Things of Which I May Not Speak

On the 28th of January, 2002 I attended a concert by The Strokes. I bought the tickets on a whim—the only songs of theirs I had heard were “Last Nite” and “Take it or Leave it” on the radio (94.7 The Zone in Chicago, now an Oldies station!). They were good, but so what? Their first album Is This It? came out late 2001, notable for the song “New York City Cops” being removed at the last moment because of the attacks of 9/11 (you could find it on the other side of the Atlantic). They were credited, at the time, with the resurgence of rock (that never quite came).

The concert was at a place called the “Web Theatre” in Phoenix, AZ, named after a failed dot-com venture where someone envisioned synergy between live performing centers and their web site. Didn’t quite work out.

I went alone—having recently moved to a state where the only people I knew were my parents—and sat in the balcony. Of course the General Admission area below was where the real fans were.

Julian Casablancas, The Strokes’ singer, let me know. “Are you hear to watch a f***in’ opera?” he screamed at the people in the balcony, halfway through the concert.

Not at all. Continue reading ‘Album of the Decade: Is This It?’ »

Or loops na prayogo.

Earlier this year, I created two pieces of music using Garageband and my voice.

My Experiments with Loops

The first one was simply an experiment. I took many built-in loops in Garageband, and layered them in to something I found compelling. Every sound you hear is a loop that came with Garageband.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Blue Skies

Next, I went one step further. I mixed my own voice (and some audio clips from movies that expressed the sentiments that I thought were shared by the music) with more loops and created something I call Blue Skies.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Enjoy.

And now to show my face on the blog. I picked up the Harmonica earlier this year. I can do the simple stuff, can’t bend a note yet and only do a pale imitation of a vibrato.

But here’s me doing the theme from Sholay (1975):

Sholay theme from Devanshu Mehta on Vimeo.

And then “Aaj Kal Tere Mere Pyaar ke Charche” from Brahmachari (1968), with a lot of mistakes and a faulty harmonica (not to mention a faulty harmonica player):

Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche – Harmonica from Devanshu Mehta on Vimeo.

Any other suggestions for Hindi songs that sound good on the Harmonica?

is The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists.

No one song is my favorite of the year, but if there ever was an argument for the power of albums over singles in the age of MP3s, this album is it. It’s like a musical, it tells a story with multiple characters. When they played live shows this year, the first hour was an uninterrupted The Hazards of Love set with each performer playing a character. It was like watching a musical, or an opera.

Many of the songs work on their own as well—most of all The Rake’s Song, but also The Wanting Comes in Waves and Won’t Want for Love. And the myriad versions of The Hazards of Love.

This is The Hazards of Love live in Boston:

I discovered the album through NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast during SXSW earlier this year. These days, I discover a lot of new music from that podcast.

Rahman already has an Oscar. And now he’s nominated for two Grammys.

That’s a ‘G’ and an ‘O’, halfway to an EGOT. Bombay Dreams didn’t get him a Tony, and I don’t see an Emmy on the horizon, but a man can dream.

I’ve started to collect data in order to put together lists of my favorite music, movies and books of the decade. And this is the first decade where I have data.

I’ve been a Netflix member for close to 8 years and religiously rate everything I watch. Now thanks to a script I wrote (and has been improved since by others), I can pull the data out of Netflix and analyze. For example, filter the data on all movies where year>1999 and stars=5. There’s my best of the decade, or at least a place for me to start.

I’ve been managing my music in iTunes since 2005, and have been pretty religious about accurate tags and rating tracks. At this point, I can slice up the data with Smart Playlists and scripts in any fashion I like. I have more than 2000 songs from this decade of which about 300 are rated 5-stars. Yeah, I’m liberal with ratings. Also, I like my own collection. So those 300 are where I would start for my list of favorites. Everything from The Marshall Mathers LP to The Hazards of Love. Or from Dhadkan to Delhi-6, for you Bollywood types. In addition to my iTunes playcounts, I have my Last.fm play counts. The Last.fm data is not a complete representation, but it is public.

Here’s a song which will definitely figure in my top 10:

Books are tougher. I haven’t rated or cataloged everything I have read, not even close. And I’ve read many from the library, a few borrowed, a fewer still online. And none of those places have my reading history. The library would keep history if I asked it to, but I asked it not to. And most of the books I read were probably written before 2000, so they wouldn’t be the best of this decade. So I may not have a list of my favorites, but a general non-definitive whatever-I-think-of.

UPDATE: Of course, I haven’t actually put my list together yet. Coming soon, to a blog near you…

So it’s that time of the decade, when we put together best-of lists. NPR Music contributors have put together their list of 50 most important recordings of the past decade. It’s a good-ish list—betraying their indie bias—but as Bob Boilen says:

We make these lists not to exclude certain recordings, but to turn people on to music that we feel stands out the most in an unimaginably crowded field. We also make these lists so you can tell us about the music you are passionate about. [...] None of the many people who helped put this list together agreed on all the selections. We all had our favorites and, of course, many never made it into the final 50. Regardless, there’s a ton of amazing music to spend time with, and probably some things you never heard of just waiting to be discovered.

Continue reading ‘Decade’s Most Important Music’ »

Last week I chronicled my search for a Hindi song that I had been tracking down for ages. This week, I found another one. This time, the search has been 11 years in the making. Continue reading ‘Tracking Down the Roots… Again!’ »

This is something I do all the time; and I believe a lot of people must find themselves with similar problems, so here goes.

The song in question is Aaj Unse Pehli Mulaaqat Hogi sung by Kishore Kumar, music RD Burman, lyrics Anand Bakshi, film Paraaya Dhan (1971).

For a while now, I knew that the tune of the line “phir hoga kya, kya pata kya khabar” was copied-from/adapted-from/”inspired-by” some western song. I had heard it in restaurants, ad jingles, english movie trailers- but none of these sources were enough to track down where the tune originally came from. In fact, I have a long list of tunes in my head for which I have been searching for the source for years. For years, I kept my ears open to hear this particular tune again somewhere I can ask someone what song was playing! No luck. Continue reading ‘Tracking Down the Roots of an Elusive Song’ »