Songs that mention Marilyn Monroe

1. Hold On – Tom Waits
2. We Didn’t Start The Fire – Billy Joel
3. The Jean Genie – David Bowie
4. Action! Not Words – Def Leppard
5. Vogue – Madonna
6. Uncorrected Personality Traits – Robyn Hitchcock
7. From Hank to Hendrix – Neil Young
8. I Want Your Love – Transvision Vamp

10,000 tracks submitted to last.fm

I submitted my 10,000th track to last.fm this week. My current top ten artists:

1. Bob Dylan (1394 tracks)
2. The Mountain Goats (664)
3. Galaxie 500 (266)
4. Neutral Milk Hotel (253)
5. The Decemberists (201)
6. Leonard Cohen (198)
7. The Fall (180)
8. Neil Young (177)
9. The New Pornographers (163)
10. Red House Painters (153)

I can’t see the top two changing anytime soon, what with The Mountain Goats’ new album out on 21 Aug — and Bob Dylan’s the following week… Happy music days ahead…

Top ten CDs of 2005

I have bought so many CDs this year, but mainly I have been catching up with old stuff. These are ten of my favourite CDs released this year:

1. The Woods – Sleater-Kinney
2. No Direction Home: The Soundtrack – Bob Dylan
3. Lost And Safe – The Books
4. The Sunset Tree – The Mountain Goats
5. Superwolf – Bonnie “Prince” Billy & Matt Sweeney
6. LCD Soundsystem – LCD Soundsystem
7. I Am A Bird Now – Antony & The Johnsons
8. Open Season – British Sea Power
9. Picaresque – The Decemberists
10. Illinois – Sufjan Stevens

So there you go. I hope there is more good stuff next year. Let’s all have a good 2006!

Top ten CDs of 2005

I have bought so many CDs this year, but mainly I have been catching up with old stuff. These are ten of my favourite CDs released this year:

1. The Woods – Sleater-Kinney
2. No Direction Home: The Soundtrack – Bob Dylan
3. Lost And Safe – The Books
4. The Sunset Tree – The Mountain Goats
5. Superwolf – Bonnie “Prince” Billy & Matt Sweeney
6. LCD Soundsystem – LCD Soundsystem
7. I Am A Bird Now – Antony & The Johnsons
8. Open Season – British Sea Power
9. Picaresque – The Decemberists
10. Illinois – Sufjan Stevens

So there you go. I hope there is more good stuff next year. Let’s all have a good 2006!

New Morning, etc.

Woohoo – listening to Bob Dylan. I am in the processing of converting all my Bob Dylan CDs to mp3, for easy access and cataloguing. I have ripped 450 so far – approximately half of my collection. I like listening to Bob Dylan!

I have been to 24 Bob concerts so far, including the 5 London shows last month. Friends and family ask me why I needed to go to 5 Bob Dylan shows in a row. He is a great performer and he tweaks his songs and setlists depending on mood, audience, venue, etc. At the 5 recent shows, he played a total of 87 songs, 57 of them unique. He played 15 songs I had not heard live before:

Blue Monday
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
Million Dollar Bash
God Knows
New Morning
Queen Jane Approximately
She Belongs to Me
Shelter from the Storm
Just Like A Woman
Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You
John Brown
Mississippi
Waitin’ For You
London Calling
Rumble

Here are some statistics for the concerts I have attended to date:

Total Number of Concerts: 24
Total Number of Songs: 436
Total Number of Unique Songs: 117
Average Number of Songs per Concert: 18.2

You want a list of the songs I have heard live? Listed below:

Bob Dylan in the UK

Saw Bob five times at Brixton this year. That’s twenty-four Bob concerts I’ve attended now.

Redundancy in Bob Dylan lyrics?

I was taught to always avoid and eschew pleonastic redundancy in writing. Redundancy is, however, acceptable in the writing of songs. Bob Dylan has written about 89 of my all time top 100 favourite songs. He has written hundreds of songs with various types of lyrics: surreal, silly, wounded, hallucinatory, political, historical, bitter, sad, happy, and so on. I love the lyrics he writes, but more importantly I love how he performs the songs – both in the recording studio and in concert. So here are a few Dylan lines that may contain redundant words or phrases:

Her mouth was watery and wet

He unleashed His power at an unknown hour that no one knew

Many times I’ve often prayed

Come over here from over there, girl

I’m here to create the new imperial empire

I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot

In a basement down the stairs (I suppose a basement could be down the escalator or the elevator)

Talking to myself in a monologue (I think this is ok because you could talk to yourself in a dialogue. Are you sure? Yeah, I reckon so.)

4.48 Psychosis

The string of numbers (100, 91, 84, 81, 72, 69, 58, 44, 37, 38, 42, 21, 28, 12, 7) at the top of this blog comes from the Tindersticks song 4.48 Psychosis, which takes its name from the Sarah Kane play 4.48 Psychosis. The truly wonderful Isabelle Huppert is currently starring in 4.48 Psychose (as it is now called) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
4.48 a.m. is apparently the time when you are most lucid and thus most prone to suicide.

I have seen the Tindersticks in concert a few times over the years. I saw two contrasting shows in 2001.

1. Subterranea, London – only a couple of hundred people at this one. This was part of Rough Trade’s 25th anniversary celebrations. The band appeared slightly nervous – one song was restarted, another abandoned. The atmosphere was great, the audience listening to each note, each word in quiet reverence. Apart from one loud-mouthed person behind me: “I liked that one… what are they called again? The timber sticks? Weird name.”

2. Royal Albert Hall, London – a few thousand at this one. The band was exquisitely supported by a 17 piece string ensemble, brass section and backing singers (would have had trouble fitting onto the stage at the Subterranea). The band had clearly rehearsed in the hall and got the right level of amplification for band members, providing one of the best sounding concerts I have attended. I can compare this to concerts at the Royal Albert Hall by Morrissey and Elton John (on separate occasions), who appeared to have turned up, plugged in and played, without thinking about how to work the unique acoustics of the hall.
The support act was the excellent David Kitt, who has since become a favourite of mine.

Bob Dylan + Free Beer

Now: Bob Dylan’s European tour is underway. I entered the Dylan pool and will check daily to see how good I am at predicting what songs he’ll pull out of the bag.

I am going to all five of the London shows in November – this will take my tally of Bob Dylan concerts to twenty-five (i.e. not nearly enough).

Then: Nine years ago I was sitting in a pub in Cambridge enjoying a drink with some friends when a strange fellow leaned into our table and anxiously asked, “Any Bob Dylan fans here?” I identified myself as one such person and asked if I could help him. He asked if I would accompany him to his table and answer a few simple questions about Bob Dylan. Mildly intrigued, I sauntered away with him. The questions were three in number and, as he had suggested, fairly simple to a Bob Dylan aficianado:

• How many UK number one singles has Bob Dylan had? (None)
• What is the second song on Blonde on Blonde? (Pledging My Time)
• What is the first line of Tangled Up In Blue? (Early one morning the sun was shining, I was laying in bed)

He was apparently a Bob Dylan fan and had told his friends that other fans could be found everywhere, including this pub. His friends were sceptical and one of them had bet £10 that he could not find a Bob Dylan fan in the pub. The strange fellow found me, won the £10 and bought me a pint of Black Sheep ale for my troubles.

 

Above is a t-shirt I saw in Amsterdam a few years ago. It contains the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s Masters Of War.

10 Points

From The Fall’s live album The “Twenty-Seven” Points:

1. It’s up to you [...]
Right Rex, you’d better get it sorted out
……and nobody likes you. Why don’t you do us all a favour and bog off back to Xanadu in Ireland.

2. You hang around with camera crews in shell suits. You lecture on sweets and propose salad. You are coming round to Viz comic. You also make all history and related topics thematic.

3. You are operation mindfuck on the children of this land.

4, You are a slowcoach of the first water.

5. You will probably cut my income by one third.

6. You are working now researching a video project.

7. You, in a flash of intuitive brilliance, have garnered that many people are unemployed.

8. You hog the bathroom and never put your hand in your pocket.

9, You post out sixty page computer printouts on the end of the earth’s days and forests.

10. All the above will come back to you in purgatory and confirm you as a damn pest.

Me. Dictum. He focus.. he focuses his clever dick mentality on himself.

A. He looks at July roses yet does not have the mentality to cut them himself.

B. He was stuck like a little pig on castle lawns and said “look at what’s happened to my leg”.

C. He has thoughts, crap, Blake-like, like “while they sleep I’ll plot to shaft the bastards in their cot through gradualment and C bit by bit”