Category Archives: Music

Daily Album on CD: ‘Pyramid,’ by The Alan Parsons Project

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Chose this one today simply because I love the band, and this particular CD is comfort music. With full acknowledgement that Rush and Yes are considered the premiere prog rock bands, The Alan Parsons Project is my personal favorite. They are one of the few bands — any genre — whose entire discography is in my music library, and there isn’t a single bad album by them. My personal favorite off of this one is “In the Lap of the Gods,” an epic instrumental that is perfect for inclusion in a playlist for, as one of my best friends has stated, “killing fake people in video games to.” I keep hoping that Ghost someday decides to perform and record their own rendition of the song.  

Daily Album on CD for Jan. 20: ‘The Tipping Point,’ by Tears for Fears

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For a lot of very understandable reasons, most of the albums that we deem our all-time favorites are the ones from our teens and young adult years — at the time of life when the memories associated with the music we listen to are far more intense and intertwined. It doesn’t hurt that at the stage of our lives, nearly all the songs and albums we are listening to is new to our ears, regardless of how old that material is. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that by the time you reach your mid-to-late 30s, your taste in music starts to calcify and it seems to take more energy to find new music that ends up being as meaningful to you as what you listened to in your formative years.

Therefore, it was a surprise to me that The Tipping Point quickly became the album it did in my collection. It may very well be my favorite album of this century thus far. I fell in love with it almost immediately, and the play counts in my Apple Music library show I’ve listened to it a half dozen times in the nearly four years since purchasing the CD. More than that, it led to my doing a full deep dive into the Tears for Fears catalog. Before this, I never owned a copy of The Hurting (though my wife brought her CD of it into the marriage,) and while Songs From the Big Chair was one of the first I owned on vinyl and ranks amongst my favorite ‘80s albums, at the time of its release The Seeds of Love effectively ended any additional desire to seek out any of their other material. Now, our music library contains the band’s complete discography.

I now appreciate The Seeds of Love in a way I didn’t at the time of its release, see just how amazing a debut album The Hurting was, have songs I love from their reunion album, Everyone Loves a Happy Ending, and even found some gems on the two Tears for Fears albums that were really Roland Orzabal solo efforts with the Tears for Fears name slapped on them. Yet, Songs From the Big Chair, as great as that album is, doesn’t mean as much to me The Tipping Point, which was the right album at the right time in a way that none of their other albums were. The themes, subject matter, and the music itself all just resonated and connected with me in a way that hasn’t happened since Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising.

As a result, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that Tears For Fears currently might now be my favorite band. My listening stats from my Apple Music library for the last couple years irrefutably support that notion. As for favorites off of Tipping Point, there are a few that stand out on an album that was clearly crafted to be listened to as a unified whole, and that’s how it really should be experienced. Having said that, the opening track, “No Small Thing,” is the perfect introduction — a deeply retrospective, almost mellow song that builds in complexity and intensity without letting the music get away from the lyrics. It sets the tone for an album that I recall one reviewer stating could’ve been called The Healing.

Then there’s “Break the Man,” a song clearly born out and absolutely in support of the “Me Too” movement. A successor of sorts to “Woman in Chains,” Tears for Fears clearly demonstrate that they are absolutely down with taking down the patriarchy. But the real gem on this album is “My Demons.” Its dark, pulsing energy and rhythm combined with confrontational lyrics actually brings me a kind of manic joy. On an album that’s my most listened to in years, this one really stands out. It’s been on heavy rotation since the The Tipping Point was released — the play count in my library shows 160 — and I’m nowhere close to getting sick of it. In fact, I played it again while typing this paragraph.

At the risk of writing a full-blown review, it just needs mentioning how wonderful “The Tipping Point,” “Rivers of Mercy,” (which is perfectly placed as the track following “My Demons”) and “Please Be Happy” are. 

If you told me in my teens that Tears for Fears would be the soundtrack of my middle-aged years, I almost would’ve given you a befuddled side-eye. Yet, this is where I am, and it feels absolutely right.

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.)

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?

My Year in Music (Frak Spotify Wrapped)

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To repeat what I said last year in My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped), though I have a Spotify account, the way I use the service – which, not coincidentally, I have just canceled our premium family subscription plan to because of the variety of ways it is an absolutely shitsome company – simply doesn’t reflect or capture the overwhelming amount of music listening I do. Because of this, the 2023 Spotify Wrapper inspired me to begin exporting on December 1 of each year the usage/meta data from my actively curated Apple Music library, which contains over 23,000 songs that we actually own. Thanks to some above-average Excel skills, this is now the second year in a row I’ve been able to assemble a report to Spotify’s while denying them the ability to gather the user data needed to both create it and, more importantly, monetize and use it for their own nefarious needs.

So, without further preamble, my 2025 year in music…

Listened for 54,871 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so,) or 38.1 days of music. I would like to note that my recent transition into playing whole albums on CD rather than through my music library is not captured in this data.

Played 4,501 different songs (I often simply shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad” by Tears for Fears, 41 times.

The top song leaderboard:

  1. “Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad,” Tears for Fears
  2. “Astronaut,” Tears for Fears
  3. “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars
  4. “The Girl That I Call Home,” Tears for Fears
  5. “Dear God,” Black Landlord
  6. “Emily Said,” Tears for Fears
  7. “Landlocked,” Tears for Fears
  8. “Close to Me,” The Cure
  9. “Change,” Tears for Fears
  10. “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen

The first five Tears for Fears songs were an EP (of sorts) of new material embedded at the start of their 2-disc Songs for a Nervous Planet album, which was otherwise a really good live best-of compilation. I listened to that EP independently of the rest of the album frequently, which caused those songs to dominate the list. Just to see what the Top 10 have looked like without those songs, here are the next five in the list:

  1. “And Love Goes On,” Earth, Wind & Fire
  2. “Turns the Love to Anger,” Erasure
  3. “Self Control,” Laura Branigan
  4. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This,” Eurythmics
  5. “Echo Beach,” Martha and the Muffins

Moving on…

Listened to 1,161 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 650 times for a total of 2,881 minutes. (This was the second year in a row that they top my list, and it wasn’t even close.

My top artists, based on song plays:

  1. Tears for Fears
  2. Erasure
  3. Pet Shop Boys
  4. Depeche Mode
  5. Barenaked Ladies
  6. Duran Duran
  7. Eurythmics
  8. New Order
  9. Suzanne Vega
  10. Ghost

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, Suzanne Vega would fall out of the Top 10, and The Alan Parsons Project would move into the 10th spot.

Finally, attempting to determine which album I listened to the most is exceedingly problematic, though I feel I have a very good guess as to how Spotify calculated it. So, without attempting to come up with parameters for filtering and sorting the data in an effort to determine it, I’ll just note that there were two albums released in 2025 that I listened to each over a dozen times: Flying With Angels by Suzanne Vega and Skeletá by Ghost.

My Year in Music (My Version of Spotify Wrapped)

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As I stated on Bluesky and Facebook yesterday, I only use Spotify to try out new-to-me music before deciding whether I like it enough to purchase it (preferably on CD in order to rip my own high quality digital tracks) and add it to my Apple Music library. Thus, Spotify Wrapped doesn’t properly present my listening this year.

However, last year I planned ahead and at the time Spotify started providing last year’s Wrapped reports to its listeners, I performed an export of the listening stats and associated song data from my Apple Music library. Then when this year’s Wrapped reports went out, I did another such export. Thanks to some decent Excel skills, I was able to create a similar report without having my data mined.

Here are the expanded stats:

Listened for 57,404 minutes (highly enabled by working from home and having music on most of the time while doing so.)

Played 4,922 songs (I frequently shuffle the whole library.)

Streamed my top song, Florence + The Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over,” 40 times.

The top song leaderboard:

1.  “Dog Days Are Over,” Florence + The Machine
2.  “Uptown Funk,” Mark Ronson
3.  “Dear God,” Black Landlord
4.  “Wrong Bitch” (extended mix,) Todrick Hall feat. Bob the Drag Queen
5.  “Gronlandic Edit,” of Montreal
6.  “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” KISS
7.  “Off the Wall,” Michael Jackson
8.  “Rapture,” Blondie
9.  “My Demons,” Tears for Fears
10.  “West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys

Listened to 1,183 artists.

Top artist was Tears for Fears. Played their songs 715 times for a total of 3,179 minutes. (This was the year I deep-dived into their catalog, listening for the first time to four different albums, which included this year’s new album of concert tracks plus five new songs.)

My top artists, based on song plays:

1.  Tears for Fears
2.  Erasure
3.  Barenaked Ladies
4.  Pet Shop Boys
5.  Duran Duran
6.  Weezer
7.  They Might Be Giants
8.  The Decemberists
9.  Eurythmics
10.  The Alan Parsons Project

It’s worth noting that if this was based on minutes played instead, They Might Be Giants would fall out of the Top 10 all the way to 14th, and Depeche Mode would move into the 10th spot. TMBG really do write songs that are much shorter on average than those released by nearly all other bands.

A Magical Moment from the Birthday Celebration

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I certainly haven’t achieved a rhythm when it comes to taking the time to write or post regularly on the blog, but it’s a good sign that I have a few different blog posts in various stages of completion. In fact, I started this particular entry several days ago and have been meaning to post about it for a couple weeks. It happened during my birthday celebration, which had been postponed nearly two whole months thanks to the extremely untimely death of our hot water heater.

The notable event was made possible by the fact that the wonderful manager at Mac’s Tavern, Erica, essentially allowed Sally and I to control the music for nearly the entire time we were there, and she set it up in a way that ensured that we didn’t have to throw lots of money into the jukebox. Instead, we created a four-hour playlist on my iPod, plugged it into the sound system, and just let it play in its entirety. (Note: that still wasn’t long enough to cover the entire time we were there, but that’s really my fault for not gauging better how long we might be there.)

One of the songs in the playlist – saved for future use – is The Decemberists’ “Ben Franklin’s Song.” Though I absolutely adore it, the song is one that only truly hardcore Decemberists fans or Lin-Manual Miranda fans know. (You can read the story behind the song by clicking here.) Unsurprisingly, very few of Sally’s or my friends would know about this song unless we play it for them. Since the birthday celebration was in Philly, the city that has elevated Franklin to god-like status, playing it felt absolutely essential.

The playlist was put on shuffle, so we truly had no idea when the song was going to play. More than a couple hours into the festivities, we jointly realized it hadn’t played yet. So, we started paying a little closer attention to the music than we had previously. Both of us were simply ready to enjoy that particular song.

When “Ben Franklin’s Song” finally started, we immediately got up, started singing along, and just got into the music. As the first verse completed, we were both surprised to see a woman join us from another part of the room, while demonstratively singing along with the same energy we were. For the remainder of the song, we had an absolute blast together. Frankly, it felt magical. It was the first time either of us met someone else who knew the song, let alone loved it as much as we do.

Before she went back to rejoin the people she came with, the woman (alas, I don’t remember her name) let us know that just as with us, she hadn’t met anyone else who knew and loved the song as much as she did. The moment was just as special for her.

So, thanks to “Ben Franklin’s Song,” I ended up having one of my most memorable moments ever when hanging out with friends at a pub. Given the reason we were there in Mac’s, it just seemed like that the Flying Spaghetti Monster decided to provide something a little something special for the day.

More Bullet-Pointed Goodness

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As the title of this post states…

  • Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter yesterday brought a drastic, tire-squealing reversal to my fleeing Facebook (at least temporarily.) Facebook suddenly became the lesser of two otherwise extreme evils. I’m going to need to rethink my approach to maintaining an online presence. Using this site far more often remains the core to whatever I decide moving forward, but the fact its that while I have more control over how I post here, posting 2-3 sentence (or smaller) entries on this site doesn’t feel right. Furthermore, I’m not aware at this time of a WordPress feature that allows me to quickly and easily share photos, and tag the location and people I’m with the way Facebook does. Admittedly, Twitter doesn’t have a nice easy way to simultaneously share, manage, and curate photos either, but the smaller posts were right at home there. In regards to the Twitter-sized posts, I certainly should simply get over myself and start putting them on this site.
  • Last year I watched 50 episodes of MST3K and thought that it would be difficult of top it. Last night, I watched my 24th so far this year. At this rate, this 2022’s total will be over 70 movies riffed by MST3K or one its alumni riff groups. The frightening thing is 120 films isn’t even half of what I own. Yes, I own a significant collection of crappy movies containing mocking commentary.
  • As much as I’ve fallen in love with Tears for Fears’s new album, The Tipping Point, I couldn’t bring myself to buy tickets for their show at The Merriweather Post Pavilion this summer. By the time I looked at ticket prices, lawn seats were the only realistic option, and frankly, if I’m going to sit for hours at a concert, I’m going to need a proper chair. I’ll try to catch them the next time a tour brings them through the area.
  • Text from a post I made on Twitter yesterday: “I’m on day #17 of a planned dry month. I don’t think I’ve ever come close to being this dissatisfied with a healthy lifestyle choice.” Seriously, I need to come up with some other coping mechanisms for experiencing this country’s descent into true dystopian authoritarianism. Given that my two favorite means of coping — the other being stress earring — are currently off the table, I need to figure out another means to deal with maintaining awareness of what is happening in the world around me.
  • Rather than simply imply it, I’m going to state it outright: living in America right now must be an amazing analog for what it felt like to live in Germany in 1932. Either that, or we are in fact in The Bad Place.
  • As was true yesterday, more in another post later today, or tomorrow.

Mini Movie Review: ‘Blinded by the Light’

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One of many reasons I’ve always felt like an alien living amongst human beings: my love for Bruce Springsteen’s music. Yes, he is one of the most popular rock stars on the planet today, but it always seemed to me that most of my generation didn’t care much for him after the Born in the USA period ended. Because of this, it was awesome watching a movie about a teenager in the late ’80s embracing Springsteen’s music even though it marked him as incredibly uncool — a sentiment I understood intimately. It needs to be noted though that, Javed, the lead character in Blinded by the Light, loved Springsteen even more than I ever did — I didn’t pay close attention to Springsteen’s lyrics the way he did until I was in my mid 20s. Nonetheless, identifying with the son of Pakistani immigrants to the UK in the same way he identified with a Baby Boomer rock and roller from New Jersey certainly felt like movie magic.