Posted via email from Jake Sutton’s posterous

Pete Seeger: THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS HATE AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER

Being a pacifist sure is a lot more work…

If I had ever managed to become a musician, I’d like to think my slogan would be something like “THIS MACHINE FUCKS SHIT UP”. Maybe I’ll put that on a t-shirt or something…

I love geeking out over my last.fm stats. I play my ipod all the damned time, and I have been “scrobbling” my tracks to last.fm since 06/06/2006 (awesome date, eh?). Anyway, I felt like doing some musical naval gazing. Perhaps the folks out there (all four of you?) will chime in with some music they are loving right now…

I pay way too much attention to my artists rankings, I’m sure, but it’s something fun for me and it keeps me listening to music, which is a good thing, if you ask me. As an example, and to get the topic of conversation started, take a look at my top artist list for the last week:

My top artists list for the last week

Some highlights and reasons behind the list:

• I fell hard for Frightened Rabbit (Amazon) after hearing a song of theirs on the NPR All Songs Considered podcast. The show in question was a review of the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, which sounds like it was pretty damned good.
• Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears (Amz), Eli “Paperboy” Reed & The True Loves (Amz), and JD Thompson (Amz) are all suggestions from my brother-in-law. All three are awesome and recommended.
• Al Green (Amz) and Leonard Cohen (Amz) are good cuddly bed time music. Badly Drawn Boy (Amz) is good sleepy bed time music.
• Loch Lomond (Amz) opened for Blitzen Trapper (Amz) when we saw them recently.
• Tom Waits (Amz) is friggin’ Tom Waits. He’s my all-time #1 artist. Period.
• Fanfarlo (skip Amz – buy from them) is a recent discovery that I haven’t put down yet.
• Modest Mouse (Amz) has some new-ish stuff on the wires.
• Portastatic (Amz) and Neutral Milk Hotel (Amz) are things I decided to revisit after hearing the All Songs Considered show commemorating the 20th anniversary of Merge Records — one of my favorite labels.
• The Dodos (Amz) was something else I thought I should give an extra listen.

That’s the stuff I’ve been playing a lot recently, then. There’s also a very long tail to this chart because a lot of the time I just play a playlist I have set up called “Been a Long Time” which is automatically filled with music I haven’t played in the last 3 months. That playlist — or my “The Best Stuff” playlist featuring 5-star tracks — is probably responsible for some of the Tom Waits tracks, actually.

So what’s the longer picture? Let’s look at the past six months:

My top artists list for the last 6 months

I’ll be honest, things start getting a little watered down at this point. I have several stand-by artists and playlists for bed time listening and a lot of them top the charts in the long run.

• The Decemberists (Amz), Andrew Bird (Amz), Leonard Cohen, Bon Iver (Amz), and Loney, Dear (Amz) are sleepy time artists, but also got boosted because we saw them live in this time span.
• Others in the bed time rotation: José González (Amz), Elliott Smith (Amz), The Avett Brothers (Amz) (though some of their songs are a bit too energetic), Van Morrison (Amz) (Holy crap! Van the Man’s official site gets blocked for malicious software! Wikipedia linked instead…), Townes Van Zandt (Amz), Iron and Wine (Amz), and Bob Dylan (Amz) (mostly “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire“).
• Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen are also just regulars in my rotation. I’m surprised Joni Mitchell (Amz) isn’t on the list.
• José González, Alice Russell (Amz), The Avett Brothers, and Loney, Dear also show up because they are all recent discoveries that I really latched onto for extended periods of time.
• Public Enemy (Amz) just should be there. I’m glad they are.

And finally, let’s check the overall picture since the middle of 2006:

My top artists list for "all time" (since 06/06/2006)

Some of these (The Innocence Mission (Amz) in particular) are definitely over-inflated due to the bed time effect, but I actually tend to and fiddle with this chart occasionally by playing an artist I feel deserves to be higher on the list, etc.

Tom Waits, Elliott Smith, Bob Dylan, Luna (Amz), Van Morrison, Pixies (Amz), Buffalo Tom (Amz), Townes Van Zandt and Leonard Cohen are legitimate favorites of mine. I really know their music. The others are maybe not the intimate favorites the others are, but they are definitely favorites.

What are your favorites? Right now or all-time, let me know. I’m curious.

Me: “Apparently all I have to do is smell good and look pretty. Why bother being smart?”

The Wife: “You have stumbled upon one of the great secrets of being a girl.”

The above conversation was prompted by The Wife’s rather strongly positive reaction to my first splash of Sailor Jerry After Shave. I should have included it in yesterday’s post, but I got distracted.

It’s a wonderful scent. Spicy and warm with nice round corners, if you know what I mean.

It seems a bit on the strong side to be called after shave. It does seem to dissipate fairly quickly, though, so maybe it would work fine in bigger splashes.

• The Green Fooder — We order pastured eggs, grass finished meats, and some other sundries from Mitch and love it all. Seriously. It’s well worth it in our opinion. I just hope he sticks with it.
• Home made lavender simple syrup and the Southend cocktail — I was all about this on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s worth mentioning here. Super good if you switch to Hendrick’s gin, too.
• Speaking of booze (and since I’ve decided my online — if not real life — personality has morphed into a strange combo of Dean Martin and George Carlin: booze & cussing!), you should get a copy of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them if you are into that sort of thing. The Sazerac formulation therein is a fave.
• Chef’s Planet cruets — Just got these today and they are the best thing I’ve encountered for counter-top cooking oil / vinegar storage.
• You know what I put in one of those? Spanish olive oil. Check it out. Whole Foods actually has some good olive oils under their 365 brand for reasonable prices.
• José Andrés — This guy’s “Made in Spain” show on PBS is what got me to grab some Spanish olive oil and makes me desperate to travel to España. The food looks sooooo jummy!
• Michael Ruhlman’s blog — I picked up three of his books because his blog posts are such high quality. He’s a fun follow on Twitter, too.
• Growing herbs — We have a nice little container garden outside our front door with mint (for cocktails, mostly), Italian parsley, sage, rosemary, oregano and basil. Of course, we also have lavender in the back yard. It’s totally awesome.

And just to go totally off track, I’ll also add one work/geekery item:

• Pair programming — It’s really, really, really good. For many reasons. I’m stoked we get to do it at my work these days. Now if only we could get our heads around proper testing…

So yeah… This week is going to finish well for li’l ol’ pseudo-hipster me.

Fact of the matter is I’m so excited for Andrew Bird that I’ve barely given a thought to Modest Mouse aside from the fact that the show is on CU campus, which is bound to make my skin crawl. When I do make myself think about it, though, I’m pretty darned excited to see them, too.

I’ve seen Andrew Bird before… long, long ago when he played with and along side of the Squirrel Nut Zippers — just as he was launching his Bowl of Fire. Since then he has matured and ventured in some really interesting directions musically. NPR’s All Songs Considered posted a live show of his (including the opener, Loney, Dear on a separate recording) and that positively blew me a way. Based on this and and on giving his latest music heavy rotation on my ipod I’m as giddy as a little girl.

Modest Mouse hasn’t released anything since their 2007 title “We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank“, which I enjoyed quite a bit, though maybe a tiny smidge less than their previous two records. Nevertheless, their show at the University of Colorado’s football stadium fieldhouse is likely to be packed and rocking. I’m hopeful they might preview some new material while they’re at it.

Next on the list is a band from Portland, OR that is really high on my list right now. Blitzen Trapper‘s indie-folk story song “Furr” from the album of the same name kills me. It’s truly one of my favorite songs of 2008. They are playing a small club in Denver, so I’m excited to see them in close quarters.

Beyond that are people you’ve all heard about, so I won’t go into them before I see them.

As for stuff not on the list… Laura Gibson is coming to town on a Sunday in April, so there’s a slight chance we might venture out for that. Her latest is really good. Also, I’m cautiously hopeful that I might get a chance to see Leonard Cohen. I will totally brave Red Rocks for him.

Oh, and yes, I’d like to post more often, but I’m a little busy these days…

• It doesn’t feel like an OS X app. I use a Mac both at work and at home now, so this is actually something that matters. I had to stop and look around for controls that belong *right there* on Mac apps.
• I was really interested to see what song metadata got imported from my iTunes library:
  • Album art was hit or miss. I suspect some of my mp3s have art embedded in a standard-compliant manner and others have it done by some iTunes-specific way.
  • iTunes offers a “Grouping” meta tag that I find useful for making “smart” playlists. This isn’t available in Songbird.
• Speaking of “smart” playlists, Songbird has ‘em too, but they are exactly the same as those in iTunes. I was kind of hoping for more. There was once a music player that let you do crazy SQL-like queries. I want that.
• Plain play lists got imported from iTunes, “smart” ones did not.

At any rate, I was just taking a peek. I’ve downed the whole pitcher of iTunes Kool-Aid and I’m not going anywhere. iTunes manages my iPod and my iPhone, my iPhone can remote control iTunes from the other side of the house, and my TiVo can play iTunes playlists that I’ve shared from my iMac. Also, contrary to many people I know, iTunes actually works great for me.

I have no reason to be looking elsewhere, but I do like so see what’s up with the new stuff.

He’s still totally awesome.

You see, one afternoon during the first of a series of double bass tracking sessions (Jason Fraticelli was on upright, Spiker on electric…playing at the same time…check out “Whiskey”), Jimmy just happened to stop by Spiker’s Undercarriage Studios on his way home. Ironically, Jimmy was the only one who didn’t drink the whiskey that day (it sure as hell sounds like he did when he launched into a 9 minute freestyle about the beverage).

All of the lyrics that you hear on that song are 100% freestyled. In fact, all of the words on the entire album are freestyled, with the exception of a couple of the hooks. You just can’t make that shit up……

Go get it:

1. Park Kitchen — So good we went there twice.
2. Kenny & Zuke’s — So good we never ate breakfast anywhere else.
3. Gogol Bordello — And the experience of an all ages show in Portland.
4. The City of Portland — We walked all over the place. It’s tiny and awesome.

So stay tuned…

—

Side note: This is turning into the Autumn of Concerts for Team Sutton. To date, we’ve seen Spiritualized (which I have so far failed to write up, but was totally awesome) and Gogol Bordello; and soon we will see Fleet Foxes, DeVotchKa, and a spoken-word turn by Hank Rollins.

Nice!

There’s a slight chance bigger things could interfere with our plans, but for right now, I think I need to queue up the latest release, Songs In A&E, to get to know it a bit more…