Julie Andrews is f*cking hot. I don’t know what spurred me to post this, but she is the most underrated beauty of the last 60 years. She’s like a cannonball of cuteness beaming with talent and laughter. She’s Emma Watson 1.0. Yes, I’m still straight. 

Well I came to the city
I was running from the past
My heart was bleeding
And it hurt my bones to laugh

Jesus.
Another perfect song. Two verses sung and then Derek singing for another.

This is where I grew up. 
This is why I am the way I am and why these kids will probably be too.  

Frederick, MD 21702.  

Vince Gill at The Troubadour 11/16/11.
Can’t remember the last time I paid $25 to see a 20-time Grammy winner play a venue that fits less than 250 people. Did I mention he played for 2 hours and 45 minutes with no intermission or opening act? This is why I love country music.

The guitar playin warn’t bad neither.

Vince told about a dozen stories throughout the night. Stories about his badass judge dad and his inspirations for songs like Cowboy Up (Levitra) and Go Rest High on That Mountain. He spoke a lot about his first time playing the Troubador 35 years ago. He was 19, had just moved to LA and the Troubadour was his first gig. In the audience that night? His two biggest idols: Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell. Vince actually covered one of Rodney’s songs that night and was invited up to the dressing room. He and Rodney became best friends and Emmylou wanted to write with him. Talk about fate. 

Back for the first time in 35 years last night, Vince walked up on stage, strapped in his tele and took a good long look at the audience staring back at him. No greeting, no wave, but he had that trademark Vince Gill-ian warmth in his face and the first words out of his mouth were, “it’s gonna be some crazy shit in here tonight.” The band rolled into One More Last Chance and kicked ass for the next two and a half hours. 

Feist at The Wiltern 11/12/11

Chilly Gonzales opened. Funny and brilliantly entertaining with his spiel on politics and transposing well-known major key songs into minor. Minor version of Ode to Joy and Happy Birthday were particularly “jewish” as he noted. Chilly’s piano playing is furious and reminds me why the piano is in the percussion family. Loved it.

Feist is a songbird in every way. She sings her between song banter. Her voice is clear as a bell and her guitar playing is sparse and tactful. The songs take on a whole new life (as they should) in a live environment and her music is so incredibly dynamic if you let it breathe with a full band onstage. Metals has a significantly darker tone than her previous two albums, but the sounds were deep last night. The highlight for me was My Moon My Man which was timed perfectly and loud as fuck. Love it when drummers do that. 

(photo credit: Timothy Norris)

I really hope Fred has more of this ready to go for Portlandia season 2. 

I find prodigies fascinating. This is incredible. 

I used to be a snotty little bastard.*

A song would come on the radio and I’d immediately identify everything wrong with it: “The mix is terrible.” “The bass sounds like my nephew farting.” “The compression feels like a baby drill sergeant is having karaoke night in my left ear.” “Really? Another song about making it rain up in da club?” “This is retarded.”

Then it was on to the artist: “Nippleback really need to stop making music.” “Remember when Katy Perry was good? Neither do I. She needs to stop making music forever.” 

It always ends with some variation of, “[so and so] needs to stop making music.” This is what a critic does, because the critic is a coward.

The critic is a coward because he does not create. He does not participate. In the arena of creative sport, he is a bystander: feckless and incapable or too afraid to enter the playing field himself. The critic is a coward. He is the impotent bastard child of self-doubt and arrogance, frustrated by his own failings and driven mad with envy by the unworthy success of another. I am the critic. We need less of me.

Tumblr is full of critics. Well, critics and curators. Curators are people who compile a buncha shit they didn’t create and put it together as if the compilation itself was a creation. Curators love to quote famous people. Curators reblog pictures of Karl Lagerfeld and Tyler the Creator and Ninja Turtle Noses as discoveries that represent their true selves. Collecting items for show-and-tell is not creation, it is curation. If not for HTML, curators would be pasting magazine cutouts on poster board to hang on bedroom walls - desiring piggish squeals and seal claps for their exquisite taste and classiness. High brows and raised pinkies to white poster board and paste. We need less of these.

What we lack are creators; Pros unfazed by critics and oblivious to reblogs and Like buttons and retweets. Creators with integrity and work ethic and talent. People who create because they have to; not for youtube views or passive income, but just because. People who find an empty space and fill it: something out of nothing. Writers who pen originals and musicians who do the same. Artists unafraid to share because their inner critic is stronger than the ones outside. These are the brave ones. Because when the dust settles, the creator leaves behind something of substance. The critic’s opinions die with him.

Creation is forever. I wrote it. I sang it. I drew it. Nothing can ever change that, and no goliath of snarky criticism can ever wipe it off the face of forever. It won’t always be great, but at the very least, it’s original. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is: create something. Be brave. Have no fear of judgment, because once you’ve created it, you’ve won. You’ve conquered the fear your critics could not. The fear will always be there, but the creators fight with courage, daily.  So, write your stories, sing your songs, snap your pictures. Be You. If they hate it, challenge them. Challenge them to participate and watch them wither like daisies.

Be You, and don’t let the critical misanthropes like me keep you down.    

*By “used to” I mean “am” and by “little” I mean “fat.”

This is Raquel Rodriguez. She’s a phenomenal talent and a very sweet, humble gal in person. Show her some love.

Every species loves a little Mariachi

all of it built on 2 chords. straight soul. the kids call it “swag”

Sometimes I listen to music and I feel my heart punching out of my chest, like it’s been prematurely stuffed in a coffin and needs to pound its way out. I’ve been wanting to write about music for a long time and I still can’t summon the right words. It’s just so fucking visceral. Music rips you up and shreds you. I can’t write about music because it’s more than emotion. It’s this indescribable experience where each song is like a life: all the growth and change and harmony and discord of a lifetime condensed into four minutes. This is what makes music relatable and diverse and indescribable - how does one articulate life? Every song is a life. Some are bland and mediocre and others are sung by Donny Hathaway. Some lives are shy and others are Freddie Mercury. Some songs are trite, or boring or unoriginal and some lives are too. I’d argue that our taste in music should expand as we mature and gain a deeper appreciation for life - seeing beauty and value in places we hadn’t before. If you make strong, sweeping judgments about entire ‘categories’ of music, you probably feel the same way about certain categories of people and lifestyles too. Every song is a unique life, don’t be a bigot.

I don’t mean to sound bombastic with some overwrought metaphor about life and music, but music is fucking awesome. It’s 4 AM and I’m psychotic on caffeine and amped from all the fist pumps I threw watching fireworks. I killed the lights to calm down, slid on my headphones and lost myself for a few hours. Actually, that’s not true, I found myself for a few hours. Nothing sustains focus like music. My greatest joy is when a song is allowed to be foreground noise: every high hat, every note, every hand clap, the lightly throbbing wurlitzer somewhere, all of it. The perfectly timed first syllable of a lyric and the breath that comes before it. It’s so undeniably real. It’s life. 

The first musical memory I have is of my dad playing rhiannon on his new hi-fi. That modest-but-unstoppable guitar lick, the light cymbal roll right before the bass lumbers in, the keys tinkling in and out between the snares on every two, lindsey’s syncopated right thumb - and that’s just the first 14 seconds. It builds and brews like the witch it is and a perfectly suited voice sings a perfectly suited melody. Perfect. If you don’t like rhiannon, fuck you. It’s still real to me dammit, not because I understand anything stevie nicks is [ever] singing about, but because it tells me I have a past. The song was a time and place and it’s followed me to wherever I am each time I hear it. It’s a reminder that life has a past and a present. Put life in the foreground and focus, listen for things you’ve never heard, remember the things you’ve already learned. 

I can’t think of anything else on earth that can release endorphins like a good song. Like shots of life racing through your veins. Ever hear a brand new song that you instantly love? Nothing in life is as pure and raw as that. When I hear a new song I love, I know I love it immediately. There is no deliberation. It’s no surprise that the most common subject of music is love; I know what love is because of music. A good song rips your heart out, punches you in the gut and induces a serene, knowing smile. A good woman will do the same. 

Music is truth. Even when it’s sampled and sliced and mashed up and scratched and beat boxed and autotuned and thumped over a tired old house beat, it’s truth. Perhaps a relative truth, but truth nonetheless. We can’t hide from it: we love what we love and hate what we hate. The brain engages in no mental gymnastics to love or hate a song. Go ahead, try to give yourself every opportunity to love a song you hate because a friend wrote it or a respected musician recommended it. It doesn’t work, the ear wants what it wants. The ear remains objective and unbiased because it can only enjoy what is true to itself. What a beautiful gift that is: to know who we are because we can’t help but love what we love. Music hones that gift like nothing else and I have a duty to maintain it for as long as I live.

Sounds good to me.

I wish every ad was this.