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November 28, 2006
November Music
I stupidly lost eMusic downloads in November; I checked today and it's reset. But not before I downloaded the three disc Tom Waits set, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. Surely this alone should be enough to convince almost anyone that eMu is essential? While we're on the subject of Tom Waits, if you are a singer-songwriter who can't sing, please don't compare yourself to Tom Waits on your flyers. We all know is code for "I can't sing, and I'm really pretentious about my songwriting". I'd recommend not using quotes from reviewers who compared you to Tom Waits either. What they meant was "he really can't sing, but this is a freesheet/student newspaper/club magazine and I'm being polite".
One of the reasons I didn't grab all my eMusic downloads was that I was listening to the Tom Waits. But I also grabbed a pile of other, non-eMu stuff. Al Stewart's A Beach Full of Shells, which is EMI and which I'd previously avoided in a sulk because it has DRM. But iTunes just sees the music, ignores the DRM, and rips it properly. I also picked up (this was at the Al Stewart concert at Warwick University) an unreleased studio album called Dark Side. Two albums picked up to fill in collection gaps (I'm trying to do a bit of this each month) -- A Twinkle in Your Eyeby Burl Ives, bought so that I have a proper, legal copy of Lollipop Tree, and Seventeen Seconds: Remastered by the Cure. I also bought the amazing Mothballs Plus by Tiger Moth. Tiger Moth's MySpace page says they sound like 'lots of bands who heard our 80s albums'. Dead right, and this is a fabulous compilation. I realised the art looks familiar too; I was a great Rodney Matthews fan as a student and the particular cover of the first Tiger Moth album is famous, much more famous than the band.
You should now be able to see what I'm listening too by observing the last.fm picture in my sidebar. What they don't seem to do, and what I want, is something like the del.icio.us linkroll -- a bit of javascript that just fetches the text directly and which I can style to exactly match the blog. Something that linked through to the band's pages on last.fm would be even better.
Posted by Alison Scott at November 28, 2006 11:01 PM