Monthly Archives: January 2026

Daily Album on CD: ‘Born on a Pirate Ship,’ Barenaked Ladies

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This CD is the first of many things in my music collection. It’s the first one I ever (as an adult) that on its release date I raced to the music shop to purchase it and immediately listen to it the moment I got home. It’s also the first one I have had signed by the members of the band. In addition, it’s the first one I ever had to replace due to it getting excessively scratched after years of rough handing.

This is the album that BNL was supporting during the New Year’s Eve 1996 show where I first encountered Paula Cole, and it really was the soundtrack to my first several months of living in NYC after moving up there in July 1996. I can still easily recall listening to this album on my Panasonic Shockman player when walking along the east side of Central Park in the evening while walking back to my apartment on Yorkville section of Manhattan from my job just off of Times Square. While “The Old Apartment” became the band’s first US hit, it wasn’t one of my favorite tracks at the time. Those were “Shoe Box,” “If I Should Fall,” “Break Your Heart,” and “Same Thing.” However, in the years since, my favorite track off the album, and one of my all-time favorite deep cuts by anyone, has become “Just a Toy” — a dark anthropomorphic dive into the mind the marionette Gepetto made just before Pinnochio and the jealousy he harbors against his younger brother.

The other interesting thing about this album is that was released as an Enhanced CD, meaning that it was encoded with Mac & PC software that allowed you to interact with additional bonus material when you put it in your computer. Unfortunately, the experience of using the Enhanced CD features is long gone as neither operating system allows you to play that software anymore. In fact, the Mac OS doesn’t even recognize the file system used on the CD, so it’s impossible to even check out the assorted sound and video files that the software used (this was something I was still able to do roughly 10-15 years ago.)

Daily Album on CD: ‘This Fire,’ by Paula Cole

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Opening acts are the crapshoot of going to concerts. Frequently, you’ve never previously heard of the opener, but the fact they are opening for the headlining act typically means that the headliners like them enough to believe that more people should know about them. I’ve gone to enough concerts over the years to absolutely forget a significant percentage of the ones I’ve seen. Others I remember because they were either awful (to my ears) or in the case of one particular band, they were so aggressively boring that I actually feel asleep in my seat during their set. There were a couple who were the reason I actually went to the concert — 4 Non Blondes and Echobelly — and then there was Paula Cole, who utterly blew me away and inspired me to get their most recent album at the next opportunity.

She was actually one of two opening acts on the evening that Barenaked Ladies performed a show at the former Roseland Ballroom in NYC on New Year’s Eve, 1996. Cannot tell you who the other one was, but Cole left a lasting impression. I don’t recall anything about the success of This Fire or any of its singles at that moment in time, but the energy and raw emotion she displayed that evening made you pay attention. Over thirty years later, I don’t recall any of the rest of her setlist, but there’s no way that “Throwing Stones” — my personal favorite of the This Fire album — Cole didn’t play it that night. The memory of her absolutely pounding the final chords of the song out of the piano combined with the way she almost screamed the final lyrics is just too firmly planted in my memory for it not to have happened. That song alone would’ve made me want to get ahold of it for my music library, but the rest of her performance left no doubt that buying the album was the prudent choice.

Oh, BNL was also spectacular that night. It was my second time seeing them live, and thanks to the concert, it was the closest I have ever been to Times Square when the ball dropped (the Roseland was approximately 10 blocks away.)

Revisting LiveJournal

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Thanks to some scuttlebutt over on Bluesky on New Year’s Day regarding the site’s short- and long-term prospects, I recently decided to visit my old LiveJournal accounts and start cut-and-pasting the text from my posts into a Word document. Nothing fancy — I’m not preserving the formatting, tags, comments, timestamp, or any other peripheral information. Just the date, title, and primary text. I’m also not including memes or shared links that are only accompanied by a line or two of snarky commentary. Thus far, I’ve saved the period covering November 3, 2004 through July 29, 2005. The file contains over 28,000 words and is nearly 75 pages long.

Damn, I wrote a lot — and frankly overshared far more — back in the day.

I haven’t looked at most of this material in years. So, while working my way through the posts, I’ve skimmed them. It’s been… enlightening. The period I’ve downloaded thus far covers a period in time where, in retrospect, I was beginning to burn out in my previous profession. At the time, I thought I was just in a bad work situation, and during 2005 I had a multi-month long job hunt that led me to the last of the positions I held as an executive assistant. However, the combination of rereading what I wrote and what I recall from being an E.A. at a big four accounting and consulting firm makes it pretty clear that it wasn’t situational at all. No, it was the job itself. The things I’m complaining about in those posts are frankly the kinds of things I dealt with at all my jobs as an E.A. from the summer of ’96 through the end of ’06.

It’s also the period where Brandon was a toddler, and it’s a joy to be reminded of little things that happened during that time that I hadn’t thought about in years. It was also the period where I launched Some Fantastic — something I’m still immensely proud of. Frankly, in retrospect, I’m not entirely certain how I managed to achieve so much during that period.

Reading all this material is also motivating me to start posting here more. I certainly don’t need to post as often as I did in the old LJ days, and that certainly applies moreso to the oversharing that took over there. However, the Bluesky and Facebook formats encourage a style of writing that really isn’t me. The one thing I’ve successfully internalized over the past few years is the need to be my authentic self. It’s time to apply that to posting online as well. 

Today’s Album on CD: ‘Sports,’ by Huey Lewis and The News

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(This is a series I originally started on Facebook several weeks ago. This is a revised cross-post. Starting tomorrow I will be posting these here.)

I recently had a random recollection that this was the first album I ever owned (on cassette.) It really is mind-boggling how many hits Huey Lewis and The News had in the ’80s. Before listening to it, my recollection was that they made exceptionally crafted middle-of-the-road pop/rock that was absolutely recognizable as a product of its era, but was otherwise not particularly special. It’s nice background music, but without this little project I’ve embarked upon, I don’t know if I otherwise would’ve listened to this album in any format. However, after listening to Sports in full, I decided I might have been a little harsh with this assessment. A couple of the songs actually held up rather nicely: “If This Is It” and the lesser hit, “Walking on a Thin Line.”

Side note: Hootie and The Blowfish are absolutely the ’90s version of Huey Lewis and The News, only with significantly fewer hits. How well would we remember them if not for the one Friends episode with the five steaks and an eggplant?