no retreat baby, no surrender

(from boston.com)

this is from the opening night of eddie vedder's east coast tour in boston on friday. this picture is currently rocking my computer's desktop. i'm wearing my tour shirt from april today, trying not to think about how much i wish i had been there (i know, i know, i just saw pearl jam a month ago..)

i can't believe it's already august. last night i had an urge to clean my apartment (very out of character for me, sadly). i rearranged the living room (which pretty much means moving the couch around, since that's the only piece of furniture i can move, really), swept, mopped, vaccummed, and thought about tackling my messy cd collection, but decided to save that for another day. i will admit that i did find a bag from easy street with a cd that hadn't been opened since i bought it in june 2006 (the receipt was with it). oops. guess i probably didn't really want that album to begin with.

looking at my unloved (from its appearance) music collection did inspire me, however, to listen to an album i haven't listened to in a few years - the rising by bruce springsteen. that, in turn, inspired me to watch the concert dvd from that tour, which made me remember seeing springsteen in tacoma in 2002, which made me sad that i missed him when he was in seattle a few months ago. this all also made me want to look for bruce springsteen videos online, and i found one of ed with bruce playing no surrender. i love this song, and forgot to mention the other day that it is also on my EV playlist. (an aside: i swear that i can remember once hearing ed vedder play bobby jean, but have no idea where it was from. does anyone know?)


here are some of the things i'm looking forward to this month:

next saturday, i'm going to see goodness at the showbox. very excited for that!

kexp is having four free concerts at the mural theater in seattle center. 8/15 is jessie sykes and the sweet hereafter, who i have never heard but have read good things about. 8/16 (my birthday!) is, i think, rocky votolato, who i really like. and i think that goodness are playing again on the 23rd, although i'm not positive. yay!

the 27th, of course, is mike mccready at the tractor.

bumbershoot! i always say i won't go all three days, but i usually end up going, so this year i just bought a 3 day pass (only 80 dollars if you buy before a certain date). off the top of my head, i'm excited to see band of horses, the black keys, lucinda williams, the blakes, old 97s, blitzen trapper, and a bunch of others i can't think of right now, plus i always see at least 2 or 3 bands i've never heard before but fall in love with (last year it was kings of leon and black rebel motorcycle club).

awesomeness

from seattlest:
On August 27, McCready’s Shadow 86 (his first band, reunited after 20 years) plays an early show at the Tractor. If you want to see one of the planet’s best axemen go to work on a tiny stage, we suggest you get your tickets right now.

done. i'm excited! it's listed as a jimi hendrix tribute, and honestly i thought that this was the best part of the flight to mars show at the showbox in may.

also, the site links to an interview with mike that somehow i missed. here is my favorite part:
You might see me staring up in the sky with my eyes closed. I’m not faking it. That just kind of happens. It happens a lot with Pearl Jam. There’s something the five of us create that I don’t get anywhere else on this planet. We all kind of speak to each other in a musical sense, a non-verbal sense.

grandfather was a sailor

ahh, i am so jealous of these eddie vedder tour dates. (notice that it starts friday in boston. speaking of boston, if i were to ever live any where beside seattle, i would want that to be it. i've never been homesick for a city i've gone to on vacation before, but i want to go back to boston. so much). i wish the jerk would add a show in seattle (for the last time, vancouver is NOT seattle!!! argh... of course, i wouldn't mind taking the train there again). i don't know why he won't play here.. he could play at the moore or the paramount or, dare i say, benaroya hall... heck, he could do a private show for my friends and i in my apartment and we could irritate the hell out of the jerks who live underneath me.

this morning, i was listening to my "EV" playlist. not in any order, the songs are: millworker, growin up, porch (solo acoustic), goodbye, brokenhearted, my hometown (bruce springsteen and eddie), man of the hour , i am a patriot, if you want to sing out sing out, parting ways, and setting forth. a lovely little playlist for my ride to work.

speaking of pearl jam, i so want this for my birthday. from the tenclub website:

thanks in advance.

the room, the sun and the sky

in the mornings, i can generally be found on the bus listening to headphones (on my pseudo-ipod). usually - lately - it is one of two things: live pearl jam (for most of july, 6/30/08 has been on repeat) or setlist, the live frames album. clearly, i am a creature of habit. however, for the last few mornings, i have stepped outside of my comfort zone to listen to carnavas, by the silversun pickups (oddly enough, the song titles never made it onto my music player - translation: i was too lazy to type them in - so, although i have had the album for a few years, i know the songs by the titles "track one," "track two" etc..) i first heard this band at the capitol hill block party (1 year ago? 2 years ago?) i've read opinions that they sound like the smashing pumpkins, but i honestly don't hear that (and i used to love the pumpkins - when i first started using the internet, i picked starla, a pumpkins song, as my america online screen name and i have used some form of that ever since). maybe i just don't mind - every band is derivative of another.



if i may, i will put music into three categories: that which i listen to daily; that which i listen to sporadically, but when i do, i remember why i started listening to it in the first place; and that which i wish i could forget i ever listened to. bands like bon jovi or mr. big fall into the latter category for sure. pearl jam and the frames are in the first. u2, rem, nirvana, and a bunch of others, including the silversun pickups, are in the second.

speaking of musical categorization, perhaps i should give the fleet foxes a second chance. carrie brownstein likes them. (if you have not read her blog, please do. it is one of my first stops every day. i love her writing, and i especially love reading the comments her entries inspire).

i especially love her for writing this: Instead of following my usual trajectory for show-going -- the one wherein I plan on going all week, but then bail at the last second due to tiredness, old age or an excuse to hang out with my pets... hello!! seeing a rock star admit that makes me feel a little less pathetic for once in a while skipping a show for that very reason. and i'm only 28. what will i be like in ten years?

can't let you roam inside my head...

a few things that are amusing me this evening...



for some reason, i think this is hilarious. at about 5:40, some lady with a terrible voice starts singing along and glen kind of stops and wags his finger and keeps going. a few seconds later, she starts again and glen says something, the beginning of which i cannot for the life of me decipher and marketa cracks up. then the lady says something like, "if people would sing i wouldn't have to sing so loudly." glen has a blank look on his face for a second, but without meeting a beat he says, "jesus. do you talk to your tv too?"

this website. while it is not about music, it is about being a fan (of the red sox, in this case). i am finding that i enjoy reading people's blogs about things i don't even care about, because it is interesting to read about the way others express thier fandom (is that a word?), if that makes sense. plus she seems to have a little obsession with josh beckett, of which i approve, and the graphic of him in her post for today is cracking me up.

the grand archives. i especially like the song swan matches. sometimes i feel like i don't listen to enough new music (i need to expand my musical horizons, me thinks). it seems like every time i listen to KEXP, for example, i hear a new band and think to myself that i should check them out but then i get discouraged because there is never enough time to listen to all the stuff i want to, so i don't. but, seriously, of all the bands i saw at the subpop thing a few weeks ago, i think that they might have been my favorite.

don't let me down...

did anyone else watch vh1 rock honors the who? pearl jam's performance of love reign o'er me is.. just... wow:

(i'm not sure what happens in the video around 3:15.. crazy sounding)

god, ed's voice sounds AMAZING. this performance is a perfect example of why i love this band. they take a song that's not even originally by them and make it theirs. (i don't mean that their covers are better than the originals, but that, somehow, pearl jam can take songs and re-do them so that they sound like theirs.. kind of like what glen hansard does in astral weeks). as a side note, i also love, how at the end of the real me, mike casually drops his guitar and walks away. awesome.

now i now next to nothing about the who (my musical ignorance is staggering really.. so much to learn, so little time) other than the songs pearl jam has covered over the years. any PJ show without baba o' riley in it seems a little incomplete to me. about 15 years ago, i bought a live who cd (which is probably still at my parent's house.. or more likely, sold in a yard sale) and tommy, which i love.

in 1999, pete townsend released a solo cd to benefit a school in chicago. ed performed on a few songs, and also at a show in chicago:


two things:
1. check out ed's hair.
2. how cool must it be to perform with someone whose music you love? it would be like me singing with PJ or the frames (well, actually it wouldn't, because i can't sing worth crap). that's one lucky man. he's sang with the who, neil young, REM, bruce springsteen..

sub pop 20th anniversary - part 2

sunday started out much more promising than it ended. i got to marymoor park a little before 1, in enough time to see grand archives who were awesome.


next, i saw a band called blitzen trapper who i again have never heard of but LOVED (yes, that much). i can't really describe their style of music because it was not any one thing. i guess if anything, i would say wilco-ish. but not really.


one of the bands i was most excited about seeing was kinski. after them, i went to listen to the foals, who i totally did not get at all, although the singer did tell a semi-funny joke about british people having such bad teeth that they have party games where they spit out blood. ha. he also ended the first song by breaking the amp, which necessitated much hand-wringing by the crew.

seeing green river would have been awesome if i had chosen a better spot to stand.

another thing - all the bands (and subpop itself) donated their proceeds to charities of their choice, which is pretty darn cool.

marymoor park is a cool place to see a concert. i was there once a few years ago to see tori amos; wilco was playing there a while back and i thought about going, but ultimately decided not to since the park is kind of a pain to get to from seattle (especially on the bus.. don't even get me started about that). but i did think that it was awesome that a lot of the cups, plates and utensils were compostable. very cool.

now, if you will excuse me, i am going to go watch the premiere of project runway. and then tomorrow is the who tribute on vh1 with pearl jam! the hits keep rolling!!