Welcome Emily!
jamie on July 25th, 2005
My niece: Emily Elizabeth. Born July 25th, 2005.
SquirrelFood.net Music BlogMusic Blog for Nuts!
Archive for July 25th, 2005
UncategorizedJason Mraz - Mr. A-Z
jamie on July 25th, 2005
I just finished listening to Mr. A-Z for the second time, and while it’s not the follow-up to Waiting For My Rocket To Come, it’s no less an album. Perhaps not as radio-ready or mass-populous friendly as WFMRTC, Mr. A-Z is a brilliant showcase of Mraz’s songwriting sensibility, and incredible grasp of lyricism. But here’s where talent and intelligence get in the way of “cool”- too many times on Mr. A-Z Mraz lets his intelligence interfere with the listening experience. Trying to blend the rhymes and the wordplay sometimes leaves him fumbling the words altogether. If you take the time to carefully reconstruct the points he’s tryin to get at, it’s (sometimes) funny, but doesn’t make listening to him try and do it any better.
Often on this album, when things start to falter, it’s the amazing talent of producer Steve Lillywhite that swoops in to rescue it, and revive the listening experience. What I wouldn’t give just to get inside that guy’s head for a while- he’s gotta have ideas just flowing through his skull like a great flood that seems to have no end. The production of this album is just incredible. Complex layering of sounds is absolutely transparent, every part filling in just enough of the spectrum to give support to the songwriting and Mraz’s voice. In this digital era of mastering an album for maixmum volume, Lillywhite’s albums always seem to accomplish more with a full sound than any amount of volume can represent.
The album starts out a little awkward in the beginning of Life Is Wonderful, which builds into a soaring, classic Mraz ending only a little bit too late for it to be considered radio-ready. Wordplay takes up position in the #2 spot (ever wonder if there’s science in track-ordering on albums?), followed by Geek In Pink, where Mraz splits his time between defaiming himself as a geek, and playing at being the mac-daddy he knows he is. Rachel Yamagata steps in for a duet in Did You Get My Message?, playing a bit of message tag with lyrical retorts back-and-forth. The album is at it’s best on Please Don’t Tell Her, a steady rock-laden toungue-bending track that admits that maybe he’s missed a step somewhere, with typical Mraz bravado.
I hear Worldplay is already on the radio, and I’d guess that Geek In Pink will soon be heard on AAA, but I don’t really hear much else in the way of singles from this album- but who knows, with enough pay-outs, anything is possible….oh, did I actually say that?
Waiting for my music to come…
jamie on July 25th, 2005
Finally! A Tuesday with something worth waiting for- Jason Mraz’s second full-length is due out today, and while I’m waiting for it to come on-line, I thought I’d comment on yesterday’s news about Sony/BMG…
New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer announced yesterday a settlement with Sony BMG Music over payola violations. The news comes after an investigation uncovered numerous incidents where Sony BMG would arrange for prizes, “gifts”, and other forms of illicit payments to be revcieved by radio station programmers for adding Sony BMG artists to station playlists.
This payola is just a fancy way of saying that Sony paid to get their music played on-air. Pay-for-play. Simple concept- if you have the cash to throw behind an artist and get them played on-air, more people will hear it. And if the song isn’t complete crap (or even if it is), people will buy it. That’s how you build a platinum-selling artist. But what if you don’t have the cash to throw at radio stations? Well, then your artists don’t get as much exosure, and your label makes less profit, and therefore has less money to support new acts. This means less money to support quality acts.
To me, it’s just another case of money-grubbing mega-corporations who will do anything to make a buck. Who cares if it’s illegal? They’ve got the cash to break the laws, and the cash to pay up settlements when they get caught. And you know what else? They made ten times the settlement amounts in the mean time. And we got saddled with crappy-ass albums by Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Lopez (to be fair, we also got Franz Ferdinand).
So the big music conglomerates claim that illegal file-trading and downloading is costing them millions? Good, they deserve it. Of course, illegal file trading also hurts the small labels- the labels that are started and run by music lovers for music lovers. These small labels that sign quality artists, but get swept aside by conglomerates like Sony with all their cash-power. Maybe the solution to the problem is to download, trade, and record as much mega-conglomerate label music as you can, and save your hard-earned money to support artists that deserve it.
