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Hard to believe but this is year three of this silly blog. So, I bring you my third-annual pick for my favorite the record of the preceeding year.

It would be an injustice to award this to anything other than Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky. I would strongly consider Elliott Smith’s New Moon, but since none of the amazing music on that record is actually new per se, I’ll stick with Wilco.

I also managed to see Wilco live at the Fillmore in Denver in support of Sky Blue Sky and it was really one of the better shows I’ve seen in the last few years. So, if you haven’t heard this record, you should get it, it’s amazing. Don’t be suprised if you recognize many of the songs from the Volkswagen commercials of last year, nearly all of the songs on this record were featured in those ads.

On to 2008. I imagine there will be some great stuff out this year!

The bike Prince rode in Purple Rain was a 1981 Honda 400 Automatic, with an aftermarket Kutter fairing.
He looks pretty bad-ass on it, but you should know that bike only made 27HP. LOL.

I bought the new Elliott Smith New Moon anthology released last week. It’s a long 2-disc set of 24 songs, many of which fans are familiar with, some I had not heard before. New Elliott Smith songs are rare jewels to me at this point, as I am an uber-fan. The fact that it’s a double album would have thrilled Elliott who sparred with his record company at length before he died over his wishes to release a double album. I think even for the uninitiated, this collection will make a good introduction to Elliott Smith’s work. It seems pretty representative of his sound and style to me. Elliott Smith’s music combines a melancholy beauty and white-hot-seething-anger. Some of his lyrics really are the best of all time. You can go back and find so much in there.

The highlights for me so far are “Riot coming” and the super catchy “All cleaned out”. Of course it’ll be months before I decide what I really think the lyrics are about. That’s just typical of his work, and why it’s the best. I also enjoy hearing the early lyrics from “Miss Misery”, for which he was nominated for an Oscar (best soundtrack), by which time the song’s lyrics were quite different from the version on New Moon.

If you at all like cerebral acoustic rock, Elliott Smith does it best, and I highly recommend this record. There are better Eliiott Smith records, but New Moon definitely adds something to his discography.

so here’s another noisy, chaotic jam that doesn’t make any sense.

this morning’s jam

D

Jaime and I went to the Boulder International Film Festival Saturday to see Air Guitar Nation, a documentary about the growing international sport of Air Guitar.

Air Guitar Nation follows the story of formation of the US Air Guitar Championships and the rise of American Air Guitar Champion C-Diddy to become World Champion in Finland at the World Air Guitar Championships. The other main character is Diddy’s american rival Bjorn Turoque (pictured above). The documentary, story, and sport are all real.

The movie was pretty much hilarious. They also mixed in a message about world peace. Apparently the founding motives of the Finnish in establishing the World Air Guitar Championships is that “If you’re holding an air guitar, you can’t hold a gun”, so if everyone air-guitared, there would be world peace.

Competitve air guitar is modeled on ice skating. Competition consists of two rounds, the individual round, where the players choose their own song, and the compulsory round, where all players play the same song, only revealed to them at contest time. Judging is by three judges using a 4.0 - 6.0 point scale, just like skating. Each song is 60 seconds. The main judging criteria is “airness”. Airness is described as “the extent to which the performance transcends the medium and becomes a higher form of artistic expression. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll know it when you see it”.

Funny stuff and a good message to take things less seriously. I don’t know where you can see this film, but I’m sure it will be available on DVD at some point. Click on the video link on Diddy’s hompage to see the video of his winning performance.

Rock on.

Jaime got me tickets to the Symphony for Christmas this year. Pretty cool gift. We rocked the fourth row. The program was the HealthOne Pops doing the music of the Doors. Interesting show. There was a singer, Randy Jackson of the band Zebra, who did a pretty dang good job of being Jim Morrison for the evening, which is a tough vocal assignment to be sure. I never heard of the guy, but he appeared to have some fans present from his other work. He did a very nice job of working the crowd and intrducing the songs.

The setup was centered around a regular rock band quartet. Bass guitar, Drums, Lead guitar, Keyboard/Piano. Then the regular orchestra surronded the band, with director Brent Havens, who did the arrangements, doing his thing on the podium. The players, were, of course, all pro. The sound was great and I enjoyed the show more than I thought I might. All the songs really do have some depth and the arrangements were all strightforward and fairly close to the original. They did jam out here and there. There was some pretty hot trading of licks between the piano guy and the guitarist. It was basically a rock show, not a symphony show. The guy on guitar was pretty much awesome, really they all were. The tempo of the show was pretty fast. Even though they are known for some of their longer songs, a lot of Doors songs are short and radio-friendly. They didn’t just stick to radio faves either. They played some deeper cuts like The Changeling and Wishful Sinful, and avoided some obvious ones like The End and Peace Frog. Spanish Caravan was a highlight, and they even did a spoken word piece from An American Prayer, which worked out better than I thought.

A fun time, even though it was 0 degrees and snowing when we got out of there (will it ever end?). Defintely not the average evening at the rock show, and of course I had my Doors stage, so I really like the songs and hadn’t heard them in a long time. Next time, though, it’ll be classical.

Last year at this time I named The Cosmic Game by Thievery Corporation as my record of 2005.

This year I’m going to expand the list to three because I heard so many great records this year.

Without further ado, my three favorite records of 2006

1 - Carnavas, Silversun Pickups : We’ve already talked about this one

2 - Makers, Rocky Votolato : I love this record. The title track is great. A sing-along-in-the-car classic. This is what my girlfriend makes fun of me for listening to. She calls it ‘emotional’.

3 - Boys And Girls In America, The Hold Steady : You owe it to yourself to get this this record. Do it. I’m gonna walk around and drink some more.

There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.

The album that refuses to leave heavy rotation in my list, for an almost absurd amount of time now:

Cat Power, The Greatest

It’s funny, because if you had asked, I might have said that I prefer You Are Free (also outstanding), but I’d have been lying. The first six tracks on The Greatest might be the stongest opening of any record I’ve heard in a long time.

This freakin’ record gets into your skull and won’t leave.

It’s cool that when I bought my mac, they threw in a little 8-track studio for free. I hadn’t really been playing my guitars in a few years. You have to give it to Apple on that one. I’ve never bought a Windows machine that made me want to play music and record little jams. There’s some truth in their advertising campaign on this front. It’s a fun way to kill two hours or so. Here’s todays jam from the little garageband studio in my iMac.

8_23_06.mp3 (aka “When you get the urge to finger-tap, don’t.”)

D