La Valse d'Amelie

Listen to it with the eyes closed and let your mind wander...<3

Hey You! What Song are you Listening to?

Fly Me To The Moon

Isn't this a perfect lullaby? :)

Everyone Needs to Love James Blake

Adele's Live at KCRW

"It's nothing quite like when you listen to a song written by someone you don't know...who've somehow managed to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life...if you've ever had a broken heart, you're about to remember it now..." - The host of BRIT Awards 2011

I Just Had Sex

Feels a bit wrong posting this clip after such a sweet lovely kid singing the song with her daddy...but well, I couldn't resist.

James Blake: CMYK

"CMYK is only the third release from London electronic producer James Blake, who is only 21-- and the reason I keep saying "only" is because I get a little dumb thinking about how much ground he's covered in so few steps. His style is already recognizable: progressions of thick soul and jazz chords (a product of years of piano lessons), pitched-down and mangled vocals (often his own), and mid-tempo beats that balance synthesized sub-bass with handclaps, snaps, and other humanizing soundlets. But each of his releases-- last year's "Air & Lack Thereof" / "Sparing the Horses" single, February's The Bells Sketch EP, and now, CMYK EP-- also sounds like its own project, filled with private rules and concepts. He's writing his theme and his variations at the same time..." read more.

Creative MV's

I think I'm getting an iPhone...so I could play this trick on your faces. lol



Each frame of this music video is a watercolor painting/drawing. Awesome.



Love those mixed beats. Oddly balanced.

Little Girl

The worlds always amazed at how much cash you made
But not at how you made it, its just strange
It sounded kind of cool over the phone
It killed your neighbors and their dog and crushed their bones

You tortured little girl
Showing them what laughters all about
Where did all the wine go?
Every night its gone

Follow Your Heart

I am now inspired to buy lots of sunscreen, flee to the beach (for a few months), learn to surf and play guitar.....ahhhh

Smooth Moves

Officially my new exercise moves and music.

Love Will Tear Us Apart

Day Dreaming

Finally picked up "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby and finished it a few weeks ago. It made me think of what my Top Five Favourite Songs of All Time are...I'm not sure if what number this song is but Aretha Franklin's Day Dreaming is definitely on the list...pretty much because I always feel like saying..."baby, let's get away.." and, of course, it's her amazingly sweet voice.

The Oriental Version of Tom Waits (And His Wife)

5 stars!

7-Minute Love Song

Finally gave in...

Jazz & Winter

The first real frost of the autumn/winter today. Cold and crisp. Blue sky and a gorgeous sunrise. The drive to work was enjoyable and some Madeleine Peyroux seemed the perfect accompaniment.

- Robin

Crystalised

You've applied the pressure
To have me crystalised
And you've got the faith
That I could bring paradise

I'll forgive and forget
Before I'm paralysed
Do I have to keep up the pace
To keep you satisfied

Pulp Fiction

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did I break your concentration?"

Tom Waits: The Piano *Had* Been Drinking

So, here we are, 50-odd years later, and Tom Waits has made a career out of distorting the world in an often disturbing way. His songs often sound like they have been bashed out of shape, put through a wringer, then left to dry in the sun until they are parched and somehow pure of spirit.

Waits talks like he sings, in a rasping drawl and with an old-timer's wealth of received wisdom. It's as if, in late middle-age, he has grown into the person he always wanted to be. His tales are often tall, and his metaphors and similes tend towards the surreal. 'Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them,' he quips. 'Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.'

Way back, when I first stumbled on Tom Waits while rooting though a friend's record collection, every song seemed to be about drinking and losing your way in the fog. His first record was even called 'Closing Time', but it sounded more like a lock-in at the loneliest bar in the world. Just Tom in the corner slumped over the piano serenading the last few nighthawks with his slurred songs about heartaches and hangovers, and the girl that got away.

His persona had already been perfected by the time he started living in the Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles in 1975, a faded establishment that also housed a couple of aristocratic junkies and several call girls who worked Sunset Strip. For six albums on Asylum Records, from his aforementioned debut in 1973 to 1980's Heartattack and Vine, Waits was the gravel-voiced, beer-stained bard of the barstool, a latter-day beatnik with a bad liver and a broken heart, whose fans were few and far between, but utterly devoted. And, boy, did he pay his dues.

For a long while, it looked like Waits would remain a cult figure, out on the furthermost horizon of the Seventies music scene, a stumblebum troubadour raised on bourbon and Bukowski. His music suggested and, to a lesser degree, still suggests, that the Sixties utterly passed him by; that, in his self-contained universe, the Beats were far more important than the Beatles, and Sinatra took precedence over the Stones.

'You imitate what you grow up around,' he says, when I mention this. 'If you grow up around Sinatra, Crosby and Louis Armstrong as a kid, it goes in and stays in. But some of that Sixties stuff went in too.'

He pays homage to them one more time on Orphans, singing Kerouac's forlorn road song 'Home I'll Never Be', and reciting Bukowski's beautiful poem 'Nirvana', both, in their own way, odes to rootlessness, restlessness, the fleeting, irrevocable moment when things could have been different. The essence, in fact, of a good many Tom Waits songs. Why, I ask, were the Beats so crucial to him?

'They were father figures,' he says softly, his long fingers tracing small circles in the coffee spill on the table. 'They were the ones I looked to for guidance. See, my dad left when I was 10, so I was always looking for a dad. It was like, "Are you my dad? Are you my dad? What about you? Are you my dad?" I found a lot of these old salty guys along the way.'

In 1978, Waits met Kathleen Brennan whom has become his wife and saved his life.

Kathleen was the catalyst for the dramatic sea-change in Waits's music that occurred with the release of Swordfishtrombones in 1983. 'I didn't just marry a beautiful woman,' he says, 'I married a record collection.' When Waits was once asked what his wife brought to the table, he replied, 'Blood and liquor and guilt.' Which is handy, because Waits himself hasn't had a drink for 14 years. When he says that Kathleen saved his life, he means it literally.

Does he miss the odd night-cap? 'Miss drinking?' he says, sounding genuinely surprised. 'Nah. Not the way I was drinking. No, I'm happy to be sober. Happy to be alive. I found myself in some places I can't believe I made it out of alive.' That bad, huh? 'Oh yeah. People with guns. People with gunshot wounds. People with heavy drug problems. People who carried guns everywhere they went, always had a gun. You live like that,' he says, without a trace of irony, 'you attract lower company.'

I ask if he wrote a different kind of song when he was drinking. He thinks about this for an instant, then says, 'No. I don't think so. I mean, one is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That's one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they're afraid to find out that it was the liquor talking all along.'

'I was trying to prove something to myself, too,' he says, revealingly. 'It was like, "Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?" All the big questions come up when you get sober. "What am I made of? What's left when you drain the pool?"'

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Leonard Cohen's Temple of Doom

"I always experience myself as falling apart, and I'm taking emergency measures," Leonard Cohen told Anthony DeCurtis in 1993's Rolling Stone. "It's coming apart at every moment. I try Prozac. I try love. I try drugs. I try Zen meditation. I try the monastery. I try forgetting about all those strategies … when I get to that place where I can't be dishonest about what I've been doing."

Leonard was just nine when his dad died, and Cohen says little about the experience except that he wrapped up a bow tie with some written verses included in the packet, and buried it with his father. He was left an inheritance that helped fund his literary pursuit later; freeing him in young adulthood to work on his poetry. Like many teen boys, he was a handful, but after high school went on to study at McGill University, where he met another famous Jewish Canadian poet, Irving Layton. Cohen worked carefully on his craft (he said one song took thirteen years to write!), developing poems and fiction stories that were mostly critically acclaimed.

Now, Leonard Cohen is practically canonized himself, revered globally. He's "half wolf half angel," according to Anjelica Huston. Cutting a familiar figure in his fedora and dashing suit, he's revered as the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters" (Lou Reed) and "our Keats, our Shelley, our Byron" (U2). Even Prince Charles lauded him. "I tell you who I also think is wonderful is a chap called Leonard Cohen, do you know him?" he asked. One son wondered if Cohen was a jazz musician. Prince Charles replied, "He's remarkable. I mean the orchestration is fantastic and the words, the lyrics and everything. He's a remarkable man, and he has this incredibly, sort of laid back, gravelly voice. It's terrific stuff."

He went into retreat to finally silence that gloom and doom that had spun for half a century or longer through his head. Becoming a "religieuse" was perhaps the ultimate fulfillment of the themes of his soul -- and ever the contrarian, he didn't choose either the Jewish or a Christian path from his youth. His spiritual name is Jikan -- "the silent one." What Leonard longed for most, strangely, was to stop writing. Yet 2006's The Book of Longing was born from his years as a monk. Cohen said he'd been looking for silence all his life, moving towards it. And yet he couldn't stop himself.

"I tried to stop, but my relationship with writing is like that of a bear running into a hive -- he can't resist the temptation to steal honey. It happens continually. It's delightful and it's horrible … I'm sure that silence, sooner or later, will arrive."

The manic depressive tension between light and dark that has informed Cohen's life, his writing, his intense yet luminous nature is still there, despite a life spent seeking ways to silence it. "The recreational, the obsessional and the pharmaceutical -- I've tried them all. I would be enthusiastically promoting any one of them if they worked," he has said, about his search for relief. But today it seems clear that the solution to stability is to stop chasing it -- to simply let it be.

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