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We’re headed to Nashville to look at property, so I don’t have and MMF this week.  Please, forgive me and wish us good luck!

Happy Monday Morning everyone! I went and recorded a few tunes over the weekend. First is an original called “Look To Me.” Lyrics are on the youtube description, you can check them out if you want. And if you have thoughts or want to rate this song or anything else, please, please do!!

So what did you think? Did you like it? Come on I need validation damnit! J/k, but I do hope you enjoyed.

I also recorded this cover of Death Cab For Cuties “I Will Follow You Into The Dark.” If you’ve not heard it, its a pretty song, and hopefully its still pretty after I get through with it.

Finally, I’ve got a cover of Ben Harper’s Steal My Kisses.

Welcome to the fourth installation of Music Fest Friday. I hope you enjoyed last week’s spotlight of R.L. Burnside! The lyric last week was a bit of a gimme again, but only Phil bothered to hazard a guess, Sweet Home Chicago. Unless more people start taking a stab at the lyric, then Phil is going to walk away with the super cool prize, to be awarded at the end of this month.

Today I’m bringing you a multi-talented artist from merry ole England, Steve Winwood. Winwood started his career playing for the Spencer Davis Group before leaving to join Traffic, followed a fantastic group that included himself and Eric Clapton as members, Blind Faith. Steve also has spent a lot of time playing on other peoples albums, including a fantastic organ piece on Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My Friends.

We’re going to start out our fest this week with one of Steve’s earlier hits, from his days with Traffic. The is Dear Mr. Fantasy, which includes a great guitar solo. Hang in there, its a little bit long, but worth it.

Moving up in the timeline (in terms of when the song came out), we’re moving into the Blind Faith portion of Steve’s career. Here we find a 1969 recording of Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home, a song that Clapton and Winwood reunited to play at the 2007 Crossroad’s Guitar Festival (which rocked). Again, this track as some amazing guitar work, and also highlights Winwood on the organ and vocals.

I could take the easy way out here and show you Higher Love for the final video. I’m sure you all remember it, though I must admit I didn’t realize it was Winwood that orignally did the tune back in the 80s. Instead I’m going to give you Winwood’s latest single, off his 2008 album Nine Lives, Dirty City, featuring Eric Clapton.

That pretty much wraps up this weeks MMF.  I hope you enjoyed it, even if you didn’t make it through all 21 or so minutes of music.  Now I’ve just go one last order of business, name that tune.

More temptation and faith I guess we livin’ for the day

I seen a man get swept off his feet with a boy with an A.K.

Good luck!  Here’s a hint, the long is from the final third of the 90s and makes use of another well known musical score.

Forgot to mention that I finished the book Terra Icognita by Ruth Downie, a novel about the Roman empire in Britain.  It was an interesting and fun read.  Now I’m on to The Ten Cent Plague, a book about the end of the golden age of comic books and censorship.

That puts me at 32 down, 18 to go.

First, last weeks lyric, no one was able to get without Googling. The answer was “Caleb Meyer” by Gillian Welch, and covered by Nickel Creek. Now on to today’s installation of Music Fest Friday.

If you took a look at the music on my iPod you would probably notice two things. First, its a bit on the eclectic side, second, it has a lot more blues on it than you’d expect. One of my co-workers lent me an album a couple of years ago by Fat Possum Records called “Not the Same Old Blues Crap,” and in addition to popular acts (or relatively so) like Iggy Pop and The Black Keys was an artist that really didn’t get discovered until late in life. RL Burnside started life in rural Mississippi before moving to Chicago and ultimately back down south. He was at one point incarcerated for murder, about which he was later quoted as saying, “I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”

As for music, we’ll start with my favorite tune of his, Goin’ Down South.

Burnside died in 2005, just after I started hearing him a couple of years ago. His style was much more in the line of country blues than delta blues. I’d say he was influenced by Dylan because he doesn’t adhere to a strict 12 or 16 bar blues pattern…except he started out a touch before Dylan’s time. Here is his tune, “Shake ‘Em On Down.”

One of the thing I like about Burnside is that he never really confined himself to acoustic or electric guitar based blues. One thing that I think the blues genre is really missing today in the mainstream is acoustic based blues songs. The majority of what people are familiar with are the works of folks like BB King, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, and while great musicians I’ve never seen them with an acoustic. In this tune, Jumper Hanging On A Line, RL is playing solo acoustic in an what appears to be an older recording.

I hope you’ve enjoyed a little bit of the Blues with RL Burnside on this Friday, the start of Lollapalooza here in Chicago.  Now for the third installation of name that tune.

Six and three is nine
Nine and nine is eighteen
Look there brother baby and see what I’ve seen

Happy Friday!

So…someone totally needs to fact check this…and if it checks out my “plus one” friends, you can really RELAX!

Been reading a bit lately, have 3 more books to add to my done pile.  The French Quarter: An Informal History Of New Orleans was an interesting read written in the 1930s, it was book 29.  Book 30 was Natural Ordermage, from the Saga Of Recluce series.  Then book 31 was a really really interesting read called Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers.

So:

29, 30, and 31 down, 19 to go.

Fridays are always off to a great start when you do something stupid. For example, maybe you go to make the first pot of coffee at work, because you are one of the first people in the office, right. Suppose you are a little groggy, because you just woke up, and you don’t realize that the pot is still half full from the previous day. That turns into having to clean a half pot of coffee of a counter. Not fun.

What is fun is Music Fest Friday. Today’s featured artist is Glen Phillips formerly of the 1980’s alt. rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket. I think Glen is one of the best song writers of his generation, with heartfelt, poignant lyrics that just about anyone can connect with. Couple that with a pretty powerful voice and good acoustic guitar work, and you have a combination that I could listen to all day long.

We’re going to start out the journey talking about Courage.

This version of the tune is a bit quicker than some, but its still a song I really enjoy. I’ve only had the pleasure of seeing Glen live once, and that was when he and Nickel Creek (another favorite I’ll use on MFF one day) toured as the Mutual Admiration Society. We’ll go to a bit of a funnier song now, which, in one recording I’ve got he prefaces saying, “This is a true story, but its, uh, not my true.” So please, enjoy yourself listening to Drive By.

You didn’t really think the dog’d get it did you? First time I heard this song I nearly spit beer out of my nose I laughed so hard the first time he sung the refrain. The final song I’ll give you today is called Darkest Hour.

If you are interested in listening to Glen with Nickel Creek, you can search archive.org for Mutual Admiration Society, or you can just check out this show.  Its going to have a lot of bluegrass influence, but really, thats not bad.  The cool think about Archive, if you’ve not been there, is that you can sometimes listen to an entire show right online, or download the audio files.  The show I linked to above is a show at Largo and the show, in order is available to listen to in your browser.

Ok, last part of the post, name that tune.  I’ve decided I’ll wrap up this round of “name that tune” at the end of August, then we’ll go on a monthly schedule.  Remember try to do this without google, and I’ll edit the answers so that the name you submit is in white…still there, you just have to highlight it to see it.

I drew that glass across his neck as fine as any blade.  And I felt his blood flow fast and hot around me where I lay!

Thats it.  Enjoy your Friday, and try not to spill your coffee.

Otherwise known as MFF. And no, dirty birds, I’m not referring to a style of porn. Going to TRY for a new weekly feature…something that has been rather lacking ’round these parts for a while. So here is how this is going to work. I’m going to try to highlight 2 or 3 similar artists, with some video of them performing, and also try to take a few minutes to talk about them. Finally, we’ll round it out with a ‘guess the song’ feature. The way this will work is that over the course of 4 weeks (2 this month) I’ll draw a name out of a hat of all the people that guessed the song correctly…that person will win…well….something. Suffice it to say, it will be awesome.

Now, lets begin with Kate Nash.

This is “The Nicest Thing.” I first heard of / saw her on Sundance Channel’s Live At Abbey Road. Nash is a 21 year old Brit. I really dig the way she is so conversational in the way she does her lyrics. Plus, this is just kind of a pretty, and sweet, and sad song. Now I sound all emo. Anyway, here is one more from her, that is a lot of fun called “Mouthwash.”

A similar artist that has been around about 10 years longer than Kate Nash is KT Tunstall, also from the British Isles…though as opposed to Nash’s London, Tunstall is from Edinburgh, Scotland. Tunstall has seen some mainstream success, namely with her single Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, which was performed on American Idol by one of the contestants…this helped her gain a stronger American audience. Here is Black Horse and the Cherry Tree….

Another pretty popular song of hers is Suddenly I See, was used as Hilary Clinton’s campaign theme song…we see how well that worked out. And since EVERYBODY’s heard that (and if not, you can find it on youtube.com pretty easily)…I’m going to give you the final video for her tune Hold On.

Made it this far?  Awesome.  No remember, no googling if you can avoid it, and that is something I’ll have to trust you on.  Here is the lyric….

Strut on a line, its discord and rhyme
I howl and I whine I’m after you

There you have it.  Leave you guesses in the comments.  I’ll give you a hint, you can thank VH1’s Top 100 Songs of the 1980s for this one.

To say I’ve been bad about posting is an understatement, and I just realized today how long my most recent book took me to read.  I think I’m slowing down with the summer.  Baseball, barbequeing, and other things of that nature are keeping me from books, which is just fine really.  I did just finish The French Quarter:  An informal history of the New Orleans underworld by Herbert Asbury, the author of Gangs of New York.

Pretty interesting book, written in the 1930s with a lot of information.  I know far more of New Orleans history now than I could have imagined.  So, now I’m on to the most recent book in the L.E. Modesitt’s Recluce series Natural Ordermage which I plan to start sometime today.

In other news we went down to my parents house for the 4th and now we can tell the world at large, we’ve chosen Nashville as our future area.  We head down in the middle of August to check out some properties and hopefully figure out where our homesite is going to be.  Very very exciting.  Also, while at my parents I was totally able to man-out with manly tasks.  In the span of 3 hours I used a chainsaw, built a bonfire, used an arc-welder, climbed on a rough, and rode a motorcycle.  In a word, I was AWESOME.

Of course I must fess up to my general suckitude in terms of posting.  Really, I just end up forgetting about it and not making time.  Not sure if that will change or not, we’ll see.  But here’s to good summer livin’!