Archive for January, 2010

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Bon Jovi will do not one, not two, but THREE songs at the Grammys

Friday, January 29th, 2010

So I was totally wrong about how many songs Bon Jovi would be doing at the Grammys, according to Entertainment Weekly.

I had been puzzled about the omission of the song that they were actually nominated for–but it turns out that ‘We Weren’t Born to Follow’ will be the first one up, followed by (probably) Who Says (why else bring in Jennifer Nettles?), and then the song that they’re holding the voting for. This makes more sense, but I’m still surprised that they’re bringing them on for such a large set when they’re only nominated for a minor award.

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Random Song: Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Livin’

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Artist: Jon Bon Jovi
Album: Blaze of Glory

I realized after I had already started this post that I’ve managed to pull two of Jon’s solo songs in a row. It didn’t even occur to me at first because Jon’s two solo albums are so radically different. In a lot of ways, I’m like one of the old fans–I never really could embrace Destination Anywhere, but I sure never had a problem with Blaze of Glory.

Dyin’ Ain’t Much of a Livin’ first made its way onto a lot of my playlists because I could sing along with it. I can sing okay, (at least if I know the song) but I have a fairly limited range. I get bit by my range a lot when I do vocals on Rock Band. I’ll be doing okay, but every once in awhile I’ll hit a song that hangs around right outside of my range.

I like the lyrics on this song as well. With any song off of Blaze of Glory, you need to accept it for what it is–it was a themed work. But in the case of this song, I think the theme of the album actually helped with the songwriting in a lot of ways. Jon’s songwriting is criticized (and often rightly so) for being cliched. In this song though, while it sometimes comes pretty close, it never really descends into a full-blown litany of cliches that it might have been. In a lot of ways, this particular song is one of the closest to poetry that Jon has ever produced.

Maybe with the limited vocal range required for this song, it might make it onto the set list for the next tour. I forgot about it when I did the post on the five rarities I’d like to see included in the set list for the Circle Tour, but it’d fit in with Jon’s limitations and it’s a great song.

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Digital Cover Art?

Monday, January 25th, 2010

The inventors of the MP3 file format have announced that they have created a new file format called MusicDNA. There’s a decent article on it at Wired.

While this does promise to resolve at least part of my issue with the current digital music marketplace (lack of cover art and liner notes) it raises other issues.

I really have to wonder about the ‘self-updating’ feature of the files. Leaving alone the DRM type issues raised by the commenters at Wired, I have to wonder what would happen when you fire up the player and 10,000 songs start trying to download updates. Even on a high-speed connection that could be a major pain.

If I wanted auxiliary content like blog posts or tour announcements, I’d rather rely on Google to find it. At least it does say that you can shut off the extras. Because personally, I would shut off everything but the lyrics and the cover art. The rest of the stuff is just clutter that will eat disk space like candy. Disk space on the desktop may not be at a premium, but it is on portable players like iPods. Also, I certainly wouldn’t pay extra for the privilege of having to shut off a pile of promotional junk attached to the files.

I think I’m still sticking with buying physical CDs. It’s just less of a hassle.

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The Triumph clip is back…

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

With Conan O’Brien’s imminent departure from the Tonight Show, a lot of folks are looking back on some of his best work during his time with NBC. That includes a lot of clips of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

MSNBC selected the clip from when Bon Jovi invited Triumph to one of their shows as one of the top Triumph moments. If you’re a fan, you’ve seen the clip before; it’s not like they have any new footage there.

This clip is one of the rare few where Triumph’s targets are finding the whole thing just as funny, if not more funny, than everyone else, and it’s still a complete hoot.

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Reader’s Digest Jon Bon Jovi interview

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

I ran across a Reader’s Digest interview with Jon today. Decent article, all told, though there’s not much here that won’t be very familiar to any real fan. And the stock photo that they pulled for the article (a Bounce promo) is hilariously outdated.

What I did find interesting is the question about the sound on The Circle. I don’t get Jon’s answer; the production on this album is anything but simpler. As a matter of fact, it’s overcomplicated and overproduced, as far as I’m concerned, but I’ve complained about that before, when I reviewed the album.

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Random Song: Queen of New Orleans

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Artist: Jon Bon Jovi
Album: Destination Anywhere

The first time that I actually listened to my copy of Destination Anywhere, I found it to be a brutal disappointment. In many ways, it was a very radical departure from the Bon Jovi music that I had been listening to up to that point. I already owned Blaze of Glory, but Blaze wasn’t a big change from New Jersey. In many ways, it was an extension of the direction that the band had been going with that album.

I did however enjoy ‘Queen of New Orleans’ and ‘August 7′. I suspect that it was because these were some of the hardest songs on the album. I got this album when I was really starting to turn away from pure pop music, and that was what put me off of most of the other songs on Destination Anywhere. Also, this was one of the few songs that didn’t sound like the percussion was nothing but a cheap drum machine.

Also, I liked the lyrics to ‘Queen of New Orleans’. Unlike the rest of the album, there was nothing depressing or downbeat about it. It was just a plain fun romp. Also, the lyrics to this song have a great flow–they’re easy to sing along to and the rhythm makes them easy to remember.

To this day, this is still the most-played track from Destination Anywhere if I check the play count in Windows Media Player.

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Back up and running

Friday, January 15th, 2010

I got my Xbox back from Microsoft yesterday–fully repaired and ready to go. Now that I have my game system up and running again, I’ll post more about Brutal Legend.

I have to say that I’m fairly impressed with Microsoft’s service during the whole repair process. Requesting a repair was easy enough and they got the system turned around pretty quickly. I wasn’t expecting to get it back for another week or so yet.
(more…)

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Pick Bon Jovi’s Grammy performance

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

CBS has a poll set up for fans to vote on what song they would like to see Bon Jovi perform. The choices are quite standard, though it does seem odd that they don’t include any songs from The Circle. I would have expected that ‘We Weren’t Born to Follow’ would at least be one of the choices, since that’s the song that they’re nominated for.

I did see some speculation that the band might perform two songs. Personally, I don’t think that’s likely. If they were up for one of the big awards, I’d say that it was a possibility. But they’re nominated for “Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals”, which usually doesn’t seem to be one of the ones that gets discussed at work the morning after the Grammys.

Seeing as how I’m not much into pop music these days at all, I’ve never even heard the other nominated songs in this category. So, I have no way of making any kind of educated guess as to whether Jon and the boys stand even a remote chance of winning this award. (I suppose this illustrates how far Bon Jovi has strayed from their hard rock roots.) Lately the music industry has shown more willingness to hand out awards to Bon Jovi, so maybe there’s a chance. I suppose I need to wait and watch the awards to find out.

The bad part about this is that if Jon wins his first “real” Grammy for “We Weren’t Born to Follow”, we’re just going to get more songs just like it and the rest of The Circle.

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Looking for an album

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Several years ago, I spotted an CD that interested me at FYE. Unfortunately, at the time I was in college and had just bought books for the semester, so my credit card was maxed out, and I didn’t have enough cash on me at the time to buy it. Since then, I have never seen it again, and at this point in time I no longer remember the title of the album or the name of the band. I’m hoping someone can help me identify it by what little information I can remember about it.

  • It was in the Hard Rock/Heavy Metal section.
  • I believe it was a self-titled album.
  • The cover showed the Strand 5 movie theater in Ocean City, NJ and the large clock nearby. The photo had a very definite purple tint to it.

If this sounds familiar to you at all, please leave a comment! I’ve been looking for this album for at least 5 years now.

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Random Song: Shooting Star

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Artist: Bad Company
Album: Straight Shooter

Sometimes when I set out to write a Random Song review, Windows Media player just doesn’t cooperate in helping me pick one. Today the shuffle function got hung up in the Phantom Menace soundtrack and I had to skip over most of it to get to anything remotely on topic. I swear that thing goes looking for the most embarrassing corners of my music collection when I want to write one of these things.

But in the end, I landed on Bad Company’s ‘Shooting Star’. This is a classic, like so much of Bad Company’s work. I can remember hearing this song many times as a child, and always feeling some kind of connection to it. That being said, for some reason I never got around to getting any of their albums for a long time. Not sure why, but it was always a case of there being something more interesting in the used record bins at my favorite store, or I would forget to look for them.

Anyway, when I went to pick up my copy of The Circle, I found a copy of 10 from 6 in the used bin. I would have preferred to find a couple of their actual albums instead of a greatest hits collection, but it’ll do. Eventually when I do get myself copies of a few of their albums, I’ll just move this CD out to my car. That put the icing on the cake for me that day. Bad Company, plus new Bon Jovi? Pretty perfect day. (Well, aside from the fact that I had a cold at the time. But it did make me forget my cold for awhile.)

Anyway, ‘Shooting Star’ is a pretty classic song. The lyrics are cliched now, but for some reason they never really get old. After all, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t harbor a secret dream of being a rock star, somewhere down deep inside. And ‘Shooting Star’ speaks directly to that dream, at least it does for me. Even without the lyrics, the music is just a good, basic groove that demands nothing less of you than rocking out.

I also love to sing along with this song. I was thrilled when I got Rock Band 2 as a gift and I saw that it had ‘Shooting Star’ on it. I eventually got so good at singing it that I managed to get the “Hello Cleveland” achievement while singing it–you’ve got to activate vocal overdrive four times in one song to get that one.

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