Wash ,'Jaynestown'
There's a lady plays her fav'rite records/On the jukebox ev'ry day/All day long she plays the same old songs/And she believes the things that they say/She sings along with all the saddest songs/And she believes the stories are real/She lets the music dictate the way that she feels.
The ultimate 1980s scifi and fantasy movie mixtape
Science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s were filled with a ton of memorable, iconic, and patently ridiculous music. Here are 30+ of the decade's finest (and most painful) movie tunes for your listening pleasure.
The page has a video for each of the songs.
eta:
The Rock and Rule soundtrack (1983)
Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Earth, Wind, and Fire in a bizarre Nelvana film about mouse people or something.
Um... what?
25th Anniversary Edition available on Blu-Ray DVD! [link]
From the NYT Year in Ideas: The Guitar That Stays in Tune
In October, an engineer and a musician named Cosmos Lyles began selling EverTune, a guitar bridge that keeps the instrument from going out of tune no matter how hard its strings are strummed or bent.
EverTune is a purely mechanical spring-and-lever system: when a string stretches or slips, the springs apply the opposing force necessary to compensate for the shift, thus maintaining the correct tension and tuning.
If that works, that's amazing. But he needs to make one for ukes. Ukes go out of tune if you breathe wrong.
I think I'm either missing something or not as smart as I think I am [link]
This is still my favorite Andrewe Kuo chart.
Captain Beefheart, a.k.a. Don Van Vliet, dies at 69 [link]
Shit.
Oh, Captain, my captain, you were the outer edge of my record collection for a long time. There stood Trout Mask Replica and I would listen to it periodically, and even enjoy certain songs. But I knew I wouldn't go beyond that marker. I needed a little less chaos in my music.
But then when I was writing the Tom Waits book I had to go back and study you further and there were so many other parts to your music. Of course, all your early stuff is amazing garage rock with your inimitable bellow, truly one of the great rock voices. But Spotlight Kid and Lick My Decals had a lot more going on. Some grooves I could hang onto. More of your fantastic lyrics.
I think I'll go listen to "Grow Fins" now.
I'm especially fond of his last couple of albums. And so few artists can bring themselves to go out on a high note without the temptation to revisit their legacy.