My annual "soundtrack project" continues with 2010's version. I seem to have regressed a bit to my earlier alternative & rap days.

1. Beck: “Orphans”
2. New Order: “Fine Time”
3. The Smiths: “Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before”
4. The Beatles: “What You're Doing”
5. The Kinks: “Victoria”
6. The Winstons: “Amen Brother”
7. Beastie Boys: “Super Disco Breakin’”
8. Mantronix: “Electronic Energy Of...”
9. People Under The Stairs: “Plunken' Em”
10. Mos Def: “Quiet Dog”
11. Hieroglyphics: “Let It Roll”
12. Bob James: “Take Me To The Mardi Gras”
13. They Might Be Giants: “I’m Impressed”
14. Vampire Weekend: “Cousins”
15. Art Brut: “Alcoholics Unanimous”
16. Wire: “Read & Burn”
17. Bad Religion: “Modern Man”
18. Minutemen: “Search”
19. The Ramonetures: “She’s the One”
20. Man Or Astro-man?: “Maximum Radiation Level”
21. Rush: “Vital Signs”
22. Neko Case: “I Wish I Was the Moon”

The best new feature in the new iOS 4.2 update has to be Airplay. I don't have Apple TV (so I can't stream video) but we do have an Airport Express hooked up to our receiver. It was (and is) great for playing iTunes through the house, but with Airplay we can now play almost any audio app through our "good" speakers, including Pandora, Public Radio, and Concert Vault. Concert Vault in particular has a pretty substantial library of live recordings (I haven't really explored it before today) and tonight my baking soundtrack was some live Clash from 1981.

Also, this seems to be changing our thinking of what a remote control could (or should) be. Perhaps the future of TV & entertainment center remotes will just be your iPad/iPhone or something similar, and less like the button-crazy remotes of today (like Sony's controller for Google TV).

Surviving Grady is my favorite Red Sox site. I think they do the best job at capturing the joys and frustrations of being a Sox fan, and they do it with a sense of humor all their own. However, their taste in music is questionable at best. Yes, everyone has their own personal preferences and, despite being a music snob, I shouldn't be judgmental. But a 5PM Friday mix that includes Counting Crows and Collective Soul, and chooses Triumph over Rush? I'm sorry, but that's just plain wrong...

Here's 2009's soundtrack. This is the first year that there's no real punk or hardcore on my annual list (not that I didn't listen to any, but there were no clear picks for 2009). Perhaps I'm mellowing with age?

1. People Under the Stairs: "Acid Raindrops (Instrumental)"
2. The Beatles: "Dig A Pony"
3. Beck: "Chemtrails"
4. Neko Case: "This Tornado Loves You"
5. The Smiths: "Rusholme Ruffians"
6. Vampire Weekend: "Bryn"
7. Interpol: "PDA"
8. Wire: "Perspex Icon"
9. Pixies: "Velouria"
10. Rush: "Far Cry"
11. Paul McCartney: "I’ve Got A Feeling"
12. Lee "Scratch" Perry & The Upsetters: "Jungle Lion"
13. Q-Tip: "Won’t Trade"
14. Chali 2na: "Comin’ Thru"
15. RJD2: "A Beautiful Mine"
16. Squarepusher: "Hello Meow"
17. Radiohead: "15 Steps"
18. People Under The Stairs: "Trippin’ At The Disco"
19. Rodrigo y Gabriela: "Triveni"

Update: if you want to hear these, download a podcast of these songs (73MB).

A new site (new to me, thanks to Daring Fireball), Finer Things in Mac, pointed out that iTunes 9 gives you more control over your smart playlists:

Smart Playlists in iTunes 9 have become smarter. They now offer more granular, nested control over rules for collecting content.

I've had some pretty complex playlists in my iTunes, using multiple Smart Playlists to get to a single Really Smart Playlist; this now makes my life easier.

The Pixies seemed to be everywhere this week:

1. This weekend I finally watched loud QUIET loud, the documentary about the Pixies' 2004 reunion tour, which I enjoyed. And despite a friend's warning that it would "bum you out after seeing it," I didn't feel that way at all. I thought it just showed the band as humans each with their own issues.

2. Doolittle was (finally) released for the Wii version of Rock Band 2 this week. Prepare to receive more of my money, Harmonix...

3. Yesterday a friend pointed out that the Pixies plan a Doolittle North American tour. Haven't seen them since the '04 tour, so this might be a good reason to get my lame ass to a show.

The cinematic for the upcoming Beatles Rock Band game is very cool: great visual style that grows with the band as it summarizes their entire career in under 3 minutes. The LA Times had a good article about it, breaking down some of the imagery and metaphors in it.

Somewhat-hidden in the cinematic are numerous "placements" of Beatles songs: Handbills mention "Come Together," "Benefit of Mr. Kite," "Rocky Racoon" [sic], "Maggie Mae," "Carry That Weight," and others. The group runs down the street past Maxwell's Silver Sundries into a pub, which has the "Mean Mr. Mustard" lyrics scrawled over the door, the all day breakfast price of "1 & 1 is 2" (but shouldn't that be "1 & 1 & 1 is 3"? Nope...see update below), and menu items like "Honey Pies" and "Savoy Truffle." In the car-turned-plane Ringo has a box of goodies from Strawberry Fields Farms, and dashing onstage you see a typewriter and paper on the ground while "Paperback Writer" plays. A lot of little details are in this very detailed mini-movie.



Update: This blog has a much more detailed annotation of the cinematic — there's way more than I had originally noticed. Also, "One and One is Two" is an old song I never heard of; I was thinking it was a misquoted lyric from "Come Together" ... of course Harmonix would never make such an easy mistake!

Surviving Grady brought this to my attention last month but I didn't mention it here. With Wake's start against the Yankees tonight, I figured now's a good a time as any to mention that Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz wrote and recorded "The Ballad of Tim Wakefield". It's not exactly coming-out-of-the-bullpen theme music, but as far as I know it's the only song about a knuckleball pitcher.

The latest episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! chronicled the 1996 failed launch of timanderic.com. It ended with an uplifting little song that may come in handy for me someday, to put things back into perspective:

Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job is bizarre & hilarious. One recent bit that consistently cracks me up is when they took a bit of a janitor's tirade and used Auto-Tune to make it a song:



This clip is from the bizarre Cinco Travel Urinal Shower video.

I have a decent-sized CD collection (about 800 or so) that I rarely use. Pretty much everything I listen to has been ripped into iTunes, so my CDs are just a cluttered eyesore taking up space in my office.



I couldn't justify selling them, since I want to keep them in case something happens to my hard drive, not to mention it wouldn't be fair to the musicians to sell the CDs and still keep the music. But I wanted to get them out of my office since I rarely (if ever) use them.



I bought some storage boxes by Disc Storage Solutions (which, for some reason, were extremely difficult to find online). The discs are put in sleeves -- two per sleeve -- and stored in the boxes. I ended up using two 500 CD and three 200 CD boxes; they hold half the CDs they advertise for me, since I'm also storing the CD artwork (instead of two CDs per sleeve). Now they're taking up very little space in the basement, rather than two large shelves in my office.



Of course, now that they're boxed up it's more difficult to browse through them. I bought Delicious Library, a CD/DVD/game/whatever cataloging app for the Mac. You just scan the CD's barcode using your webcam and it adds it to your library -- complete with artwork -- or you can also enter them manually (for compilations, bootlegs, and those barcodes that just won't scan).



Delicious Library works great, though I wish it had other browsing options: for example, there's no way to browse your CD collection by genre. But overall it's much better than having a wall of CDs.

Jill & I watched the latest Harry Potter movie last night. I couldn't help but think that Sirius Black was inspired by Neil Peart circa 1977...

While working on a Squarepusher episode of Sinko, I learned about the "Amen Break." I know the beat so well but never knew the original source (The Winstons) or how influential six seconds of that song were to hip hop, drum & bass, and beyond. I came across a great 18-minute video that goes into detail about this beat, its sampling, and copyright:

Ranking every Beatles song in order is a near-impossible project, but one that offers plenty of fodder for arguments. Let the discussion begin: Playing The Beatles Backwards: The Ultimate Countdown
(via kottke)

This is the fourth year of my annual soundtrack project, and here is this year's summary of my musical tastes. Again, the only rule is that the songs chosen have to fit on a regular audio CD.

1. Thes One: "Gate City Savings And Loan"
2. The Shins: "Little Boxes"
3. Wire: "Outdoor Miner"
4. The La's: "Feelin' (live)"
5. Vampire Weekend: "A-Punk"
6. The Smiths: "The Headmaster Ritual"
7. The Ventures: "Medley: Walk–Don't Run; Lullaby Of The Leaves; Perfidia (live)"
8. DJ Alibi: "One Day"
9. The Corporation: "Sweet Musille"
10. Minutemen: "Viet Nam"
11. The Clash: "Rudie Can't Fail"
12. The English Beat: "Two Swords"
13. Beck: "Gamma Ray"
14. The Hives: "You Got It All...Wrong"
15. Sweetthieves: "N.P.N."
16. Sunny Day Real Estate: "Theo B"
17. Smashing Pumpkins: "Tarantula"
18. Rush: "Best I Can"
19. Guided By Voices: "Surgical Focus"
20. Digable Planets: "9th Wonder (Blackitolism)"
21. Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass: "Whipped Cream (Anthony Marinelli Remix)"
22. People Under the Stairs: "Step Bacc"
23. King Tubby: "I Am, I Am The King"

I've been meaning to check out Last.fm + YouTube = music tv goodness for a while, and it's pretty cool: If you have a Last.fm account, plug it in and watch videos by bands you like. It's like a personalized MTV (back when MTV actually played videos, of course). Here's "my" channel.

I don't know how I missed it (or perhaps it's sitting on my TiVo and I don't even know it) but Rush was on The Colbert Report. Thank you YouTube!

Use ska to teach your kids to clean their room! This song is from the show Yo Gabba Gabba (which I've never seen) and features Alex Desert of Hepcat.



(via Battle of the Midwestern Housewives)

While some friends have made fun of me in the past for my preference for short songs -- I've always thought "If you can't sing it in 3 minutes, don't bother" -- somebody apparently agrees with me. Joshua Allen did a little "research" to determine that 2 minutes and 42 seconds is the ideal song length.

I know it's not a serious piece, but he does bring up one of the best pop songs ever written, one that I continue to enjoy and marvel at the more I hear it: "There She Goes" by The La's:

The song is "There She Goes," and is so flawless that it instantly made everything else the band did pointless. This ditty is two minutes and 42 seconds, and is all about songwriting economy...

The main riff acts as the intro. The verses are the chorus. The solo is 100 percent fat-free and leads right into a tidy bridge. And then we’re back where we started. It's like some ingenious IKEA futon or Japanese love hotel where every component is doing double-duty. When "There She Goes" is over, I guarantee absolutely no one in the room goes: "Jesus, finally."

(via kottke)

I have a new site for my music podcast Sinko: same URL, different look.

I was originally using Apple's iWeb because it was simple and worked well with Garageband (which I use to create each podcast) but uploading was another story: with each new episode iWeb recreated the entire site (which had to be uploaded), and it doesn't share common images used on the site. The new site is not only easier for me to update, but also has better archive browsing (including viewing podcasts by music genre) and the ability for you to leave comments.

The one change that may affect you (if you're a subscriber) is the RSS feed. The new URL is sinko.kieranchapman.net/rss.xml, so update your iTunes and other feeds as needed.