to be modern. It’s embracing the weaknesses of an “outdated” technology because of the sound.

Lateralus- Tool

This is that other album I wouldn’t recommend to all of my readers. Quite simply because it probably rocks too hard for you. All other bands on Earth that aspire to be “heavy” really just wish they were Tool. Cause unlike other ‘heavy’ music, Tool will not seem wussy 10 years later. Tool will never sound wussy. It will only sound awesome. While Aenima kinda blew people away and put Tool on the map, it was their third full length album that made me learn to appreciate the music of Tool. Lateralus is the very definition of bad@$$. I actually don’t know a lot about the recording process of Lateralus, so we get to skip the history lesson and jump right into why this record sounds so good.

I only know it was recorded and mixed in more studios than I care to count and principle production credit is given to the band and David Bottrill, a producer known (up to that point) only for his work with King Crimson in 1995 and Tool’s first 2 albums. He is now one of the most highly demanded hard rock producers in large part for the sound of Lateralus. Most often this album is classified as “prog” or progressive rock because of the mathematically complex rhythms and modal structures that dominate the music. In the end, if the interest factor were merely that it’s complicated and hard to play though, I don’t suppose I would like it very much at all, as most “prog-rock" bores me to death. It’s that it’s so easy to surrender to. Start this album so you can hear it loud and clear and then make sure your stereo can handle what’s coming. The opening drums in The Grudge will make you want to go hunt Elk with your hands. The dynamic range (softest sound to loudest) of this record will catch you by surprise even after lots of listens. The clearest example is the song “Parabol” which is mostly pretty quiet but the last guitar swell exploding into “Parabola” will knock you on your butt. No one in the world sings like Maynard James Keenan. He can sing the softest parts then scream like an army like it’s effortless. The ‘single’ on Lateralus was Schism, a song as fascinating to me today as it was 6 years ago when I first heard it. I’ve never heard another bass or guitar sound like that... like they’re a perfect extension of the drum set. Many of the sounds on this record are honestly still a mystery to me and I love figuring out how sounds are made. If I hadn’t seen the band reproduce them live before my eyes, I’d believe most of them were synthesized or highly manipulated in the studio. The album continues on it’s ‘make you listen carefully then tear your brains out through your nose’ course to the very end which culminates in inharmonic noise and static over some absurdly incredible drumming. Sometimes I feel like I could kill a black bear with my bare hands when this album is finally done with me. Fortunately, I’ve never been near a forest at those times.

The Dark Side of the Moon- Pink Floyd

So this is one of those “duh” records and one I could go on about forever, but I’m consciously attempting to keep my thoughts on dark side brief. The Dark Side of the Moon was recorded in 1972 in the world renowned Abbey Road Studios in London, on a pretty much one of a kind E.M.I. recording console that every other studio in the world wishes belonged to them. This is, of course, where The Beatles recorded their Abbey Road album (named for the studio, not visa versa). Production is credited to Pink Floyd and Engineering to Alan Parsons.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a pioneering “concept album”, addressing themes like madness, aging, mortality and death, social conflict, war, and materialism. These themes are advanced not only by the music and lyrics, but by the unique soundscape of the album. There’s a lot of sound that can’t be described as musical in nature clamoring for attention on the tape. A low (nearly inaudible at times) ‘heartbeat’ plays for the entire length of the album appearing most prominently in the intro and outro. Voices are heard throughout the album some laughing maniacally and many answering questions posed about personal violence, death, fears and insecurities, and insanity. Employing a much wider range of instrumentation than previously, Pink Floyd incorporated female vocals and saxophone, and experimented with tape effects, looping, sound effects, panning/flanging, and the very new technology of synthesis/sequencing.

Entire books have been written about the recording and mixing of this record, but I believe I can summarize why it’s such a great record fairly briefly. It’s very simple. The music is not trying to be out of reach, the lyrics are accessible and everyone can relate to the subject matter. It only spends enough time being unique to keep you interested then it just reaches out and rocks the way you expect four of the most talented musicians in the world to rock. The sounds are fantastic, the approach is revolutionary, and the result is timeless. It’s a record that satisfies completely. You feel motivated to make the most of your time, to enjoy your life and not fear death or age. You’re less inclined to wear away your life in the pursuit of material things, and more inclined to look with sympathy on the plight of others. AND... let us not forget that it succeeded in rocking super hard while doing it.

Ten Summoner's Tales- Sting

Where’s he gonna go next? Well, to Sting. No, this is not a joke. I know, I’ve been all over the map so far, and I assure you, the future bodes no more homogenous. Ten Summoners’ Tales was recorded in 1992 and 1993, Sting’s first ‘pop’ album since the dissolve of The Police in the mid 80’s. Sting recruited Hugh Padgham of the Townhouse Studio in London, who had produced The Police’ final album Synchronicity, to produce and engineer and a handful of his players from his solo ‘jazz’ albums, including guitarist Dominic Miller and phenom drummer Vinnie Colaiuta.

Sting did most of the musical arranging himself (an accomplished bassist/classically trained guitarist), playing off his drummer, guitarist, and keys player. He took many melodic ideas and designating them in his mind for various horns, strings, reeds, and random instruments. He and Padgham finalized these ideas and booked studio musicians where no immediate players were known. Possibly featuring more outstanding players than any pop album in 20 years, the songs of this album sprang to life in the studio in the hands of gifted and disciplined musicians. Sting has recalled with fondness and regret that no other album he has ever recorded brought musicians to life like this one. Hundreds of takes were made of those eleven songs with alternate bridges, newly incorporated solos, and variances on the arrangement so Padgham and Sting would have options. The process of recording finished, the rigorous process of screening takes and making arrangement and editing decisions came to task. This album was recorded on two synched decks of 2” 24-track analog tape. Perhaps only Jason will understand and appreciate the difficulty of making numerous 48 channel edits and arrangement decisions post-recording on this medium. (Nowadays it’s a cinch.) In any case, the album took a few months to finalize and mix. When the album was presented to legendary engineer Bob Ludwig for mastering he ‘gaped in awe’ before his speakers and listened to it seven times before he set to work, calling it one of the most astounding pieces of recording he’d ever heard. The title, by the way, is a play on Sting’s actual name, Gordon Sumner, being ten “tales” and an epilogue.

I love this album because of the staggering musicianship (coolest Hammond Organ burn of all time on ‘St. Augustine in Hell’). While studio musicians are usually very good players, you don’t typically get to hear it on a top 40 record. Believe it or not, that guitar part on Brittany’s song was probably not that dude’s finest minute. This record is different in that regard. Every player on it is doing something neat. Everyone is giving something special to this record. Brian Wilson used to pull that kind of performance out of his players, but even then, session tapes indicate it was often a difficult process. On this record, everyone who came just gave and gave and the result is honestly incredible. If you don’t like Sting, I can completely understand. But a real careful listen to this album will give you a kind of reverence for the musicians who lend their various voices to a song, and the magic that can happen when they decide to let it happen together. That unity may be the hardest thing to achieve in any musical collaboration or performance. It’s especially hard to capture on tape after successive hours in a studio. Believe me, I know.