tunequest

Total hat-tip to Webomatica for this. The web is slowly filling up Songsmith "remixes" of popular songs. It's a program recently released by Microsoft Research that purports to make anyone and everyone a songwriter. Just select a musical style and sing into a microphone and the app will automatically generate accompanying music. Arrangements and chords can all be customized. Of course it didn't take long for enterprising users to figure out that ...

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Before the beginning of this year, I had barely heard of Kelley Polar or his music. Toward the end of '07, I ran across one of his songs and checked out his debut album, Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens. I was hooked in short order. Color me exultant when I learned a new album would be coming out just as I was really getting into Polar's music. And ...

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Is that not a magnificent album cover? It's almost worth picking up Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens just to have that, especially if were available on vinyl, which sadly it is not. The image is a generally well-regarded photo of the Eagle Nebula, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. It's a striking visual, but more notably, its use here is a near perfect metaphor for the ...

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From the album Beaucoup Fish (1999) Life, kid, suck, drink from the box, the juice kicks up. yeah. bruce lee. High energy and repetitive, Bruce Lee basically sounds like it was recorded on a manufacturing line. With one verse repeated again and again, Underworld performs an exercise in rhythm and variations on a theme. Using brute force, this thing will pound its way into your head, but for a form of House music, ...

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So the news recently hit that Weird Al finally has a Top 10 record after all these years. According to Billboard, that's 73,000 copies of Straight Outta Lynwood sold. Congrats to Al; he deserves it. It's worth noting, though, that album sales are down overall and that nearly equal sales of 72,310 only ranked a 16 on the Billboard 200 for 1999's Running with Scissors. But really, that news has got ...

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Here's today's song of the day. Michael Jackson's Pretty Young Thing from Thriller. For all Michael's recent problems, the fact remains he was absolutely amazing in his time. Thriller, Off the Wall and to a lesser extent, Bad are still phenomenal albums. I like the quasi-funk backing on this song. Groove it. [audio:061030PYT.mp3] Oh, and tomorrow is Halloween; you know what that means.

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