May Tomorrow be Sunny and Bright

Some of my friends and I share music to listen to while we work. Sometimes we rate/review what gets shared with us and share those reviews with the group.

Chris was going to share his top 10 albums of 2018 one at a time, but (for reasons unexplained), he shared them all at once. Number 3 was Christine and the Queens’ Chris, so I decided to tackle number 2 this week and his number 1 next week. And I’ll probably do the other albums in subsequent weeks when nobody else shares anything. If you want to know all of his top 10 albums of last year, you can check out his blog here. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on

The Voidz – Virtue (2018)

This is the second offering from a side project (or perhaps just the next project) for Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas.

Its Better than I Ever Knew

Some of my co-workers and I started sharing some of our favorite music. We’ve been doing it for a while, but now we’re actually reviewing them and sharing those reviews with one another.

This week it wasn’t an album. It was a mix of 10 songs from our senior year of high school. For some of us these would have been literal mixtapes. My list has songs which were big the summer before my senior year through graduation. And they are songs I liked at the time. For other people they might be older songs which they liked while they were in high school (if I would have done that, The Beatles would have made the list)(spoiler: The Beatles weren’t on my list). For others, they might be songs which were popular, but they didn’t like them until later. Whatever.

I’m pretty sure this post has more tags than any other I’ve ever written.

Tim’s mix (1996-1997)

“While I did graduate in 1996, my graduating class was 1997, so I am pulling from music all the way to ’97. This includes songs popular then, and songs recorded around then, or songs I just liked and listened to a lot. I thought it would be fun to arrange them in album style, by where I think the best listening order is. So, while the same artist might be listed multiple times, I think it is more enjoyable to listen to in the order below:”

Jump off Van Halen’s 1984

RacecaR RacecaR & Sparks Fire

Here’s the problem with some local shows: you get some bands together and they all advertise the show. The show starts at 7:00 and that’s when all the people show up. Then they leave after the band they came to see plays. So the last band – arguably the biggest of those playing the show – plays for their wives and parents. This is especially bad if the headliner has traveled far at all.

I don’t know if it’s the same thing where you’re at, but to me that says our local scene isn’t very healthy. It means people are going to support their friends (a good thing, always), but don’t care enough for the rest of the music to stick around. I know you only paid $5, but when I was in college and didn’t have a lot of money, I’d want to be sure I got my money’s worth and see the whole show.

But this isn’t a blog post about the sad situation of my local music scene. Last night I played a show and the headlining band decided to do it a little different. Instead of playing last (like you’d expect), they played second to last.

I can’t blame them.

The opening act was a band called Racecar Racecar. I’m sorry, it’s RacecaR RacecaR. It’s a palindrome. I think I’ve heard of them before, but I’m sure I’ve never actually heard them.