« December 2008 | Main | April 2009 »
February 11, 2009
Listening with Fresh Ears
I mentioned a few days before Declan was born that I had been working on putting together a playlist for the little guy's enjoyment. The songs on this playlist pulled from the little bit of baby and kids music we have, but also included a lot of fun songs, baby-related songs, and songs that he just needs to hear before he gets too old. As with any playlist or mixtape, putting it together was a lot of fun. What's really great about this one is that it's always growing as I find more songs to add, and eventually when he starts to respond to songs that he's decided that he likes. Right now, the only limit is the size of the 1st gen iPod nano on which his music is stored and played.
Publishing the whole playlist here would be a bit too much, so I just picked out some songs that, for the most part, came from the "baby-related songs" category. Some of these are obviously just selected by typing "baby" into the iTunes search box, but I like to think that some others are more inspired and thoughtful choices. I'm proud of how this has turned out so far and of course welcome any suggestions for additions to his musical education.
Your Mother Should Know - The Beatles
Cry Baby Cry - The Beatles
Good Night - The Beatles
I Don't Want to Grow Up - Bill Frisell & Petra Haden
Father and Son - Cat Stevens
Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing - Chris Issac
My Father's Eyes - Eric Clapton
Ode To My Family - The Cranberries
Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - Bob Dylan
Baby Genius - Eels
Lullaby - James
Beautiful Boy - John Lennon
Stop Crying Your Heart Out - Oasis
Me In Honey - R.E.M.
Baby You're My Light - Richard Hawley
Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In the Shadow - The Rolling Stones
Be My Baby - The Ronettes
Stop Your Crying - Spiritualized
Stay Up Late - Talking Heads
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives - Voxtrot
Eat For Two - 10,000 Maniacs
Posted by jeradlewis at 7:30 PM | Comments (0)
February 9, 2009
And Then A Sheer Drop
"15 Step" from last night's Grammy awards show. Yeah, I'm biased, but this was the most original performance of any of the songs on the show last night.
Posted by jeradlewis at 8:06 AM | Comments (0)
February 8, 2009
The Grammys
I'm going to do something resembling liveblogging the Grammys tonight. Since liveblogging is so passe in this world of Twitter, I guess I'm just going to post a lot of things on Twitter. I hope that this is really worth watching.
Posted by jeradlewis at 8:53 PM
February 4, 2009
A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Robyn
Yesterday I learned that one of my favorite artists is going to be back in Boston for the second time in less than six months. Robyn Hitchcock is going to playing at the Paradise on April 13th and this time he's bringing the Venus 3 along with him. For the uninitiated, the Venus 3 is his backing band consisting of Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, and Bill Rieflin (three fifths of R.E.M.'s current touring contingent). Naturally, with Peter in town, I'll be sure to be there. I last saw RH & V3 was a few years ago at TT's. To see anyone from my Favorite Band Ever in town is always a treat, as well as seeing Robyn back in the US again. He just played a show featuring his album I Often Dream of Trains at Somerville Theater at the end of 2008 and was in Northampton doing a solo show earlier in the year. I highly advise anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Hitchcock live to join me at the Paradise. I've never seen any other performer who's so thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end as Robyn. Sure, he's one of the more (the most?) quirky guys to string together some words, but you can't help but be equally amused, confused, and entertained.
After hearing the news of Robyn in Boston more Hitchcock-related news seemed to pop up all around me today. First, I saw a bit about the band's new album on Pitchfork and then he showed up on the list of musicians who are on Twitter. The Twitter posts attributed to him haven't been updated in a couple of months, but they do seem to be sufficiently-quirky enough to be genuine Hitchcock.
If you saw Rachel Getting Married in the theater then you surely caught Robyn's two songs featured in the movie. You can check these out here. After starring in the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film Storefront Hitchcock, Robyn has shown up in a few of his films including Rachel... and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
Finally, I came across another news story detailing Robyn's plans to write a musical based on Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry. On the first RH & V3 there's a song called "A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Briggs," based on this movie. Nothing is too strange for this guy.
Posted by jeradlewis at 8:59 PM
February 3, 2009
Welcome
I've been a bit quiet here for a while and this picture above should tell you why. Just before Christmas we welcomed a healthy little baby Declan into the world. The six weeks since then have been really great. Both my wife and I have had plenty of time off of work to get to know him and get acclimated to having a little person living with us.
Of course, you can find lots of pictures of the little guy on my Flickr page. I hope that it won't be this long before I post again. I've just set up this site with the latest version of Movable Type and have a new desktop blogging tool, Blogo, that seems like it's going to make posting just a bit easier, which is exactly what I need.
I'll write more about our new family member soon, but now I think I have to go see why his swinging doesn't seem to be stopping the crying.
Posted by jeradlewis at 2:10 PM | Comments (2)