Deserted Island

Once again, iTool has devoured my playlists, ratings and other information from my vast music library. I dunno, the program might just not be geared to supporting the amount of music I own, some 23.000 songs (that's an update... I've been saying 22,000+ for a while now, but it just crossed over a few days ago when I bought a bunch of music...)

Because of this, I've started using Spotify in angry protest... tired of iToons... but it also means I've been listening to my entire library on random. I don't do this particularly often. Twenty three thousand songs would take over 2 months to go through if I did nothing but listened to music all day long. And I do sleep, watch TV, play video games, etc.

But random's cool. I've been remembering a lot of music that I'd sort of forgotten about, or hadn't heard in quite a long time.



Like this; it's a song about someone who was cat-sitting their friend's pet, which then escaped. (Not to worry, in stuff on the band's web page, the cat was found...)




Or this one... yeah... I sort of think of this song as being ode to an introvert...



I'm not very good at "favorite" games. I'm the girl who describes at least six people as being "my best friend." I don't like to pick one thing; I want this and that and the other and all that over there, too, while I'm at it. Favorite food? Cheese (mostly any sort, except American, which is just gross.), steak, escargot with butter and garlic, spinach dip, asparagus and cream cheese omelets, chocolate mint ice cream, sixlets, licorice, fresh tomato slices with just a bit of sea salt, salted caramel, coffee... really, can I stop now? I'm making myself hungry.

And I've also never been really good at the "if you were on a deserted island, what 5 books would you take with you?" Seriously? Most of the books I love come in series; the Liaden series, which I adore, is over 16 books just by itself! (and yes, I probably could read the whole series back to back for a while...) I mean, have y'all seen my bookshelves? If I still own the book, it means I've read it more than once. In fact, there are several sets of books I make it a habit to read once every few years (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Tenant of Wildefell Hall, the Liaden Universe, Uplift Saga, the Crystal Singer series, Dresden Files, the Vlad Taltos series, Watership Down, Rose of the Prohpet... )

Movies? Hunt for Red October, Mulan, Star Wars (yes, even episode 1. Fuck you. I don't care what you think.) the Duelists, Das Boot, Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name series, Hudson Hawk, Shaun of the Dead, the BBC Pride and Prejudice (the good one, not the craptastic Keirra Knightly version) the Mummy, xXx (yes. hush.), Lord of the Rings (elves! At helmsdeep. Oh, shut UP!) Fantasia, Shoot 'em Up (yes.), American Beauty... crap, now I want to go downstairs and watch tv all day...

But I thought, maybe - MAYBE, mind you - I could come up with 100 songs that I'd want to listen to for the rest of my life.

(Deserted island bullshit aside; seriously, if I can power a cd player, why the fuck can't I get off an island?)

I asked my husband what he thought and he said, "Oh, one song to listen to for the rest of my life? That's easy. 4:33."




Jerk.

If I'm going to talk about my "favorite" music, I can't not mention David Ford. Which is probably going to take a lot of (asides.) Sorry.

Aside #1: A few years back, the husband took me to the ballet for my birthday. I love the ballet. One of my best friends in high school was a dancer - my mom and I used to go watch her perform the nutcracker - and I always just loved it. She died on graduation night; she hadn't even been drinking, she just fell asleep at the wheel and went over the side of a bridge. Anyway, the husband took me to see Romeo and Juliet.

"On July 4, 2008, with the approval of the Prokofiev family and permission from the Russian State Archive, the original Prokofiev score was given its world premiere. Musicologist Simon Morrison, author of The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years, unearthed the original materials in the Moscow archives, obtained permissions, and reconstructed the entire score. Mark Morris created the choreography for the production. The Mark Morris Dance Group premiered the work at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in New York state. The production subsequently began a year-long tour to include Berkeley, Norfolk, London, New York, and Chicago." -- wikipedia article

Aside #2 Now, keep in mind that I'm a russo-phile (Russian artwork, music, literature, hell, I even minored in Russian Studies, a subject that might have done me more professional good if I'd bothered to learn to SPEAK RUSSIAN instead of Chinese... don't look at me like that, the line was shorter...) and this was just one of the most perfect birthday presents ever.

So, the Norfolk center for the arts starts sending me stuff about upcoming shows. Including what I thought was a really clever marketing idea; a CD with one song from each of the upcoming performers for that season.

Concert tickets are pretty expensive, however, so we don't usually bother to go. I ripped the CD and promptly forgot about it. I don't even know that I listened to it that day.

Several months later, I load my phone up with a random playlist - grabbed about 200 songs - and went to the laundromat. I've got my laptop out and I'm plugging away at my latest story when this song comes on:




The volume is cranked on my headphones, I'm trying desperately to ignore the other people doing their wash, and this music just crashes over me like a crescendo of words and music and emotions. Holy shit. I stopped what I was doing, closed my eyes, and had a fucking religious experience, right there in the laundromat.

Seriously. Listen to it again. Turn the music up as loud as you can until you can't hear anything else. Close your eyes. Just feel it.

Wow.

You'll see opinion dressed as fact

See definitions inexact

And explain away the darkest days

As misinterpretation

The dumbing down, it's so uncouth

Like there's one single fucking truth

I couldn't bear that right and wrong

Could be so uncomplicated.

Yes, I could listen to this song, this one song, every day for the rest of my life.

But I'd rather have some variety; so he's a random sampling of songs from my (as yet incomplete, but I have 46 songs on the list so far) Top 100

Black Velvet - Alannah Myles
Mohammed's Radio - Warren Zevon
She Said She was a Dancer - Jethro Tull
Ordinary World - Duran Duran
Birdhouse in your Soul - They Might Be Giants
Landslide - Fleetwood Mac
Non Je Ne Regrette Rein - Edith Pilaf
Whiter Shade of Pale - Procol Harum
Alexandra Leaving - Leonard Cohen
The Speed of Pain - Marilyn Manson

My Brief Life as a Folk Music Groupie

Don't forget, it's the 2nd Day of XXXmas... and today Alison Tyler has some fantastic smutty prizes for you. Go check it out...

(Do you know what this means? Because I want to remind you all of the fabulous advent calendar that Victoria Blisse has put together, I may well write a blog post every day this month... holy shit! Merry Christmas!)

So... as usual, it began with a joke.

Like I said yesterday, I had a Christmas Party, and Jonah Knight came to sing at my party. He has a wonderful album just recently out; Creepy Christmas...

But about a week ago, the husband said "Ask Jonah if he needs anything to perform, extension cords, crash space, groupies, etc."

And I did just that. Including asking if I needed to provide groupies...

So yes, electrical sockets, groupies, and a place to sleep. My wife would prefer that the groupies and I do not sleep in the same place :) 

The husband and I batted that around for a while. I'm probably the only one of our friends with a tendency toward groupie-ness... but we were making dirty jokes, as we are wont to do, and cracking ourselves up. Eventually the husband suggested that we take a groupie-style picture and mail it to Jonah's wife.

Being myself, I couldn't help but make the suggestion to Jonah. I was astonished, however, when he agreed. Which is how we ended up ushering every adult female guest at my party into the bedroom and taking a picture.

Seriously, my bed has never gotten this much action!

Guest Post: Jonah Knight

Is Lit Rock A Thing?

When Lynn told me that she had been listening to my music during the writing and editing of Blister Effect and that she wanted to credit me with a dedication, I was extremely flattered. And it got me thinking again about the two-way influence of music and literature. It’s not news that songwriters often find inspiration from fiction and that writers of fiction talk about the music they listen to when they write. Recently though, I’ve heard whispers of something new but not really. Something sure to shake the music and publishing industries to their knees: Lit Rock.

My unscientific research indicates that the desire for naming this new subgenre is coming from the Wizard Rock community. If you don’t know, Wizard Rock is a large and passionate group of hardcore Harry Potter fans that have been writing, recording, and performing music inspired by their favorite boy wizard. There are festivals, conventions, and large scale tours. It’s bigger than Hagrid’s appetite.

But alas! The Potter passion is dwindling with the end of the movie franchise and no immediate plans for more books. So what do these musicians do? What do the thousands of fans listen to next?

Enter Lit Rock.

Did you know that there are cool books that have nothing to do with Harry Potter? Well, some of the Wizard Rock people are making a transition from all-Harry all-the-time towards a more varied literature inspired setlist. But that’s not all that Lit Rock might become.

I was recently contracted by Mercury Retrograde Press to spend two years writing songs for their novels. I think that this partnership represents another step into the future of music and publishing. As the world of Fandom has exploded, dozens of hundreds of songs have been written based on books, and as trans-media projects come along with greater frequency and with bigger budgets, the collaborations have become higher profile.

I dare say however, that my contract with Mercury Retrograde is truly the first of its kind. I think that I am the first songwriter to essentially be put on staff by a publisher. We anticipate well over a dozen songs to be released between 2013-2014 that tie-in with the worlds of the books. I am very excited and, truthfully, a little nervous. If a small press and an independent musician can pull this off, look for more of this strange new world.

Jonah Knight performs Paranormal Modern Folk, often at Science Fiction conventions in the mid-Atlantic region. Thus far in 2012 he has performed at MarsCon, Farpoint, Madicon (Musical Guest of Honor), RavenCon, The Steampunk World's Fair, Balticon, and ConCarolinas. For the rest of the year, he is currently scheduled to appear at Confluence and Capclave, is waiting to hear back from a few more, and is scheduling house concerts. He is at work on his sixth album, Another Creepy Christmas, a collection of creepy holiday songs.