Squublog

On the aforementioned "Sorry," Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line ("But I don't want to do it") in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the "Sorry" vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, "You know, I've weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human." Often, I don't even care if his choices work or if they fail. I just want to know what Rose hoped they would do.

(here)

I wonder how long that link works.

I haven't heard the album yet. I haven't yet gotten past my deep horror that this album has actually, TRULY, without doubt, as far as I can make out, been released. Even without having heard any of the album I can say that I agree with a lot of what Klosterman says in that review, and that I disagree with other stuff. At any rate it's a pretty brilliant piece of rock criticism.

That quote up there is, to me, with the price of admission.

And, also: makes me really want to hear the album. Might even buy the damned thing, which sort of goes to one of the points he makes that I don't really agree with (in fact I don't even know if I understand it.) To whit:

For one thing, Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we'll ever contemplate in this context—it's the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file.

I guess I could buy what he's saying (pun intended) based solely on the fact that he threw that word "marketed" in there. I don't know shit about how anybody's marketing albums, or how anybody's going to continue to do so or stop doing so. While he might be right, in spirit, about how most popular music will be ingested from now forward (and is being ingested already,) I really don't think there's any way to claim that nobody's going to making and distributing albums anymore.

But again, maybe I don't quite get his point. That last phrase, "the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file," is maybe the real meat of what he's saying. In that case it's back to the marketing thing. But even then I wish he'd make his point in a different way, make it more clear. Seems like a very interesting discussion to have. But I'm not having time right now to do it myself.

A few days ago I rambled a bit about a mysterious band called Keith Cross & Peter Ross.

I keep hearing this "Peace in the End" song and needing to let other people hear it.

So here you go, take a listen:

Peace in the End.

Quality-wise I think it suffers a tad from being apparently overloaded a bit when it was recorded from vinyl by whoever did that.

And while I'm here, here's the track after it that reminds me of Traffic's Low Spark of High Heeled Boys: Story to a Friend.

I really want to just rip this thing out and put it back all different. I can't do what I was doing. The gradual shift in appearance toward web 2.0 (falling short, somewhere around web 1.8652, I think) might have stifled the... no, it didn't. I just like to start off talking about completely not what I'm talking about.

Keith Cross & Peter Ross - Bored Civilians - an album from, I think, 1972. Peter Ross apparently played guitar, at some point, with Richard Thompson. If you don't know who he is you can't help me. Keith Cross played guitar in some early 70s British prog/hard rock band called T2 (presumably what the movie was named after) (!) Somewhere I read (on this very internet) that Keith Cross was some kind of next-coming-of-Eric-Clapton, or called such, or some damned thing.

I've never heard of any of this. I've been completely kept in the back room. Not for lack of trying - over the years I've kept my ears occasionally in or around the Victrola speaker whenever the doggie wasn't in the way. I downloaded a "rip" of the whole thing, taken from a vinyl copy at some point, when I found a link on a site called Time Has Told Me. If you're interested after my rant, here, you can find it there pretty easily. I'm not gonna link to the thing, just because currently I'm not in the mood. (Plus there seem to be a number of blogs that do what that blog does, which as far as I'm concerned is a public service and they should be very well commended for their efforts, but I'm not one of those guys.)

I downloaded it because I've been downloading all kinds of things at random from there ever since a friend pointed me in that direction. There's a lot of good shit, most (not all) of it really hard to get "legitimately." (Do I use scare quotes all the time because I'm as stupid as it looks? (Should I really call those "scare quotes"?)) Out of the 20 or so things I've grabbed so far, this one has stood out to me most prominently. These two guys both sing, both play guitar. There are lots of harmonies, lots of acoustic guitars, but it's not any kind of "acoustic folk" thing. For me the comparisons that most come to mind are maybe a little bit of America, a lot of Traffic once or twice, some Crosby, Stills & Nash (mostly Nash,) and a little Beatles (but everything from 1972 had to have just a little Beatles, right?) The album has lots of high points. In particular, I'm gaga for a cover of a Fotheringay song called "Peace in the End", of which I'd never heard the original. (I've probably never heard Fotheringay at all, though I was familiar with them cuzza they sort of have a lot to do with Fairport Convention, and if you didn't know who Richard Thompson was up there you still won't know or care what I'm talking about.) Conveniently in my listening right now that track's just jumped into my headphones. This is the kind of song that stops me dead in my tracks. At some point that'll wear out and I'll have ruined yet another series of synapses, but for now... ooh boy. Bliss is what.

Another comparison that's come to mind is a much more recenter kinda music group called Midlake. They came out with an album a few years ago (or less? maybe last year) called The Trials of Van Occupanther. That thing sounds like a throwback to this kind of 1970s thing. To me.

What about me, me and my kind?
If we're unknown are we left behind?
We have our lovers, too, and our friends
hope in the end.
You may think our lives are forever,
I think you may be wrong.

Another track called Story to a Friend on this Bored Civilians album bears a striking resemblance to Traffic's Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, in a lot of ways. It's none the worse song for it, though.

I don't know when which guy is singing, listening to this thing. But the lead voices are fantastic. Everything about this thing is fantastic. And here comes my frustration, the point (believe it or not) of this rant: why can't the internet tell me what the hell happened to these two guys? All I can find is the sort of brief history I've already hinted at. Keith Cross split with T2 after one album, joined up with Peter Ross, and they made this thing. These two guys then split up. That is all. End of story, according to the internet.

HOW CAN THAT BE? I don't claim to know everything about 70s rock music, but I have gotten pretty good over the years at being able to track down information I don't have on the subject. But here everything's a dead end. Allmusic.com, wikipedia, google and whatever random shit I find there. I can find people talking about this album, but they're all saying the same things.

What happened to these guys? I'm pretty satisfied that they didn't do anything else for any major labels, but I just can't believe that one or both of them just gave up music altogether.

This thing got 2 stars from AllMusic. I'm noticing a trend here. For me this album is far and away the best Poison ever did. Then again, I'm not a Poison fan.

I picked this up for no good reason, as far as I can remember. I never liked Ce Ce Deville, Poison's stickin'-out-blond-haired guitarist, so when he was replaced for this album by Ritchie Kotzen, about whom I knew (and still know) nothing, I guess maybe I figured I should listen. I must've heard a single or something to get me interested in the first place; maybe in listening to this thing now I'll remember what song that was.

Ritchie Kotzen, unlike Ce Ce Deville, actually knows how to play the guitar. He probably plays the guitar too much, or at least parts of the album sound like Poison's saying, "Hey, listen, we have a good guitarist doing shit now." It never feels too flashy for me, but maybe someone else might think it is.

Much more importantly for me, though, being the vocals-above-all-else person that I usually am, Ritchie's backing vocals add about a hundred and fifty seven tons of balls to Poison's sound. There's a real blues rock band here on this album that has nothing to do with th


(Watch all of this closely. Or don't. I remember the day I started writing that. I had to stop to be on parent duty. Took my daughter upstairs, played with balls and danced in the sun room. Put the album in question on up there, thinking I could finish listening then and finish writing down impressions that night. No idea what I did that night, but it wasn't finish writing. Months passed. Now I'm not even bothering to finish reading what I started writing. We're going to leave this one here, as a half-finished remembering of a day spent trying to muse about remembering what brought me to buy and listen to Poison's Native Tongue.)

(P.S. Hope you like it.)

Pulled out Crimson Glory's "Strange and Beautiful" this morning while digging for some Galactic Cowboys CD I don't even know whether or not I have. I must've bought this CD, probably used, in the mid-90s. A good friend of mine either suggested it to me or played it for me or something. Stylistically it occupies a strange place in the spectrum of my tastes, sort of just on the edge. There's a progressive vibe to it, and there's a hair-metal thing going on with the guitars. Vocals a little like Robert Plant or maybe David Coverdale when sounding like Robert Plant on that one thing with Jimmy Page. The bass sound is almost identical to the bass on Faith No More's "Epic," and the rest of that album the name of which is strangely escaping me right now. I always got the impression that these guys were some kind of almost-Queensryche-like group, maybe the way Queensryche sounded early in their career.

None of that really describes the sound of this album. I liked this thing A LOT at the time I got it. I'm not sure what it was about it; the sound, maybe, though the vocals aren't exactly what I'm usually into. There's an ethereal quality to it that I can't figure out where it's coming from, as it's a pretty pounding album in a lot of places.

Funny, track 3, "love and dreams," starts off reminding me a whole hell of a lot of Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit." This track is doing a good job of reminding me of why I like the thing. The sound of the acoustic guitar is brilliant, a jangly strummed close-mic'd sound that I've always enjoyed (think the sound of that Supertramp song, for one thing.) There are some great harmonies here, even if the lead vocal has a lot of that Plant-inspired thing going on that bothers me just a tad. Here also is where the "ethereal" thing really comes in. And the bass line's got a tone of motion, very well done.

This is a little dated: things like those vocals and the fairly cheesy-synth sounds don't hold up that well. Nevertheless I'm still enjoying it.

Something I've always remembered about this CD has nothing to do with this CD: Crimson Glory's previous record, "Transcendence", which I've never even heard, featured cover art that's gotta be done by the same person who did artwork for Omni in the 80s. According to allmusic, that album's a lot better than this one. Around track 5 ("Dance on Fire") I'm definitely feeling the filler-ness, and that track's a long ways off of the progressive thing they apparently started off doing. Track 6, "Song for Angels," is really hair-ballad stuff, but I'm very often a sucker for hair-ballad stuff, and this is no different. I remember enjoying this track a lot, and I still do.

(Possibly, though not definitely, the first or second entry in my Musimembering series.)

Right now I've got 2 Yes albums in my iAudio (mp3) player: Talk, and The Ladder. It's a pretty random sample of my collection of Yes stuff, which is by no means complete but contains more than just those 2 records. In fact it's a pretty random collection, as I've never gotten onto a "let's try to buy all 17,000 Yes records" kick.

Talk is from 1994. Trevor Rabin's featured heavily. AllMusic.com calls the album "A Disaster," which I don't get. Being only a casual Yes fan, though, perhaps I'm not qualified to recognize a disaster.

I've always like Trevor Rabin, his vocals, guitar playing, and song writing, although the latter can be pretty hit-or-miss for him. I've got a suspicion that Yes fans probably never took to his very 80s style of music-making, but I did. Of course I'm one of those people who didn't get into them at all until 90125, when Rabin first joined the group.

Talk is not a fantastic album. For me, the Jon Anderson tracks are the weak spots, like "I am Waiting," which is just too floaty (as he tends to be a lot of the time,) sort of light and airy and I just picture a roller skating rink and a disco ball. It's a good album though, with a few stand out tracks like "The Calling," "State of Play," "Walls," and some very strong production throughout. Lots of interplay between heavy bass and rhythm stuff and acoustic guitar strumming. The acoustic guitar sound is of a kind that I sometimes really hate, using piezo pickups instead of more traditional old-fashioned putting a microphone in front of the instrument. There's a cold, unnatural feel to guitars recorded like that, and it rarely works for me. Somehow Yes does well with that sound. (In fact I'm not even sure they're acoustic guitars and not electrics with piezo pickups - I never can really tell the difference.)

I barely remember the circumstances around my buying this CD, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't long after its release. I enjoyed it a lot on the first few listens, probably for the most part due to the production and sound. There are lots of good harmony/backing vocal things throughout, and Rabin's a big part of that. Additionally, there's this sort of epic 3 part thing (I think it's maybe what'd be the 2nd side if this were on vinyl or cassette,) called "Endless Dream," the middle bit of which is the title-track, is over 11 minutes long, and still blows me away. While I'm a sucker for long tracks, it takes more than only that to get me. This one's got some great interplay between mellow piano and atmospheric guitar work. It also features lead vocals by both Anderson and Rabin, using both of their melodic strengths. It does veer into that light-airy Anderson stuff at times, but that's well balanced by the rest of it. About a quarter of the way in there's some chill-inducing stereo guitar work, filling in with that beautiful rhythmic backing-vocal stuff from Anderson, recalling some cool moments from 90125.

The last quarter of the track opens up into full-on progressive mode, from droning synths to vast vocal chorus work, including Anderson's voice soaring way up there where a lot of people can't stand to listen to it.

Continuing to be out of order. I'm somewhere in the middle-beginning of my "experiment." Don't know right now how much I've explained it. That's neither that nor this, nor there. Anywhere.

I have a gradually deteriorating collection of music. It's clear to me that I've reached, and long since begun the descent from, the pinnacle of my music collecting days. I still buy CDs, download stuff from some independent sites like DMusic, trade rips of stuff with friends (did I just say that out loud?); but it's nothing like it used to be. My buying/attaining now is always sporadic, never focused (sound familiar?) and just not as satisfying as it once was.

Still, on occasion I'll pull out something old to listen to and think about how I ought to write something about it. Never settle on what exactly I'd write, as reviewing music is a skill I've never worked on hard enough to even figure out, let alone master. Sometimes I think I'd just like to write about where I was when I got my hands on the thing, or when I first heard it. That wouldn't always work, though, as sometimes there's not much to tell related to that.

This "Musimembering" thing is something to do with that. I don't know if I'll keep it up - I'm buried in half-started projects to which I can't do justice, including this blog itself, and just writing this introduction (as well as the first example, which is pretty weak, and which will probably appear tomorrow,) is eating into time I really shouldn't be taking up with this garbage. Of course the way I am I'm going to want to keep doing these all RIGHT NOW, taking up more time, and burn out the idea quickly while wasting time better spent elsewhere. We'll just see what happens.

So excuse the first entry or two, I've had to start somewhere by way of diving in, and I'm certain I chose a pretty boring entry point.

I am completely can't believe anything like possible is the claims expressed by the postings I've just read surrounining the most horriblendous piece of BEST FUCKIGN SONG EVER I've just been hearing for a while. Here, so to boot:

Ramadan,
Ramadan,
lots of praying
With no breakfast!

Ramadan,
so much fun,
do all your shopping
at Wal-Mart!

This is not only not possibly what it tried to be, but better than anything it didn't tried to be. It's smearing me with it.

Oh, what is this? The Most Unwanted Song, by once-Russian (still Russian? (not Rush)) dudes Komar & Melamid, some artists who did (do?) Art. art. Art?

Needn't shall I go through the specificis. I'm not sure what the deal with where that link is is, the song link, I mean, that you're maybe (I hope) hearinging, but hopefully it'll be there when you're here reading this. This piece of musicsong, all 22-almost minutes of it, is fucking goddamn fucking f-fucking brilliant. I don't think there are cussing in it, though. Unlike this is. The methodology that I'm not going into about how this song was created by the musician (who wasn't the artists who conceived of it,) involved polling and figuring out what people most hated to hear. But seriously, that couldn't have actually made somebody think everybody'd hate this thing. How could everybody hate this thing?

My mainly complaint: not long enough. Seriously. However they figured out that 22 minutes was exactly the long of the worst horrible for most people (the survey says!?) they should've fudged that up a little so this would fill a whole album instead of just apparently half of one, or maybe since it was... I can't.

I at least in partially hope that some of my readers might not have already seen tell hear of this elseway. DaveX and your late-into-the-early: it's to be this for hearing, at very least yours. Right.

It's hard to tell how far from I think it's "novelty," but there's enough great amidst the makes-me-laughing for me to consider it to be more than that.

Here are various places where this was/is being linked/talked about. I found it first on Boing Boing, then...
this here at arts journal?
and this here at musicology and
this here at design observer.

Followed a link from Kottke.org to Top Ten Artists Suffering The Lindsey Buckingham Paradox on a blog called Not too Crazy. Had to do it, since it's got Buckingham right there in the title. I'm a big fan of his, both as a guiding-force/producer/songwriter/guitarist/singer for Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. And I'm basically in agreement about the fact that his work as a solo artist rarely (if ever) lives up to the potential exhibited by his work with Fleetwood Mac. Basically.

Trouble is, I'm suspicious of anything that discusses the relative artistic merits of a person's works. As an example of why: the list in that post includes Sting. Now I'm not big fan of his, and I'm not a huge Police fan either. But there's no doubt in my mind that the music created by Sting as a solo artist is not possibly quantifiably not-as-good as the music created by the band. A lot of it's very different, to be sure, but comparing the two is an apples-and-oranges thing.

With Lindsey it's a little more difficult to argue that the music he produces on his own isn't just less-good, overall, than the Fleetwood Mac stuff. The trouble here is that Lindsey's released just 4 solo albums since he started doing solo stuff in the 80s. When I got his Go Insane album on cassette in the mid-80s it blew me away. For a long time. It sounds nothing like Fleetwood Mac, so there's that apples-and-oranges thing, but it also sounds much more dated-to-the-80s than any Mac stuff has ever sounded dated to me. Since I fell in love with the record when I was fairly young, I've got no way to be objective about it now (in addition to the fact that I've got no idea how to dig up the cassette copy of it, and I've never downloaded it/bought a CD/etc,) but at any rate it was great to me then, and I probably listened to it as much as or more than any of the Mac cassettes I loved at the time.

Sometime there I also bought Law and Order on cassette. That one I didn't think much of, though it had its moments. It basically sounded like Buckingham was going for a style that I wasn't interested in. In hindsight I've enjoyed that one over the years a bit more than I did at first, and while part of that's surely nostalgia, some of it's because my tastes have changed and I've to some extent caught up with what he was trying to do.

The Fleetwood Mac album that came out shortly after that first solo record, Mirage, is a very good indicator of what I think is probably going on with this "Paradox," at least in this case. Lindsey is a better producer than he is a songwriter. That's not to say that he isn't a fantastic songwriter - because I certainly think he is. But he strikes me as being the kind of fantastic songwriter who really has to work for it, and who isn't entirely consistent even while releasing things at such a slow pace. I suspect (though I could be miles off,) that he spends more time crafting his songs after they're written than he does writing them in the first place. The memorable songs on Mirage (for me, anyway,) are none of them songs Buckingham wrote. The songs on that album that he did write are in a similar vein to the material on Law and Order, and by the time they created Mirage he'd probably already spread his own material pretty thin. Songs like "Gypsy" and "Hold Me" more or less hold that record together; they're brilliantly produced and put together, and written by the other writers in the band. As a producer on other peoples' songs, he has a chance to work with songs that are great as written, and to spend all that fiddle-around-in-the-studio energy making them shine.

It's interesting to compare Buckingham to his counterpart, Stevie Nicks. As a solo artist she's certainly had more success, and she's also had more output. But does any of it hold up to the things she's done with Fleetwood Mac? I'd say not quite, though I'll admit that that's going to be a taste thing. Part of the difference here is that when she does "solo" records, she's really not solo. She works with good collaborators, for the most part. The problem with that, though, is that I don't think any of those collaborators are as brilliant as Buckingham, as musicians or as producers.

His third solo release, in the early 90s, Out of the Cradle, which I bought on CD right when it came out (or close to it) was a bit of a disappointment for me. It had some great stuff, great production and sounded great, but at least half of the songs never caught me in a very good way. Still, I listened to it (and still do, on occasion,) and enjoyed it. The stand-out tracks (like "Don't Look Down", "Wrong", and "This is the Time") are fantastic, but for me the bulk of the material suffers from the same whatever-kind-of-music-this-is-ain't-what-I-wanna-hear problem that I had with Law and Order.

My big argument on this score is a result of his most recent solo record, Under the Skin. I love this record. Stylistically he's in territory that I enjoy a lot - acoustic rock, not so much that sort of Adult Contemporary-ish thing he kept bumping up against on Law and Order and Out of the Cradle. It's a good album. Still, the standout tracks are so good that it's obvious that there's still a consistency problem. "Shut us Down" is probably one of the best songs he's written, be it for solo release or with Fleetwood Mac.

Maybe he's best when he really focuses on a song. He wrote/produced/performed the standout soundtrack song from National Lampoon's Vacation, "Holiday Road." This "Shut us Down" track was in the movie Elizabethtown. Maybe his best songs stand out more than his albums.

Basically I think there's a very broad "paradox" going on here. Rock bands are awesome. The best bands (in my opinion, obviously) are very often those wherein the individual members have so much talent that in the process of tearing each other apart to create an album there's very little left but great songs. Think Genesis, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles... even when their members have great success as solo artists, there's something lost in them having free reign with their material.

Of course I'm never able to say anything unequivocally: If there's something lost in these people going solo, there's something else gained. Some of the best songs by solo performers might, for whatever reason, have never made it past the thrashing editing that happens in being part of a band. For me as a music fan, I like to hear everything my favorite artists create. I don't trust their bands or their producers to decide what's "good" and what isn't. I don't even trust the artists themselves to decide that. I think it's absolutely idiotic that Axl is still trying to "finish" Chinese Democracy. Some of the songs being pruned away could turn out to be the ones I'd really like to hear. And of course it's all about me.

One of the reasons that I can't blog (again, excuses...) properly is that I've got shit so damned compartmentalized. I push and pull in here trying to keep things straight; fighting myselves over whether to keep up the walls; coming to conclusions then reversing them when "evidence" surfaces.

The anonymity thing is pretty constant, but it's also one that I find myself running up against a lot. At least I did in the past; more recently I'm pretty sure one of those editors in here traps the stuff before it even bubbles anywhere close to the surface. This morning a teeny-tiny bit of "evidence" (yeah, that's not what it is,) popped into focus for me. A post over at Saradighm Shift up and vanished. I got word that the reason for that has something to do with fears of collisions between real worlds and virtual ones. (I'm being vague here, of course, but if I've not been vague enough I can only apologize in advance or hindsight in the case that even this much of an information leak violates anyone's treaties.)

It's gotten to where I don't talk about 90% of what goes on in my areal-region. (Note: I can't fucking believe "areal" is a word.)

So since we're in the middle of some otherwhen, I'll peel back a layer. (Note: We're not really in the middle of any otherwhen at this point, as I've changed my mind and not included this as part of the thing that you may not have read about yet anyway and so you can safely ignore this whole shit here.) I've probably already at least hinted at this one, if not outright talked about it before (I'm almost certain I've talked about it before, as a matter of fact, and so I'm not really peeling back anything that's not barely concealed, but so what.)

I just about said, "I love American Idol." I can't quite go that far. But when it's on it's a must-see show for me (right now really the only one of those, although Survivor is close,) and it's not in any self-consciously ironic way. I like it because it's about people singing, and I like to hear people singing. I like it because it's a contest that sucks me into its drama.

I don't love it because it's cheesy. Now, anybody who isn't here in secret-American-Idol-fandom with me is responding to that with a big, "yeah, NO SHIT." There are two responses for that, though: one, I don't hate cheesy, in the right proportions. Over-cheesy can kill a thing for me, but my tolerance for cheese is probably a little higher than your average middle-aged anonymous faux-hip blogger. Second, American Idol is cheesy at worst.

I have this difficult relationship with schmaltz and cheese, I think, that comes out of my upbringing. Or maybe it's just inside me -- deep down inside, I have a big puddle of cheese. It goes beyond American Idol, though. Recently I find that I'm able to watch episodes of Lawrence Welk, all the way through, with the same lack of irony. I'm lucky that I'm able to do that also now with no residual "I'm-suck-a-dork" guilt, because my daughter (coming up on 16 months old now) enjoys the show. Granted, there's a high level of cheese and schmaltz there. I don't enjoy it in the same way as I do American Idol; in fact I'm not sure why I enjoy it. That puddle of cheese in my center is coated in a heavy layer of something I can't really put a single word on (though I'm tempted to make one up,) some kind of nostalgia for times I wasn't alive for in the first place. (Is that just a different usage for "nostalgia"?) (Nostemporalgia.) I've gotten similar pleasure out of listening to radio shows from way-back in the before-me.

So while I'm opened up here, I'll talk about something I've been kind of wanting to talk about for a couple of weeks now. The previous two weeks (as I write this) on AI featured the contestants performing all Beatles music. The first week worked really well, as most of the contestants did well with the theme (actually just Lennon / McCartney songs that week); the second week, which was apparently added due to some kind of popular demand, was a bit of a stretch for some of them. Some of the contestants are apparently pretty clueless about the Beatles, and it showed.

However, 22 year old Chikezie blew my mind two weeks running. He and the band took some big liberties with two Beatles tracks, and both of them were, for me, perfect examples of why I watch the show. Prior to that first Beatles week, Chikezie had shown himself to be a good soul singer, but he very often sang songs I just didn't care about (with an exception... I'll get there.)

The first Beatles song he did was "She's a Woman." It started with bluegrass instrumentation, then made a very nice jump into an uptempo rock performance. (If anything works, you can see the video here, on Fox's American Idol site.)

The following week he started with a chill-inducing ballad take on "I've Just Seen a Face," which then shifted styles with a harmonica break into an uptempo dobro-laden country and western deal. Again, his vocals were brilliant and I was floored that I'd seen something like this two weeks in a row on the show. (That video might be here.) That song is one of my mother's favorite Beatles songs, and I've known that and also loved the song since before I can remember. (That almost makes sense, right?) The day after the show she told me she also really enjoyed Chikezie's take on it.

For the record, it was that first Chikezie Beatles performance that led me to find Fox's site and watch some videos. I've watched both of those a number of times now, and they just keep getting better. If you're still here, I encourage you to check out his take on a song that I think is called "I Believe to my Soul," but probably isn't because guessing at song titles never works. That link might be here.

If those links don't work: The "I Believe" song is under Season 7 performances, Top 20 Boys; "She's a Woman" is under Top 12, and "I've Just Seen a Face" is under Top 11. (yeah, you'd really have to trust me to dig around their nutso site's navigation to dig these things up.)

What I would actually enjoy (I think) discussing is what it is people don't like about the show. I'll certainly grant that my tastes aren't typical, but I can't fathom anybody writing off the best performers and performances on this show as somehow second-rate. Wrapped in cheese or not, these people can sing, and their best performances are anything but derivative or uninteresting. (If I thought anybody'd be interested I'd continue with links to some of the stand-out performances by other contestants.)

Another thing I'm curious about is why I am already defending myself right there.

At any rate, tonight Chikezie bored the shit out of me doing some soulful ballad I'd never heard before. No matter what, he's got a great voice, but the song wasn't my thing. Tonight's stand-out for me, by far, was David Cook doing his version of Chris Cornell's take on "Billy Jean." I had no idea Chris Cornell had a take on that song at all, but I imagine I need to hear it if this thing tonight was any indication. (Sorry, I don't think Idol posts the videos on the night of the performances, so no link to that one.)

Tangentially: I noticed that the dobro player in the American Idol band is (at least sometimes) none-other than the apparently still completely unfamous dobro-player from the the Clark Brothers. Since none of you watch American Idol, you definitely didn't watch Next Great American Band, which is a shame. I loved it, too, and the Clark Brothers were very often fantastic on it. They ended up winning, though apparently it didn't even get enough viewers for this fact to merit being mentioned on Idol.