I realized the other day that I’m having a summer of female vocalists. First it was the new Tracey Thorn record in May. Then in June I got the second Lady Gaga record for my birthday, and almost immediately had to buy the first. In each of these cases I pulled a total deep-ender and found myself listening to little else (except for the occasional Orbital, which is my anti-writer’s-block go-to music).

For July it’s most definitely been Janelle Monae. I was a little late to this party–my pal Luke and millions of others have been blogging her praises since the record came out in May. But now I’m fully hooked. Everything everyone says is true: it’s an incredibly rich, diverse, funky album. I love the references to folks like Bowie and Prince, but I also adore the orchestral sections, esp. the strings. She’s arranged the record into two suites and it feels like a soundtrack, which reminds me of my obsession with the Diva soundtrack when I was in high school. And I double-dog dare you *not* to tap your feet along with the single. Go ahead, try it–I’ll wait:

See?

I suspect that my August will continue to be filled w/female voices: Kristin Hersh’s new record was just released. Actually it’s a book and a record. A recbook. A bookord. Whatever it is, I’m ordering it right up.

But something very good happened, too: the new Tracey Thorn CD, Love and Its Opposite, came in the mail. Yay! You may remember a few months ago when I complained that I couldn’t possibly be expected to wait til it was released. And then suddenly here it is, in a lovely package from Merge Records with a poster (for my office wall!) and a sticker (for my bike! or computer, haven’t decided yet).

I imposed a media blackout on myself and didn’t read the review in the New Yorker or anywhere else until after I’d had a chance to listen to the record all the way through a couple of times. It’s different than the last record, not techno-y at all, which I initially missed a bit (even though when you look at the whole of her/EBTG’s career the dancey stuff is not in the majority by any means). On this records there’s lots of piano, the songs are mostly quiet, and some are just achingly sad and gorgeous. But there’s some rolicking good times in there too, including the most enjoyable song about menopause *I’ve* ever heard (don’t know about you, though).

Just like with the last record there won’t be a tour, and I’m surprisingly un-unhappy about that. I’ve written before on my mixed feelings about live music these days: I miss it, but more in a nostalgic way than a run-right-out-and-go-to-a-show way. So in some ways it’s easier when there’s *not* a tour, then I don’t need to feel guilty or lame about not going. I feel g + l enough about missing The Primitives at the Bell House earlier this month, and of course I will also be missing Unrest at same in July.

But all’s not lost: from what I’ve read there will be videos of Tracey Thorn performing these new songs from time to time. Scroll down on her website to see the first one: the new single. I do miss the strings from the recorded version, but it’s lovely all the same.

Last night we finished up watching 2102. It was my pick, and I’m not going to apologize for it: I like a good big budget special effects apocalyptic flick every so often. Yes, at 2 hrs 38 mins it was a good hour too long, full of lame end-of-the-world conversations that could’ve been left on the cutting room floor. But the actiony parts were pretty sweet. Giant fissures opening up in the earth! California literally sliding into the ocean! Supervolcano exploding under Yosemite! Planes flying through Las Vegas skyscrapers as they collapsed! Good times. And it’s always nice to see John Cusack getting work.

So the big giant ending of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) is that the things referred to as arks that save the human race (plus a few giraffes and elephants) that we *thought* were spaceships throughout most of the movie are *actually* boats! (really submarines, absolutely enormous submarines.) So the ultimate Earth-ending climax is a series of gigantic tsunamis that overrun practically the entire landmass of the planet. Again, the effects were nice. Well worth the Netflixing.

(More spoilers: John Cusack does not die, just in case you were worried.)

But I think my brain was working overtime as I slept, because I awoke with a lingering weird feeling about water. Maybe it’s the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which is such a huge bummer that I can’t read anything more about it. Also, once we lived in an apartment that had a roof that leaked insanely when it rained. Seriously, water used to drip from the light fixtures, and our landlords regularly failed to see that as a problem.

Continuing the watery theme, in the early morning hours it rained torrentially. We listen to white noise when we sleep that just happens to be the sounds of rainfall, so despite the thunder it took us a while to wake up. But I realized that the rain was louder than usual at 5:12am and spent the next 10 minutes stumbling around the apartment closing windows and drying off windowsills. Happy Monday! I was kind of tired today, natch.

All of this means that I’ve had the “Rain Rain Rain Came Down Down Down” song from the old Disney cartoon for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day running through my head all day. I tried to find it for you on YouTube, but I could only find it in Swedish and Finnish. Here’s the Swedish version — enjoy!

The section dating 1986-1995 is a treasure. I think I actually had many of these early episodes on videotape until well after college — the playlist for 12/28/87 looks awfully familiar. Be careful when you click that link: it’s easy to lose whole buckets of time watching video after video (The Lucy Show! Siouxsie! Jesus & Mary Chain! Housemartins!). In fact, I started this post last night but spent so much time in nostalgiaville that I didn’t have time to finish it.

It would be hard to overestimate the impact that 120 Minutes had on my musical life. I didn’t really listen to music of my own until the summer before 7th grade, when we moved 1/2way across the country and got a color TV, cable, and a VCR all at the same time. That was the same year MTV launched, and while I did listen to the radio (most notably the show Rock Over London which played the top songs on the British charts), watching MTV was what really got me into music. Yes, I was a classic victim of ’80s new wave + pop music hysteria: Duran Duran, Madonna, Prince, Eurythmics, etc., the whole kit + kaboodle.

When we moved again just before 9th grade, MTV moved with me. Even though I was still mostly a teenybopper I already fancied myself something of a musical connoisseur, scouring record stores for import 12″s and B sides and the like. Because what’s cooler than the song on the B side of the import 12″ 45rpm for Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth?” Nothing, I say!

But, thanks to 120 Minutes (and a British cousin who sent me indie mixtapes), during high school I got a teeny tiny bit (musically) cooler. The show was my introduction to “college rock,” which led to actually listening to college radio and, eventually, co-hosting a college radio show of my own. Yay!

These days we don’t have cable, but of course MTV doesn’t even play music videos anymore anyway. And with the internets we can watch practically any video we want whenever we want to. But this site makes me miss MTV, just a little bit.

But that was stupid, because it turns out that the slower stuff is fabulous (duh for me). It’s always been those songs that really foreground her incredible voice. When I was looking for the YouTube link above to “It’s All True” I stumbled across this video for the version of The Style Council’s “The Paris Match” with Tracey singing. It’s still amazing all these many years later, and so much more convenient than having to go into the living room to fire up the turntable:

Her new record is coming out on Ben Watt’s Buzzin’ Fly label in Spring 2010, yippee!

* linking to this post is cracking me up because apparently back in May of aught-eight I was all “I don’t want an iPhone!” And look at me now.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the other stuff that I like about Twitter. I don’t go overboard w/the celebs on Twitter — really it’s only a few folks. But it’s neato to be able to follow some musicians that I like, most notably Kristin Hersh and Tracey Thorn. Maybe it’s because they’re old like me and have kids and still talk about “records.” Tracey Thorn’s kids made fun of her for using that word, and now that I’m a librarian it sometimes has a different meaning for me, too, though I will always think of A sides and B sides before anything else (old habits die hard). Kristin Hersh, one of the most prolific (and sharing) musicians out there, lets us know every time she has a new song up on her website. And they both tweet silly funny stuff about their kids, an indulgence that any parent will probably appreciate (and admit to).

My Twitter music fan habit is probably just another mutation in the evolution path (and aging) of me as a music fan. I’ve written some about this in the past. The older I get, the less I crave live music, browsing record (ha) stores, and reading music reviews/news/zines/etc. (though I still sometimes miss my college radio show). But I still feel strongly about music and consider “music fan” to be a core facet of my personality.

Gets me thinking: what counts as a “fan”? I’ve seen only a handful of live shows since Gus was born and probably buy only 1-2 CDs every few months these days. But I still listen to music every day. And my Twitter habit helps keep music in mind, too.

1. After multiple recommendations I finally got my hands on some Thermals records. And they are awesome! Good for listening to while cleaning the stacks of papers off your desk, arranging the fall workshop schedule, and doing the dishes. Since it has rained here for a million billion jillion days straight, the line that’s the title of this post seems particularly apt.

2. Seriously, it has rained for a million billion jillion days straight. I mean, I used to dig in Ireland, I know from rain. I finally bought some big tall boots, but this is still getting pretty old. No rain today but the forecast for the weekend looks ominous, bah.

3. Last week we went to the curriculum share at Gus’s school to see all the fantastic work they’ve done all year. I am completely in awe of his teacher: she took those 27 kids on a ton of field trips all over the city (they studied a lot of architecture this year), including walks over the Brooklyn, Manhattan AND Williamsburg bridges (not all in the same day). Among the work Gus showed us was a book he made entitled “All Kinds of Awesome Poems By Gus.” Which makes me giggle every time I think of it.

4. I finally cleared a whole bunch of random old photos off my phone recently. Here are two:

This is from a crazy place with tons of inflatable stuff to climb on called Bounce U that we went to with friends earlier this year. Gus had a blast, predictably.

There’s a fun public art project all along a street near my work for which lots of people knitted cozies for the parking meters! It’s amazing, very Doctor Seussian. I took this photo right after the cozies were installed — they look much more droopy now that they’ve been rained on for a month. You can get a better look in the nice Flickr photostream and there’s also more info in the Times.

Among the lovely wishes + gifts, I got the latest release by 50 Foot Wave: “Power + Light.” 50 Foot Wave is Kristin Hersh (of Throwing Muses fame)’s other band, and they are loud + rocking. Lately this old lady has been all about the rock music, and I am happy to report that this scratches my rock itch. (Which sounds kind of yucky, actually.)

But that’s not what I want to blag about. What I really want to do is give big ups to Kristin & Co. because they have escaped the shackles of the recording industry and are kicking it open access-style. They founded Cash Music as an alternative means of music distribution. They released this new record on beautiful vinyl (choice of 4 colors! I picked cyan), which you can buy. And they also made the mp3 of the whole dang record available to download for free. Which kicks ass for me because now I don’t have to sit there making sure the cats don’t mess w/things while the USB turntable rips the vinyl to mp3. And of course the whole dang thing is Creative Commons licensed, so others can mix + mash these tracks as the spirit moves them.

I’ve been interested in open access/source kinds of things for a while, I guess, but I’ve gotten more and more passionate about those issues since I became a librarian (don’t get me started on the absurdities of scholarly journal publishing). Of course music/content/art producers need to get paid for the good work they do, but so many of them are held hostage by the recording/publishing industry. These models are broken. I’m not sure what the answer is — I don’t think we’ll know that for a while yet — but I’m 100% convinced that things like Cash Music are a step in the right direction.

1. Throwing Muses/50 Foot Wave, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY

Yeah, so it turns out that I was kind of lying when I said I wasn’t all that disappointed not to be going to this show. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve had the 50 Foot Wave records on repeat this whole week. I’d listened to them a bit a while ago but hadn’t much recently and holy crap they are amazing. Much harder than Kristin Hersh’s solo stuff, and even harder than much Throwing Muses, but in a wall-of-driving-guitar-and-drums way rather than an intricately-woven-guitar-and-drums way. I like it. Which makes me even more mopey because 50 Foot Wave don’t play out much and I’ve never seen them live, bah.

But it *is* late, and I’m already exhausted. For whatever reason Spring Forward is really kicking my butt this year. Maybe it’s the morning darkness, but this has been a long week. Who’s idea was it to move the time change up to March, anyway?

2. ACRL National Conference, Seattle, WA

Yes, the biannual library nerd-a-thon! It’s far away and expensive and inconveniently right in the middle of our semester, so I decided not to go. CUNY follows the public school holidays which means that our spring break is in April, not now like everywhere else. (Which I don’t hate at all, actually, since it makes childcare easier.) Also I thought that this would be a really busy week for instruction in our library.

But it turns out that we don’t have that many classes this week (we’ve scheduled most for after midterms, in a week or so). And I’ve been thinking a lot of research thoughts recently and really jonesing for an academic conference. Yes, had you any doubt about the depth of my nerdiness, I’m pretty sure I just dispelled it.

So I am using twitter to follow the conference. I guess living vicariously isn’t so bad. And it is much, much cheaper.