Tag Archives: music

The case of the mysterious disappearing playlists…

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One of the many wonderful things I’ve found myself able to do while working from home is to set up my personal computer to do some of the tedious update activities so that I can click “next” and “ok” in the background while hammering out the next great PowerPoint briefing or staff memo on my work laptop. It’s become an awfully convenient method of making sure I’m running the latest version of applications, everything is backed up, and my tired old Mac Mini is in as good an operational condition as possible. Up until today the process had been a happy and productive one.

Today, though, some combination of changes in iTunes and on my phone conspired to delete all of my hard built playlists from both the computer and the phone simultaneously. The music files are still sitting safely in iTunes, thank God, but such playlists as “Angry,” “V. Angry,” “Sleepy,” and “Depress me,” are nowhere to be found. I’m left with just the main list of everything from Music for the Royal Fireworks to songs that are so filled with pop goodness that I’m not even going to mention their names here.

I know I should just get with the program and stream my music like a normal person. You see, although I live among the millennials, I’ll never quite be one of them. My music habits were formed at a time when you went to a store for your music – and you came home with a shiny new jewel case filled with liner notes (and you got the privilege of slicing the hell out of your finger trying to get all of the security packaging off the product). Even though I don’t buy music on physical media much anymore, I do like the idea of knowing that I have all the correct files sitting on my hard drive waiting to be served up to me instead of just expecting them to live forever on someone else’s cloud. Maybe it’s the last vestigial piece of my analog self in the digital age.

So now I need to rebuild my playlists. It’s daunting, but perhaps guided by the spirit of WinAMP it won’t take five years to get things sorted and back in service just the way I like them. I know listening to music doesn’t need to be this hard… it’s just another fine example of liking what I like with all logic and simplicity cast aside. If that doesn’t give you a deep look into who I am as a person, I don’t know what will.

To stave off the madness…

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I learned something new today. Well, it wasn’t really new, but it’s something I had completely forgotten. It seems if you play really pretty bad music from the early 1990s at as high a level as your radio will manage, and keep just the right pace to maintain a healthy dose of highway noise, you can reach a kind of nirvana. Just before your ears start bleeding there will be such a clash of sound flooding into your head that it will push out every other coherent though. More importantly it will silence, at least temporarily, that part of your brain that keeps telling you to cash it all in, sell it all off, drive to nowhere, get a shit job that requires no skill or independent though, and spend the rest of your days reading every book in the public library of whatever small town you end up in.

The only side effect is a blinding headache and inability to hear anything below a dull roar. Whatever it takes to stave off the madness one more day, I suppose.e

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Coat blowing. I dearly love my ever-loyal, if somewhat ditzy, chocolate labrador. She is the operative definition of a kind and loving soul. But honest to whatever God there is in heaven if she doesn’t stop blowing her winter coat soon I’m going to lose what small slivers of sanity I have managed to hang on to lo these many years. It’s like the whole bleeding house is covered in a fine, slightly fluffy film of dog.

2. The other email. Without delving into any specific details, I have an alternate email address that occasionally gets used for work. In part it’s annoying because I can’t access this account from my desk. Fortunately, almost no one ever uses that address so it’s not completely inconvenient. That being said, if you don’t log into the damned thing about once a week, you start getting nasty messages from the Great Email Monitor threatening to cut off your access. Once they do that you’ve got to start from scratch setting up a new account, which could take as long as 247 work days to complete. Since I really do need this account for about one message ever 8-10 weeks it effectively just creates a barely essential pain in the ass that requires me to set up a calendar reminder to schlep next door once a week to log in, look at an empty inbox, and ensure that the account stays active for another week. You’ll forgive me, I hope, for being only slightly vexed (but not at all surprised) by such a patently inefficient process.

3. Acting surprised. A major musician has died under unclear or suspicious circumstances. I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised that a music superstar might have succumbed to the effects of legal and/or illegal medications. It’s not like this is the first time music and drugs march down the same road. It’s the fact that anyone from fans to media pontificators can pretend such events are anything other than “as expected” that’s farcical. A man is dead and that’s sad enough in its own right, but when it’s self-inflicted I have a hard time finding it an outright tragedy.

Tuning in…

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photo (10)A few days ago, I went digging thought iTunes for a few songs that I hadn’t heard in a while. After years of being transferred from computer to computer, to external hard drives, and being tweaked, curated, and edited to the extreme, it seems that iTunes has been slowly leaking. Some of my favorite albums, carefully imported from CD seven or eight years ago before all my shiny plastic disks went to live in a couple of large cardboard boxes, were nowhere to be seen. Some had just one or two songs. I’m guessing that I “lost” half my music collection before I really started to notice it… as much a fan as I am of going all electronic, I’m suddenly glad that I didn’t sell those disks off for a buck or two a piece years ago.

So now, while I had planned on spending a good part of the day getting mt tax stuff together, I’m most likely going to be sitting here swapping out disks every two minutes until balance is restored. It’s ok. Once it’s done, the music will end up being saved as part of my ridiculously over complicated double redundant back up scheme. Then again, if I don’t have to do this again in seven years, it’s probably worth the effort.

Time warp…

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Every morning for the last week or two I’ve gotten in the truck, pulled up one of the “current hits” channels on Sirius and had an immediate and visceral “what is this gawd awful noise” kind of response to whatever song happens to be playing. I don’t want to say what I think I’m saying, but damn it, I remember top 40 songs being, well, better. Since life is too short to listen to music you can’t stand, I almost always find myself gravitating towards “the 90s on 9.” Not that I consider the 1990s in any way the high point of music or anything, it just… well… It just sounds better than what I’m hearing on those other channels.

I can’t help but take a nervous look over my shoulder. I know that dad’s satellite radio is more or less stuck on the 50s channel and only occasionally makes a jump over to the 60s. The thought that this is what’s slowly happening to me, has filled be with an unnatural dread. I’m serious. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

As much of a curmudgeon as I am, I still think of myself as at least being passingly in touch with pop culture. I’ve already lost my hair and even though I’ve clearly made my peace with that, I’m just not willing to surrender anything else quite so easily to the evil bastard called aging gracefully. I remember liking music from summer well enough, so I’m crossing my fingers that 2012 is just a particularly bad year in music and not the harbinger of worse things to come. Maybe I’ll just leave it on 90s on 9 and call it a day.

24601…

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I’ve hidden it reasonably well from all except those who have known me the longest, but I can’t deny that at heart I’m the same band geek I have alwas been. I was flipping stations a bit ago and not paying attention, I landed on the local public television station. Not long after, I was surprised to find myself singing along with #24601 in his escape from Javert. I’d actually forgotten that I even knew the words. But there I was in the kitchen washing dishes, singing like a stark raving lunatic. Lots of memories from what feels like a different lifetime. It’s amazing what a few bars of music can bring back to you. But thank the gods that it does.

Eclectic…

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I was loading up some new music for my trip this week and really looked at the “Just for You” box for the first time in quite a while. According to the wiz bang Genius at Apple HQs, my recommendations include: Waylon Jennings, Social Distortion, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Skid Row, Boston, and several selections from H.M.S. Pinafore. How’s that for eclectic taste in music.

For the record, what I actually downloaded was: All-American Rejects, Relient K, Simon & Garfunkel, The Byrds, several tracks from “Punk goes Pop II,” Bob Dylan, and yes, even Britney Spears (Yeah, I’m having a hard time believing I wrote that out loud too). So, I’m expecting my next recommendations from iTunes to be even more interesting.

My Christmas Wish…

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Just once. Just one time in my life, I would like to not begin Christmas on the 24th of frigging November. I’m serious here people. There is no good reason for Christmas music coming out of every speaker in a building at this point. I mean, I don’t start playing Sousa marches on the 3rd of June do I?

Arrrgghhh… Pardon me, while I go beat myself about the head and neck with a blunt instrument.

August and Everything After…

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I just found out that Counting Crows is releasing a “deluxe edition” of August and Everything After on September 18th… Lots of demos and live cuts on the second disk. I can’t actually remember the last time I went to a store and “bought an album,” but I’ll be getting mine on Tuesday. Because I’m a helpful kind of guy, you can get yours from Amazon.

The original release was a big part of the soundtrack to some of the best memories I have… I’m always amazed that everything around you can change, but the music always brings you back to a unique time and place. Listening to this will be like a chance meeting with old friends… OK, old friends from Berkeley… damned dirty hippy friends… but still, it’s just like Frosted Flakes, baby… They’re Grrrrreat!

Garryowen…

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Editorial Note: Apparently at one point, I had default music playing on my MySpace profile *shudder*. It seems to be for the best that it went extinct some time ago.

OK, so more than one person has sent me a message asking what’s up with the music on my profile. If you’re that interested, Wikipedia has a good article on the song itself. Mostly it’s there because I sort of like it. I know, century old marching tunes aren’t exactly top-40 material, but then again, I’ve never been much of a top-40 kind of guy. Still, I like the imagery of Custer’s 7th riding out of Fort Lincoln, guidons unfurled in the breeze, to meet their destiny on the Plains.

What can I say, I’m got a soft spot for lost causes.