Graceless Gracenote Entries

Having upgraded my MP3 player and finding myself with twice as much space than before, I’ve recently spent way too much time loading up the more obscure albums and compilations that didn’t make the ‘first cut’ of my previous player, which still had a significant capacity. As time went on and my compulsive CD buying continued, I had to prune more and more songs from the Creative Zen so that I could fit in the new albums, and I ended up being much more satisfied with the outcome, as the continued random shuffle regularly touched upon more prized songs, rather than so many would-be B-sides and easily forgettable tunes that I’d not heard for years, often with good reason. A bright and booming random playlist frequently lifted my spirits, even more so than when I created my own playlist, which is odd as I have for so many decades made myself and friends mixed tapes, then mixed minidiscs then mixed CDs, where the order of the songs was crucial to the overall effect.

At the end of my time with my Zen, it contained about 30GB worth of favourite songs, as I had removed the less interesting ones and most of the dross. I marvelled at how, when I first bought it, I had thought to myself that 30GB was a huge amount of space so I loaded up any old CD, and the whole CD, rather than selecting only my favourite tracks. I would even add things like The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan, when I’m not even that big a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, and umpteen classical compilations even if they contained 10 minute symphonies that I usually found too dull and syrupy and would have no interest in or patience for whilst out and about.

So you would think that I would heed my own warning, having lived through that and having to recover from my initial blind bloat of MP3s, and only load up a carefully chosen selection to my iPod—-YES, I caved in and (bitterly) got an iPod, which I will go into another time, but it offered more than twice as much space and the imperfect 60GB Creative Zen was no longer available. But no, I’ve found that I’ve just spent a week loading up a tonne of CDs that have held so little interest for me over the years that I had to look up my (admittedly anal) rating of and comments on each song when I first played it, which I scarily keep in indexed books. I’ve again recklessly added all sorts of obscure classical music collections including Flemish Romantic Horn Concertos and loads of free CDs with Classic FM magazine, I’ve added albums full of big bands and CDs of singer/actors like Doris Day and Danny Kaye, and have worryingly considered adding that Noel Coward CD I bought years ago after some nostalgia trip but never even unwrapped. (The latter thought was sparked by a review of the new West End stage version of Brief Encounter mentioning that they play A Room with a View at the end.)

There are artists I liked once in their day but haven’t recently, such as Lou Dalgliesh, and some whose albums were given to me by friends long ago but I just didn’t really ‘get’ them, like Eleanor Shanley, Robyn Hitchcock and Paul Kelly. I’ve added them in case I liked them more than I remembered, giving them a chance a resurgence, and maybe when I’m sitting on a train some time, one of their songs will come up and I’ll be bewitched by it. It’s like having my own radio station where all of the 10,000 songs that might be played have been pre-selected by me, but there is still plenty of room for discovery amongst them, as well as a smile raised when the most loved favourites rear their beloved heads. Or maybe I’ll want to delete the less loved ones, and then I’ll miss the fact that the Zen would let you do such pruning instantly whilst out and about, whereas the vastly less flexible iPod would make me remember which song I want to remove and do so when I’m next on the PC that contains my iTunes directory, and frankly, there’s little chance that I would even remember by then that I’d wanted to delete anything.

But those are rambling musings, and now for a rambling rant. Gracenote, the CD track identification service used by iTunes and other software to gather the information on the audio tracks…. I fully acknowledge that this is a blessing, as all we have to do is insert our CD—even some obscure collection of Lithuanian Disco classics played on the fipple flute that you bought in the Woolworth’s bargain bin in 1987, which you can’t imagine anyone else owns—and suddenly all the information you need comes up automatically. iTunes has accessed the Gracenote database, and in theory, everything you need to know is there—the name of each tune, the performer, the composer, and the album name. It is a blissful change from the days when I had to enter the title and artist on the minidisc by rotating a dial to painfully select each individual letter at an excruciatingly slow speed. Even when I invested in a package that would hook my minidisc and stereo up to my PC in the early days and enable me to type the titles in, that still was a lot more work than the simplicity offered by Gracenote. In theory, I shouldn’t have to do anything as some other owner of the CD in question has already gone to the trouble of typing in all the information and adding it to the database.

But why can’t they do it properly? Okay, I accept that I’m a terrible pedant. I get annoyed by typos—which we all make, it’s just a shame that they’re in the now official version that pops up for everyone—and the shortcuts. I don’t want it to say '10 Pole Tudor', making me go back to change everything to ‘Tenpole’-—and I usually try to race the downloader and get it fixed before each song is added to my collection. I don’t want every single track on one album to say ‘Beatles’ so I have to go back and add the ‘The’, or remove it from ‘The Counting Crows’. I can’t cope with someone having put the artist throughout a whole album in the form of ‘Hewerdine, Boo’ when all the other albums display the first name first. But mostly, classical music is a nightmare. I am so completely grateful to the poor souls who painstakingly entered every bit of the many, many details—the aria name, the key it is in, the catalogue number, in which act it appears in which opera, which tenor backed by which orchestra conducted by which conductor performed it, sometimes even including the acute é’s and so forth so everything looks perfect.

But most of the souls have even less patience than I and have, for some reason, entered the artist, that is the performer, as being ‘Beethoven' or ‘Puccini’, which is intensely irritating, particularly when they have also entered the composer’s name in the song title section (eg “Puccini: O Mio Babino Caro”) and in the composer’s section, so I cannot understand their thinking. I also hate the cop-outs who put ‘unclassifiable’ as the genre description of albums; I can understand having loyalty to an artist who might claim to be so, but what if you want to listen to a particular genre one day and that artist is hidden away as ‘unclassifiable’?

Some of it is personal preference, of course; I prefer to put ‘(Live)’ at the end of song titles so I can distinguish the live version from the studio recording, particularly when iTunes coughs up a list of duplicates. I also prefer to mention performers who make a significant contribution to a piece. For instance, it might be Colin Reid’s album and him playing guitar (wonderfully) on Never Going Back Again, but it would surely be silly not to mention Eddi Reader at all when she is providing lead vocals, as you might otherwise come to wonder who you are listening to (were it someone with a less distinctive voice), but the Gracenote contributors often omit the significant additional artists, even though there is also a section for ‘album artist’. I would prefer to put the song’s artist as ‘Colin Read & Eddi Reader’ if not Colin ‘featuring Eddi Reader.’

Clearly, my insane rant here is driven by the fact that I have spent too much time adding too many albums at once, necessitating quite a lot of amendments in my iTunes catalogue. Tackling a listing for a classical CD can be utterly exhausting. I’m sure normal people don’t bat an eyelid about this and are thinking I need to get a life, which is true, I know. But if anyone out there is the first to enter a CD’s details into the database, and that may well be true if you eagerly rip open your copy of Word magazine (or fellow pedants can point out my hypocrisy here as they’ve changed the name to The Word, but I can’t bring myself to adapt to that as it just makes me think of Terry Christian) and you load up that issue’s excellent free compilation CD, please have some respect for the anal among us who need the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, or at least the songs spelled correctly and the performers to be given due credit. Though no doubt by tomorrow, I’ll have recovered from this ordeal and remembered that it’s of serious little importance, and I’ll want to ask for your forgiveness for my scary whingeing….Perhaps listening to some music for a while will calm me down. I’ll go put on my favourite album of Mozart performing ABBA’s greatest hits.

Another Day in the Life with Music on the Journey

Sorry for the lack of posts but I’m so often snowed under by work….I hope to post something shortly but in the interim, I shall do something boring, just let you know what my MP3 player played me (in random play mode) yesterday on the train. It was in an agreeable, peaceful mood, and led me to reminisce about my brief encounters with Pete Townshend and Bobby McFerrin (they weren't together).

1. Over My Head – Aztec Camera. I adore Roddy Frame’s work but this one’s a bit sickly; I’ve heard this track compared to Chet Baker-like jazz, and oddly the first time my Zen ever played a Chet Baker track, which it has held silently for over a year, is on the same day.

2. I Need Love – Luka Bloom. Christy Moore’s kid brother can do no wrong in my eyes, and though he’s an incredible songwriter, he does good covers, even getting away with this LL Cool J number. The day before yesterday, the Zen played the excellent and catchy Sam Phillips song of the same name.

3. One—Aimee Mann. Originally recorded for a Harry Nilsson tribute album (see below), it was reused on the Magnolia soundtrack album—a fine Paul Thomas Anderson film largely based around Mann’s music that everyone should see; it’s a great ensemble piece where even Tom Cruise doesn’t come out as ‘the star’, although it’s a bit long but worth it. Backing vocals on this track are provided by Squeeze’s Chris Difford and Neil Innes of the Rutles and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I believe Innes was the one I saw open for legendary comic Bob Newhart a few years ago when Innes was painfully out of step with the audience, which remained largely silent, and the whole night was awful as the dreadful barely existent sound system (a single amp on stage) meant most of us heard nothing and much of the audience spent Newhart's set searching for theatre staff to kill.

4. Celtic New Year – Van Morrison. Fairly recent recording with an early Van feel.

5. Silver Lining – Steve Poltz. I deleted this mid-way; it was too country for starters and must have been a result of my thinking, when I first bought the Zen, that 30GB was an endless amount of space so I could slap on any old whole album. I’m astonished to learn this was a single. Steve's other stuff is enjoyable, but I must confess to learning about him at a Jewel concert when taking a friend as a birthday gift; he opened the show with a delightfully zany set and loads of confident talent in comedy and on guitar, then joined her on stage as part of her band. He was her ex-boyfriend and co-writer of her hit You Were Meant for Me, which got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest running single in the Billboard Top 100, and apparently it was he who first discovered her, asking the waitress to join him on stage, where she was spotted by talent hunters. He has a freaky MySpace site that, with typical wackiness, suggests that most of his songs are about wolves and that his genre is gospel/Chinese pop/death metal.

6. Bring Him Home/Vincent - Peter Corry/Brian Kennedy. From the George Best memorial service. Kennedy replaces the one mention of “Vincent” in Don MacLean’s lovely tribute to Vincent Van Gogh with “George”, and Corry gives a moving rendition of the gorgeous song from Les Miserables, which was recently so perfectly delivered by Alfie Boe at the Festival of Remembrance, as I mentioned in a previous post.

7. Don’t Worry, Be Happy – Bobby McFerrin. Cute, but I can’t really take his advice because he offers no solutions. If the verses were ‘here’s how to win the lottery’ or ‘give me your address, I will send you some of my vast wealth’, I would find it a lot easier not to worry and be happy. When you’re worried about not being able to pay your rent, I don’t see how it’s helpful to have someone warn you that frowning might bring everyone else down, as you really wouldn’t care. But it’s catchy. I once encountered McFerrin at the gourmet grocery/restaurant where I worked in North Carolina; he was a guest at the adjacent inn and had been in for breakfast, and I was working the till. He was so quiet, I took little notice until the couple behind him in the queue gushed after he’d left, as they had tickets to see him in concert that night. He’s very nice, very normal. Doesn’t walk around making sound effects, saves it for the show.

8. Words of Love – Mama Cass. Sublime. My father raised me as a big Mama Cass fan, and Dream a Little Dream of Me is one of my ‘default songs’, ie one I find myself singing around the house nearly all the time—along with Tim Finn’s Young Mountain. If I were to struggle to find a connection between some of the artists in this Zen-produced random playlist, I could point to the fact that it contains Aimee Mann’s cover of a Harry Nilsson song—one of a tribute album to which Ron Sexsmith also contributed--and that Mama Cass died (of heart failure—she didn’t choke on her own vomit as the story goes) in Harry Nilsson’s London flat when he was away, as did Keith Moon (not on the same night; a few years later of an overdose, when Nilsson was also away), and Nilsson then sold the flat to Moon’s bandmate (in The Who of course) Pete Townshend.

9. Baby This Night – Hawksley Workman. Quirky Workman, real name Ryan Corrigan, is a Juno award winner—the Canadian Grammies—for Best New Solo Artist. Known for great live shows with odd dances, but I've not yet had the privilege...

10. Under the Skin – Lindsay Buckingham. Title track from his first solo album in 15 years, largely acoustic with him playing almost all the instruments—as Joan Armatrading (see below) tends to do on her more recent albums.

On the train home after working late at the office:-

1. Come Rain or Come Shine – Peggy Lee. Nothing I can add to this splendour; it’s Peggy Lee.

2. Give Me My Rapture – Van Morrison. From Poetic Champions Compose….I can forgive the Zen playing Van more than once in a session as I have so very much Van on it.

3. Ferry Cross the Mersey – Gerry and the Pacemakers. I only recently learned that Frankie Goes to Hollywood recorded a cover of this, which I’ve lived happily without hearing, but I must have heard in 1989 the charity version recorded by Frankie’s Holly Johnson, Paul McCartney, the Christians and Gerry Marsden himself in aid of those affected by the Hillsborough disaster. I was in London most of that year, and I always remember my worried father ringing from the States to make sure I was safe when he’d heard the tragic news, and I cruelly acted like the thoughtless youngster I was by replying to his caring kindness with a sarky, “Why on earth would I be at a football match in Liverpool?!?’, which I so regretted saying.

4. Kare Kare – Crowded House. The Finns have been top favourites for decades, but I seem to be the only Finn fan who didn’t see as masterful this Youth-produced Together Alone album, which was recorded (after Tim Finn left following one album) at Karekare Beach as used in The Piano; I never took to it as much as their earlier albums, and though this near jam session is good, it feels a bit like Crowded House imitating Moody Blues. I can be that critical because they set the standard so high; even their lesser pieces are relatively outstanding.

5. Keep On Running – Spencer Davis Group. I must confess that my first real awareness of Stevie Winwood was the Higher Love video played endlessly on MTV. Thankfully I’ve gone backwards, and I love this and I’m a Man; they’re always strangely uplifting. I recently saw on TOTP2 an archive clip of Chicago of dreary If You Leave Me Now fame covering I’m a Man, but they were quite different from that Chicago; it was on their debut album in 1969 and they were called the Chicago Transit Authority then. Thinking of Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship and then just Starship), I wonder if transport was a popular theme in band names at the time; I’m sure more will occur to me later. Like, uh, Steve Winwood’s Traffic, for starters….

6. Angelou – Van Morrison. You see? Lots of Van to choose from. I’m always reminded when I hear Van sing this one that I’ve been pronouncing it wrong; he says it like some nativity scene proclamation: ‘Angel, Lo!’. I always thought of it as sounding more like Angela combined with toilet, more like: Ann-je-loo. Or if calling her name in Paris, as in the song, I might say Ahnzh-ih-loo. But maybe it’s the Belfast accent. I saw Holly Lerski’s excellent band called Angelou, which has been described as being the spiritual sister of Jeff Buckley, open at Ronnie Scotts once when Boo Hewerdine, whose label picked up Angelou’s first album, played—I think the time he performed with with Gary Clark of Danny Wilson, followed by Colin Vearncombe (ex-Black) and his tremendous voice. But I don’t recall how Angelou the band pronounced their name.

7. The Kids Are Alright – The Who. There used to be a guy in my junior high French class who wore a badge/button with Pete Townshend’s warped-looking 60s face on it every single day. It took me ages to understand this hero worship of such a weird looking guy. (Imagine if, as adults, we went around wearing badges every day of people we admired.) A few years later, I found myself staying in a large hotel in Florida where the Who were also staying, and I convinced the mater to park her car near where I was sure they’d exit the sprawling hotel en route to the concert so I could wait and watch discreetly. I seemed alone in my interest as everyone else at the hotel was there for a field hockey tournament. When they hadn’t appeared by the time I thought they were due to leave, I looked down and fumbled with the newspaper to find the concert listing to check the time, then looked up to find that I’d just missed seeing Roger Daltrey get into a white limo, which drove off. I was about to give up when I saw a single groupie set up camp nearby and I figured she knew something. Sure enough, I soon made my mother jump out of her skin when I surprised myself by shouting, ‘OHMIGOD THAT’S PETE TOWNSHEND!’ ‘Who’s Pete Townshend?’ she asked. ‘I thought you wanted to see The Who.’

This was long before the days of compact digital cameras and cameraphones, but I remembered as I jumped up that my mother, a realtor, kept a camera in her glovebox, which I grabbed as I ran out of the car the few yards to where Pete was reluctantly, grumpily pausing for a photo by the groupie. I muttered a sort of ‘me, too?’ request, and he nodded vaguely but made it clear he was leaving in one minute. I pressed the shutter button, nothing happened, and as I helplessly examined the camera in panicked agony, Townshend turned and got into his limo and left. I was initially miserable until I realised that I had accomplished my original mission of just getting to see The Who—or one of them—close up. My lasting memory was that this older Townshend looked nothing like that warped figure on John from French Class’s badge. He was actually a fairly attractive man in person with beautiful blue eyes that seemed too gentle for a rock star who smashed precious musical instruments that had done him no harm.

So back to the MP3 list….

8. Love Will Tear Us Apart ’95 – Joy Division. The 1995 Permanent remix with added guitar. I look forward to finding the time to see finally the highly praised Anton Corbijn film of Ian Curtis’ life, Control.

9. Look for the Silver Lining – Chet Baker. He always makes me think of watching Ewan McGregor from a front row seat in the stalls do an excellent job in his uncle (Local Hero etc actor) Denis Lawson’s revival of David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle against the Eunuchs, originally a 60s play and film with Beatles connections, which I seem to recall played a lot of Chet Baker to create the atmosphere, unless it was Dave Brubeck and I’m remembering wrong.

10. Idiot Boy – Ron Sexsmith. “God so loved the idiot boy / He gave him coffee grounds in a paper cup / And a reason everyday to keep getting up / In a world that drags you down”. Perhaps he’ll be next on the Starbucks label. Humble and very highly regarded by well-known fellow artists, but bizarrely underappreciated by the average record-buyer, this excellent Canadian singer/songwriter has, like Workman, won a Juno: Songwriter of the Year in 2005, having been nominated several times before and no doubt in future.

11. Everyday Boy – Joan Armatrading. Kinda interesting that the Zen chose two ‘adjective Boy’ songs. This one is also grand: “But you respect yourself / And you let it show / Some fade with guilt And the shame / The way you Tell your story / With no tears For yourself.” That's made me think of someone I've mentioned in posts here before but I've gone on about that enough.

My Creative Zen Tries To Comfort Me

Despite spending decades carefully constructing mixed tapes, CDs and minidiscs in order to introduce friends to new music, I find that I happily passed control to my Creative Zen Vision M and have still been unable to take it off random play. The once or twice when I sorted a playlist so I could better get to know my new albums, which are otherwise completely lost amongst the nearly 7700 tracks, I’ve found myself feeling depressed and missing the delight of suddenly being presented with a nostalgic 80s memory or having my heart lifted at some ultra-boppy song I hadn’t thought of for ages. My Zen also usually seems adept at determining my mood, playing cheerful songs when I really need them or switching to gentle classical music when Southeastern are announcing their latest horror to us train passengers. (Does my Zen subscribe to Zen Buddhism?)

I shall expand on that theory when I have more time, but for now, I will just insert the random playlist it provided one stressful day when the expected length of my trip to work doubled. I tried to concentrate on the samples of fine music and remain calm, and I jotted down the tracks to keep myself focused on something other than wanting to kill the sadistic train managers. So for now, here’s a glimpse of a morning’s random choice by my Zen:-

Jackie Wilson Said – Dexy’s Midnight Runners (I prefer Van’s original but this is good fun)
Fantastic Day – Haircut 100 (you’ve lost all respect for me now, haven’t you?)
Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A – Angela Malsbury & London Mozart players (played as danger of train being cancelled was announced)
Don’t Cry Baby – Madeleine Peyroux (like new Billie Holiday)
Little Cowboy – Harry Nilsson
Man That I’ve Become – Nick Lowe
You Made a Fool of Me – Tasmin Archer
Something Stupid – Frank Sinatra and Nancy Sinatra
Honey Honey – Feist
People Gonna Talk – James Hunter (like new Sam Cooke)
Anytime - Neil Finn
Rebel Rebel – David Bowie
There Stands the Glass-Ted Baxter (everyone should hear his Biloxi)
Vehicles and Animals - Athlete
Bosom Buddies – Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur (from Mame)
Kids (Rise from the Ashes)-- Ed Harcourt
All I Want is Everything—Darden Smith & Boo Hewerdine
Happy Birthday – Altered Images
Help Yourself - Amy Winehouse
Speaking Confidentially – Cowboy Junkies
Pollution – Tom Lehrer
Different God – Brian Kennedy
Graceland (Live) – Boo Hewerdine (performing his hit with The Bible; did the Zen know he’d written the previous BK song?)
Surf (Live) – Roddy Frame (Everyone must get his Surf album)
In Your Sway – Tim Finn
It’s Been a Long, Long Time – Keely Smith (wife of King of the Swingers Louis Prima)
Carolina – Rico
Bare – Matt Nathanson
Mr Harris – Aimee Mann
Ramshackle Day Parade – Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros
You Dream Too Much – Richard Thompson
Best Friends – Ron Sexsmith.