So now that the craziness of the holiday season is out of the way, I’ve finally gotten around to putting together a new blog post. And in the spirit of expanding the nature of my blog, this week I’ve decided to talk about music. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the varied and often unusual sources I have for finding new music (well, new to me, at any rate). The first of these, and one of my main sources these days, is Pandora.com. For anyone not in the know, Pandora.com is an Internet radio site (another similar site is last.fm, but I haven’t really spent any time on that site, so I don’t know how they compare). What I love about Pandora (especially compared to traditional radio stations) is that it lets you build your own stations, based on the types of music you want to listen to.
The way it works is you pick a musician, or even a specific song, and you use that as the baseline for your station. From there, Pandora then builds a list of songs that share similar musical qualities to the song (or the songs of the artist) that you started with. As the songs play, you can give them a thumbs up or thumbs down, and Pandora uses these decisions to further tailor the station, to better give you exactly the type of music you want. And you can build as many stations as you want, and then listen to whichever one suits your current mood. I have a couple of country stations (one alt. country/country rock, the other old-school country music), a Celtic rock station, a Goth rock station, a couple of modern rock stations, and a few others (and I just recently added a Reggae station – can’t believe I didn’t think to put that one together sooner!).
I’ve discovered a number of great singers and groups that I’d never heard of before this way. And many of them are artists who’ve never made it big enough to show up on the Top 40 stations (which seem to play the same ten songs over and over and over again, I swear). It amazes me sometimes just how much great music is out there if you get away from the local radio stations and look for it (especially when you're living in the back woods of Montana -- we're not exactly on the cutting edge of music out here). One of the singers I discovered on Pandora that I absolutely love is Sarah Borges. She sings alt. country/country rock music. After hearing a couple of her songs on Pandora, I bought one of her CDs off of Amazon, and loved every song on it. The amusing part (for me, at least) is the fact that I mostly have the HBO show True Blood to thank for discovering Sarah’s music. The reason for this is that the song I used as my starter song for the station I heard her on was the theme song to True Blood, “Bad Things” by Jace Everett (another country rock artist I’m starting to really like, although I haven’t gotten around to buying one of his CDs yet).
Which brings me to my next source of music, my television. I’ve run across all kinds of great songs while watching TV, and from such odd sources as TV theme songs, background songs during shows, and of all things, commercials (as commercials have gotten away from the old-fashioned “jingle” and more into using songs from actual bands, a surprising number of really good songs have started showing up in commercials these days). A great example is the band Dirty Vegas, who I was first introduced to through a Mitsubishi Eclipse ad which featured their song “Days Go By”. After hearing that song I tracked down the album, and loved all of the songs on it.
An especially good source of music on TV is movie trailers. I’ve lost track of how many great songs I’ve first heard playing in a movie trailer (and as a flip-side to that, I think the majority of the most memorable movie trailers I’ve ever seen featured a great, memorable song). An interesting thing about movie trailers, though, is how often the same songs are used over again for different movies. Even better are the songs that get tapped repeatedly for trailers, actual movie soundtracks, video game soundtracks, TV shows, etc. I don’t know if certain songs just really lend themselves to these things, or if it’s just that some bands really take advantage of these avenues to get their songs out there.
A classic example of this is the 80s gem "Oh Yeah" by Yello (and even if you’re too young to remember the 80s, you’ve almost certainly heard a clip of this song somewhere). It was first featured in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986, and then a year later in The Secret Of My Success. I personally most remember it from a series of Twix commercials that came out right about that same time. Well, I looked it up on Wikipedia (because I was pretty sure I’d heard it other places, and wanted to see where else it had turned up), and here’s what they have listed for it – it has been featured in at least a dozen movies, almost a dozen TV show episodes, numerous commercials, and the video game Gran Turismo 4 (it is also the theme song for Duffman on The Simpsons). Now that's what you call a popular song! (I'd love to know how much the band has earned in royalties off of that tune).
A more recent example is “Running Up That Hill” by Placebo (a cover of a song originally done by Kate Bush, a great artist that I’ve been a fan of for years now). I first heard Placebo’s version in the trailer for Daybreakers (and quickly purchased the MP3 from Amazon), but it has also featured in episodes of several TV shows. One final example (and one of my all-time favorite movie trailer songs) is “Club Foot” by Kasabian. I first heard the song in the trailer for Serenity, but it also appeared in another movie trailer, in a couple of TV show episodes, a couple of movie soundtracks, and in several video game soundtracks. I loved this song enough I actually tracked down the original album it came from at Amazon.uk (and had it shipped to me from England). And the entire album is absolutely brilliant.
On the subject of movie trailers, here’s a random bit of trivia for you – generally, songs featured in movie trailers aren’t actually on the movie’s soundtrack. However, a surprising number of movie trailers I’ve seen feature songs from a DIFFERENT movie’s soundtrack. This is something I’d noticed in the past when I’d track down songs from movie trailers to purchase, but while I found it to be an interesting phenomenon, I never gave much thought about why that was. While I was doing some research for this blog (yes, believe it or don’t, I actually do research the things I write about for this blog – this is one of the reasons I’m such a huge Wikipedia supporter), I came across a write-up on Wikipedia about movie trailer music. And it turns out that the reason the trailers generally don’t feature music from the movie itself is that the score/soundtrack for the film is finished very late in the post-production process, long after the trailers have been edited together and released, and so they have to go to other sources for the trailer music.
Another surprisingly good source for great music is video games. And I’m not just talking about Guitar Hero and Rock Band (although both of these games have certainly introduced me to some fantastic music). Red Dead Redemption, for example (which I gushed over in my previous blog post), featured a couple of songs that I enjoyed enough that I bought them on Amazon.
One genre of game in particular that features great soundtracks is racing games. I own a number of MP3s of songs that I first heard in Burnout 3: Takedown and Burnout Revenge. Another song from a racing game that I love is “My Favorite Game” by The Cardigans, which is the opening credits song for Gran Turismo 2. Interestingly enough, the song originally appeared on a Cardigans album titled “Gran Turismo”, which was released a year prior – a CD title that is in no way connected to the video game series (and is itself a brilliant album – it’s also the only Cardigans’ album I really like, as their previous music has a much more bubblegum pop sound to it, whereas Gran Turismo has a darker, more electronic sound that I absolutely love). “My Favorite Game” is probably my favorite song on the album (a close second would be “Erase/Rewind”, a song which has featured in several movie soundtracks).
It pretty much goes without saying that music games (AKA the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises) are great sources of music. For me, though, it’s not about the big-name, popular songs that we’ve all heard before. No, for me, the best music in Rock Band and Guitar Hero are the “bonus” tracks, which feature artists most people probably haven’t heard of before. One of the things I loved about Guitar Hero is their inclusion of songs by European singers. Even though they’re singing in German or Spanish or Italian (so I have no idea what the singer is saying), the songs are still really fun to listen to. Between the two games, I’ve discovered a wealth of songs I’d never heard before that I fell in love with.
On the subject of foreign music, another type of music I really enjoy is Japanese pop music, or J-Pop as it is generally referred to (there’s a long and not that interesting story behind my discovery of J-Pop, which I won’t go into here). Again, for the most part I have no idea what the singers are saying (although a surprising number of Japanese songs I’ve heard actually jump back and forth between Japanese and English lyrics), but that doesn’t prevent me from really enjoying the music (on a side tangent, I’ve never had much respect for people who criticize music of a genre they don’t like (heavy metal haters seem to love this one) by complaining that you can’t even understand what the singer is saying. My response to this argument has always been, “So what? Understanding what the singer is saying has nothing to do with whether or not you enjoy listening to the music.” But that’s just me).
Among the Japanese musicians that I enjoy are Judy and Mary (an interesting choice for the band’s name, as the band is comprised of four people, and to my knowledge, none of them are named either Judy or Mary – no idea where the name of the band came from), aiko (who's song "あした" is the first J-Pop song I ever heard, and the song that got me into the genre), and The Brilliant Green (an absolutely fantastic band, probably my favorite J-Pop group).
Before I close this thing out, I couldn't do a post about music without giving a quick shout-out to a fantastic Celtic rock band -- Amadan. Hailing from Corvallis, OR, I first saw them play at Sean Kelly's Irish Pub in Missoula. They absolutely rocked! I was a fan from the very first song (I mean, how many rock bands do you find that have a didgeridoo player?). They are just a great, fun band. All of their CDs are well worth a listen, and they're great to watch live (okay, I have to admit they're not quite as good as they used to be, as several of their original members left the band when they graduated college, but they're still a hell of a good band).
Well I think that about brings another blog entry to its inevitable conclusion. And I’ll finish by mentioning the latest song that I’m really digging – "Panic Switch", by Silversun Pickups (which I first heard in the trailer for Sucker Punch, a movie I can’t wait to see!!).
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