The Cure - Hungry Ghost.

End of year best-of lists usually pass me by. Partly because it's often tough to weigh the merits of new music in such a short space of time, and partly because my music buying rarely has anything to do with when it was released, so I'm just as likely to have bought all 70s music or 80s music as I am to have bought anything released this year. 

As a result my favourite records of any particular year tend not to be defined by the music that was released that year, but by the things I've listened to the most. And one of my most listened to albums of 2009 is 4:13 Dream by The Cure. It's so great to hear a band this far into their career still sounding like they mean it. All credit to Robert Smith for maintaining a sense of vitality in his music. 

Here's Hungry Ghost, recorded live at the NME Poll Winners gig earlier in the year. We were there when this was recorded. It's awesome. 

The music we played in the delivery room

Here's an exhaustive list of the music leading up to, during, and the 5 or 6 hours after Baby Flapjack was born. All completely awesome. 

Alan Pasqua - Russian Peasant
David Torn - Lars And The Real Girl (soundtrack) 
Tracy Chapman - Crossroads
(back to Lars And The Real Girl - was playing as he was born) 
Steve Lawson and Lobelia - Live In Nebraska (I played it too him about half an hour after he was born)
Theo Travis/Robert Fripp - Thread
Rosie Thomas - These Friends Of Mine
Rob Ickes - Road Song

Then this morning, we listed to Pat Metheny's 'One Quiet Night'. 

There you go - all brilliant natal and post-natal music. Highly, highly recommended. 

Here's a Spotify playlist of as much of this stuff as is on there...

...our live in Nebraska EP isn't on there, but it is here - 

Oh, and what's also a MUST for the delivery room if you want music is an Altec Lansing Orbit speaker - incredible quality sound from a tiny tiny speaker, connects direct to iPod, or anything else with a headphone out (I use it with my Nokia N97 around the house) - best gadget I've bought in YEARS.

These Are Days.

Reminded of this by a friend on twitter. Started Crying. Yeah, babies can do that to you. 

These are the days
These are days you'll remember
Never before and never since, I promise
Will the whole world be warm as this
And as you feel it,
You'll know it's true
That you are blessed and lucky
It's true that you
Are touched by something
That will grow and bloom in you

These are days that you'll remember
When May is rushing over you
With desire to be part of the miracles
You see in every hour
You'll know it's true
That you are blessed and lucky
It's true that you are touched
By something that will grow and bloom in you

These are days
These are the days you might fill
With laughter until you break
These days you might feel
A shaft of light
Make its way across your face
And when you do
Then you'll know how it was meant to be
See the signs and know their meaning
It's true
Then you'll know how it was meant to be
Hear the signs and know they're speaking
To you, to you

Baby Flapjack - 2711/2009. Welcome to the World. It just got 9.9lbs cooler. 

New Weird Ways To Discover Music...

OK, so I'm writing this book - you know all about it, right? 

If not see here and here for more on what it is. 

Anyway, I'm up to almost 45,000 words, and it's been a fascinating project. 2 of the characters are on twitter, 3 of them are blogging, and a host of real flesh-and-blood twitterers are interacting with them in interesting ways that are making their way into the book. :)

The latest thing that the characters have been doing is building Spotify playlists. First, Drum Monkey, the drummer, put together some improvised music inspiration for Meg the bassist. 

She, having learned all about Spotify playlists now, has put together a list of things that inspire her, for Drum Monkey. 

For me, the interesting part of it was thinking about the kinds of things she's put on it. Some of them are obvious, but one of the tracks, I'd never even heard. It just seemed like the kind of thing she'd go for. 

The track is 'One' by Talvin Singh, and it's AWESOME! So my imaginary characters in my book are introducing me to new music. this is getting weird. 

Meg's whole Spotify playlist is here (spotify link) and her blog post about it is here. 

And these are the two band-blogs to follow. 

the two twitter accounts are: 

If you want to join in the fun, and you're on twitter send me a message, and I'l direct message you a link and a password for the PDF of the book as it goes along. Feel free to join in, comment, chat to them on twitter. It's fun. I need to think of ways of keeping this going after the book's finished... 

Gallhammer moving poster.

I LOVE this: Steve Brown is a good friend, former boat-dwelling house-mate and probably the awesomest music photographer on the planet.

Last year about this time he did a photo shoot for a Japanese black metal band called Gallhammer, which was on the cover of Terrorizer magazine

And now, his amazing illustrator wife Lorna has animated it! Turned it all 'Harry Potter' as she says :)

Ahh, creativity, it's inspiring.

Watch it in full screen to get the detail


Silje Nergaard with Pat Metheny - Tell Me Where You're Going

Ahhhh. 

I've been finally reunited with my not unsubstantial vinyl collection. Well, most of it - some of it is with a friend who was supposed to be selling it for me about 2 years ago, and hasn't as yet, so I'll have to get that back too. But the rest of it is in our hallway. It's only here til I can get rid of it - sell it, donate it to charity shops, swap it for cakes or cruelty-free nail varnish. Whatever. 

But it does mean that I'm being reminded of both the good and the bad music I bought back in my vinyl-addiction days. 

And one of the best records I ever bought was the 12" single of this - Tell Me Where You're Going. I bought it cos it was about 50p and had Pat Metheny's name on the cover. But once I got it I played it, and played it, and played it. It's a beautiful song, and makes me yearn for Pat to do more work with pop singers. 

It's also worth noting that it's five and a half minutes long - people don't generally write or play five and a half minute pop songs these days. Perhaps because they don't write songs that deserve that amount of exploration. Or celebration. 

Whatever, this is outstanding. Enjoy. 

Things I Learned Today

I've just found out, by looking at a friend's blog, that the iTunes store has short weblinks. Who else knew? And if you did, why didn't you tell me? :) 

Anyway, it means that, should you want to go and listen to or buy my music on iTunes, you can just click on 

http://www.itunes.com/stevelawson to take you there. 

or indeed, to find Lo's tunes, 

So there you go. Things I didn't know until today. 

Hurrah! 

Miriam Jones' Solitary Songs

Been meaning to post about these for ages. Miriam Jones, as I've mentioned before, is one of my favourite singer/songwriters, and someone I'm really proud to play with. I've posted the EP of hers that I played on before... 

Anyway, for most of the last year, she's been doing a 'song a month, written, recorded and released on her own' kinda project, called the Solitary Songs. A few of them I've played live with her (the slide part I sometimes play on Helicopter is particularly fun ;) ) 

But here they are, just her and a guitar. They're awesome. Y'all should download them. Srsly. 

http://miriamjones.bandcamp.com/album/the-solitary-songs">Come Clean (April) by Miriam Jones http://miriamjones.bandcamp.com/album/the-solitary-songs">Come Clean (April) by Miriam Jones

Steve and Lobelia Live In Nebraska EP now on Bandcamp!

Yay! Finally, thanks to the great help of Kevin Quickle, I've managed to get the Live In Nebraska EP up to bandcamp for proper magic high res download. 

This is very exciting - every time we've pressed CDs of this, they've sold out in just 2 or 3 gigs - so much so that we didn't even have a copy to rip to put up on Bandcamp (Bandcamp requires CD-quality WAVs, not the high-res MP3s I had that were for sale in my old online shop...) 

So here it is - it's one of the musical things I'm most proud of that I've done, and captures just how well we were playing on that US tour really well. It's a great recording, thanks to us actually playing the show in a recording studio - Power Base Studios in Wisner, Nebraska. Great job done by Dan Kane on sound. 

Here it is - listen, share it, embed any of the tracks that you particularly like in your own blog posts if you wish, and if you want to download it, pay whatever you think it's worth. 

Undying Inc. - Indian Extreme Metal Band.

OK, Andrew Dubber tweeted about these guys a few days ago - I opened the website, and left the tab open for later perusal. I wouldn't have left it this long if I'd known. Wow. Seriously great band - supremely heavy, scary, screamy, shouty extreme metal. Like Meshuggah, Cavalera Conspiracy and Pantera thrown into one band. Outstanding.

Here's their myspace player - check out the page at http://myspace.com/undyinginc4 -

[EDIT - OK, so Myspace don't let you embed the player - they replace it with a video of some octopuses. Ah well - click the link below to check them out ]

via myspace.com