lemonstar

Probably one of my favourite and most listened to jazz musicians Chet Baker - jazz is a broad church and he played in so many different styles, band contexts and eras.

Bonny Light Horseman - the first eponymous album - even though the new one is also great

Slowdive - 2017 self titled album - after a 22 year hiatus

I'll be back on this soon - I didn't mean to leave this dangling - been away, got ill, life-crap etc. Thanks for the responses and ideas - I'm going to reply.

Just listened to the track Molchat Doma have released in advance of a new album (6th Sep - why do they notify fans so far in advance?) https://www.brooklynvegan.com/molchat-doma-announce-new-album-share-son-video/ Details of tour which starts not long after the album is released Sun. Oct. 20 – Glasgow, UK @ SWG3 Galvanizers Tue. Oct. 22 – Manchester, UK @ New Century Wed. Oct. 23 – Bristol, UK @ SWX Thu. Oct. 24 – London, UK @ Roundhouse

Is it an age thing - does it just dry up and never return? I'm 62 - my ability to create anything - string a few chords together and write some lyrics has evaporated since lockdown - ~May 2020 and I'm not a person who has the "writers block" or "muse" mindset - I know (or the way I've always looked at it) is that it's application - keep shaking the tree and see what falls down - I just don't seems to have much mental energy or mental agility to conjure something up and keep working on, feeding in new ideas, it until I've fashioned it into something - I don't expect to do all of that in a day or a week or a month but I'm about 4 years down the line nad have one half finished song I no longer have the passion for and no other ideas. I've got my guitar tuned to DADGAD for a change - desperate times, desperate measures - how does this pan out? What can you do? Did this happen to you? What did you? I'm not someone who buys gear thinking it will push me along - that's never a route I go down. I prefer to sit with my guitar - which admittedly I'm not doing as much - because I have no new ideas - and sit with a pad... I'm going nowhere. I read a lot - upped my reading since lockdown and listen to a lot of podcast - not much of a TV watcher - Uni Challenge that's it generally. I listen back to songs I have completed and feel quite amazed at some of the creativity - I find it hard to understand how I did it in the past and don't seem to be able to do it now. Maybe it's just an age thing. I'm just talking out loud. My enthusiasm for discovering new music is as strong as ever but sometimes I think it's all a distraction - looking for inspiration - listening to music, reading. I have some money saved and was going to buy another guitar but given the way I'm going ATM I've put that off - there seems to be no point.

@Leonard Smalls Evan! The reason I started playing a guitar and writing my own songs! He's a one man lost generation now - apparently (we've been saying this for about 20 years now) - there's a new album in the pipeline.

I'm a big fan of Juliana, partly because she works at the job of songwriting, works at it like a regular job. This live album, The White Broken Line, wasn't easy to get hold of - it's one if my favourite albums from her.

Where would you look? I’m thinking there might be some Black Friday deals on the horizon.

I read they had recorded 23 tracks so there is more to come and there's another with Paul. I also read that Ringo might also be involved in some way.

@nekomatic I've got a couple of albums with her playing alongside the great saxophonist Andy Sheppard.

I'm not going to draw any firm conclusions about the new Blur album after only a couple of days listening. Most of the tracks feel to me like tracks at the back end of an album AFTER you've heard the best 5-6 tracks - more like the embers of a late night camp fire on a beach... no graffiti aerosol cans exploding in the fire. Like new shoes - takes a while to wear them in.

Orwell's 1984 audiobook read by Peter Capaldi - he's a good choice what with his great diction, gravitas and a mix of panic, menace and barely contained resentment in his voice.

@Frank Blank - well that's debate to be had - in a pub one night myself and a mate were trying to decide on the best opening 4 bars of any piece of music - Beethoven's 5th tied with Ticket To Ride I think. I still rate Complete Control as one of the best singles of all time - I used to slap it on almost every Friday after finishing lectures at uni.

That is an interesting album - a rich complex sound - not that I was expecting Billy Bragg or anything. Glad you mentioned it.

Out takes with Elvis invariably cracking up laughing - from an era when almost everything was done in one take. I have the vinyl packed away in a box in the garage but was nice to finally find it again.

This is right up my Straße! I had no idea he had died!

I stuck some pennies in fwiw.

I use the free Bitwarden - to generate, store and automatically paste in passwords - it works across Windows, Android, iOs. I have changed mine just for the sheer hell of it. As @velvetkevorkian suggested - it's worth checking https://haveibeenpwned.com/ - it's very possible the same username and password have been harvested from another site that he was using. The question that has to be asked is - has BC been hacked (unlikely as only one incident [so far]) - this is why maintaining sites (as I've found) can be a PITA - you have to keep on top of security updates and sometimes the updates don't always work out. Worse than that - depending on how extensive the site security patch is - any hand crafted changes to the code have to be redone - it's not always simple and problem free.

Who do these guys think they are? This is who - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.E.O._(band) and pretty damn good imho.

A great collection of well crafted songs. I know of Rob Aldridge from the criminally under-rated Umajets - he died at the back end of 2021 - he was about 58 I think. His fb page has some nice videos of him playing acoustically for 30-60mins just for the joy of pleasing his fans - I always think you can appreciate the guitar work more when it’s stripped back to one guitar and vocals.

@Barking Spiders When I see Simple Minds mentioned I think of the great early John Peel sessions and also about the time they headlined the Leeds and Reading - I went to the Leeds gig - not specifically for them - there were just so many good bands on the bill that year - standouts were All About Eve, Martin Stephenson and the Dainties, The Levellers (I think) - it was a great day. Before SM came on there was a short video promoting the work of Amnesty International - it featured someone being held in a squalid cell, horrible food being shoved under the door, being hosed down with cold water and shouted at in strange unfamiliar language then… a letter is slid under the door of his cell… and some wag in the crowd shouted “It’s your poll tax!”

I don't think I've mentioned it here before or seen it mentioned either but there's a site I use for discovering music and books - GNOD - Global Network of Discovery - a site - one of several interesting sites set up by Marek Gibney - some of his projects have been short lived by GNOD has been running for a good few years. Go to gnod.com and scroll down to the music section - you can try both alternative ways to explore or discover new music that you might like based on you entering the name of a band or artist. I've been listening to piano jazz and be-bop - Bill Evans and Vince Gauraldi - if I choose the music-map.com option and enter Bill Evans I see this map:- Interesting eh? So this led me to look for Sonny Clark and I must have a listen to Oscar Peterson - I already know Ron Carter and Cannonball Adderley. If you go down the other route and choose the https://www.gnoosic.com/ link - you get to enter 3 bands/artists and then you get a set of suggestions - the names you enter helps to grow the dataset.