Sat 8 Nov – Hotel Cafe Tour

Saturday's show was simply fabulous. The two hours were extremely satisfying, and the format of the show was a pleasant deviation from the standard concert fare.

The venue was interesting. The bar and restaurant are upstairs, and we all lined up, snaking through the dining area, as we waited for the doors to open. The concert itself was in the Duck Room, a dark, cozy basement that had me thinking that it could easily have been a speakeasy back in the day, hiding under the cover of the legitimate business upstairs. It was…

I've held off for a bit before writing about the recent facelift that Last gave the site. I wanted to really get a feel for it and see what I thought before I critiqued it.

Overall, I'd give it a B+. When I first saw it, it was rather jarring to see such a drastic change. Nothing looked the same. But once I started getting used to where everything moved to, I started liking it more and more. And there are some really powerful tools that they've added that make me one very happy camper:

1) Live updating of charts.…

After my last rant wondering where the good music had run away to, I've been pleasantly surprised lately.

Right now, Gaelle is blowing my mind a bit. It depresses me to know that this album has been out since 2004 and I just discovered her in the last month! What really hooked me was Mercy Street, her cover of the Peter Gabriel classic. I stumbled across it somewhere on Last.fm radio and it was good enough to lead me to her album. It's phenomenal. There's some Erykah Badu soul, some Blue Six mellowness, mixed together around her fabulous voice…

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote anything on here. I guess it's time for me to remedy that with some random crap.

First off, Where the Hell is Rachael Yamagata's new album?? It was originally supposed to be out sometime in September-ish, and four months later there's still no new information that I can find anywhere. WTF??? I needs me some new Rachael!! After hearing "Sunday Afternoon" (video below), which I would guess is one of the new songs, I'm SOOO looking forward to its release.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSGZqOQ2680

And what's the deal with Lou Rhodes' new album,…

I cruised by mrkvm's page and saw something weird - the Overall Artists and Overall Songs charts were displaying just the past three months!!

I thought that was pretty cool, so I dug through my site settings on Last to find a new option under the "Website" tab for which overall charts are being displayed. Maybe I'm just slow and it's been there a while, but it's new to me so I thought it was cool enough to share. So there. :P :)

This is not your typical "best of" journal. I'm not going to go into what my favorite releases of the year have been - too much of what I get into isn't "fresh" enough to qualify for that, so this is an overview of my most-listened-too artists. The chart parameters are imperfect, so it's really only a discussion of my last 6 months worth of listening rather than the year as a whole, but c'est la vie.

Here they are as listed in my rolling 6 month chart as of this morning:
1 Flunk 578
2 John Mayer 545
3…

As reported on the BBC, and confirmed on Last's blog, Last.fm has been purchased by CBS. What does this mean for us, the users of Last.fm?

My initial reaction was, "Hmm, that's an interesting combination", followed quickly by, "Man, that sucks." I always seem to have that initial negative backlash to corporate acquisitions of companies I like, mostly because I've seen it turn great companies, great sites, into utterly useless commercial crap far too often.

After reading a bit more, though, I have hope for this. If CBS manages to keep a mostly hands-off leash on Last, this could turn…

In doing some recent research into Lamb, one of my absolute favorite artists, I stumbled across the names of its two members and a little info on what they were up to now. One of the articles I found mentioned that Lou Rhodes, the female half of Lamb, had gone on to record some solo work.

My first response to this was to hit iTunes and see if it was available there. Not only is it on iTMS, but there's a second version with 3 bonus tracks that are excellent! I highly recommend any that enjoys her exquisite,…

I absolutely fell in love with Happenstance when it came out. There is so much passion and depth to her music that I can't resist. I've listened to that album, her EP and her iTunes release of the KCRW session so much that I can't even count the number of times.

I've been waiting for her to release some new material, and when I read in March that she had finished up recording and sent the new album off for production, I somehow became even more excited than I had before. And now, she's released an awesome little teaser trailer…

I just picked up John Mayer's new EP on iTunes, "The Village Sessions", and I am being blown away right now. I loved these songs on Continuum (WTH?? How is Continuum not listed as an album on Last?), and this is even better. It's all been pared down to a guitar and his vocals, stripping out the lushness of the studio version and really drilling down to reveal the barest, most essential essence of these songs.

I've never seen him live, but I really hope to get the chance some day. At the very least, I really hope that…