I took last week off from blogging to allow time for the 40th birthday cruise my wife and I took on Royal Caribbean’s Liberty of the Seas. I’ll kick this week off with a short video from the cruise.
Cruise ships offer so many options for entertainment and relaxation but it’s funny how — just like in our regular lives — we tend to zero in on a just a few. In our case, it was the Schooner Bar, where each night an Australian pianist named Paul O’Shea set up shop.
Brad Paisley tends to put at least one rip-roaring ass-kicker of a song on every album — the sort of instrumental throwdown that ensures all of the players will have blisters on their fingers.
On his best album, 2009’s American Saturday Night, that song is ‘Catch All the Fish,’ an anthem for every beer-drinking fisherman in the world (which is probably all of them).
I’ve never entirely understood the controversies that surrounded the Buena Vista Social Club, made popular by both a Wim Wenders documentary and an album produced by Ry Cooder.
Something about using nostalgia for Cuba’s golden era to line the pockets of the Castro regime. Or an American taking credit for “discovering” Cuban musicians who had been famous internationally for decades. I’ve even read some criticism that Cooder’s guitar style didn’t mesh well with the rest of the band on some recordings.
