tunequest

In my last post, I detailed the ten albums that earned the highest ratings from me during 2007. But while I did find them each to be fantastic recordings, ratings don't necessarily reflect popularity. That is to say that the most highly rated albums might not have been the most often played. Indeed that's not the case. I took data from the past year and ran it through my Impact ...

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When I began the original tunequest in February of last year, I had ~6000 songs in my iTunes library that had a play count of zero. Part of that list consisted of old CDs that just hadn't been played since they were digitized. A good number of them were the result of over-zealous music collection and exploration. That was one of the reasons I decided to undertake the endeavor ...

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Webomatica posts about his best and worst James Bond songs. It's a nice list; I threw my picks into the comments, though I left out the iconic James Bond Theme. god bless John Barry for that. We disagree about Man With The Golden Gun, but to each his own. But, really, I'd like to call some attention to another Bond-related project. Shortly before composer David Arnold took over the ...

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tunequest in review: for the week ending may 27, 2006. stats: 226 songs played over 16 hours. a further 11 were removed and 1 was added, for a net progress of 236 songs, which is a nearly 50% decline from last week's performance. well, it figures that this week's would be lackluster compared to last; i'm nothing if not inconsistent. it's not surprising though. i knew there would be a drop ...

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As promised, I dug up the column I once wrote about the legendary Martin Denny's infamous (and highly collectable) Exotic Moog record (1969). It wasn't until after I wrote this that I learned that Denny didn't actually play any of the music on the record. In a 1997 interview with Cool and Strange Music Magazine, he revealed that Liberty, his record label, took control of the project and had ghost ...

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for the week ending may 20, 2006. stats: a superlative week here at tunequest. 394 songs played over 25 hours and 40 minutes. a further 5 songs were removed from the library for a net progress of 399, a new record. frankly, i'm surprised by the results. an afternoon braves game and a couple of extented meetings cut into my normal office listening time and i didn't ...

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John Barry, a renowned musical master delivers a most sweepingly sentimental score to the 1995 IMAX film Across the Sea of Time, a visually impressive (so I've heard) love letter to New York City, past and present. At a time when Barry's output had slowed to a trickle, this project was done by special request of his son. It's clear that he put lots of care and attention to ...

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On the flight home from Boston, I listened to the soundtrack to Dr. No, the original James Bond film, composed by Monty Norman. B'jebus! It is terrible. I'm no fan of calypso and Carribean music in general, so the record starts at a deficit. And from there, it doesn't make any headway. How many versions of that damn mango tree song do we really need to hear? Honestly, this soundtrack is ...

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