Heart on a Stick

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Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:

Shiina Ringo - Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana

seen/heard  °  listen °  buy

Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo - Echos Hypnotiques

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

Whatever Brains - Trim-Jeans and/or Gross Urge Plus Ten CD-R

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

Gene Watson - A Taste of the Truth

seen/heard   °  stream album °  buy

Franco & le TPOK Jazz - Francophonic Volume 2

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

Amerie - In Love & War

seen/heard   °  stream album °  buy

Nirvana - Live at Reading

seen/heard   °  stream album °  buy

Shakira - She Wolf

seen/heard   °  listen   ° preorder

Magneta Lane - Gambling with God

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

Various Artists - Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

The xx - xx

seen/heard   °  listen °  preorder

Future of the Left - Travels With Myself And Another

seen/heard   °  listen°  buy

Rokia Traoré - Tchamantché

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

Emmy the Great - First Love

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

seen/heard   °  listen °  buy

Shiina Ringo - Superficial Gossip

seen/heard  °  listen °  buy

Shiina Ringo - Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana

seen/heard  °  listen °  buy








CONTACT

e-mail:  heartonastick (at) gmail (dot) com

MP3s that appear on this page are available for a limited amount of time; they are posted for illustrative or promotional purposes.  Everyone is encouraged to support the artists and buy their work.  If you are an artist or artist's representative and object to having the music posted, please contact me at the above e-mail address.

PR Reps/Labels/Bands:  At this time, I am not accepting any free product.  If I like an album, I'll buy it.  (Who would I be to recommend a CD I haven't bought myself?)  Links to album streams, MP3s, or myspace pages can be sent to the e-mail address above - though frankly I pay little attention to press releases and their ilk. Sorry.

 

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Come on in There, Hambone

posted 04/10/2008

Caring Changes the World

(pic via)

 

Have you been outside?  It's too nice to think, almost too nice to worry.

Cecil Gant was a Nashville-born boogie woogie piano player who banked on ballads.  The "G.I. Sing-Sation" - he was "discovered" playing war bond rallies - had a #1 R&B hit with "I Wonder," cut batches of stuff for bunches of labels between 1944 and his death (which was pneumonia- or STD- or drink-related) in 1951.  Most of the material was original, much of it made up on the spot.

In his Unsung Heroes of Rock ‘n' Roll, Nick Tosches quotes the founder of Bullet Records, Jim Bulliet:  "[Gant] drank too much.  He would say, ‘I want to do a session' when he ran out of money.  We would get a bass-player and a guitarist and get him a piano, and I'd go sit in the control room and he'd tinkle around on it, and then he'd say, ‘I'm read,' and tap that bottle; and if we didn't get it the first time, we didn't get it, ‘cause he couldn't remember what he did.  He'd dream up and write a song while he sat there, and he'd give me the title of it.  And the uniqueness of the thing is that all of them sold."

"We're Gonna Rock" (1950) and "Rock Little Baby" (1951) were heavy and hyper, employed the musical and lyrical lexicon of what would get branded and bastardized and re-branded, and re-so-on-and-so-forthed.  But it's too nice out for all jumping around.

Cecil Gant - Hit That Jive Jack (mp3) (buy)

Cecil Gant - I'm a Good Man, But a Poor Man (mp3) (buy)

Cecil Gant - Loose as a Goose (mp3) (buy)

"Hit That Jive Jack" and "Loose as a Goose" bounce right by, the former flying on fills and smiling scat, the latter going from skip to hop and back at whim.  The middle track's my favorite blues ballad of his; Gant's voice is too under-adorned and matter-of-fact to dip into despair.

Take them outside with you.

*

I won't pretend to have deep ties to Letters to Cleo; it's a band I first heard over the closing credits of Melrose Place, for fuck's sake.  It was amusing enough to hear frontwoman Kay Hanley as the voice of Josie in the well-soundtracked but overbearing Josie and the Pussycats movie some years back, and I'd read that she did time making scratch working for videogames and cartoons and such.  She's got a kid and mouths to feed and stuff.

But after hearing two very good songs from Hanley last year - you can download "I Guess I Get It" and watch the video for "Work is for Suckers" at her myspace - it's disheartening to stumble across this interview and find out she's currently a back-up singer for Miley Cyrus.  And that she considers one of the songs she wrote for un film de Care Bears: Oopsy Does It to be "one of the best songs I've written."

Hey!  Here she is lip-synching "Caring Changes the World" at last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade:

I realize I'm not exactly the target demo, here, but that makes me want to kidnap orphans and smother them to death.  Lucky for Hanley and the orphans, it's too nice outside for any of that.

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1. G Mazz left...
04/11/2008 6:41 am

...

now pleeease finish the vampire weekend posts! :)


2. J____ left...

Had to wipe the first part of that for obvious reasons, but thank you so much for that. You are awesome, and it looks like I owe you two (2) vampire weekend entries.