Also, since I work in the internets business (sortof), I try not to spend too much time doing internetsy stuff when I’m not working. I fail miserably, of course. My name is Steven, and I am an internet addict. I mean, hell, I’m typing this at 11:05 p.m. on a Sunday night when I should be in bed sleeping or reading a good novel.

Though I started the thinking process long before I read it, this piece by Mr. Merlin Mann sums up a lot of my problems with life in the internets, too.

I’m going to unplug a significant portion of my life. The personal part, anyway. I’m on the internets hook for the forseeable future when it comes to my professional life, but that doesn’t mean I have to abuse it, right? Riiiight. We’ll see how it goes.

It feels like fall’s about to start here, and I plan to do these things this Fall and Winter:

• work in my yard
• get better at an acoustic instrument (hopefully the banjo again)
• eat better, cook more
• pay better (not necessarily more, cause God knows I spend a lot of time on ‘em) but better attention to my family
• go fishing
• read novels (not just books, but novels)
• get outside, get a little exercise
• unplug

As far as Soul music goes, I’m generally old school: mostly Stax (Booker T. and the MGs, etc.) with a heaping helping of Al Green (before he found the Lord), a splash of Mr. Brown, and a scattering of 70s funk. I thought REAL funk and soul had died a horrible, horrible death some time in the late 70s. But, so much good Soul music was recorded in the 60s and 70s, I figured I had enough to get me by.

Then I stumbled upon Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Holy. Crap. REAL SOUL MUSIC. Made in the 00s! And it was GOOD, too! I then learned that Daptone Records puts out all sorts of great greasy Soul, just like I like it, and the Dap-Kings are the Daptone house band. Think Booker T. and the MGs with Stax only move to Brooklyn instead of Memphis.

Musicianship-wise, I started on drums in school band (I actually started on alto sax, but that didn’t last but a few weeks), but the first non-schoolband instrument I played was bass. I later switched to guitar, though never got very good at it. Still, playing bass is where my heart is, and Duck Dunn my hero. Duck’s going to have to share the podium now, though, because the playing Dap-Kings’ bandleader and producer and bass player, Gabriel “Bosco Mann” Roth, is just exquisite.

If you’re new to Daptone, start with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings (any album will do, but I’m a big fan of 100 Days, 100 Nights, which is their latest). Then hit the Mighty Imperials, and THEN pick up the two collections of singles, which are greasy, greasy, GREASY!

1. Total volume of music files on my computer: 4812 songs, 14.5 days, 23.97 GB, as reported by iTunes. I’ve probably got another gig or so on my machine at work that doesn’t overlap with this collection.

2. Last CD I bought: Hell if I know. Seriously. I’ve pretty much stopped buying CDs. I get my music from the internets these days, mostly from the iTMS. However, I think the last CD I bought was Joe Jackson’s Live 1980/1986, which probably puts me on some hipster list. It was either that or ‘Tis the Season for Los Straitjackets! by Los Straitjackets, “13 Rockin’ Christmas Instrumentals!” for my last Tiki Christmas Extravaganza, which proably removes me from that list.

3. Song Playing Right Now:“Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Barenaked Ladies, which is a cover of a Bruce Cockburn song (and a really good one, too — I mean the cover and the song itself. This song has one of my all-time favorite bits of song lyric: “Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight / Gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”

4. Five Songs (or Albums) I listen to a lot or that move me:

• Ghost in the Machine (A&M 1981) by The Police: my all-time favorite album. Despite it being the band’s “experimental” album and being full of odd instrumentation, it sounds as fresh today as it did in 1981. I used up at least two cassette copies of it before moving to CD. It got me through a lot of shit, even at the age of 12 (how old I was when it came out).
• Reckoning (I.R.S. Records 1984) by R.E.M.: a close second on the all-time list. I came to the R.E.M. party a little late (1986), but hearing the opening strains of “Harborcoat” literally changed my life on that rainy Spring day in 1986. I still come back to that album and marvel at the sounds of those songs: “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)”, “Pretty Persuasion,”"(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville,” et al. An amazing record (and it has a cover by the late Rev. Howard Finster). This album and the murkier followup Fables of the Reconstruction play central roles in my personal vision of the South.
• Bread and Circus (CBS 1989) by Toad the Wet Sprocket: I always thought the band did themselves a disservice with the goofy name. I think it had something to do with them being woefully underappreciated despite putting out five amazing albums (and a good collection of outtakes). And the thing about Toad is that each album is really different from the others, but still has a distinctive “Toadness” about it. Just the best, most intelligent guitar rock put out in the 1990s amidst all the grunge and boybands and shit that littered the American music scene during that decade. B&C was a tough choice and you could argue any of their albums as the “best”, but fuck it, I’m sticking with my answer. It’s the first and contains some transcendent moments like the odd time signature change during the guitar solo in “Know Me,” which is a weird thing to highlight out of all the possible choices amongst great examples like the line in “Rings” (from their last album, Coil), which using the metaphor of a tree keeping its whole history inside itself “Isn’t it strange / to see my life / you must cut me down /tolook inside.” I saw Toad up close and personal at Juanita’s in Little Rock on the tour for the following album, Pale, and they blew me away. One of the very best shows I’ll ever see.
• “Throw Your Arms Around Me” by Hunters & Collectors, from their 1986 album Human Frailty. That song just rips me up every time. One of the best, weirdest love songs ever. I submit into evidence, the chorus: “We may never meet again/ So shed your skin and let’s get started / You will throw you arms around me”. H&C were a wildly popular Australian band who barely made a dent here in the U.S. An odd fact: their singer, Mark Seymour, is the brother of Paul Seymour, the bassist (and cover artist) for kiwi (and 1/3 Aussie) band Crowded House who have a great live acoustic version of this song.
• “Oh, Lucky Man” by the Grapes of Wrath from their 1987 album Treehouse. Just a great example of some late-80s Jangle Pop: big chiming Rickenbackers, soaring harmonies, a driving rock beat. Another obscure gem.

• Vienna Teng
• Odessa Chen

Both are extraordinarily good acoustic-y singer-songwriter types. Great stuff.

“What’s so cool about GarageBand is that it exemplifies the market that Apple is going after. People who want to use their computers to make cool things. People who want to be producers, not just consumers. If it’s possible to distill into a single thought what it is that makes Apple Apple, and what has made the Macintosh so enduringly popular, that’s it.”

That’s what I’ve been trying for years to say about why I love Macs. I’m a producer on a pretty small scale, but that’s how I view myself.

I’ve already ordered my copy of GarageBand (along with the swank upgrades to the other iLife components). I can’t wait to get back to recording some of my music.

UPDATE: Well, as cool as GB seemed, it’s not really the right app for me on my machine. I was looking for a more robust app for recording a number of audio tracks, and GB ain’t it (at least, not on my 1GHz G4 iMac). It’s a great looping app, and it’s exactly right for the target market: creative folks who aren’t musicians (necessarily) but want to make some cool music for their iMovies or iPhoto slideshows or whatnot.

For a great (and really cheap) DAW app for OS X, try Tracktion, which is also available for Windows (and soon Linux, they say). It’s the bees knees.

“Even after an artist has gone through the audit and has found recoverable money, they are expected to negotiate a settlement with the record company. Furthermore, their auditors are required to meet with label executives BEFORE they can release findings to their clients.”

and the even more astounding:

“In a shocking statement made by Back Street Boy, Kevin Richardson, he testified that they have NEVER received a royalty check.”

And the record companies (and their bitches) say that sharing music hurts the artists. Yeah, right.