“My voice is unadorned. I don’t try for perfection. I try to be honest and truthful and soulful with the voice I have. If I make mistakes in notes, or there are cracks in notes, I don’t fix them. That’s the way it is.”

In my opinion, The Beatles are the most amazing band ever. I just finished watching “American Beauty,” which is an amazingly beautiful film, and it ends with a cover of “Because” by The Beatles. Covers of Beatles songs just never cut it for me, so I put on the actual song, which is from Abbey Road, which is one of my favorite Beatles records, and I noticed that it’s one of the few songs that they used a synthesizer on, so I thought I’d wikipedia the song, and it’s freakin’ interesting!

Among other cool facts in the wikipedia entry, the synth used in the song was the MiniMoog, which is pretty rad because I have the modern day version of that synth: the Minimoog Voyager. :D

From me:
Omg I love this woman.

From the website:
The wonderful Nellie McKay sings “Mother of Pearl” and “If I Had You” from her sparkling set at TED2008.

Umm… I’m obsessed with Doseone from Subtle. The following is an excerpt, verbatim (including capitalization and such), from a book that he compiled of his drawings and illustrations called “the pelt”:

note: nostradamus was a hack

the numbers on your house begin to sweat as you go to remove the 2 bills and usual circular. Your mailman’s standing out by the recycling with his back to you. you can sort of see in his truck rear window that he’s adjusting a clown nose to sit properly on his face. You turn to fish out the missing person postcard, but you begin to feel watched. You look to your left a full grown baby and large orange cat are fake driving and staring at you sideways from the front seats of an airbrushed blue van. as they slowly take a speed bump to the axels you notice that todays missing little girl is none other than a strapping young ed mcmahon. Your eyes go inside out for a split second. WHIP! Suddenly the powerlines across the street go taut, release, and then slowly suck in their slack over a standard oakland sky. There in the immediate distance a rather plump dove/pigeon looks as though its flying directly toward you. its carrying what appears to be a veiled birdcage in the three strong fingers of its one good foot. a slow sky second later it’s setting the strange gift on the shallow wall that fronts your apartment’s un-porch. the dumpy little pigeon peers up at you and winks it’s one eyebrow twice. Out the corner of your eye you notice the blue mean man van going up in orange flames at the nice red sign down by the second speedbump. The massive cat and grown baby are no where to be seen. The pigeon takes off quietly, sending something like chills down your suddenly so dreamy street. A moment later the block goes slow again, and the mailman has gotten ghost as well. Only the birds belated birthday cage remains veiled there before you. you slowly life the crushed velvet cloth covering the abandoned birdcage, and there on its side on a bed of damp news paper, is the candied and severed head of a young ed mcmahon. Were it not for the last give minutes you’d be shocked, but instead you grab a nearby stick and start to poke its closed eyes very gently. Nothing happens. and as you reach to pull the top off a deep breath, it’s done eyes snap wide open. you reach to cut yell, but young ed cuts you off.

“Put a cat in a box, and rig up a rube goldberg contraption involving a hammer, a vial of poison, and a quantum triggering device. if an electron moves into the opposite location, the hammer will drop smashing the vial and killing the cat.
The laws of quantum mechanics hold that as long as the electron remains undisturbed, it hangs in limbo, occupying both its possible states.
The cat, by extension, is both dead and alive.”

note: It will be hailed as a giant step forward for all mankind… When they decide to permanently alter the aestetics of either a school or prison bus, their appearance being otherwise identical,less the fenced-in windows is entirely unacceptable.

optimists are easy…
They’re practically sluts…

“The poem is never finished, it’s abandoned.” - W.H. Auden

I’ve purchased and tried to read several books on writing lyrics and poetry, and they’ve all been pretty bleh. This book however is freakin’ excellent! Where all the other lyric books have focused on show tunes-type lyrics and songwriters who are far from contemporary, this book is quite broad in the pool of artists that it pulls from and interviews, and has a lot of really really great ideas for approaching songwriting and just creativity in general. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s at all interested in songwriting / lyrics.

From Amazon.com:
Lyrics sheds light on all aspects of lyric writing for music and will make songwriters feel more confident and creative when they tackle lyrics. It’s perfect for all songwriters: those who don’t like their own lyrics and find them difficult to write, experienced writers looking for a creative edge, and those offering lyrics to set to music in a partnership. Topics include channeling personal experiences into lyrics, overcoming writer’s block, the right lyrics for a bridge, the separation between lyrics and poetry, exploring imagery and metaphor, avoiding cliches, and more. The book also offers tips on the various styles of lyrics, from protests, spirituals, and confessionals to narratives and comic songs.

“I had an uncle who use to tell me stories. It seems to me now his sole purpose in life was to scare me witless. A recurring character in his stories was this spider-man. When I was about six or seven, he used to try and scare me and my sister, arriving late at night and whispering. He was my bogeyman.” - Robert Smith of The Cure on ‘Lullaby’

“I get ideas from almost anywhere but especially from supermarket queues - I have a talent for eavesdropping and it’s amazing what you learn waiting to pay for your juice.” - Morrissey (1987)