Music

Only Ben Folds

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Ben Folds put his cab driver on stage to perform with him. It’s kind of the dream I had back in college, in which John and John They Might Be Giants hear me playing clarinet (somehow) and invite me to tour with them.

Obviously, that never happened. I should have been driving cabs.

The Wonders of the Internet

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The summer before second grade, I attended one of those Hebrew day camps. One of my favorite activities was, of course, singing. We sang various songs in English and in Hebrew, and the melodies have stayed with me forever. Not being fluent in Hebrew, my memories of the words have faded over time. There is this one particular melody I remember. We used to sing it, hundreds of kids, around a huge tree, led by the head rabbi and his wife who played guitar. (I had a crush on one of the rabbi’s daughters who was in the “grade” above me, naturally.)

I used to sing this song to myself for years and years, and every once in a while it pops back into my head. Well I was listening to some Matisyahu — a hasidic reggae/rap artist — and even though he doesn’t sing this particular song, my mind became flooded with all of those melodies from when I was much younger.

But I couldn’t remember the Hebrew words as we sang them around that huge tree. I decided, for the first time, to use the internet to find the words to that song. I simply searched Google, in English, for the transliteration of some of the sounds that best matched my memory. My query was hebrew song avodah ki hashem. Well, I had the “ki hashem” part right, but not “avodah.” While that’s a valid Hebrew word, it’s not in the song. Basically, my mind had transformed the consonants to different sounds, replacing spotty memory with recognizable Hebrew words, but amazingly the vowel sounds I contained in my memory remained largely intact 25 years later.

The first page of search results led me to this page, a blog entry naturally, containing the real words to the tune I remember. The internet never ceases to amaze me, and some times it just blows me away.

Music On Load – A Rant In Three Parts

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There was a bad web design trend around 1996 and 1997 that has since gone away, thankfully. There were many people who designed websites and decided that the user would be required to listen to music, usually annoying music, when the sites finished loading. Sometimes, there was no way to stop the music, but usually you had to press the Esc key or click the browser’s stop button.

Thankfully, this annoying “feature” fell out of favor. Unfortunately, however, it’s back in the form of MySpace profiles. I fcuking hate MySpace, the third most-visited site on the internet. It’s such a horrible website, poorly designed and programmed, it’s a miracle that its shoddiness hasn’t caused the site to crumble under its own increasing mass.

Of course, to appeal to the masses (and to cater to bands that are unsigned for a reason), MySpace lets users add music (and videos) to their profiles. This means that even if I’m not already listening to my own music while browsing, my experience will be completely interrupted. It is disgusting. Turn off the profile music and make it an option to start playing. Otherwise it is a horrible annoyance.

Of course the answer is to stop using MySpace. More and more people are using it as thier main form of online communication, so just giving it up is unfortunately not going to work for me. I’ll just deal with it until people realize that even the Netscape blink tag was less annoying than automatic music (especially automatic “bad” music).

They will. Eventually something much better will replace MySpace in the minds of the hordes that use it. I have faith. I have faith because if I didn’t, I might cry. :>

Ben Folds and the Baltimore Symphony

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Unfortunately, I couldn’t make Jen‘s birthday celebration this weekend — I had plans to go to Baltimore for a pretty special event, despite my wisdom teeth extraction. Ben Folds was performing with his piano as he normally does, but Saturday’s concert included a set of back-up musicians normally known as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Becca was kind enough to pick up tickets a while back for Amy and me, so the three of us plus Steve ventured from the D.C. area to Baltimore for the concert.

Obviously, the music was amazing. Some of the orchestrations were a little over the top; where Ben is usually somewhat subtle, the orchestra added a bit of “THIS PART IS SWEET! THIS PART IS SWEET! ARE YOU GETTING IT!” and “THIS PART IS LOUD AND IT ROCKS! THIS PART IS LOUD AND IT ROCKS! DID YOU CATCH THAT?” if you know what I mean. The classy setting didn’t deter Ben from his potty-mouthed behavior (for example, the “director’s cut” line from the minor-key version of Give Me My Money Back, “You fucking whore,” was happily included).

Somewhat relatedly, I was later taught the etymology of the description “upper crust.”

My favorite arrangement of the night was Narcolepsy, which included an opera singer, but the low note for me was the last encore, The Luckiest. Ben should have known to end the concert with a different song.

Unfortunately, from where we were sitting (orchestra right), the entire concert could have been mixed better. We were not in a direct path of a speaker, so the sound we were getting was a mix between the natural acoustics of the room and the reverberation of the amplified instruments against the balcony. That might have had something to do with the problem. I often couldn’t completely determine exactly what Ben was saying between songs and the music was muddled in general. I’m sure Darren could have fixed that right up. Otherwise, the seats were great and the concert was fantastic.