Donelson Fire Is Second For Family

Two people I know lost everything in the recent fire at Biltmore Apartments in Donelson. Here's the story link from Newschannel5.

Room #1002

"Oh no. This won't work," she said.

I wasn't too surprised. When she told me which room number was hers, I knew that it was a room with one king sized bed. There was another woman traveling with her who was parking the car while I escorted this lady and her luggage to room number 1002.* Maybe her friend was just driving her and not actually staying though, so I kept quiet and let her tell me when we entered that the room wasn't what she needed.

She politely told me that this wouldn't work and I assured her that I would find two doubles for her; no problem. I moved to her telephone and called down to the front desk to make the necessary room change. The change was made in the computer and I carried one of her bags back to the brass bellcart, telling her that all was fine. I apologized for the mix-up and told her that we could wait for her friend before moving to the new room.

She stood alone in the middle of #1002 and watched me as I worked. "I'm not going to cry," she told me (or maybe she was telling herself). I paused and looked into her eyes as she continued speaking. Some people are overly dramatic about such things and treat wrongly assigned rooms as terribly offensive matters. She didn't have that tone in her voice though and I anxiously and respectfully awaited her further words.

"I'm not going to cry," she told me. "My husband was supposed to come on this trip with me but he died two weeks ago. I don't need this king anymore. Joyce was kind enough to come with me." She wasn't crying, but her voice was shaky and it cracked a bit while she stood there, probably telling that heartbreaking news to one more stranger than she wanted to. She appeared to be in her sixties. I admired her overall strength as she gave me the small speech. A friend was supposed to change the reservation to a room with two double beds, but obviously either the call or change hadn't been made.

Joyce arrived and we moved to another room. I completed my assistance to her and offered her my name in case there was anything else I could do for her during her stay. She thanked me for my help and I thanked her as well, again giving her my condolences.

Off to another room and another guest with the knowledge that I'd be remembering the guest in #1002 for a good while. I wish her well.

*Not her actual room number. Neither is Joyce the name of her friend. The rest is true.

One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.

"Got to be good looking cause he's so hard to see."

(Methinks I am easily influenced by this Beatles CD playing as I type.)

He's a good big brother. As evidenced here.

I bet he often dreams of these two famous adventurers.

"I had to laugh. I saw the photograph."

Living is easy with eyes closed.

All hail Giles Martin!

All Songs Considered's Bob Boilen speaks with Giles about the project here.

thebeatles.com

He Went To Chicago

He didn't take nearly as many pictures as he had hoped to, but the trip wasn't about that anyway.

My Best John Cusack

I would hold a boombox over my head, playing Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" loudly underneath my love's window to prove to her that she's my everything.

I'd be totally cool with lounging around in a house of ill repute discussing Western philosophy with the prostitutes therein.

Who wouldn't want to be a 1920s playwright with the likes of Dianne West and Jennifer Tilly always around?

I'm all about peace and love, but Cusack does have a way of making a hitman going home and attending his class reunion seem pretty cool.

Public service announcement: Don't sleep with the wife of your new coworker. It will mess your life up!

If I ever get a job offer to work on the 7 1/2 floor with Catherine Keener, I will not hesitate to accept, slouch over and look behind every file cabinet for that famous portal.

Most of all, I would love to own a record store, make lists all day long, obsess about every woman who ever left me and wonder why I was left. (Maybe it's because I tend to frequent houses of ill repute to discuss Western philosophy with prostitutes?)

Oh, and I just happen to love dogs.

"What's an album cover?," asks a younger generation.

A highpoint of my recent trip to Chicago was spending time with my brother. Hanging out with him for a few hours on that chilly Chicago evening, I was in my element. He drove me around his town in his new Honda Fit (I envy!) and we talked about music, work and life in general.

At one point, we ventured into a record store and browsed and talked music for a good hour or so. I hadn't talked music like this since I hung out with some Tom Waits fans before his Ryman show last summer. It's what I miss most about my record store clerk days. I'd clock in and stock those longboxed CDs all night long. Every workplace conversation (with co-workers and customers alike) was the same wonderful topic: Music, and not limited to any one genre; oh, how I learned and taught so much back then.

My brother and I, driving around along Lake Shore Drive, found ourselves discussing the (ever increasing?) demise of album cover art. I remember well my dad showing me Steely Dan album covers and Yes album covers when I was so young. To think that a Roger Dean won't have the medium of music to showcase his artistic talents seems a shame to me. I even remember holding my first album (ELO's Greatest Hits) and studying its very simple cover (a gold medal as I recall) and appreciating it as a part of the cool experience of what I was hearing on my turntable.

"Paradise Theater" by Styx was another one of those that I spent hours taking in as something very important. There on the front was that Paradise Theater in its heyday, all lights shining brightly and crowds of people arriving for the "Gala Premiere" as its marquee indicated with such luminosity. Flip to the back cover and a different image of the same theater some years later was pictured in its sad demise. With windows broken and litter on the empty street before it, the marquee now informed any potential passersby that it was "Temporarily Closed."

The stories weren't just in the songs; they were on the album covers as well. Now, the story is not that album covers seem to be less and less important in this digital age, but that there is a whole generation of music buyers who don't understand why anyone would care about its demise. It's about the music, right? What does a picture have to do with whether or not a song (or collection of songs) is any good? The thing is, I guess there is a good point in that. It's time for me to take my spot on the old fogey soapbox and rant about how the present is not as good as the past, at least as far as album covers are concerned.

Here I am with my iPod. It's a Mini so there is no picture screen. I don't even get the tiny jpeg image to squint at. I could have more space for more artists on it, but along the same lines of my old-school ways, I only put entire albums on it. Even if I only really like a few songs from an album, I put the whole thing on there because I feel that the artists worked too hard on their albums to only have a song or two remembered. But that's another rant for another day.

My brother and I were of the opinion that there was dwindling hope for the continued appreciation of the album cover. (Don't get us started on liner notes!) Today, however, I came across an article stating otherwise in Wired magazine. The author writes about designers doing their part to keep the covers cool and relevant with Flash Lite. Here's the link: Designers Work to Rescue a Dying Art Form -- the Album Cover

(I recommend reading this while eating barbecue at Mothership BBQ in Nashville. All cool restaurateurs should decorate their walls with old album covers like this guy.)

Joss Stone, Makes Tonight A Wonderful Thing

When in 1980, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen sang of the young lady who "don't remember the Queen of Soul," he surely wasn't singing of today's Joss Stone, who at nineteen years* of age (and with her third album under her belt) is most certainly familiar with Aretha Franklin. Joss cut her teeth on the soulful sounds of Aretha, under the tutelage of the amazing Betty Wright with her debut on 2003's The Soul Sessions debut.

Her newest release, Introducing Joss Stone, is titled to suggest a major departure from that first album built to wow a public in awe of a fifteen year old blonde Brit with a voice so capable of channeling the power of America's black soul singers who were belting out sorrow and empowerment so many decades before her very own birth. This is the release that Joss most wants us to know is all her own. Instead of Betty Wright and her guidance, we now have Tony! Toni! Toné!'s Raphael Saadiq in charge of all things sonic and groove related. Very frequently, from one track to the next, I hear beats and sounds that would not be out of place on the best of Prince's dance tracks. (My best compliment is this: It's the kind of record that makes me write down Raphael's name and make a note to listen to anything that he works on in the near future.)

Joss herself remains forceful and positive and sexy with confidence. The CD's title (and a few interviews I've read) indicate that she is trying to show the world that she is much more than a girl who can sound like Aretha, et al. She's writing and co-writing her own songs now and she's telling us that this should really be viewed as the first "real" Joss Stone album. While some are criticizing her lyrics as not being on par with the best in the biz (Hey, she's only nineteen! No need to force the metaphors just yet.), I think that she delivers some very strong and empowering words about love and self-confidence. The clever wordplay may be a bit lacking, but I defy you not to lose yourself in dance while playing "Put Your Hands On Me." My only concern is that she sometimes gets a bit close to sounding like Mariah Carey with some of her vocal acrobatics -- there is beauty in showing off without sounding like you are showing off -- but she gets a pass from me.

On one song**, Joss works in a beautiful interpolation of Joni Mitchell's "Catch Me I'm Falling" among a few other classics from back in the day on other tracks. I also noticed that the "turntablist" gets proper credit in the CD booklet for whatever it is that he does. This is not your father's recording studio.

Joss Stone has released yet another strong album. Whether this is her first "real" record, or her actual third one, I'm glad that I have it around to play loudly while I jog, drive, or pretend that I know how to dance. "She thinks I'm crazy / But I'm just growing old."

*At least I think she's still nineteen. If she's twenty now, then my Steely Dan reference falls somewhat flat.

**If the CD booklet was in front of me and not in my car, I could tell which song I'm thinking about. What? The website doesn't have room for all of the lyrics and credits found in the CD booklet? (I'd probably write a better review if I had the liner notes in front of me.)

Springsteen's surprise appearance at own tribute show

New York. Carnegie Hall. A tribute to Bruce Springsteen. The highpoint? Bruce Springsteen himself shows up and plays for 30 minutes to end (and steal) the show.

Featured artists included Steve Earle, Ronnie Spector, Patty Smith, Pete Yorn and Odetta.

Springsteen said of Odetta: "...the greatest version of '57 Channels' I've ever heard."

Here's her rendition of it. My goosebumps are huge.

Rocks!

Newton Dominey and Newton Dominey on myspace

Year Zero. Now.

I love a lot of bands but there is only one music artist's bumper sticker on the back of my car. It's an N, an I, and a backwards N. You follow me and you know that I love Nine Inch Nails. Whenever I drive south on I-65 near Brentwood, I recall the first time I heard bits of Reznor's Pretty Hate Machine in an NPR story about the frenzied and emotional industrial sound of his creation.

Not all of his music has hit me the way that Pretty Hate Machine did. I bought that tape that very afternoon and kept it playing in my tape deck for damn near a month straight. While he has experimented successfully with making incredible sounding music since, no complete album of his has been sounded as emotionally desperate as that first release.

Well, here I am with goosebumps listening to 2007's Year Zero. So far, it's raw and furious and needy as hell. Listen to it here. Don't answer phones or open doors. Turn off your television and focus on what may be the best Nine Inch Nails album in a long, long time. Visceral anguish is all over this. The beats are nasty and sexy and don't care about you. But the singer's words regret, and they want, and they reach out with long, skinny arms, pleading for love and compassion. There is the balance.

Year Zero is as complete as 1989's Pretty Hate Machine and as sexy as 1994's "Closer To God." It's minimalism with swagger and lust. It's about the future and paranoia as we all inch through the meat grinder together while singing along to "God Given." Year Zero hits the streets on April 17. It'll be mid-May before I listen to anything other than this genius release.

Again, it's here.

Another day, another podcast.

Currently listening to a cool jazz podcast called Jazzcorner Innerviews. Cool interviews with interesting people in the jazz world.

The podcast that really has fun is Coverville. As the name suggests, it's all cover songs grouped together in various themes. It's where I first heard Tom Waits sing Jame's Brown's "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag." Click here for the archives.

Don't be surprised if I start my own darn podcast in the next month or so. I'm seriously considering it.

Georgia, when she was little.

Click the pics for the larger sizes at webshots.

Read one magazine article, say goodbye to social life.

On the plane to Chicago, I read an article in Spirit Magazine about Second Life. It's not the first time I had heard of Second Life, but it's now that I've decided to give it a try.

Any readers play around with this? Your thoughts?

Chez Bez goes to Chicago!

On Monday morning, I fly to Chicago for the first time.

What to do for a few hours in the afternoon while I play tourist?