I just read that Twilight made $35 million on its opening day alone, on its way to god knows how much for the opening weekend. Wow. This really is another Harry Potter, with a more narrowly focused audience (namely, girls aged 12 to 99).
This is as good a movie as could be made from Stephenie Meyer’s novel. The source material is weak as literature and thin in plot but strong on personality and heavy with the dreamy innocence of teenage romance. And that describes the movie as well.
Among the many things I adore about Rufus Wainwright is how unabashedly gay his lyrics are.
It seems the openly gay artists in my collection usually write in the third person or make clever use of pronouns. I’ve been scanning Indigo Girls lyrics for awhile now and I’ve yet to find a love song of theirs that couldn’t be written for a man.
Here we are at the end of November and Aimee Mann’s @#%&*! Smilers remains comfortably atop my Best 2008 Albums list, where it has sat since its release in June. Nothing has really come close to toppling it, either. It’s not only the best album she’s ever put out but one of the best albums I’ve heard by anybody in years.
I don’t think many in the business can write sad songs as well as she can, and even fewer can sing them as sweetly. And while she has a demonstrated capacity to rock out, it’s her recent focus on acoustic guitar, piano and bass that has pushed her music to a new level.
Jack Johnson is one of those artists who has written just one song and made a career out of recording it in slightly different ways.
OK, I say that with some degree of confidence, but the truth is I only own one full album of his (Brushfire Fairytales) and I’ve only heard a handful of songs apart from that album. So maybe he does things that are completely unexpected on the rest of his discography. But somehow I doubt it.
Of the various incarnations of the single Jack Johnson song, two stand out in my mind as the best of the bunch.
It’s weird to listen to an artist obsessively for a long time and never really know what he looks like. I own and adore all of Josh Rouse’s albums but I could’ve shared a cab with him and never known it.
So it’s odd to watch this live clip and discover that he looks like a cross between Kyle MacLachlan and k.d. lang as he plays in front of what looks like a display of children’s books. So much for our musical heroes being larger than life.
But that’s what’s cool about these live clips. They make it abundantly clear that these great musicians are just regular people plying their trade the way countless buskers have before them.
Meet Me In Montauk 