I don’t know if it’s cool to like Mumford & Sons now, or if they’ve already moved on to overplayed and overrated.
I remember when Coldplay was the hippest band around and then a year or too later they were the punchline of a “You know how I know you’re gay?” joke in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I have the feeling that Mumford & Sons is on the brink of that conversion.
Here’s a nice marriage of art and science. Alexander Chen, of the Google Creative Lab, programmed this visualization of an isolated Beach Boys vocal track based on the aural dynamics of church bells.
In his words, “Using a mathematical relationship between the circumference of a circular surface and pitch, I wrote code that draws a circle for each note of the song.”
I’ve been writing this blog long enough now (more than 5 years without missing a day!) that sometimes previous posts are completely new to me.
When Thisway popped up as today’s Random Weekend selection, I started writing about how I have no recollection of how I discovered this band and their one album in the late 90s. But the sentiment felt vaguely familiar, so I search the Meet Me In Montauk archive and, sure enough, I’d written just that already.
One of the reasons I love Fountains of Wayne is that their lyrics are so straight-forward and relatable.
They write about people who might live in your neighborhood, pass by you on the highway, sit in the cubicle next to yours at work.
But today’s random SOTD, ‘Cold Comfort Flowers’ from the band’s last album, Sky Full of Holes, is a different ballgame.
Every time I think about a concert experience, I can’t help but flash back to the Tift Merritt show I attended with my wife this past April.
Merritt played to a room of no more than 40 people — I feel like I’ve been to dinner parties that seated more — and we were in the front row, literally able to reach out and touch her as she played if we were so inclined.
