Quoth the AP: "A Pink Floyd spokesman says founding member Richard Wright has died. He was 65."

I think it was early in 8th grade when Lee Bernardyn, astonished that I'd never heard of Pink Floyd, gave me a cassette tape copy of "The Wall." I was instantly hooked--lush keyboards, odd tangential lyrics, and over everything David Gilmore's crystalline blues guitar. I listened to the Floyd near-obsessively as a teenager, especially "Wish You Were Here," "Dark Side of the Moon," and the then-new "Momentary Lapse of Reason."

When you think of the great keyboard players of classic rock, Rick Wright doesn't often cross your mind. He didn't have the technical skill of Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman, or the swampy southern rock sensibility of Greg Allman. In interviews and concerts, he was the one who looked quiet and a little sleepy. Drugs (and by several accounts, Roger Waters' constant verbal abuse) left him nearly unable to play by the late 1970s, and it took awhile for him to recover.

Still, without Wright, you'd have no "Us And Them." No "Great Gig in the Sky." And in "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," David Gilmore's melancholy solo would have nothing to stand on without Wright's dense, wandering soundscape.

The heavenly choir is about to have some great backing keyboards. He'll be missed.

Thanks to this highly entertaining thread on kathrynt's LJ, I am now listening to Tori Amos' cover of George Michael's "Father Figure." It is dreamy, it is beautiful, it is wonderfully executed, and it is utterly wrong on so very many levels that it may replace Alanis Morrisette's version of "My Hump" as my new favorite fucked-up cover.

In other entertainment opinions, and with apologies to those of you who follow Doctor Who slavishly and obsessively: I just lost two hours on the first post-Rose episodes to air on US TV, and I'm never going to get them back. Who writes this stuff, and do they know that anyone over the age of 12 is watching?

bubblesutonium and I used to have CD racks scattered all over the house, but we're finally succumbing to the twenty-first century. In idle moments, I've been working on ripping all of our CDs into a more digital and portable form.

This leads to some occasional hilarity, such as when I realize how many different recordings of the same song I've accumulated over time. My record so far: Rush's "YYZ," five separate recordings.

I'm not proud of this.

I suspect exactly none of you (well, maybe rednikki or nireena) will care about this, but I just created a mix that I'm intensely proud of. Two and a half hours of beat to carry me through the night:

( Dance For Your Life )

A few of you may have noticed that I listen to a lot of high energy dance music, much to my wife's frequent chagrin.

I completely understand the complaints. It's synthesized, repetitive, mostly lyricless, rhythmic stuff, almost all in 4/4 time, nearly indistinguishable after you've been listening to it for awhile.

This is, oddly, why I like it. I can listen to it and turn my brain to other things. I'm not trying to analyze the chords, or the rhythm, or the lyrics; it just carries me along at a brisk 180 beats per minute or so. Most important, it keeps me awake.

If I lived in a different era or didn't have a mild distaste for how drugs affect me, I'm convinced I would be permanently addicted to uppers. I'm not by nature a particularly energetic person, but my work requires me to be 'on' and focused for hours and hours at a time. As it is I have to keep an eye on my caffeine intake. I routinely go through 4 or 5 caffeinated sodas per day.

I restarted running awhile back after realizing that a winter with no skiing at all had left me in such a state that I was going to have to buy an all new set of pants with, er, more room in the waist. I'd forgotten about one of the kinda odd side effects for me of running regularly. My body goes a little screwy on me. I lose most of my desire for sleep. I get more energetic and aggressive. Because of the extra dose of adrenaline I have to be careful not to turn into more of a pluperfect bastard than I already am, especially at work.

I'm hoping that the extra shot of energy will let me listen to some quieter stuff for awhile. Even -I'm- starting to get sick of listening to hard house and the Run Lola Run soundtrack.

For some reason in the last few weeks, I keep hearing mixes with a sample of somebody yelling through a voice processor:

"THIS IS THE POLICE SPEAKING. THIS CLUB IS CLOSED FOREVER."

What the heck is this from and why is it allofasudden so popular?

Conversation this morning:

Her: "So, it takes you fifteen years to learn to fake playing music, huh?"
Me: "Um. Yeah. What can I say. I'm slow."
Her: "Good thing you have a day job."

...and then we got into a discussion of what faking actually -is-, which might bear repeating:

Piano sheet music comes in two varieties. In classical piano music, every note, measure, and rest is shown separately. The trick is to play each note exactly as it was written by the composer. That's the style I was originally taught, back in high school. I was never very good at it, but I can plunk out a decent Pachelbel's Canon or Moonlight Sonata or Prelude and Fugue in D.

Jazz, blues, and rock music is shown completely differently. You get a melody line, a time signature, and a set of chords. That's it. Everything else - what you do with the chords, the rhythm, you improvise.

This is also called 'faking.' There are fake books out there with literally 500-1000 songs in one book, one song per page.

Good jazz players can follow fake books easily. I never really learned enough music theory to do so in high school, because you have to know what chords like F#/Bflat are and how they relate to, say, C#Maj.

So yay: fake music! One day I aspire to play real music. Practice practice.

File under "Things You Don't Expect To Hear on the Radio": A bluegrass banjo song that retells 'Moby Dick' - sort of.

Its immortal chorus:


Call me call me Ishamel
Call me what you will
You can call me e-mail
And save your telephone bills

My car is for sale. If you're in the Seattle area and you have need of an '02 Volkswagen Golf GTI GLX VR6 with 28000 miles on it, let me know.

A couple weeks ago, preparing to sell it, I hauled it over to the local car stereo shop and had them remove all the custom bits. I'm now back to the stock stereo - with tape deck.

All of my mix tapes date from college. I made several at the time. The one in the car at the moment has a lot of acapella music: Sweet Honey In the Rock, Take 6, Bobby McFerrin, Yes....

I'm remembering now why I rarely listen to acapella any more. It makes me want to sing.

I, of course, couldn't hold a tune with a bucket and a pair of tongs. My mother, who sings beautifully, tried for years to encourage me to pretend otherwise - chorus, voice lessons, jazz vocal groups, you name it. It wasn't until I got to college that I finally learned the truth: I couldn't sing worth a damn, and never had been able to.

So I don't sing. Except, sometimes, to myself, in the car. Badly.

Note to self: remove temptation. Set iPod on "techno" before going home tonight.

Random late night thoughts, mostly from the drive home from work last night at 11:30 PM:

Remind me why I ever liked Alanis Morrisette's "You Oughta Know"? I heard it first while driving on a freeway in Connecticut and loved it enough to rush right out and buy a used record-company-freebie copy of the album before anybody else had heard of it. Last night I listened to the song while driving home and realized to my dismay that it wasn't the same song any more. Good thing Alanis has done better stuff since.

The local half-assed ClearChannel station played a version of Usher's "Yeah" that doesn't have either Lil Jon's backup or Ludacris' rap on it. Memo to station managers: This is not 1986. Racist program directors are kindly advised to get over themselves. Either play rap or don't, but don't play a half-assed badly-cut remix that cuts out all of the parts you don't like.

I've been raiding my CD collection for songs and albums to load on the iPod. It's been fun to re-discover some old favorites I hadn't listened to in years.

I'd forgotten how much I liked The Story.

tafkar may be mildly amused by the CD I found with a bunch of early 90s rave stuff, including but not limited to Ottorongo's "Fuck You," Blue Pearl's "Can You Feel The Passion" (aka "Playing With Knives"), Two Little Boys, and Apotheosis' version of 'O Fortuna.'

No matter how many times I hear it, when Joe Satriani's "Flying in a Blue Dream" pops up, I always remember looking out the window of the Amtrak train, watching the the Connecticut River wind through the long, wooded bend south of Springfield, MA.

The Onion noticed it first, but Sting used to have talent. Most of my acquaintances think he lost it when he went solo. (Ok, maybe not Strahd.) Me, I still love his mid-80s stuff, when he was in his jazz period and working with Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, and Gil Evans. My only regret about "Moon Over Bourbon Street" is that Sting didn't give Marsalis about ten minutes to lay out a real sax solo.

I hardly ever listen to Jethro Tull or Led Zeppelin any more, but there's still an ungodly amount of Rush and Pink Floyd on that pod. Some things don't change.

Music keeps me sane. But you knew that.

I can't find the words to explain how grateful I will be when this week is over. From the many surly, unpleasant people I've dealt with to nearly getting killed on the roads to intense work and work-related guilt, it's been an awful week.

Borrowing a technique from quinnclub, here are two good things. Actually, three.

- I'm not normally in favor of having a stay-at-home spouse, but there are advantages to coming home from a long day and having your spouse be perky, cheerful and rested instead of tired, upset, and depressed.
- Our back yard is finally done, and it looks amazing. I want to get some chairs down there pronto so I can sit around and enjoy the spring.
- The Einsturzende Neubauten show rocked.

Oh yeah, the show. I'm a bit torn about how to explain the show. About 10% of my friends list already know Neubauten much, much better than I do, and about 90% of them have never heard of them. So, for the 10%, my apologies for repeating the obvious.

( Neubauten )

Here's hoping for a quiet weekend. Maybe I'll get to sit around outside a bit.