Went to Amoeba Records on Haight Street with a local friend last night. Wow. It was pretty cool on lots of levels. I mean, just the shear number of artists was impressive. But it was also fun to flip through the used “Pet Shop Boys”:http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:p9z8b5p4tsqh section and realize that I’ve managed to collect most of the rare releases (Very/Relentless) and limited editions (the lego case for Very — not exactly limited, but a complete relic of a more interesting time in music packaging) over the years. I picked up three items — two used, one new:
* “The Creek Drank The Cradle”, Iron & Wine (new)
* “30° everywhere”, Promise Ring (used)
* “Hopes and Dreams”, Keane
I bought the Promise Ring disc mostly for completeness — it’s been on my Amazon.com wishlist for months. My friend was playing Keane in the car; I guess it as Travis, and he commented “well, close; they’re the new Travis”. Sort of, although perhaps more consistently bright. Overall very very good. And then the Iron & Wine disc, well, it was a total impulse. I’ve been really digging his joint EP with Calexico, “In The Reins”, so decided to take a chance. Listening to the soft, lilting sounds now, what an amazing album.
G gave me guitar lessons for Christmas. Its a long story, but I was already excited, and listening to the stripped down, spare guitar and vocals of Iron & Wine raises the expectations. My first lesson is the Monday after I return from San Francisco, January 9.
Finally, I’m listening to all of this amazing music using “Banshee”:http://banshee-project.org, a music management application for Gnome. I hadn’t used it much before this, but since I can’t sync my iPod with my laptop (it’s tied to my iMac right now), this was a good excuse to try it out. And I really, really like it. It has iPod support so maybe I’ll try to move my music over and sync to Linux. That’d be cool. And since I really like it, maybe this is finally an excuse to look at C# and see what all the fuss is about.
But really, who cares what the fuss is about when you have music like this?