Today is my wife’s birthday, so I’m celebrating the occasion by featuring an artist she has recently discovered.
It’s rare that my wife seeks out music on her own… she generally listens to the same albums (or singles, more often) that she has listened to for years. Or she’ll pick up on something I’ve been listening to and adopt it as her own (Miranda Lambert, for example).
It shouldn’t matter that it’s really Tom Cruise climbing the actual tallest building in the world, leaping out of windows and sprinting horizontally across the face of the Burj Khalifa, a half-mile above the ground in Dubai.
With today’s special effects, the filmmakers could have recreated that scene shot for shot using models and green screen and the viewer would be none the wiser. Hell, most viewers of Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol probably assume that’s how it was done anyway.
After tuning into my first televised musical competition last Spring with The Voice, I signed on for my second this Fall with The Sing-Off.
In an era of Auto-Tune and processed pop stars, there is something very refreshing about a competition that features nothing but the human voice. And the a capella groups featured on this show do jaw-dropping things with those voices.
Next week I will start counting down my top ten songs of 2011, focusing not necessarily on hot singles or songs that captured the zeitgeist this year but simply the songs that affected me the most for one reason or another.
First, though, I will spend a week on several odds and ends that didn’t make the countdown but made my musical year brighter each in their own way.
I’m afraid I was a bit harsh in my description of Paul Simon’s Songs From The Capeman yesterday. While it was certainly a letdown following a seven year wait after his two best albums, and it’s something of a half-baked affair, it isn’t without special moments.
If I hadn’t already posted the wonderfully profane centerpiece track, ‘The Vampires,’ I wouldn’t be able to resist highlighting it on Christmas morning. That song alone is worth the price of the Capeman album.
