#They listen to Frank Sinatra because he's my favorite musician.

[the-genius-az]

What does Azula, her wife Mai and loyal concubine Ty Lee do for stress relief?

Thanks for the question, Amor!

Soft and cute moment.

The three of them snuggle together while drinking alcohol and relaxing listening to music, while having a kissing and affection session.

They ignore everyone just for that moment, it happens three times every month.

Passionate and horny moment.

Mai and Ty Lee are filled with Azula's thick, hot cum, it's the only way they are truly relaxed and satisfied.

While Azula finally relieves her stress by filling her lovers, she doesn't even feel that pressure from his balls anymore.

[dre6ming]

Actors on Actors

The delicate beginning rush

Austin x singer/actress fem reader

Masterlist <all chapters here>

Instagram photo dump masterlist

Pairing: Austin Butler x singer/actress fem reader

Warning: none

Plot: you and Austin get to be a part of the series Actors on Actors with Variety and you talk about both of your careers and his upcoming movie ‘Elvis’

Word count: 5630

Disclaimer: everything fake

Intro

Y/n:

Growing up I was surrounded by the magic of Elvis Presley, I would listen to his songs and watch his movies all the time. You know even as a young girl I was immersed in his craft and then learning more about him, finding out how much he borrowed from black culture was a big thing. How did that play out in the movie? Are we going to see some of that? Because I don't think he would've been as successful or would've found his own voice had he not seen those gospel musicians in church. Because Elvis loved gospel music so much as well.

Austin:

So true, he did love gospel and jazz and blues, you know. He curated his own sound based on that and he was living in a time when those artists that he loved so much didn't really have a voice, because of their skin. But he did, he had that privilege, so he was able to take this beautiful sound, that not many people, back then, paid any mind to, because of who was singing it. He took that and he made it into a phenomenon. So Baz wanted that the be very clear and he wrote it beautifully in the scrip, I-I hope people like the way we brought that to screen. Because Elvis was in awe of that culture and it was crucial to his success.

*video montage intro*

Y/n: *nods towards him and smiles*

Hi Austin

Austin: * scratches his beard and smirks*

I'm so happy to be here with you today, truly.

Y/n: *blushes*

Aw, I'm so, so honored to be doing this with you! I was gonna ask what was it like being a kid and living next to Disneyland? I've never been there, but I've always dreamed of going.

Austin: * fidgets around with his rings, looking down*

Oh that's a good first question.

Y/n: *laughs*

Because it would've been the only thing that I thought about, if I were in your place.

Austin: *giggles*

Um that's crazy though, that you've never been to Disneyland.

Y/n:

It's like I would've skipped school, I would've- So what was it like?

Austin: * shakes his head in disbelief*

I did, I did... so my, um *licks his lips* my mom homeschooled me for a couple years in elementary school

*y/n giggles in the background*

Y/n:

Oh ok

Austin:

And so she would just say and even when I was in elementary school. She would say: hey you wanna take the day off school and just go to Disneyland

* y/n audibly gasps*

Austin:

She was the most fun mom

Y/n:

Aw oh my goodness

Austin:

So we would just go and we'd ride Pirates of the Caribbean or something like that

Y/n: *swoons*

Oh, god what a lucky kid.

Austin:

That was, a lot of my childhood, was wrapped up in that

Y/n:

I'm so jealous, I never did anything like that with my mom, I grew up in Brooklyn and I loved it, I really did, but the most fun I had around there was going to this old record store. And when I was really young, I used to come home from school, go into the shop and the owner and I would just listen to lots of old records. *laughs* since I didn't have any money you know, *Austin nods smiling* Frank, the owner he, he introduced me to so many of the classics and quickly Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Elvis, they became some of my favorites.

Austin: *hums*

That's beautiful, but I still can't believe you've never been to Disneyland. *shocked*

Y/n: *shakes her head*

I actually never went out of New York as a kid

Austin: *adjusts in his seat*

Wow

Y/n: *leans a bit forward, adjusting the neckline of her dress*

Yeah, no, my, my parents worked a lot, they also didn't make a lot *shrugs* , so for vacation we would just visit Coney Island for a day in the summer time.

Austin:

What about now, what's like your favorite vacation spot, I'm sure you've been on few.

Y/n: * crosses her legs*

I haven't actually, besides traveling for work, I haven't been on a vacation. Growing up in a middle class house hold, made me very self conscious about how I spend my money and I guess paying for a vacation is something that makes me a bit uncomfortable, even if I can afford it now. But I'd love to go visit Scotland.

Austin: *licks his lips again, listening carefully*

Oh I'd love that too, I've never been either

Y/n:

What's your favorite vacation spot?

Austin: *looks around deep in thought*

Ugh, I think Florence, Italy, I've been there, a few years ago, before the pandemic and everything, it was so beautiful, I stayed over at a Vineyard, it was so amazing.

Y/n: *pushes her hair behind her ears*

Still I can't move on, like I would've been all day: take me to Disneyland

Austin: *chuckles*

I'm gonna take you to Disneyland

Y/n: *gesticulates*

Can you? Take me to Disneyland! Please!

Austin: * laughs *

It'd be so much fun, let's go

Y/n: * holds her hand up*

I know, I want to go, pinky promise!?

Austin: * extends his right hand and intertwines his pinky finger with hers*

Pinky promise! You know I'm always curious for people who didn't grow up around Disneyland, If it would make them feel as nostalgic as it makes me because every time I go to Disneyland I feel like a kid again.

Y/n:

Ooh, that's interesting, probably it would, I don't know, I loved and still love Disney so much.

Austin:

Yeah

Y/n:

By the way, you looked absolutely phenomenal in the first Elvis trailer, I can't wait see it. Ugh

Austin:

Oh thank you

Y/n:

I was really blown away and as someone who's now, you know, stepping into the music industry and being creative that way, seeing another fellow actor, go that way for a role it's just made  me... I ...I was-  I was amazed, I was impressed. Watching you go into this character and have the stamina have the presence, the spirit, the essence of what I, you know, grew  up looking around at, looking at Elvis, but bringing it and making it your own is no small thing. I have yet to play a character that requires me to do that kind of change but it must've been, it must've been difficult I, I imagine. And you had to play Elvis as a teenager tapping into that kid-like spirit, all the way to his passing.

Austin:

Mhm, that's *pauses* that was one of the challenges of it.

Y/n:

I was gonna ask you...

Austin:

We're shooting it out of sequence as well

Y/n:

Okay

Austin:

To lock into each period of time and know where you are spiritually and emotionally, in every moment because one day we're shooting 70s and the next day it's the 50s and then he's 19 or you know.

Y/n:

Did you did, you have to do a lot of , you know, cause I saw even with just how his physicality was, his body changing as he aged and got more mature from that teenage boy to the man we knew. Was there a lot of prosthetics? Like what was the physical transformation like.

Austin: *clears his throat *

Initially Baz, when we started working on it, he said we could film it in sequence, so we thought ok well I can take a break and I can gain the weight and do that, but then with Covid and everything the whole schedule got turned upside down *y/n hums listening closely* . So we ended up, working a lot with, you know,  finding the subtle ways that you can age. A lot of that was, I had a movement coach named Polly Bennett that was amazing and she was great at working from the inside-out and that, that was the way that I knew how I needed to approach it. And so we could work on how your body changes with time when you start aging and he's performing and there's lots of movement, you know, I wanted to ask you, cause you did professional dancing for a while, cause towards his fourties' he started expecting a lot of pain and I felt that completely.

Y/n: * breaths in deep *

Yeah so for my first ever job, for the "50 shades after" series I had to do professional dancing for 3 years and I don't know if I ever expected the toll it would take on my body. Even though I was so young, I was 11 when I started and at 14 when I finished I had to go into a lot of physiotherapy,  because my muscles and my joints, just hurt so bad. And even now I have to be extremely careful with the way I move around because I get this extreme back pain and my muscles get locked in, it's it's really not that great so yes sports is great, it's healthy, but performing and dancing are very different from just doing  sports and it requires a lot of engagement from your body. I swim a lot now, to keep myself active and I have to watch myself when it comes to doing stuns on set.

Austin:

What's like the hardest stunt you've done

Y/n:

The hardest one wasn't necessary physically hard, but I needed a day to recover from it. So Amelia, the character I play,  her death is mysterious she falls or she jumps from the rooftop of her high school and we had to film that and I'm extremely scared of heights and yes I was in a harness and there was a huge mattress at the bottom, but it was still so scary to do and I was so afraid of it and during the time that I was falling I would tense my muscles so bad that the next day I just had to take a day off because I couldn't, I couldn't get out of bed, because I had contracted my muscles so hard, it sent me into a fit of pain. How about you, how did you recover from the physical effort? Because I imagine that everything you did took multiple takes as well.

Austin: *looks concerned*

It, It definitely was challenging from many many points, I- I was always in the gym trying to keep myself fit, but I definitely did have days when I felt like my body would give up on me, but I pushed through somehow I did.

Y/n:

And did I, did I understand it right? That you actually did the 68 comeback performance first, that that was your first time in full Elvis costume, right? How was that?

Austin: * scrunches up his nose and takes a deep breath *

Oh my god that was so nerve-racking *y/n giggles smiling* because I had a year and a half before that point to prepare. And suddenly the moment of truth is here, where are you gotta go out and all the preparation is, it's for nothing if you don't get it right within action and cut.

Y/n: * nods approvingly*

Yeah, yeah

Austin:

And so before walking on the stage I had the terror that, what if I'm not good enough or if I go out there and I fail everybody? And my carrier feels like it's on the line in this moment right...

Y/n:

*whispers* I'm so sorry

Austin: *breaks a smile*

But ,you know, I thought of Elvis and the way his career was on the line back then and he had terror and so I could end up just living in that and realizing that fear isn't the enemy in that moment and that if you use it, is the same energy that he was going out there with and started channeling it into the audience. *he absentmindedly points around*

Y/n:

Mhm, yeah

Austin:

And then you see somebody in the audience really genuinely smile and then somebody else laughs and a girl blushing when you get their energy and you have the rapport with the audience. You actually performed live on stage with Taylor recently, right, did you feel that? Do you connect with people while they're in the audience? Do you feel the energy of that?

Y/n: *laughs nervously fidgeting with her bracelet*

Yeah you, you feel it all and you know Taylor Swift fans, they're just, they're so passionate about the music you're playing to them and it was my first time ever performing a song in front of an audience and nonetheless a song that I wrote, so I was so scared before I went out there and started singing. *Austin looks in awe at her* I was trying to talk myself up, but I was so so nervous and I almost had a panic attack and you know Taylor was there trying to calm me down, but nothing actually calmed me down until I was in front of the audience. I started singing and I saw people resonating with my words and with my energy and the way they were mirroring my feelings * puts her hand over her heart* it was truly just magical it's all I can say.

Austin:

Right, beautiful song by the way.

Y/n: *mouthing thank you*

Austin:

Yeah I was listening to it on the way here and in a weird way, I relate to it. Before Elvis I was in a place in my career where I felt like "at this point I'm about to quit acting". Because nothing out of what I had done until then really felt good enough for me to still stay in the business. My career, I never felt like it took off or anything so listening to you and Taylor saying about this fear of going out of style and becoming old I've been there and I felt like that. So what was the writing process for you?

Y/n: *looks up thinking*

Hmm... Well I was doing the background vocals for the re-recording of Red in January of last year and one day I came to the studio and Taylor was there strumming the guitar singing "nothing new" . But she only had the first verse and a few bits of the chorus and she wanted to put the song out because the fans had been expecting it, she had teased it before, so now she had to put it out and after listening to the bits that she had written I asked if I could take the song home and try to write on it. *snickers * Which was very bold of me, because I had never done anything like that before and it took me like two days to feel confident with what I had written, because I finished it the night I came home with it, but it took me some time to actually get the courage to show it to Taylor. And for me I didn't personally write from the perspective of someone who feels like their career is in jeopardy or they are going out of style. I wrote from the perspective of someone who feels like their youth and innocence are in jeopardy.

Austin: *picks at his chin, tapping his foot against the floor*

Do you feel pressure of having to grow up faster than you're ready to?

Y/n: *sighs looking at her hands, cracking her knuckles*

Yes I do! The media puts that pressure on me and on girls in general. A week after my 18th birthday I stumbled over this article on the Internet *whispers covering her mouth playfully* it is a dark place everyone should be wary of it, *speaks normal again* but I couldn't help myself and I, I opened it and I read it *pauses to breathe* and someone a man, a man well in his 40s, had written about me. It was an article wishing "happy birthday" to me, followed by the question: when will I play characters *stammering* characters who perform adult scenes on TV ? Will there be a "Fifty Shades of Grey" remake with me as the protagonist? Would I be down to film those kind of scenes and how soon should fans expect to see that from me. *hands shaking*

Austin: *leans forward taking her hands in his*

That's horrible

Y/n: *breaths*

And I don't know I felt just so humiliated and ever since then every few weeks articles like this pop up. I sat to close next to a boy, I looked way too comfortable with a guy and people start throwing around things like: am I dating? are we getting some action? feels so dehumanizing and it makes intimacy feel so filthy.

Austin: *pulls his chair closer looking her in the eyes*

It shouldn't feel like that, I'm a man, so in a way I've never experienced that part of media. But my past relationships have. I hate how easy people strip artists of their work and reduce them to a product. I watched "Reconstructing Amelia" three times so far and I have to say, you're performance was incredible.

Y/n: *sniffs breaking a smile and squeezing Austin's hands*

Thank you!

Austin: *gives her a toothy smile*

What was the preparation for that role like?

Y/n: *sits back in her chair adjusting her dress*

I read the book 1st of all and then it wasn't much that I needed to prepare for. I related to Amelia to a T, I also was bullied back when I used to go to public school and I felt how mean kids can be and I definitely felt pressured to do certain things to fit in, never things like what Amelia had to, but her story is meant to just shine light on something that's so big, that's so talked about , as well , but still it's so ignored and people just look over it you know.

Austin: *nods bouncing his leg up and down *

You also got to work with Orlando Bloom and Emily Blunt, what was that like?

Y/n: *tilts her head*

They're incredible and I'm sad that I didn't have more scenes with them because of the way we filmed the movie, we have the present time and the past time. The past time being Amelia's point of view, things that are happening at school with her private life and there's not that much interaction between her and her mother or her father and so I didn't really get to bond or work with them too much. There was also Covid that kinda of kept us separate but they both made a point to reach out to me and be supportive and give their advice and I got to see them at the Oscars again and talk to them for longer than I got to through the whole process of filming so that was great. *laughs*

Austin: *starts clapping*

I wanted to congratulate you for that, it was well deserved

Y/n: *blushes and tries to hide her face with her hands*

*Austin laughs at her silliness*

Y/n: *gets composure and clears her throat*

Yeah I - thank you! I can't even say that it was a dream of mine to win an Oscar. I... I have this thing where I don't even dare dream certain things because even doing that feels like too much for me, but it is nice to see my work being paid off in such an honorable way. But the list of nominees was huge and there were many talented names on it. By no means do I believe I'm the best out of all of them, but I am happy to have taken the award home. I am!

Austin:

I was rooting for you the whole time

Y/n:

Where you?

Austin:

Yeah.

Y/n:

I'll make sure to do the same for you next year and circling back to you, you sing in this movie, right? Was that the first time for you singing in a movie? What was it like, trying to sound like Elvis?

Austin: *blushes*

So flattering to have you say that, thank you, I’m excited to hear what you think after you've seen the movie. * scratches the back of his head* it was my first time ever singing in a movie or in front of anyone other than my mother or close friends. I worked with vocal coaches, because I have a similar tone to Elvis's voice but I had to work with it in a way that wouldn't hurt my voice, but I haven't seen the movie or anything other than the trailer and I don't know how it ended up sounding. I did a few tracks for the movie soundtrack, that will be coming out, but I haven't heard much of those either so I don't really know how it ended up sounding but I'm, I'm hopeful.

Y/n:

When did you first fall in love with music?

Austin:

I can't remember a time when I didn't love music. I got my first guitar when I was 12 and since then I couldn't put it down. I'm not shy about playing an instrument around other people, but my singing voice has always been an insecurity of mine because I never felt like it sounded good, so it was a challenge to break out of that shell. I think my love for music and for Elvis, as well, helped a lot there. How about you? How did you come to love music and song writing? Because you write a lot of songs and you have a song coming out soon.

Y/n: *crosses her arms over her chest*

I've always love music also and when I was eight I begged my parents for a guitar as a Christmas gift and I received one, but when I asked for them to take me somewhere I could learn how to play guitar that's where they drew the line and said “no”. So I had a guitar sitting around in my room for a long long time and I decorated it with Hannah Montana stickers. *Austin laughs clutching his stomach* Then I got casted in "50 shades after" and Jamie Dornan, who plays Christian Grey, is an amazing guitar player and I asked him if he could teach me guitar. Also my character, Phoebe, is a pianist, in the series and I asked if I could actually learn how to play the piano and the studio paid for me to have piano lessons and that's how I learned piano and guitar at the same time and now I also play the ukulele and I'm learning violin.

Austin:

Amazing. *mumbles the word “beautiful”*

Y/n:

And then songwriting... I've always kept a journal, always and I used to write these poems in it. Then I got to work with Taylor and saw how her poems were brought to life by the melodies she composed and I thought: is that something I could do? And now I have a song that's coming out and I'm excited about it.

Austin:

I'm excited about it too.

*both laughing*

Y/n:

You said there's a soundtrack coming out for the movie, I'm guessing Baz Luhrmann is on the production of it. Tell me more about him. What’s Baz like?

Austin:

He's incredible

Y/n:

A director with whom I hope to work some day. Meeting him at the met gala was so surreal, he's so nice and he had so many wonderful words to say about my performance in previous projects that I have done and he seems like such a wonderful human being and I wonder what was it like to work so closely with him. Were you a big fan of his before? Because I've always loved Romeo and Juliet ever since I first watched it when I was 10 and I adored the directing of it. Was there something in his style of directing that surprised you?

Austin:

I often say he is the closest thing to a jazz musician when it comes to a director, you know, other directors they are like classical musicians they have specific directions and notes you follow. Then you have Baz who does so much homework and his team does so much work and you have a year and a half to prepare for this thing and you show up to work and he says “ I just re-wrote this entire scene last night” and you're like a deer caught in the headlights because suddenly you have to re-learn what you've been doing for a year and a half and he has this freedom to him. He had this thing that he used to say on set all the time, that we are all a big family and there's no place for fear in art.

Y/n: *nods listening closely*

Wonderful, I hope I get to experience that one day.

Austin:

I really hope you do, he really brought me out of my hiding, I was so shy and he took me and turned me into this rock 'n roll star. But it was mostly about finding my sound, I didn't want to be just an impersonator, I wanted to do justice to the person and Baz played a big part in achieving that.

Y/n:

Was it hard finding your sound? To make it be like Elvis's?

Austin:

I worked with multiple vocal coaches, over the course of two years, trying to find my sound in Elvis's music. I hope we did it, as I said I've only heard what it's played in the trailer so far. But the sound became more fluid and a lot more easy to get into when I got to actually do it and be there in action, it was like when you finish school and you’re finally are in the world trying to show to everybody what you've been learning. What was it like for you to match your sound to Taylor, to sing backing for her?

Y/n:

I also worked with vocal coaches prior to actually going in the studio with her. It was my first time ever in a studio when I recorded with her and I was so emotional over it because somewhere in the back of my mind I think I always dreamed of becoming a singer and finding my voice around Taylor was the best thing I could've ever asked for. Her and Jack Antonoff are so supportive and so understanding. I have a very similar voice to hers if I try hard enough we almost sound identical which is part of why she wanted me to do the background vocals for her , but I have this thing where I can get into a higher vocal range than her and she can go very low where I can't and so we complement each other in that sense and it works very well, but I think I'm still trying to navigate my sound. I hope with future projects I get to play with my sound and adapt it to myself even more.

Austin:

Well I can't wait to hear more of your singing.

Y/n:

Thanks

Austin: *rests his hands on his knees*

I also had this amazing experience when we were recording in Nashville there was this old wooden church where we recorded some of the gospel numbers and there were 30 people there and I was the only white guy and I felt so out of place. But the moment they started singing and they just let it all hang out, I felt so welcomed and so privileged to be a part of that and I got to enjoy gospel music for eight hours straight and it was so beautiful how they transitioned from one gospel to another so smoothly. In that moment I really, really understood what drew Elvis in about those kind of sounds and music. I felt this electricity in my body and I always went back to that feeling when performing my scenes and every single time I didn't feel like that, I knew I was off so I always tried to go back there mentally to get myself into character.

Y/n:

That sounds beautiful. I had that for of the confrontational scenes I did as Amelia. I watched hours and hours on YouTube of female actresses having these raging screaming matches on the screen and I took note from that and from the feeling of how frustrated I felt for them. I was like these are fictional people on the screen and the feelings of rage and frustration that they are making me experience, I need to be able to do that and so I would just before we would do a scene where I have to fight with someone I would go back and watch some of those scenes that I loved so much. Actually there's one that makes me laugh now thinking back but there was that scene of Zoe Saldana in "Avatar", that rage she felt and betrayal, in the way she literally send it home to you through the screen it always touched me and I tried to do that.

Austin:

You were doing it. I'm here to say you were, there were times watching you do these scenes where I felt like I wanted to fight with you, on your side.

Y/n: *placing both hands over her heart*

Aw you have no idea how much that means for me. But what else did you do in order really buckle down and focus on the role?

Austin:

*mumbling* I'm so interested to hear your take on this *clears his throat* So during Elvis I didn't see my family for about three years because I was prepping with Baz in Nashville and then we flew to Australia and I had months where I wouldn't talk to anyone and when I did all I could think of was Elvis

Y/n:

Wow

Austin:

And so I was trying to do everything like him, my voice, my accent, my laugh so I don't think it was very enjoyable to talk to me anyway. I would talk to my sister and she'd be like

Y/n:

Austin what are you doing?! *laughs*

Austin: *also laughing*

Yeah yeah oh my, at first it angered me a bit, but with time I think I understood her. What about you, was there anything you did?

Y/n:

Yes I unfortunately also went into a period of time where I didn't talk to anyone for months. I went into this spiral, into this very dark corner of my mind and I- I was forced to pull myself out of there because I was not doing very well. I'm thankful to have people like Timothee by my side. He saw the signs of depression and then came to the rescue because I don't know where exactly the line between me and the character I was playing got so blurry that I couldn't feel it anymore. I was lost in this person who wasn't me, but was becoming me. So I don't think I was ready for that kind of method acting.

Austin:

I can definitely say that happen to me too. I got lost in Elvis, but I had Baz, who at the end of the day would always call me aside and be like: just go home and be Austin. I didn't listen every time, but sometimes I did and that helped a lot.

Y/n:

You also started acting very young like me, I watched you on tv many times, on Disney and Nickelodeon. What's something you took from those acting days and brought into the way you work now

Austin:

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, but as a kid surrounded by adults who are telling me, teaching me how to work in front of a camera I just was so disciplined and I had this desire to be perfect and that's definitely something I carried with me. I'm not sure it's the healthiest thing though.

Y/n:

Oh I know that all too well *chuckles* I'm also a perfectionist, my whole life I've been one, it's not healthy, it gets the job done it gets rewarded, but it's not healthy for you as a person to always raise the stakes higher and higher and make the standards sometimes unachievable

Austin:

Sometime ago I watched a Ted talk where they talked about the difference between shame and guilt. I thought: how can I put that into acting. As I do with everything. Difference is shame is "I am a bad person", guilt is "I did a bad thing" and every single time I felt off I would just say to myself "I'm a bad actor". It was never about "I did a bad scene" , my craft was off, you know I always took it so hard upon myself but in the end what even is bad in art...

Y/n:

Right it's so subjective.

Austin:

So I'm working on just getting to free myself up from that, that weight we put on ourselves.

Y/n:

Well this has been such a crazy day, I'm so happy to have done this with you.

Austin:

Pleasure is all mine and I look forward to talking to you a lot more, I'm so grateful we got to do this today.

*they both stand up and hug each other*

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[hooked-on-elvis]

Have you seen this picture of Elvis? I get so exited when I see an Italian connection to Elvis. For example today I discovered he owned several Beretta guns that explicitly say “Made in Italy”. 😍

This is not quite the same, but yeah: BRAZIL! 🇧🇷

OMG, YES! I'm crazy about that picture, I shared it here months ago. I totally have that feeling too! So cool you mentioned Elvis also collected Italian guns. I know just how you feel about it, dear. 🥹

Well, on Elvis and Brazil, there's a few connections I'll never get over... they're so dear to me.

First, during the last of Elvis' appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show (January 6, 1957), EP performed on the same day as a Brazilian singer named Leny Eversong. They didn't performed together, but I was so happy they got a couple pictures taken that day, backstage. Leny was/is one of the greatest female Brazilian voices. ♥ I don't know if that's true or not, but some places say Elvis told her she reminded him of his momma. Cute.

January 6, 1957: Elvis backstage with Brazilian singer Leny Eversong and the host of the show, Ed Sullivan.

Another Elvis/Brazil connection took place during his Hollywood era. On my favorite Elvis movie "Live a Little, Love a Little" (1968) there's a song composed by the Brazilian musician, Luiz Bonfá. The song is "Almost In Love", a beautiful ballad which dreamy melody was borrowed from Luiz Bonfá's original 1965 song "Moonlight in Rio", while the lyrics Elvis sings was composed by Randy Starr. According to Luiz Bonfá, in 1968 he was working at MGM and someone (I won't remember who) told him Elvis needed a song for the soundtrack of this 1968 movie. That's when the Brazilian musician would lend his beautiful melody, an original composition, to what would become the song recorded by the King and featured in the 1968 movie "Live a Little, Love a Little" soundtrack.

Brazilian's Bossa Nova was very popular around the world in the 60s but, unfortunately, that was the only song composed by a Brazilian musician that the King ever recorded. Either way I'm so, so proud of it. ♥

Last but not least, years later, on November 30, 1972 Elvis attended Paul Anka and Brazilian musician Sergio Mendes's opening night at the Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV. They met backstage. Sergio Mendes is one of the greatest Brazilian musicians of all times. He was friends with Frank Sinatra (they toured in the 60s). About that night meeting the King, Sergio said Elvis went backstage to congratulate Paul and him for the concert, telling them he did enjoy the show.

Here's some pictures:

November 30, 1972: Elvis attended Sergio Mendes and Paul Anka's opening night at Caesar's Palace. The photos show Elvis backstage at Caesar's Palace, early on December 1st, with Sergio and Paul.

Sergio Mendes and Frank Sinatra toured together in 1968.

Those are the Brazilian connections to Elvis that I know of so far. I don't believe there's more but who knows?

According to Kathy Westemoreland on her Facebook page (as shared on this website), Elvis did enjoy the music of the Portuguese singer, Amalia Rodrigues, known as the "Queen of Fado". Brazilian Portuguese and the Portuguese from Portugal are not the same but they are similar, just like American English and British English, because Brazil was a Portugal colony when it was first "discovered" in 1500, that until 1822 when Brazil became an independent nation. That leaves me wondering if Elvis knew a little bit of Portuguese or not, having him listened to some songs in Portuguese (both from Portugal with the Fado music and from Brazil with our Bossa Nova). That would be so cool, but I've heard or seen nothing that could proved this yet.

Italian language, on the other side, Elvis knew at least one word: "Arrivederci" -- "Oh, no, that's Italian", he said after mistaken German for Italian during a press conference in Germany in 1958, giving us yet another cute moment of him to cherish.

Anyway. Thank you so much for being kind and reminding me of that Army Elvis picture with the Brazil showing in the map right behind him on the wall. I love that picture. It's so silly, but even the slightest connections of Elvis with our different nations thrills us, I know exactly how you feel about the Italian guns he collected. ♥

I bet you love the song "Heart of Rome" too, don't you? Or "It's Now or Never", an English version from an Italian song ("O Sole mio"). I think there's more connections of Elvis and Italy. I'd love to read all about it if you'd like to share, including pictures of the Italian guns Elvis had, if you have any of them.

Ohh, by the way, another cool thing I know connecting Elvis to Italy is that Elvis' suite at the former International Hotel then Hilton Hotel and now Westgate Hotel in Las Vegas, which unfortunately was remodeled and doesn't look like it was when Elvis was there, is named today after a region in central Italy! I've seen somewhere on Youtube that Elvis' actual penthouse suite, when remodeled, was split in two or three different villas. Well, one is named "Tuscany". SO COOL! ⚡🥹 ✨

WestGate Hotel, Las Vegas. That picture above was taken on October 2023 by an Elvis fan, Jill Stringham, shared on the Facebook group "Elvis in the 70s". Below there's a video inside the suite.

[pearls-place]

Hiii hope your weekend was great! I just rewatched Rocketman the other night haha! It’s suchhhh a beautiful & heartbreaking movie & Taron Egerton did such an amazing job embodying Elton, I can why it’s one of your favorites! Ghostbusters and Ferris Bueller’s are both great movies too!

Billy Joel is cool! I used to be a big fan a couple years ago but I don’t really listen to him much anymore. Do you have any favorites of his? I love ABBA too, especially their Vouluz-Vous album. I’ve been wanting to get more into Queen so if you’ve got any recommendations that’d be cool! Some favorites of mine are George Harrison & Elton John (as you already know I think haha) as well as ELO, Kate Bush, Roy Orbison, & Cheap Trick. I mostly listen to a lot of 60s-70s classic/psychedelic rock & folk but sometimes I’ll listen to 40s-50s stuff. Is there any band/musician who you really strongly dislike? If so, why?

Hope you have a good day!

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Hello! My weekend was pretty good, I hope yours was too!

That’s so funny, cause I just rewatched Rocketman Saturday! It is such a beautiful movie: the costumes, the music, the acting, everything! I’m always either laughing or crying throughout the whole thing!!

I really like Billy Joel’s album The Stranger, it has a lot of really good ones on it! Song wise, I really like The Stranger, Movin’ Out, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, Vienna, and You May Be Right. Voulez-Vous is one of my favorite ABBA songs, and the album is good to! I’m into a lot of Queen’s most well known songs, but I’m starting to dig deeper! I really like You’re My Best Friend, I Want to Break Free, Killer Queen, and Crazy Little Thing Called Love. I’m a little bit familiar with ELO and Cheap Trick, not super. What are some of your favorites of them and of the others? I think if you like psychedelic rock, you’d really like The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, especially the song I Am The Walrus.

I cannot stand Michael Buble. It’s become kind of a joke within my family, but I just don’t like him! I get what he’s trying to do, but I just don’t think that he has the right vocal tone/overall vibe that emulates that people he thinks he emulates. Or maybe it’s because I already liked the originals like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. I don’t know, I just don’t like him. How about you? Is there anyone you don’t like?

I hope you have a good day too!

~ Pearl :D

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[satisfactory-dreams]

HI!! SRS HERE!!

Again, hope your day is well!!

To answer some of your questions… I’m from the United States (East Coast!), I unfortunately BARELY keep up with modern music :( The most modern music I listen to is the Foo Fighters really. OH and Billie Eilish and Phoebe Bridgers! I only like the new sad stuff 😁😁😁 I’ve been trying to get more into Kate Bush so I don’t have a favorite song (yet!!) because I want to listen to more of her discography! She is sooo awesome though.

Oh! I will leave you with some fun facts though :) You might already know some of them. They’re about S&G because they’re who I’m obsessed with right now! But I’ll have more in the future with other people!

- Paul Simon was actually born in New Jersey and not New York! A lot of people think just because he was raised in New York that he was born there

- In the Concert for Central Park, Paul Simon wore a wig because he was insecure about his hair, and then forced Art Garfunkel to wear one as well (my boyfriend told me this one 😭😭)

- Art Garfunkel loves math (he was a math teacher… for some reason.) JUST LIKE I DO!! I’m a math major

Hmmmmm, I'm looking for pictures of the concert I think i can see it in this one lol. Haha i love that Paul could so easily force him to do it too 🤭

I knew about Paul being born in New Jersey but it's interesting how he's associated with New York. It's the same with Frank Sinatra I'd say. I'm not from the states but I find those things interesting. Btw I live in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧but originally from Brazil, moved out of there as a baby and was raised in multiple European countries before settling there.

I feel like Art liking maths kind of explains why he's not as celebrated for songwriting lol. I remember him saying that he read his first book at like 19, which tbf made me feel better about myself as j wasn't much of a book reader in the past (even though unlike him I have finished books before the age of 19 😭) but I am trying to change that. I liked maths in school, not passionate about it but enjoyed, wouldn't mind doing something related to it in the future.

Where do you stand on the Paul vs Art debate? I don't like them being pittied against each other but a lot people do think Art didn't bring as much to the table. What do you think about that? 🤔

I want to listen to more modern musicians but can never bother to. I haven't listened to the radio since 2013, Lana is my only modern musician and I only started getting her recently. Before I never understood her appeal but I am glad I came around.

Anyway thanks for the ask 🥰 and have a great day too 😊

[liaromancewriter]

Hope you’re having a lovely day today! I’ve got some questions for you regarding Ethan and Cassie, as well as Maxenna <3

As a music lover, I’m curious about their music taste. If they were in charge of the music anywhere, what would play? What’s in their respective playlists and what are their favorite songs?

Hi Avy,

Love this question because I’m a huge music fan too! This answer is super long. Sorry 😬

Ethan & Cassie:

Cassie has eclectic tastes and enjoys music that tells a story or something she can dance to. She enjoys Top 40, pop and indie music, as well as oldies. “Dream A Little Dream” is their song and she’ll always want to dance when it comes on. Ethan sometimes plays that song because he knows she cannot resist. 

Her favorite musicians include The Black Keys, Lana Del Rey, Kelly Clarkson, Christina Perri, Imagine Dragons, and Matt Nathanson, among others. Ethan cannot stand when she plays Matt Nathanson’s “Come On Get Higher” because that was her song with her ex, Jackson. She loves the song though and will listen to it with headphones on out of respect for his wishes. (Except when he rubs Nigella in her face; then she’s blasting that song to annoy him!) 

Her running playlist is designed to keep her pumped up for a 5-mile run, so it’s a mix of rock, dance and pop.

Ethan listens to opera and classical symphonies for the most part, much to Cassie’s dismay who is trying to educate him on more recent music. Like her though he enjoys oldies and jazz standards like Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke and Annie Lennox, particularly when he’s cooking in the kitchen or wants to dance with Cassie. 

When he was younger, he was into rock and post-grunge. One of his favorite bands in his teens and through college was Green Day. He even went to their concerts and still has a t-shirt.

Max & Sienna:

In my background for Sienna, she grew up in New Orleans and therefore was exposed to jazz and blues from an early age. When she’s baking her playlist is primarily composed of jazz, blues and soul music with songs from artists like Marc Broussard, Joe Bonamassa, B.B. King, Bonnie Rait, and Keb’Mo, among others. 

Like Cassie, she listens to Top 40 and pop songs too, especially something fun to dance to when they go clubbing or at weddings. When they lived together, they would put on these songs and just dance in the living room or go out on the town. After she got married, the tradition continued whenever Cassie would visit, often dragging Max along with them. (Not that he minds 😄)

Max is not a huge fan of pop music, but he can tolerate it (with his sister and then his wife, he has no choice 😂). He enjoys classic rock, but his favorite genre is Blues with some Jazz thrown in. His playlists are full of established and emerging artists such as B.B. King, Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band, Gráinne Duffy, Susan Tedeschi, Eric Clapton, and Eva Cassidy, among others.

Since, Sienna and Max both love blues music their favorite activity (well, second favorite 😏) is to spend an evening at the blues club in their Georgetown neighborhood. They love dancing together, at home, as well as hitting night clubs if the mood strikes. So, music is a huge part of their lives.

Here’s a look at both couple’s wedding songs.

Character Asks: @trappedinfanfiction @bex-la-get @genevievemd @choicesaddict5 @jerzwriter @rookiemartin @vi-writes-stuff @coffeeheartaddict2 @quixoticdreamer16 @dorisz @lucy-268 @a-crepusculo @ofmischiefandmedicine @queencarb @crazy-loca-blog @takemyopenheart

[sinceileftyoublog]

Gretchen Lieberum Interview: Eerie Nostalgia

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Singer-songwriter Gretchen Lieberum wanted to make an album of standards while totally subverting your preconception of what that sounded like. With This May Only Be A Dream, which came out Friday, she succeeds, in both capturing the magic of old recordings and performance styles while talking full advantage of the time-bending quality of modern production. In BAFTA-winning composer Keefus Ciancia, Lieberum picked the perfect partner. After singing over piano, she sent what were basically demos to Ciancia, who removed the piano, deconstructing and reconstructing the songs to then be rerecorded with session musicians. The result shares the ambition of something like Julia Holter’s version of “Hello Stranger” but over a whole album. Album opener “Come Rain or Come Shine”, which has been recorded by Ray Charles, Billie Holliday, and Chet Baker, combines lurking, fluttering woodwinds with reverb-laden vocals and chaotic orchestration. On “Blue Skies”, a song that you expect to build up with drums, strings, and chorus, like in a climax scene in a Hollywood epic, the strings cut in and out, toying with your perception. While there are some songs that sound familiar, like the Fiona Apple-esque percussive clatter of “Angel Eyes” or the solemn, quiet closer “While We’re Young”, the back-and-forth between subtlety and Technicolor orchestration keeps you on your toes.

A couple months ago, I spoke with Lieberum from her home in L.A. and Ciancia from his in France about how the album was constructed, their approach to recording, and how they would describe the music. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: So this seriously just started with you singing over piano, Gretchen?

Gretchen Lieberum: I have a friend who has a studio in his house. I wanted to do an album of standards for years and years. It’s just an idea I’ve had I couldn’t let go of. I wanted to do an album of these songs but interpreted in an unusual way, not acoustic bass, drums, piano, and that’s it. I’ve known Keefus for years, and he was the only guy I wanted for the job. So I waited years and years, and finally, the timing was right to start working on it. I’d just record vocals with my friend Peter at his studio playing piano, which is great because I do much better in low pressure situations. If I’m in a big fancy studio, I’m like, “Oh god, how much is this costing?” It’s hard for me to be emotional and in the moment. I was just able to go to my friend’s house and record any song that popped into my head or I was feeling. I would send them to Keefus, and he would pick his faves. I think I recorded maybe 25 songs in all, and we ended up with 10.

Keefus Ciancia: The most important part is what Gretchen said--the comfort zone that Gretchen was in where she could get to the feel and heart of the song, comfortably with Peter. He’s an amazing piano player, and they had such a good rhythm that everything I was getting made it so that it was just real. It felt right. That was always fun to be able to open these and also have total separation, pick out Peter’s stuff and start reimagining things, erasing the chords. Gretchen was on fire! She was knocking them out. A lot of great pieces I’ve never heard, too, which I really enjoyed. Maybe that was good for me, too, to not know those standards as well so I wasn’t trapped in the chords. Maybe my lameness of being a hack--I wanted to be a jazz player but I couldn’t do it! [laughs]

GL: That’s what’s so great. I didn’t want a jazz guy to produce it. That’s what ended up happening--he would choose his own chords underneath the melodies that were really interesting and cool.

SILY: Did you know he was gonna remove the piano?

GL: Oh yeah. I know Keefus’s aesthetic and how he works, so I was like, “I’m gonna send you this, have fun, go to town.” I sent him literally zero notes and never knew what I was gonna get back. There’d be a song that’s a stark ballad that would come back with a full orchestra, some of the tempo sped up, some of it slowed down. Different lines chopped up into different places. Quite a few times, I’d take the song and rerecord the vocal to go with what Keefus did, to emotionally match what he created. Sometimes not--the song “Come Rain or Come Shine” was one take I did at Peter’s house and didn’t change at all.

SILY: How did you whittle down from the initial list of 25 songs for this record?

GL: This project was so much about emotion and love and love of these songs. What songs I loved singing and what was inspiring me. I grew up in a house where jazz was constantly playing. My father wasn’t a musician but a huge fan. It was a big part of my life growing up. I was in the jazz band as a singer in high school. These are songs I’ve known my whole life. There were some that I tried that I didn’t feel that I didn’t send to Keefus.

There are a few that aren’t jazz standards, too. We do a Beach Boys song, which is also a song that I love.

SILY: They’re standards nonetheless, independent of genre.

GL: Yes.

SILY: What made you want to release “Come Rain or Come Shine” as the first single and open with it?

GL: It’s just one of my favorites. One of the ones I’m most proud of. It’s indicative of the project as a whole. It’s a standard I approach traditionally from how I’m singing it, but there are these surreal flourishes around it. Also, I mean, what an intro, that [screams] “Ahhh!”

KC: I agree.

SILY: What was the process of getting the session musicians in after Keefus worked on the songs?

KC: Basically, it was kind of known all the way through that once we got these bodies we’d get some more breath and air on it to get more of the quality Gretchen and I love from old 50′s recordings but also taking it somewhere new. That studio is now closed--Vox Studios--such an amazing place that was perfect for that record. It was the first commercial studio in Hollywood through Paramount.

GL: It was the longest continuously running studio in the world, I read.

KC: Someone will move in, I’m sure. Woody [Jackson], who owns it, there was no rebuilding the rooms because they sounded so good from how they were built in the 40′s. The room is amazing, and his engineer Michael Harris is incredible. He was the first one to get his ears on this stuff besides Gretchen and I. To be able to put it in a room, listen through a different system, warm things up for his outboard gear. We had some of our favorite musicians. It wasn’t a ton of folks, but the dream scenario where we had 5 days and a rolling, “Get moving”. The next day, Gretchen sings, then some more people come in.

GL: Jay Bellerose is so damn good. So tasty. He just goes in and does his thing.

KC: His heart breathes all the old jazz but he’s also someone who likes to keep pushing things. I think that was the trick with us--we always want to hear something new. Of course, there are some things that sound great that you should do again, but we all listen to music so much you just want something new. Sometimes, you have to make it yourself.

SILY: The album does sound new even though it has older reference points, both the songs themselves and aesthetically. A lot of older jazz tunes with woodwinds and fluttery strings have something eerie and disorienting about them. Thinking about a track like “Blue Skies”, when the sound cuts in and out. That’s not something you hear on traditional “standards” records. To what extent were you trying to achieve that eerie nostalgia?

GL: I think “eerie nostalgia”’s just our M.O., you know? [laughs]

KC: I like that, eerie nostalgia.

GL: I don’t even think we try. 

SILY: “For All We Know” starts out with quiet plucks of string but ends up a swinging jazz tune, the moment on here that’s the most “traditional.”

GL: Even on that one, it’s funny because our friend David Ralicke, who plays the horns on everything--he’s incredible and has such great taste. But this one, I was like “Keefus, I don’t know.” Keefus was like, “It’s gotta get big. It’s gotta be a party at the end, an explosion!” Ralicke, he sent a bunch of horns. When he sent them in, they were very bright and intense, and I was like, “Oh god, this is a little weird!” Keefus was like, “Don’t worry, I’m gonna make it weird and demented.” It is traditional, but something about the way it’s mixed or the added affects give it that eeriness, which I love.

One thing Keefus often did that was really surprising to me was there were songs I sent as straight ballads, like this one. If you listen to the lyrics, the first half is like, “Who knows what’s gonna happen? Life is so uncertain.” But then it’s like, “Who cares? Tomorrow may never come.” And it’s a celebration. It’s one of my favorite songs now after being most uncertain about it at first. Keefus, you sent me Frank Sinatra, Jr. singing “Black Knight” [as a reference]. It starts as a ballad and explodes, an emotional outburst.

SILY: Is there any other specific track on here you think is a standout?

KC: Each one is such a little episode, that even that was tricky to put in order for the record. It almost would have been interesting to go old school and release 45s, make each one of them a single and B-side. When you hear “Wild Is The Wind”, on my radio, I would make that a single. It’s totally different than the others. It’s not this powerhouse. But if I bought it as a single, I would think it’s a really beautiful single. Same with “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”. That’s on Keefus & Gretchen radio. [laughs]

GL: “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” was the very first song Keefus did. It was the only vocal recorded at my house, with a different friend in my dining room, with a little laptop mic set up. We used that vocal. It’s a pretty special one, and genre-defying. “Wild Is The Wind” fits comfortably in the jazz section. Or not--I don’t know. It’s a weird question. One of the things I hate more than anything is when I’m uploading my music and it asks you to pick a category. I don’t know. I hate picking a category. Nothing feels quite right, and it feels like a mixture of all of these things.

KC: Gretchen is a huge jazz fan listening for a long time, but jazz records strayed from her and my tastes as it went along. Jazz records went on a different road and started getting not such a punk rock vibe. It was a classy thing, not so underground. That was one thing we were talking about when finishing the record. We think it should be heard by all age groups and invite them to learn these pieces because they might not have the chance to learn them as often. To pick a genre can really be dangerous for all artists because there are a ton of artists that like a ton of different music and can make a ton of different music and change their records as they go. That was big, too: approaching this apart from being a jazz record and bringing in new listeners. Gretchen and I don’t know exaxctly how this works with the tagging on Spotify, but if you put “jazz” on it, does that mean other people will never listen to it?

GL: I don’t think it is a jazz album. It’s an album of standards, but I wouldn’t call it a jazz album.

KC: I like to call it torched songs instead of torch songs.

SILY: What was the overall approach to the sequencing?

GL: I really pulled my hair out. I was crying myself to sleep at night. It was hard. One thing we ended up doing, which was Keefus’s idea, was he felt like the A-side of the record leaned themselves more to samples and surreal electronic elements. Keefus was like, “Once you get sucked into the album, the vibe is very complementary, and you can take people anywhere.” So after the first 4-5 songs, “Wild is the Wind” comes, which is a stripped down ballad. From then, you’re just on the ride.

SILY: What was the inspiration behind the album title?

GL: I had this idea of taking a line from one of the songs as the album title. I went through all the songs and went through some of my favorite lines. At one point, I thought I was gonna call it “How Blue The Sky” which is from the last song, “While We’re Young.” But then I thought “This May Only Be A Dream” felt really good with the dreaminess of this music and the somewhat surreal journey it takes you on. One thing I’m really proud of about the record is it takes you on an emotional journey from start to finish. I know the kids don’t listen to albums anymore. Peter was one of the people I sent it to, and he said, “I feel like I watched a film listening to this album.” That felt right.

SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?

GL: Keefus’s daughter Raven [Violet Ciancia-Vincent] is a really talented visual video artist. She’s the one that directed the video for “Come Rain or Come Shine.” We made a video for the song “Don’t Explain”, and that’s just a still from the video. She layers things like a collage, so there’s a video of me with fireworks on top of it. When I was trying to come up with something to make the cover, I took a bunch of stills from the video, and that one jumped out at me, especially with the title, This May Only Be A Dream. I just thought it really worked beautifully together. The font, to me, is a throwback to the Blue Note covers. I know a lot of people do Blue Note covers, so I wanted to do a little nod to it without fully going there.

SILY: Are you planning on doing any shows?

GL: When we do end up playing live again--Keefus, I should probably talk to you about what the hell you think I should do--but some of it would be laptop-tracked songs with live bass or drums on top of it. That’s possible, right, Keefus?

KC: I would dream of a full-on 10-to-12 piece orchestra. For a special show in Los Angeles, and when everything explodes, a special show in New York and Paris. I think you could get the right band, and it’s all completely playable.

GL: Maybe a keyboard player adding samples.

KC: Do you play, Jordan? Gretchen’s looking for band members.

SILY: I don’t.

GL: Show me ya stuff, kid! [laughs]

SILY: What else is next for you?

GL: My husband [filmmaker Jacob Aaron Estes] ended up doing an alternate video for “Don’t Explain” that we’re gonna release that I’m pretty excited about. The other thing that I do--which is a totally other universe--is my Prince cover band with Maya Rudolph. I hope we start playing again. That would be great. I am glad, though, that I had so much time to focus on my own music. As much as I love doing Princess, it’s not totally me. I want to really focus on this for a while.

KC: I’m doing Pringles commericals. [laughs] I’ve been working on a bunch of shows and some records and a new soundtrack for a show [Made For Love]. I’ve made a lot of music during the last year and a half. There’s some fun stuff coming up. I’ll start a new Unloved record when our band is allowed to fly over here.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading that’s caught your attention?

GL: My mind just went utterly blank. [laughs] Utterly. I’ve been reading a lot of weird dystopian future stuff to distract my anxiety about the dystopian future stuff we’re dealing with in real life. Reading it calms my nerves.

KC: I watched the Bee Gees documentary [How Can You Mend a Broken Heart] the other night on HBO. I thought it was beautiful. They just touch those places, when you hear those voices.

[starrybluez]

I was tagged by 2 lovely mutuals @music-on-canvas and @duranarchy-in-the-uk to put together a list of the 10 songs I'm most obsessed with. Thank you both! 💜😊

This was tough for me to narrow down from my collection of music which songs I loved the most. Tried to just pick one per artist to make it a little easier. Almost all of these are rockers - the more easy-going mellow tunes are at the end.

1. New Religion – Duran Duran

I keep changing my mind on favorite Duran songs. Most of the early ones have become my babies so it's difficult to pick a favorite! 😅 I went with New Religion this time because that BASS. JT definitely wins my heart on this one. The live versions they did in the 80's are particularly great to watch. It's really a treat to hear Andy singing along with Simon. Love Andy. 💖

2. Get It On – The Power Station / T.Rex

Both versions sound great to me but if I had to choose, I really enjoy the power (no pun intended) of the Power Station one. Nice to hear Andy shredding on guitar and Robert Palmer's take on the vocal.

3. Gotta Get A Grip On You – Robert Palmer

And speaking of Robert Palmer, I can't get enough of this song of his. Incredible and versatile singer. I do recommend listening to the whole album “Some People Can Do What They Like” if you want to funk out a bit. My dad bought the album and I guess he's still a big fan since he recently quoted the chorus from "Addicted To Love".

4. White Rabbit – Jefferson Airplane

One of the many songs on this list I will sing along to. Yeah, most likely this is acid fuelled – or something to that effect, but what colorful lyrics it inspires! “Go ask Alice. When she's ten feet tallll!” Not that I'm encouraging everyone to take recreational drugs – I’ve never taken any and I can be weird and silly enough without them! 😅

5. I Want To Take You Higher – Sly & The Family Stone / Ike & Tina Turner

Only recently did I hear the Duran remake of this song. Love Simon's vocals but everything else on it was giving me a headache. Maybe if I heard it through the proper speakers instead of a tinny cellphone or computer, I could at least hear the bass. Still prefer the earlier soul singer versions. I don't think anything can beat those. Both Tina and Sly are so good, I don't even have the words. They render me speechless! On a side note, I did watch the Prince's Trust video from ’86 with Tina and a handful of my other favorite singers and she just outsang all those guys.

6. So Glad To See You Here – Paul McCartney & Wings

He's mostly known for his ballads, but this rocker is a favorite of mine. There's a whole slew of well-known guest musicians jamming on this. But really it's fun for me to just hear Paulie wailing his face off back in the day. Again, I highly recommend the album it's from. Very unpopular opinion, but I regard Back To The Egg as his best album, along with Flaming Pie.

7. Mystery Achievement – Pretenders

Another album from my family's music collection that I grew up listening to. And it's another one I would listen to in its entirety. The rhythm section along with Chrissie Hynde's amazing voice really drives the song at the beginning and then the guitars join in to carry it along to the end.

8. Suffragette City – David Bowie

Another one I have to sing along to everytime. The lyrics are too much fun not to. And it's Bowie, which should say enough right there. Hard for me to get through the whole song though without cracking up at the line “this mellow thighed chick just put my spine out of place”. Yes. I'm also really mature. 🙄

9. Turn My Back On You – Sade

This group does not get talked about enough. Again the bassline is what's most memorable for me. The singer is effortlessly cool. And if you've seen the music video, she rocks a suit as well as any of the guys in the band.

10. Many Too Many – Genesis

Now we get to the really mellow stuff towards the end. This piano ballad is often in my head. The beginning notes particularly stand out. The whole thing is very dreamlike. I'm actually more of a fan of their 70's songs than their popular 80's hits.

Bonus: 11. You Go To My Head - Frank Sinatra / Ella Fitzgerald

And I added this classic tune as a bonus, because I didn't think the list would be complete without one great jazz standard. I picked both singers’ versions – they are two of my favorites from the 40's and 50's era. I find myself getting lost in those dreamy vocals.

I could add some more bonuses, but then this list would be way too long. I tag anyone else who wants to participate!

[youcanblogifyouwantto]

Biff’s Year in Music

2020 what can I say… I feel like this meme summed up the first half of it pretty well.

https://cheezburger.com/12209157/ant-man-meme-gives-a-recap-of-all-the-horrors-of-2020-so-far

Then to top it off this last week my son developed a spontaneous pneumothorax which basically is a collapsing of his lung for no apparent reason other than he is a tall thin white adolescent. To make matters worse he is 18 and COVID is raging in all the hospitals.  Thankfully my wife is an RN and should have been a lawyer as she was able to argue her way into staying with him.  Good thing she did because one the doctors fucked up so bad she gave him another Pneumothorax by turning a valve a wrong way.  Needless to say it has been a very rough year and especially rough week for me and my family.  Music has been and always will be the only constant positive release for me.  2020 had some great music and being home for almost an entire year now has led to a lot of music consumption.  The only other thing I did almost as much as listen to music was drink and cook food to match what I was drinking.  I’ve always loved beer and wine and dabbled in Whiskey but this year was the year of the cocktail for me.  I would discover a new alcohol type and then plan crazy elaborate dinners that cocktail would either be an aperitif of digestif for. Fun yes, healthy? …That is yet to be determined. I did take up running again to counter the amount I was drinking and eating and I would say that I have consistently worked out more this year than any other year so my liver might be fucked but my heart and lungs are strong.

So to start it off, this year saw releases from some of my all-time favorite musicians that I found nice and good even but never clicked or haven’t yet.  I had been eagerly anticipating Matt Berninger’s solo release all year and I dig it but strangely not enough to return to it unless I purposely tell myself to.  The same goes for Bright Eyes, Real Estate, Sylavan Esso, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever minus Cars in Space (I played the shit out of that song), Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Car Seat Headrest, Dirty Projectors, Sufjan Stevens, Laura Marling (on first listen I thought easy top for the year then Fiona Apple came out and I haven’t returned to Laura Marling since), Damien Jurado, Jason Isbell, Neil Young (Homegrown had a special place in my heart for a month but again haven’t returned since August), Future Islands, Kevin Morby, and Busta Rhymes. All of these albums I do not hate or even dislike in fact some I liked a lot at first but just didn’t have staying power.  The following list are albums I loved that some stayed all year in rotation. Not in particular order but kinda like a Coachella poster if it’s near the top it’s one of my favorites of the year. I can be very longwinded on paper and very brief in person so I will try my antisocial tendencies to describe these albums. I will say for the most part the albums that hit this year are like comfort food music for my soul.

Waxahatchee  - St. Cloud – Home, comfort, introspective

Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher – Witty, production, great voice

Run The Jewels – RTJ4  - best running album ever. My favorite from these guys and best rap album I’ve heard in a while.

Jeff Tweedy – Love is the King. Maybe blasphemy but I like better than Warm. Perfect example of music comfort food. His biography is great too and so is the Summer teeth deluxe reissue.

Fleet Foxes – Shore – Beautiful, peaceful everything I needed from them and more. Side note Helplessness Blues was the first album review I ever wrote for ATR and I’m so glad I found those guys! Thank you for continuing the tradition.

Jeff Rosenstock – NO DREAM There was some good punk rock this year but this was the best also great running music. Rosenstock is now my go to for punk

Taylor Swift- Folk Lore- Story Telling, Sweater music, more music comfort food. And now Evermore continues the greatness. Dorothea might be my favorite track from both records. If you would have told me a Taylor Swift album would be in my tops for the year a couple of years ago I would have laughed you out of my face and now she has two albums in my tops. 2020 is one crazy year!

The Avalanches- We Will Always Love You- I’ve loved every single and was waiting for this to drop before posting this.  Well Worth the wait. I like it better than the Gorillaz release and that is saying a lot. It’s hard to have this many spot on features and keep a cohesive vibe! Johnny Marr meets MGMT is another need more of this collab.

Loma  - Don’t Shy Away- If 2020 could be articulated through music disorienting but also working from home has some perks. Good balance of weird and comfort

Adrienne Leckner – Songs- She writes great songs and performs them immaculately

Muzz- ST – The last show I went to before shutdown was Morrissey with Interpol opening and I forgot how much I love Bank’s voice.  This album is highly underrated in my opinion especially Evergreen.

Gorillaz –Song Machine – Best since Demon Days and Robert Smith/Damon Albarn Collab was never anything I thought I needed but now want more of. When Tony Allen died I went through a deep Tony Allen dive that was quite enjoyable. Great Drummer!

Dinner party – ST – The title explains it better than I can

Against All Logic – 2017-2019 – Kelly Lee Owens and this were the only electronica to stay all year both great running albums and If you can’t do it good do it hard is worth the price of admission alone

Hamilton Leithhauser- The Loves of your life- I love this man and I loved the walkmen. I feel he for me is like Frank Sinatra was for my mom. Not as sweet as a voice but can sing the hell out of a song.

Walter Martin – The world at Night- Another Walkmen member, this is another comfort food album it just feels right in my soul

Ka – Descendants Of Cain – Criminally underrated for too long this dude paints lyrical mood pictures like GZA.

Perfume Genius – Set My Heart On Fire Immediately – Beautiful Authentic Elegant

Fiona Apple – Fetch The Bolt Cutters  - Lyrically and sonically slays me. You have to like spoken word and weird rhythm texture but she nails both of those.

Bonny Light Horseman- ST – Great folk indie I just knew this was an album for me on first listen

Rose city band - Summerlong – Best new discovery, feeds my jam band meets indie soul

Strokes - The New Abnormal – I don’t know why this didn’t get more love? I loved it and The Adults are Talking is top five best Strokes songs.

Pinegrove- Marigold – More indie comfort food music

Bartees Strange – Live Forever – Second best new discovery. This dude is all over the place but in a good way. If you like this check out his singles where he covers many National songs.

Kelly Lee Owens – Inner Song- My Friend Antony described this better than I can at the current moment. Inner songs indeed.

The Killers – Imploding the Mirage- Most surprised album of the year, I’ve never been a big Killers fan but this one just wrapped it hooks inside me and didn’t let go all year

Young Jesus – Welcome to Conceptual Beach- Avant-garde or experimental music stretches me in ways that are very good for my soul and this one was such an album

My Morning Jacket – Waterfall II – Took a trip up to Humboldt in Early August and this was the soundtrack of the trip. Very much needed social distance return to nature vacation.

Hum- Inlet – I rocked out to this many a summer early fall evening sitting on my dock fishing and drinking beer.

Haim- Women in Music Pt. III – Best Haim yet and yes they are maturing into great song writers

Nation of Language- Introduction, Presence – Third best new discovery.. My friend Spencer at Shadows and Noise (a blog I’ve contributed to on occasion) accurately describes this album nicely. My wife loves Depeche Mode, New Order, and Erasure so this album is a new version of that genre that she and I can love together.

Coriky- ST – Half of Fugazi with a female drummer that sounds like classic Sleater Kinney in fact Fugazi meets Sleater Kinney is how I would describe this and that can’t be wrong!

EP’s Singles

James Blake- Before (Great marriage of his old and new)

Kruangbin & Leon Bridges- Texas Sun

Local Natives – Sour Lemon

Radio Dept – The Absence of Birds

Leon Bridges – Sweeter

Tom Berlin – Projections

Father John Misty – To S/ To R

Rostam- Unfold you

 Mank is one of the only great movies of 2020!

[jacobpaulnielsen]

Interview with Oz Fritz on working with Tom Waits and the making of 1999′s Mule Variations

Jacob Nielsen: Do you have phases with bands?

Oz Fritz: I listen to the music I grew up with all the time when I'm driving. I make mix CDs, so I have about 50 mix CDs and Dylan is definitely fairly prominent. When I first heard "Like A Rolling Stone" I had a religious experience. I kinda stopped following him when he did the Frank Sinatra songs. I didn't get that. Some of the bootlegs, the production sounds better to me than the actual album because the songs are not overly produced. A lot of his albums have terrible production. That's one thing.

JN: What do you mean?

OF: It could mean kind of a number of different things, but just that there's no excitement in the track or it obviously sounds like a drum machine. There's no real qualifier I could say that makes it sound "not good" to me. For Dylan's whole style - if you've read about how he records, he likes to record really fast and sometimes that doesn't translate. Some of his other, later stuff, is produced really well. Like "Love and Theft" and the one after that.

JN: Was it Time Out of Mind? 

OF: Time Out of Mind is a classic. Although, that one gets to sound a bit dated at times. But yeah, that's a very good production. Actually, getting back to Tom Waits...that [album] very much inspired Tom Waits. And from what I've heard, and what I'm told, Dylan was inspired by Tom Waits. 

JN: Those are two big personalities.

OF: And then there was the fact that right around then, when Dylan was touring he always had a bullet mic. A bullet mic is a kind of a green, specialty mic made by Shure that's specifically for harmonica. Plugging a mic like that directly into an amp gets that distorted sound. Tom kind of used it as part of his lo-fi aesthetic. That was a mic he would sing into to get a lo-fi version of a vocal. And so Dylan toured with that. Besides a regular mic, he had this bullet mic which, according to Tom, he never used but it was there. 

I know Tom was influenced by Time Out of Mind because the next record we did was a record Tom produced from John Hammond Jr. called Wicked Grin and he hired the same keyboard player that had been on Time Out of Mind. His name is Augie Meyers. He's an old veteran musician from Texas. Tom put together the whole band for that album and Augie Meyers was included because of his work on Time Out of Mind. 

When I was working with Tom [beginning with Mule Variations], he was constantly telling me influences and things like that. There was a constant flow of information. I know that Time Out of Mind wasn't on his radar at that point. 

JN: What were the reference tracks like for Mule Variations. Would Tom say, you know, I want "Hold On" to sound like this Rod Stewart song?

OF: No he wouldn't be that specific. Before we started, he wanted me to listen to the Radiohead album that had just come out. He wouldn't say why or what specifically about it I should hear. Just a general aesthetic I guess. 

JN: Bands like Radiohead don't seem very "on brand" for a guy like Tom Waits.

OF: Oh man. He stays really on top of what is happening. He told me about The White Stripes before anyone had ever heard of 'em. I think another one might have been The Strokes. He stays pretty involved. 

At some point near the end [of the Mule Variations sessions] he and Kathleen went to a Bjork concert. He was extremely impressed by her turntablist, who wasn’t just scratching but playing samples from records. That caused Tom to find a DJ and bring him in and have him throw some stuff down. 

JN: Right. There are samples on ‘Big In Japan’, right? What was that like in the studio?

OF: He’s constantly recording stuff. Back then, it was on cassette. I was just given a loop. Primus was doing the music for that and so he just played the loop and they played the song. It was longer, too. He edited some of the lyrics out. It got to be a little bit long, he decided. 

JN: Mule Variations is 16 songs, but it was meant to be 25. So that’s a double album. What songs were cut from the album? 

OF: There’s one called “Lost at the Bottom of the World,” which is on Orphans, and there’s one that’s never made it anywhere and it’s actually one of my favorite songs of his. It’s called “Always Keep a Diamond in Your Mind”. We recorded [Always Keep a Diamond in Your Mind] for Mule Variations and we recorded a different version for Alice. It did find life. Solomon Burke put it on one of his records. I didn’t think he did justice to the song. I love Tom’s versions way more. Those are the only ones I remember off hand. 

JN: Years ago, you had told me that the album was called Mule Variations because of all the different versions of “Get Behind the Mule”. 

OF: That’s right.

JN: Was that similar for songs like “Always Keep a Diamond in Your Mind”? Did he record that song a bunch of different ways, too? 

OF: No we only had one...or maybe two different versions. I don’t remember. He worked on it. It was definitely a song in contention [for the record]. He obviously loved the song enough to put it down again on the next albums [Alice and Blood Money]. I don’t know what went in his process on not putting it on the record. That is something he has in common with Dylan that I’ve found. Some of Dylan’s best songs, he’s not put on record. There’s one called Blind Willie McTell. Some consider it one of his best songs. 

Marc Ribot once told me (and this is just people’s theories and opinions) that Tom is wary of power. If something sounds too powerful, it turns him off.

JN: I wonder about his definition of power. I hear a song like “Come On Up to the House” or “Anywhere I Lay My Head” and I’m like holy shit. Tom has this amazing ability to sound like someone who is just totally broken. To me that’s very powerful. 

OF: Well, Marc could have been coming from the point of view of his guitar playing. We did a whole week of Ribot doing overdubs, and I love his guitar playing. At the end of it I told him that and Marc’s comment was “well...we’ll see how much of it is used.” So I think Marc might have found stuff that was really powerful in his guitar playing and it didn’t make it on to the records. 

JN: What can you recall about some of the equipment that was used on the album?

OF: So the first record that Tom did at Prairie Sun was Bone Machine. At that point, there was no “Waits Room,” there was nothing done in those lower rooms. There was only the tracking room - Studio B - and then there was the mixing room - Studio A. Studio B, the live room, sounded good but it was very generic sounding. So they started this record [Bone Machine] and they had him all set up. After one playback, Tom just hated it. He hated the sound. It lacked character, for him. So he wasn’t going to do the record there. He then had the idea to do it at his house. He rented a whole bunch of mics and mic-pres, took it to his house with engineers, but apparently it also didn’t work there. So he came back to Prairie Sun and they were just walking down that driveway. Tom was trying to think of what to do and he looked over and saw that building that has the Waits Room in it. He went in. It was a storage room and he said “well, what would this room be like if we took all the junk out of it?” So they did and it sounded amazing. So the Waits Room was actually born during the making of Bone Machine. 

So for Mule Variations, which was now eight years later, he came back and he wanted to do it in that same room. This time he took over that whole floor. At that point there was no mixing board there. No control room either. It wasn’t its own studio. The control room was upstairs in Studio B. There were lines that ran from the basement [Studio C] to the upstairs [Studio B]. It was really physically hard. To adjust a mic, I’d have to run down the hill, adjust the mic, and run up the hill. We set up playback down there so they could listen back without having to come up to the control room. That whole floor was utilized for the recording. There were two rooms: the Waits Room and the Corn Room. The Corn Room is a much bigger room. [We tracked] between those two spaces, but sometimes we used the middle part of the studio. 

So Tom would be playing in the Waits Room, he’d either be playing a guitar or piano, and he would be singing. This was basically his modus operandi for almost all of the songs, or maybe all of them: he would record his basic part first and then add stuff on. A lot of the songs, like Get Behind the Mule, would just be him, another piano/rhythm guitar, Larry Taylor (an upright bass player), and then a guy usually doing hand percussion. Occasionally, like for Filipino Box Spring Hog, drums would be set up outside the Waits Room. The door would be open so they would all have sight line and feel like they were in the same room.

As far as the equipment, he’s still all analog and analog approach. The recorder was a suitor 880 and all the mic pres were on that Neve desk upstairs [in Studio B]. This was in ‘98 or ‘99, I think maybe ‘98. Pro Tools had just come out, and Tom likes to check out new technology. Like I said, he likes to stay on top of things. 

There’s a long story about how Jacquire King got involved. I went and interviewed with Tom to do the record and then Tom kept delaying the start time. I had a bunch of dates already booked with Bill Laswell to do live sound in the summer, which I wasn’t going to give up because he’s a long term client and friend of mine. So I told Tom when they finally got the start date “there’s gonna be some days I’m not gonna be here because I’ve got to go overseas.” Tom said “Well, you know I don’t want to keep switching engineers. You know, I really love your vibe. We’ll probably do something in the future, but I want to have one engineer for the whole thing.” So, cool. Whatever. He went looking for another engineer and he’d heard about Jacquire King. They brought him up to Prairie Sun for the interview. Tom’s interview consists of a session. He doesn’t tell you when you’re going for the interview. When you get there he says, “Okay, let’s do some recording.” They did that for Jacquire and Jacquire was not experienced with analog recording at the time. They didn’t like his recording. They tried a thing in the Waits room and it just didn’t work out. So I got a call the next week from Tom, saying that he and Kathleen both like Jacquire but they realized he didn’t really have his chops up yet on analog recording. So...would I be willing to be the chief recording engineer? [I’d] set the parameters, meet with Jacquire, and show him how I do analog recording. The thing Tom liked about Jacquire was he was a Pro Tools engineer. So Jacquire became more than just a substitute for me. He brought out Pro Tools and they used it on FIlipino Box Spring Hog. Lowside of the Road might have been mixed [on Pro Tools] too. 

JN: What is the difference in mixing on Pro Tools vs. Analog?

OF: At that point, I don’t think they were using Pro Tools in the box, which means to completely mix something in the computer, strictly digital. It doesn't go to a mixing desk or any other gear outside the computer. They were using Pro Tools as the source instead of a tape machine. The reason they were using Pro Tools was because he was kind of cutting and pasting stuff and moving stuff around. Which is a lot harder to do with tape. 

I would say the whole record is maybe 80 or 90 percent analog. Even the Pro Tools stuff wasn’t mixed in Pro Tools. It went out, back through the Neve and then mixed to analog tape. 

JN: On a song like Lowside of the Road, the beginning sounds like a man snoring. Is that a vibraslap making that sound?

OF: That song had its genesis somewhere else. It came from an 8 track tape that he had. I think he recorded it at his house. That’s where the basic tracks were. They brought that into Prairie Sun and they overdubbed on top of that. I’m not sure how it started. 

JN: On Mule Variations there are a lot of these images that are “painted” with sound. Was that sort of stuff a directive to you? Did Tom say “Oz, I want this to sound like a guy snoring.”?

OF: Nothing was ever that specific. But the visuals, when you say “painted,” that’s very accurate. He wouldn’t say “make it sound like a guy’s snoring,” but when I was mixing or overdubbing Cold Water, he said he wanted more brown in the mix. Which I knew. I could relate that to a particular range or frequencies. 

When we were mixing Alice, he’d give these real abstract images. He said, “Oz. Picture yourself in a dollhouse. You’re in a dollhouse. You’re in a room in a dollhouse and a regular size person comes in and sticks their face into the dollhouse. That’s how I want my vocal to sound.”

JN: That seems pretty on brand for Tom Waits. Is that pretty unique in comparison to other artists you’ve worked with?

OF: It’s totally unique. No one else has come close to being like that in terms of direction. Bill Laswell once told me when we were working on a dub record and he told me I should reference a book called Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. That’s the only thing that comes close. 

There was a more traditional reference that came from Tom too. There’s a drummer named Andrew Borger, who’s on the record. He had made a tape, a cassette, of him playing drums. It was like an audition tape. And it was slightly overloaded. It had a particular sound, which Tom loved. He brought me that cassette tape and told me to emulate that sound. Man, it was really hard. I got a great sound, I thought. It’s the drum sound for Filipino Box Spring Hog. It’s much different than the cassette tape but that was my attempt to get that reference. 

JN: Tom is someone who’s very famous for his different voices. Songs like Pony and Cold Water are great examples of his range. Tell me about recording his different voices.

OF: They were all the same microphone, those two particular songs. There wasn’t a lot of variation on microphones. There was a lot of processing done in the mixing to try to sculpt the vocal sound. In Get Behind the Mule, he’s singing through a PVC pipe. That was the same microphone, but obviously it sounds way different because he’s singing through a pipe. That was completely his decision to do that. 

There was one time though, there was a session on the Blood Money album, where he was trying to get this song and he just couldn’t get it. I suggested to him to try a real lo-fi mic. He did and that’s how he got the vocal. That was a bit of an exception. Generally, it was always kind of the same mic that he sang into. 

Tom wanted to record Chocolate Jesus outside. He set everyone up in front of those white doors that are in front of the Waits Room. Jacquire mic’d everything up. When Tom heard it he thought it sounded too nice. Too high fidelity. So Jacquire went back. He took down all his close mics, put up a pair of shotgun mics, and recorded the whole ensemble just with these shotgun mics. I technically mixed that song but there wasn’t much to do because there were only two channels. 

JN: That’s another song that really paints a picture with sound. That recording feels like a hot summer day in the Deep South. Tom sounds exhausted, almost like a sharecropper. 

OF: Right.

JN: You don’t seek out a production credit on albums you work on, do you?

OF: Right. There’s no producer. There’s a reducer. 

JN: It sounds to me like Tom seeks out people that will help him shape the sounds that he has, not vice versa. 

OF: Yeah. You’ve got to sort of realize your place though, too. He never told me this, I was trained this way in New York...the artist is the boss. I’m doing their record. I’m not doing my record. The only creative stuff I felt free to do was on the technical side. Nowadays you have a lot of musicians who do their own engineering, so they’ll start giving you engineering suggestions. Stuff like what mics to use or even how to place them. Which is fine, but Tom never went near that at all. One time he wanted me to hear the sound of a whip on a cassette in the back of his SUV that was cranked incredibly fucking loud [laughs]. He would just try to give you references to try to go for. 

[In Listen Up!] there’s a chapter about working with Tom Waits. He talks about giving these ideas to Tom and Kathleen. He’d come up with these sounds or whatever, you know, “check this out, let’s use it!” type of thing. At one point he talks about how Tom called him up at the hotel, and if you read the book you’ll get a lot of very colorful imagery of Tom basically saying “back the fuck off,” but he says it much more politely. 

Some other input I got was, Tom was very influenced by this turntable DJ that Bjork had, and so he brought a guy in [to do that]. He was also very interested in samples. I had a sound effects library and I brought that in and we used some of the effects off of that. 

My sound effects library was on these things called DATs (Digital Audio Tapes). They were the same quality as recordable CDs. During the 90s, I was living sort of bi-costally. All of my work was back in New York and most of my work was with Bill Laswell at his Greenpoint studio in Brooklyn. Above his studio, I had converted it into an art gallery and I used to stay above the studio. I had a lot of time. I basically dubbed all of Bill’s CD sound effects and put them on DATs. [During Mule Variations], I’d bring the whole thing in. We put an auctioneer on Eyeball Kid. Tom would just come up with ideas and we would just go through [my DATs] and choose one. 

JN: The first track that comes to mind with something like your library is “What’s He Building?” Did you rely on your sound effects library when you were tracking that song?

OF: Well, that was a pretty unique recording. He did three or four takes of that song, but there was no overdubs added afterwards. Everything was completely live. It’s that big room, The Corn Room, at Prairie Sun. Tom brought any musical instrument that he had at his house, he brought to Prairie Sun. That whole floor was just tons of instruments. He had all this home-made percussion. The kind that Harry Parch would make. So there was all kinds of instruments like that in the Corn Room and he just started doing the vocal, the spoken word on a handheld mic. An SM7 or something like that. Then Kathleen and the assistant engineer at the time, Jeff Sloan (who was also a percussionist), made the background sounds. All the background sounds are them hitting stuff just kind of randomly while Tom’s doing the spoken word. Some of the sounds are from the harp of a piano just being hit. That was all done live, but he edited some of it out. There were a lot more verses.

JN: Really?

OF: Oh yeah. The guy was definitely building something in there. 

JN: This album was recorded at the peak of the CD boom in the music industry. A lot of people, at least at Tom Waits’ calibur, were recording digitally. Is there any insight as to why Tom kind of insisted on doing things analog?

OF: At Prairie Sun back then, there were no Pro Tools and that was how you recorded there. At my interview with Tom, I told him I had been listening to Bone Machine and I really liked the sound of it. 

He said “No, don’t use that as a reference. You should be listening to Rain Dogs. That’s the one I want to use as a reference for my recordings.” 

It just so happened that I knew the difference in the recording between Bone Machine and Rain Dogs. [Robert Musso], who recorded Rain Dogs, was one of my engineer teachers in New York. I knew that they did it by the New York standard, which is 30 inches per second for the tape speed, no noise reduction. I knew that Bone Machine had been recorded in California at 15 ips, half the speed and using noise reduction. The difference in those techniques is that, when you use noise reduction, you can’t slam the tape. You can’t hit the tape hard. Part of the whole New York aesthetic was...record at 30 ips, hit the tape as hard as you can without blowing things up and you get a thing called tape compression. That’s partly what makes things sound that punchy. That’s part of why Mule Variations has a bigger, more open sound. Whereas, with Bone Machine - which I love the sound of [and] I think Tchad Blake did a really excellent job mixing it - sounds a little tighter or closed.

JN: What do you mean when you say “hit the tape”?

OF: Record at a hot level, so your drums [for example] are hitting your VU meters. They’re slamming it. When people say they love the sound of tape, a lot of that is recording it to its maximum headroom. You don’t get quite the same effect when you’re doing it at 15 ips and using noise reduction. Noise reduction is severely processing the sound. Partly, the reason why records from the 50s and 60s and 70s sound bigger was the whole philosophy was using as little electronics as possible. To go as much as you could directly from the mic to the tape recorder and have as few electronics in between as possible. So that was kind of the aesthetic brought to Mule Variations. As much as possible, direct to the tape machine. With Dolby noise reduction, it’s encoding the sound when it goes into the tape machine and then decoding the sound when it comes out. That’s how it’s taking out the noise, but it’s being processed. [The sound] doesn’t go through that stage if you’re not using noise reduction. If you’re not using noise reduction, you’re almost obliged to record at a loud level because when you record at a louder level, you’re not going to get as much noise.

JN: Did Tom know that you had studied under Robert Musso?

OF: No. I told him at the interview, but he hadn’t known that prior. He did check me out a little bit. When he called me the very first time and he asked for a sample of my mixes, he called them “hyper real.” They were too big, or maybe too powerful for him. I think part of it was that he needed a professional engineer that was in the area. I’d been recommended to him by Brain, the drummer for Primus. I knew Brain from New York. The thing that Tom was super impressed with was, I sent him a tape of my ambient recording. Stuff that I had done out on the street. Interesting things. Just sounds. He liked that more than my actual mix reel. 

JN: How do you approach miking a room like the Corn Room?

OF: Well, I always had room mics. I had two U87s up in the corners of the Waits room along with all the close mics. It’s just a matter of putting up extra mics, having ambient mics. For a drum track, I use four sets of ambient mics. Two for the whole room, to get the biggest room [sound] as possible. Two that I call boom mics. They’re not close mics, but they’re not real distant so they’re like if a person was just standing in front of a drum kit.

This was an educational experience for me too. I never worked on anything like Tom Waits. I’m writing a book - my memoir about the music industry. Part of what I say in there is, when I was in New York, I learned how to make things sound as big and powerful as possible. We went to extra lengths to push the boundaries. Coming out and working with Tom Waits, that was a whole different aesthetic. He didn’t want it to sound as big, beautiful, and shiny as possible. [His] whole lo-fi aesthetic was a huge educational part of my recording career. 

Years ago, you told me that the initial mix of Hold On had these beautiful guitar arpeggios. Then Tom comes to you and says “Oz, some guy like Rod Stewart is going to come along and cover this song,” and so he didn’t want it to sound too pretty. How many other times did he come back and say “it sounds too good”?

That was really the only time. Mixing was challenging, definitely. We finished tracking and we moved from the tracking room at Prairie Sun to the mix room, which had a different board and was configured differently back then. We spent a week there, mixing. He would always love the sound of it when he was hearing it in the control room. We’d make a cassette for him but he’d listen at home and he wasn’t digging the mixes at all. It was getting to be every single day that was happening. So I was getting kind of nervous. Like, at what point am I going to get fired? 

We decided that what he didn’t really like was the sound of that board. It was a Trident board. It did have a much different sound than the Neve board. We were constantly making rough mixes. He really dug the sound of the rough mixes done in the Neve room [Studio B]. So the whole thing was…”Okay, after this week we’re going back into Studio B to mix on the Neve.” But there was one day, a Friday, when we mixed Big in Japan [on the Trident board]. At that point it had been four or five days of not really hearing anything he liked when he got home. He said “okay, give me a cassette.” He wasn’t even that thrilled with what was happening. I made him a cassette of Big in Japan and he brought it home and he just loved it. He loved the mix. All he said was he wanted the edits put back in. The tape that had been edited out was on the floor, so I had to go and dig through all these pieces of tape, find the right piece and put it back into the song. That was the mix. 

In terms of the mixing...it was a long process. He had me and Jacquire each do our own versions of mixes. I think Jacquire has three on there, or two of ‘em, from Pro Tools and then I have the rest. Most of the mixes I did, that he accepted, four or five of them were done in one night. He gets into this thing where he likes to work really fast. He doesn’t want people thinking too much. Just working on instinct. I think it was the night of Hold On that we were on a roll and did four or five songs. Eyeball Kid was mixed that night, then Come On Up to the House. 

Alice was done the same way too. He always worked Monday to Friday and took weekends off. On a Friday he walks in and says “Okay, Oz. Let’s do some mixing.” I started mixing some songs and I think we mixed three or four, just knocked them off. He loved it. He said “Well Oz, we’re on a roll. Can you stay over and work tomorrow?” Okay, sure. I worked on Saturday and I think we mixed maybe 90% of the album in those two days. That’s after trying mixes, you know, regular. Spending a whole day on a song.

JN: How many other people work like that?

OF: Well...no one. Bill Laswell to some extent, also works really fast. People have that recognition when something is happening, and they know when to stop and not to take it too far. Tom’s like that. He’s always trying to keep it alive and fresh and not too overly worked. 

[Working on Mule Variations], you didn’t know exactly what you were going to do every day. You might be thinking, okay, we’ve got all the songs done. We’re going to do overdubs today. And then he’d say, “I’ve got a new song.” It was always very Zen in the sense of...you had to pay attention to what was going on. 

JN: What new songs did he come in with?

OF: There’s one on Orphans. Rain On Me, I think it’s called. That was one where, I think we were mixing and he’s like “okay, I’ve got a new song. I want to record this.”

On Blood Money and Alice, three of the mixes were just complete rough mixes. Two of them were from [when] we recorded everything live and then the band would come in for a playback. I would run the playback into a DAT, which was CD quality. Just to hear the monitor mix. Two of those mixes were the first time anybody had ever heard it on tape, including myself. That’s just my balance going to the recorder. 

JN: What songs were those?

OF: I’m bad with titles. Something about King Edward’s Brother. I don’t remember the other one, but the very first song on Blood Money is the rough mix. 

That’s a very interesting story, too. 9/11 happened while we had some time off. The first session that we had was about a week after it happened. Tom said he was thinking about cancelling it, but if he did he would just be sitting in front of the TV getting more depressed, so we did the session. The mood was...you just feel his mood. He just projects it. Not that he’s intentionally being negative or whatever, but if he’s not in a good mood, you kind of just feel it. He came in, the mood was really heavy and says “I want to put a hand drum on Misery’s the River of the World and then I want you to give it a good rough mix.” Meaning I got to spend more than 15 minutes getting a balance. I spent two or three hours getting a decent rough mix. When it came time to mix those records, he was very concerned that those two albums were going to sound the same because they were all done in the same studio with the same musicians and the same production team. So he brought this other engineer up from LA to mix Blood Money. They did about three or four mixes of Misery is the River of the World, but he always went back and he ended up using that rough mix. I think it’s not because it’s such a brilliant mix but because there was something about the mood in the studio at the time. If you listen to the song, it’s kind of appropriate for a 9/11 aftermoment. 

JN: What do you remember about the album’s release? 

OF: Even though CDs were prevalent, everything inside the studio was an analog world. Like, I didn’t know how to use Pro Tools. It wasn’t a common thing. From what I remember, everyone always did both. Major releases still pressed to vinyl and CD. 

Tom loved all the songs that we had but there were too many of them. He had hoped to make it a double album, but the record company was shy about that because it was his first record on Epitaph. They felt like it was much harder to market a double album. Some of the songs that were chosen were at the mastering session. It went up to that last minute. I really loved Lowside of the Road, which I was less involved with. I really lobbied hard for that to be on the record. It came close to not being on the record. 

[soundsof71]

Hal Blaine: “May he rest forever on 2 and 4.”

That quote is from his family’s Facebook posting, announcing Hal Blaine’s passing at age 90.

He played on 40 #1 singles, 150 top 10s, some 6000+ tracks in all. (You’ll see stats that say north of 30,000 but don’t believe the hype. All these guys were union and kept their timecards. When Hal says more than 6000, he knew what he was talking about.)

Hal was the drummer on six straight Grammy Record of the Year winners, 1966 through 1971: 

“A Taste of Honey”, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass

“Strangers In The Night”, Frank Sinatra

“Up, Up, and Away”,  The Fifth Dimension

“Mrs. Robinson”, Simon & Garfunkel

“Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In”, The Fifth Dimension

“Bridge Over Troubled Water”, Simon & Garfunkel

Plus if it was a studio recording by The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, Sonny & Cher, Carpenters, The Association, The Fifth Dimension, or The Partridge Family, the odds are that it was probably Hal. 

You don’t need me to cue up Hal’s biggest hits like the ones listed above, or “Be My Baby”, “Good Vibrations” (Hal seen below working on it with Brian Wilson)...

...so I’m going to take you to the first song that made me say, “WHO’S PLAYING  THOSE DRUMS?!?!” The song was a deceptively complicated pop trifle called “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe, and it spent four weeks at #1, starting on March 15, 1969 (50 years ago almost to the day as I write this). 

I say deceptively complicated because even though it’s basically two verses and the chorus three times (it actually starts with the chorus, which I’m a sucker for.) There’s not even a bridge, but it manages to go through 11 key changes in less than three minutes! And while there are other instruments, I always heard it as a duet between the drums and the strings. 

You already know it was Hal Blaine on strings, and the string arranger was another member of the extended family known at the time as The Usuals, Jimmie Haskell. I was delighted to find this, as both Hal and Jimmie were well known to me from so many other albums in the family collection by then. (I was reading album credits before I was reading books.) 

This really is an astonishing track. Bubblegum pop on one level, exceptionally baroque on another, and a drums-strings pas de deux the likes of which we’ve yet to hear again. I used to listen to this on repeat for hours, singing at the top of my lungs -- including the drum breaks and strings stings (c’mon, you know you sing instrumental parts too!) spinning around and around the room until I was DIZZY. 

Check Hal’s snare kicking it off like a gunshot.

I have a couple of other gems of Hal’s that are a little off the beaten path.

I hope that y’all are enough in the know by now to not be pissing on The Partridge Family, who was making absolutely first-rate pop composed by some of the best writers of the day, with pros like Hal Blaine laying down the tracks. 

(Plus, c’mon, David Cassidy would have been a singing star without the show,  and Shirley Jones WAS a star, an Oscar-winner no less, with one of the great voices that humankind has ever been blessed with.)

“I Can Hear Your Heartbeat” uses Hal’s right foot on the bass pedal as the titular heartbeat, until the whole kit comes swinging in after the first verse. One of the keys to appreciating Hal (or any drummer, really) is to listen to when he starts and stops, and the gaps in between what his hands are doing. This one is a real gem. 

(And yes, there’s performance footage of the Partridges of course, but none of the clips SOUND good enough to hear all that Hal is up to.)

Now having sung Hal’s praises, I’ll note again that it’s possible to overstate the case (which Hal encouraged, and participated in more than once). There were plenty of other drummers on the Hollywood studio scene, including Earl Palmer (very likely on more records than Hal in fact), plus a number of times that Hal was one of a couple of drummers on a single track.

This was a Phil Spector trick. Multiple drums, multiple bassists (often one electric and one acoustic), and an army of guitars all playing at once were the key to the Wall of Sound, NOT multitracking. Sure, Phil used that too now and again, but rarely to add depth. More often for polishing, because there’s no substitute for the vibrations in the air when all those players are playing simultaneously. THAT’s the Wall of Sound, and Hal and his friends are the exact musicians Phil used.

Mike Nesmith used this "Wall of Sound” trick to fine effect when he produced one of the best tracks he wrote for The Monkees, “Mary Mary”, so sharp that it appeared in FIVE episodes, yet still manages to be too little known.

“Mary Mary” features FIVE guitarists (Glen Cambell and James Burton both on lead, with Peter Tork among the rhythm players), two bassists (Larry Knechtel and Bob West), and two drummers (Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon, whose name may also be familiar to you from Derek & The Dominoes, George Harrison, Delaney & Bonnnie,  et al.), with notable percussive support from Cary Coleman.

This is definitely Hal kicking it off, though, with a snare lick so sweet that Mike looped it three times and added it to the front of the track, making it that much easier to sample, and sampled it was, including on a nifty COVER of this track by Run-D.M.C. (even though they changed Mike’s lyric on the verses, Mike is the only writer credited) that also used Mickey’s vocal singing the words “Mary Mary”.

I should mention that The Monkees’ version of “Mary Mary” was never released as a single in the US, but WAS included as a cardboard cutout single on the back of Honey Combs cereal!!!! Yes, I had it, though, like a fool, I failed to keep  up with it.

Anyway, this is GROOVE, kids.

Last but not least, Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” (1968) was so far ahead of its time that it STILL sounds like it’s from the future. Originally recorded early in the year, it was re-recorded for the famed Elvis ‘68 TV special, but scrapped at the last minute. (Hal did in fact appear in the special!) The second version of "A Little Less Conversation” was used to outstanding effect in the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven, and a subsequent remix by Junkie XL charted even higher than Elvis’s original, going to #1 in 14 countries including the UK.

And all of ‘em featured Hal’s drums, absolutely swinging.

You’ve surely seen Hal’s name by now in the context of “The Wrecking Crew”, a name that he invented well after the era had finished to describe this loose group of LA studio aces. It was not only NOT used at the time, but explicitly and angrily rejected by many of the folks tagged with that label later (Leon Russell was so furious at the name that he insisted that the chapter of the movie devoted to him be removed, and he’s far from alone in his outrage)...but hey, as long as you keep that in mind, you can still enjoy the documentary of the same name for what it is: a long conversation between some of the folks who made some remarkable music.

You probably know the song “A Little Less Conversation” well enough (although you should check it out if you don’t), but in this little clip from the aforementioned Wrecking Crew movie, you can see 2008 Hal playing along with 1968 Hal for 30 seconds or so.

Watch his right hand in particular. It’s practically floating on air. He’s holding the drumstick so lightly that I bet you could have snuck up behind him and snatched it right out of his hand. Not that 70s rock drummers like Bonzo couldn’t swing plenty, but the death grip on drumsticks as heavy as telephone poles characteristic of later drumming is barely even the same thing as what Hal was doing.

I’m not saying one is better than the other -- I hope you know by now that I love light 60s pop every bit as much as heavy 70s rock -- but this clip tells you everything you need to know about why drummers in particular revere Hal as one of the greats...even if he pissed them off sometimes, too. 

Additional notes: the photo, the quote and some of the stats at the top are courtesy redef,  the picture of Hal with Brian Wilson is via forums.stevehoffman.tv, and the single of “Mary Mary” is via 45cat. The rest is from yewchewb, and me obsessively reading the back of albums since 1963.

Here’s a great list of highlights from Hal’s credits. You’re going to be flabbergasted by them. If you have any kind of record collection that dips into the 60s at all, you may have dozens of them.

And while most of Hal’s key work was in the 60s, he did in fact have a terrific 1971, with appearances on two albums each by The Partridge Family (including one of my favorite singles of theirs, “Echo Valley 2-6809″) and Barbra Streisand (Stoney End is one of my favorites by anyone that year), Carpenters (featuring “Rainy Days and Mondays”), and a good-sized handful more.

[rainh2oman]

Jazz Potluck - Episode 01.

Like countless folks around the world, I LOVE music. Pretty much any and all genres. JAZZ however, is the music that seems to bring the most joy in my life. As a creative person, I always need to have music on in the background while I work, (well, all the time really) and jazz has always seemed to catalyze my creativity.

I dig this sentiment from the late writer Anaïs Nin:

>>>"Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations."

This “Jazz Potluck” is something that I’ve been wanting to do for years and years, but I never quite got around to it... (I’ve got enough plates spinning already, not much room for another! Hehe.) Anyway, I’ll be sharing Spotify playlists here as often as I can... containing a rich mix of jazz that I love, and would love for YOU to love! I’m certainly no music critic, and I’ve no intention of “analyzing” the music I share, the way that a professional might. But, I will provide some brief personal notes about the songs in the playlists, and hopefully some jumping off points for further exploration, if you dig what you hear!

So without further ado, here’s the very first edition of my Jazz Potluck... Episode 01! There are 16 songs here, with no particular theme, other than that I DIG ‘em, and they get a lot of rotation in my headphones! Quite an eclectic mix!

Here’s the direct link to the playlist on Spotify - Jazz Potluck, Ep 01.

A preview of the tracks in the playlist, and some brief notes on the songs, below.

“Dirty Blonde” by The Bad Plus

“Giant Steps” by John Coltrane

“Chinoiserie” by Medeski, Martin and Wood

“This I Dig of You” by Hank Mobley

“The Windup” by Julian Lage

“3-in-1 Without The Oil” by Roland Kirk

“Gangsterism on the Rise” by Jason Moran

“II B.S.” by Charles Mingus

“It Might As Well Be Spring” by Brad Mehldau

“Gazzelloni” by Eric Dolphy

“Nu Nu” by Avishai Cohen

“Salmon Jump Suite” by Happy Apple

“Brother Mister” by Christian McBride & Inside Straight

“Tiffakonkae” by Kamasi Washington

“Greasy Granny” by the Charlie Hunter Trio

“Cease the Bombing” by Grant Green

Playlist - EP 01.

01. “Dirty Blonde” by the trio “The Bad Plus.” Starting this thing off with a BANG! From the moment I first heard this song back in 2004, I knew that I had stumbled on a Jazz Trio with something utterly unique in their music. A piano, bass and drum trio that has produced some delightful original material over the years, as well as a bunch of “cover” songs that in some ways, helped make them famous in the Jazz world.

For all of the critical acclaim the band has received over the years, one thing that has always stood out to me is the HUMOR in their music. They are often filed under “Avant Garde” Jazz... but they are really in a sub genre of their own. They play with real heart and soul, but they don’t take themselves too seriously, and they KNOW how to have a good time. When you hear all hell break loose at the 2:44 mark in “Dirty Blonde,” you’ll know that you came to the right party.

02. “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane. What can I say... I listen to this song pretty much EVERY MORNING when I wake up. If not immediately after I open my eyes, certainly by the time I’m making coffee. The fast paced tempo and saxophone wizardry of Coltrane and his crew in this Jazz standard always motivates me to get going.

If you’re not familiar with the song, here is a FANTASTIC video backgrounder on the piece, called “The Most Feared Song In Jazz, Explained.” I highly recommend watching it right before or after listening to the song. VERY enlightening!

03. “Chinoiserie” by the trio “Medeski, Martin and Wood.” What an amazingly funky cover of the Duke Ellington composition! I’ve been a fan of MMW since the early 90′s, and this album is probably my favorite, next to “Shack Man.” Medeski rocking the Hammond B3 Organ, Chris Wood’s bouncing bass, and Billy Martin’s frenetic drumming, make this tune just boogie right along. Be sure and listen to Duke’s original version of the song, to see how it sounds with a much larger band!

04. “This I Dig of You” by Hank Mobley. Uptempo, feel-good tune! (And I love Art Blakey’s drum solo around the 4:50 mark!) This is widely considered to be Mobley’s most popular original composition.

05. “The Windup” by Guitarist and Composer Julian Lage. This tune features his current Trio. I was a latecomer to the music of Julian Lage. I only really started listening to his music in 2019... but I’ve made up for lost time! (I think I have his entire catalogue now!) If you’re not familiar with Lage, he’s a prodigy  and was recognized as such by age 12. Now he’s in his early 30′s, and a career that’s going strong!

06. “3-in-1 Without The Oil” by Roland Kirk. If you’ve heard of Roland Kirk (who later went by Rahsaan Roland Kirk) you’re likely aware that he was famous for playing multiple instruments at once. I always found his crazy, loosy-goosey style to be sort of “optimistic” if that makes sense? Very unconventional, and devil may care! 

And speaking of his talent for playing multiple horns at the same time, here’s a passage from my FAVORITE novel, “Another Roadside Attraction.” Author Tom Robbins seems to really peg Roland Kirk in just one sentence.

>>>They are playing phonograph records, some wild new jazz. Straining my ears just now I heard Amanda ask, “John Paul, is it true that Roland Kirk is the entire Count Basie orchestra in drag?"

07. “Gangsterism on the Rise” by Jason Moran. I love the heavy left hand Moran utilizes on his piano in this tune. (Not unlike Pianist Ethan Inverson from “The Bad Plus” in “Dirty Blonde,” the first track in this playlist.) Boom boom boom! Here’s a quote from a music critic that pegs Moran’s style quite well: >>>“Moran is a spellbinding virtuoso who moves between boogie, avant-funk and Brahms as if he had never heard a good reason not to.”

He’s also a stylish sort of fellow....

08. “II B.S.” by Charles Mingus. I’ll have MUCH more to say about Mingus in future playlists... but I had to include at least one of his compositions in this 1st Episode! He is likely my all time favorite Jazz Composer. (He was an amazing bassist as well, but his compositions are what really knock my socks off.)

09. “It Might As Well Be Spring” by Brad Mehldau. This album was Mehldau’s major label debut, and was the first album of his that I purchased way back in 1995! What an AMAZING debut! I chose to include this cover of "It Might As Well Be Spring” because of it’s unusual and playful time signature. It’s a classic Rodgers and Hammerstein tune from the 1945 musical film “State Fair.” Mehldau does something really surprising with this classic tune, and it was such a breath of fresh air to me when I first heard it!

Here’s a passage I dig, from the great jazz book “Playing Changes,” by veteran Jazz Writer Nate Chinen. He zeroes in on what makes Mehldau’s rendition of the song unique.

>>>Introducing Brad Mehldau opens with a quick spray of staccato: tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, like someone knocking impatiently at a door. It’s the preface to Mehldau’s arrangement of a show tune, “It Might As Well Be Spring,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein film musical State Fair. The song had long been a verifiable jazz standard, with dozens of canonical recordings: by singers like Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone, and by others ranging from the pianist Bill Evans to the trumpeter Clifford Brown.

>>>Mehldau’s version arrived in 1995, precisely half a century after the line “I am starry eyed and vaguely discontented” made its way into the popular lexicon. He and his trio had made a neat structural modification to the tune, tinkering with its pulse in a way that their syncopated prelude set in clear relief. Instead of the even 4/4 cadence known as common time, the track races along in 7/8, creating the impression of a rhythmic hiccup, or a sprint with a hitch in its stride.

>>>Jazz musicians have been dabbling in irregular meters since well before Dave Brubeck’s enormously popular 1959 album Time Out, which made them an exotic selling point. What’s striking about Mehldau’s performance is where he ventures after the opening vamp, phrasing the melody in a cool, flowing cadence even as his partners, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Jorge Rossy, busy themselves with percolating chatter behind him. In his articulation of the theme, and in a solo full of deft intricacies punctuated with breathlike pauses, Mehldau gives the song a sleek, appealing contour. His performance doesn’t feel herky-jerky or cerebral. It feels natural, even inevitable.

10. “Gazzelloni” by Eric Dolphy. "Out To Lunch” was the first album I ever bought in the “Avant-Garde Jazz” genre. I certainly wouldn't have been ready for this album in my teens or early 20′s, but I’m really happy that I developed a taste for the genre in later years. It’s some of the most expressive Jazz that I’ve ever heard, and I LOVE to have it on when I’m designing something, or working on a painting. Seems to connect the creative synapses in my brain somehow!

11. “Nu Nu” by Israeli Bassist and Composer Avishai Cohen. (Not to be confused with the Jazz Trumpeter of the same name.) This song is the opening track to Cohen’s album “Continuo” and really sets the tone for the rest of the album. I don’t know what time signatures Cohen uses in this tune, but they change up frequently over the course of 5 minutes. He’s a great composer, and a MONSTER on the bass. It’s said that he took up the bass in his early teens, because he was inspired by the legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius. (An inspiration that likely applies to MANY Jazz bassists since the 70′s.)

12. “Salmon Jump Suite” by the trio known as “Happy Apple.” This song is a smash-em crash-em DEMOLITION DERBY.... and I mean that in the most respectful and delightful way! Play it loud, and I think you’ll agree. Badass.

Oh, and the Drummer is Dave King, who’s main gig is as the Drummer for the aforementioned trio “The Bad Plus.” King is one of my favorite drummers, not just in Jazz, but it ALL genres of music. A real monster on the drums!

13. “Brother Mister” by Christian McBride and his band “Inside Straight” from the album “Kind of Brown.” McBride REALLY gets around as a bassist and composer... just scroll through his credits as a sideman on his Wikipedia page! One of the hardest working musicians in ALL of Jazz! His humor and playfulness comes across in both his playing, and his compositions, and "Brother Mister” is a great example of these. “Kind of Brown” is easily my favorite McBride album!

I should also note that McBride’s funny, extrovert personality has turned him into a popular Jazz radio host! You can catch him on Sirius X, NPR and other programs.

14. “Tiffakonkae” by Kamasi Washington. I simply cannot get enough of Kamasi’s music. I find him to be one of THE greatest talents to emerge in Jazz, in it’s entire history. I don’t think that is hyperbole. I was a couple of years late in discovering him, but since the day I heard his first album “The Epic,” he has been on my DAILY listening routine. No kidding.

If you like what you hear in this cut from his 2nd full length album, do yourself a favor and watch/listen to this special on NPR, that will show you some of what I’m talking about. It’s a 2 hour live performance and series of brief interviews with Kamasi and his collaborators, known as “The West Coast Get Down.” It might give you a buzz.

I’ll be featuring Kamasi and company on PLENTY of Jazz Potluck playlists going forward!!!

Here’s Nate Chinen again, from his book “Playing Changes,” talking about Kamasi bursting onto the scene. (Indeed, Chinen opens the first chapter of the book with Kamasi!)

>>>Kamasi Washington stood tall on a lot of big stages during his Year of Ascendance. Swaying in tempo, pushing heavy gusts through his tenor saxophone, he exuded the regal composure of a conquering hero: dauntless, doubtless, ablaze with rugged purpose. His sound on the horn—rangy and intemperate, or clipped and urgent—suggested an almost tactile force, a physical fact. He cut an equally imposing visual presence, in an unkempt Afro, a thick beard, and a dashiki, its patterned fabric loosely draped over his burly frame. And as his band raged around him, the music’s exultant sprawl enacted a ritual of transcendence. It was all rattling and ecstatic, maybe a little mystical. For many who bore witness, it was, brazenly, something to believe in.

15. “Greasy Granny” by the Charlie Hunter Trio. This album was my first introduction to this virtuosic Guitarist, back in 1995. (I seem to be including a number of albums from 1995 in this list... funny coincidence!) Anyway, as you listen to this tune, keep in mind that he is playing bass lines, chords AND melodies, ALL SIMULTANEOUSLY!!! I don’t know how in the hell he does it, but I’ve seen him performing live a few times over the years, and he makes it look effortless!

This song, “Greasy Granny” is as FUN as the name suggests.

16. “Cease the Bombing” by Guitarist Grant Green, from his 1970 album “Carryin’ On.” Figured I’d close out this 1st Episode of the Jazz Potluck with a long and smooth groove. Easy like Sunday morning.........

Stay well, people!

[let-it-raines]

I'm going to follow the "it's the time for giving" motto of that annon and give you my love and admiration, because you and your writing always brighten my day. Also, could I ask for a CS fic where someone walks by a street musician every day in her way to work and she always bring him coffe and something to eat because she thinks he's poor and could use some help, but actually he's like a super star and just plays in the street for fun? 😘

Hi, Anon! Thanks so much for your kind words! They brighten my day, and I really appreciate you and want to give you all of my love and admiration! I love this idea, and I really hope you like this prompt answer!

She’s not exactly sure how it started, but she stops by The Bean (yeah, she knows it’s a cheesy name for a coffee shop but it’s better and cheaper than Starbucks) and buys two cups of coffee five days a week. One is black, the bitter smell of the hot liquid invading her senses, while the other is full of sugar and milk, really more of a latte than anything. But she’s never been a fan of coffee alone. She likes when it’s mixed in with sweets, and she can get her sugar and caffeine fix all at once.

If she has to walk a few extra blocks to burn it off, it’s worth it.

So she buys two cups, walks out of The Bean, and makes her way to the office, her heels tucked away in her purse while her feet are clothed in white tennis shoes to walk the New York streets. She looks like every movie cliché of a New Yorker, but she doesn’t care. She’s not crazy enough to wear heels while walking (and walking and walking) through crowds to get to work.

The sounds of horns honking, people talking, tires screeching, and buildings being repaired with the loudest drills imaginable fill her ears for a few blocks until things start to get quieter and calmer, Manhattan someone feeling a little peaceful. And like every morning, she hears a guitar being expertly plucked and a melodic voice singing along to a song from at least half a century ago, and she smiles at the familiar, wonderful sound.

The source of the music comes into sight when she turns the corner and passes the thirty-third street subway station. She could have swiped her metro card and ridden here, sure, but she’s got to work off the latte (and maybe the pizza she ate last night). Plus, she likes watching the people, tourists mixed with locals, and all of the different cultures being combined. She’s not saying New York City is the greatest city in the world, but it’s got to come close with the way it’s like walking through different countries and cultures all in one day.

Today’s apparently a Frank Sinatra day for her favorite street performer, a fitting choice for New York City, and she can already feel herself humming along as she gets closer and closer to him. Today he’s got on an old Yankees cap, the blue edges fraying on the side, as well as his usual jeans with worn out holes in the knees and his trusty black leather jacket that he must take expert care of for the condition it’s in. He smiles when he sees her, nodding his head in acknowledgment, but not stopping his playing. He’s really brilliant, could probably be somebody if he wasn’t a street musician in an area where it’s mostly poor recent graduates and curry restaurants, but life isn’t fair and sometimes the talented don’t get their big break.

When she checks her watch, she realizes she doesn’t have time to stay and listen or chat, as they sometimes do, so she carefully places his black coffee down next to his guitar case, flashes him a smile, and is then off to work.

And so goes nearly every morning of her life.

Tuesday he sings the songs of Elvis. She gives him his coffee.

Wednesday it’s the Beatles, his one voice somehow capturing some of the magic of all of theirs. She gives him his coffee.

Thursday it’s Bing Crosby. She gives him his coffee.

Friday he jams out to the Backstreet Boys. She gives him his coffee and a tip for making her laugh before eight in the morning on a Friday after a long week of work.

Her weekend passes as normal, time spent doing laundry, buying groceries, cleaning, and going out with her friends on Saturday night, and on Monday, she buys her two cups of coffee and makes her way to work. She gets to Murray Hill, expecting to see her musical coffee acquaintance, but he’s not there.

And he’s not there on Tuesday or Wednesday or for the next two weeks. After week one, she stops buying the coffee, having to tell her regular barista she doesn’t need it. She gets a pitying look, something she does not appreciate it, and she carries that awful feeling in her gut on her way to work and every time she takes a sip of her own coffee. It’s ridiculous how one little change in her day can affect her so much, but she’s a woman of routine. She likes doing the same thing at the same time, and her British street singer not being there is throwing her off in the mornings.

She wonders if maybe he got a job, something that takes up his mornings. She doesn’t really know what he did to begin with, if he even had a job. She’s always kind of assumed he didn’t have one or maybe he worked gigs at night along with his street performances. He’s a nice looking guy, stunning blue eyes and a neatly trimmed beard that covers a defined jaw, and his hair is always cleanly cut. So he definitely spends time on his appearance and has the funds to do so, but she doesn’t know many people who have well-paying jobs and spend their mornings performing on the streets.

He’s a mystery, one she thinks about far too much on her strolls to and from work, and as the days pass, she wonders where her Mystery Musical Man has gone off to.

But then one day, music blaring in her headphones, she’s walking her same path, one coffee cup in her hand, and she sees him strumming along on his guitar. She’s a little early this morning, so even though she doesn’t have his coffee, she stops and listens to him playing a majorly stripped down version of We Are the Champions.

There’s no one else around, everyone looking past the street performer, so when it’s over, she throws some cash into the guitar case and flashes him a smile before opening her mouth. “Where have you been?”

He quirks an eyebrow, the thick black brow practically reaching his hairline, before he flashes his perfectly white teeth and eyes her coffee mug. “Did you miss me?”

She shrugs, not really sure how to carry on this conversation with a man who is a stranger but also not. “I guess so. I didn’t – I stopped buying your coffee. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, love,” he insists, “I wasn’t around. Wouldn’t want you to waste your money, but I did miss you and your coffee.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely. They don’t make black coffee in LA, and they don’t have pretty lasses bring it to you.”

That throws her for multiple reasons, but it’s mostly because he admitted to being in LA…and maybe a little bit that he called her pretty, but she’s going to harbor that secret inside and pretend her cheeks don’t heat. But seriously. What the hell was he doing in LA? Is she even allowed to ask? Is that taking a step too far?

“What a pity,” she says instead of everything she wants to say. “I wonder how you survived.”

“The hardest few weeks of my life honestly. I didn’t think I was going to make it.”She barks out a laugh before talking to him for a few more minutes, only leaving when she absolutely has to get to the office, and while her life feels a little more settled having him back, she’s also full of every question imaginable.

Mostly, what the hell does he do? Why was he in LA for weeks? Why does he perform in such a calm spot when there are better out there? And what is his name?

The next day she buys two cups of coffee, the barista giving her another pitying smile, and she walks her usual walk, dropping the steaming cup off every day. They talk a little more than they used to, but it’s never about anything serious, and she still doesn’t have any answers to any of her questions. If anything, the man is more of a mystery than he was at the beginning, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

He’s between songs when she walks up, his guitar resting on his back, and so she hands him his cup instead of placing it on the ground.

“Thank you, love.”

“Yeah, no problem.” She doesn’t know what else to say, the awkwardness somehow filling the entirety of Manhattan. But like the smooth talker she is, she blurts out her next words. “What’s your name?”

He’s in the middle of sipping on his coffee when she asks, so she impatiently watches him drink the liquid, his throat bobbing, and it takes a hell of a lot of restraint to hold herself back from just running away.

“Killian,” he finally answers, flashing her a smile. “And you?”

“Do you not have a last name?”

“I do. I just didn’t think you’d care.”

“I care. I’m Emma Swan if that helps.”

“Jones then. Killian Jones.”

Her lips twitch, laughter practically bubbling below the surface. “Did you phrase it that way so you could say your name like James Bond?”

“I guess you’ll never know.”

So now she knows Mystery Musical Man’s name, but she doesn’t think she’s ever going to call him anything else in her head. That’s what she’s called him for months now, and it’s hard to change things. But now he calls her Swan every morning, and it makes her smile. Of course, it’s only after a few weeks that she realizes he likely knew her name because it was on all of the coffee cups. But she kind of finds it endearing that he never used her name without her permission.

It starts with an exchange of coffee, and the floodgates open when there’s an exchange of names. Every day is nearly the same, but when she hands him his coffee, he calls her Swan and makes an extra effort to interact with her. Sometimes he even messes with lyrics, changing the names around to fit hers, and it brightens her day so that work doesn’t seem so dreary. As the days pass, they talk more and more. She wakes up earlier to buy their coffee so she can get to Murray Hill faster, and they talk until she absolutely has to go to work, his musical stylings lessening as they get caught up in talking to each other, learning a bit more about the other.

She tells him she’s in family law, and he tells her he’s a musician. She doesn’t quite understand that, really wanting to know what he does outside of performing on the street, but he never says more. If he doesn’t want to share, that’s perfectly fine. The only reason she’s sharing things about herself is because this is a man she talks to for fifteen minutes a day and who likely will move his spot somewhere else more populated to make more money.

But he never moves. He’s always there, and if he’s not going to be, he tells her the day before. All of the changes become part of her routine, and she becomes quite fond of her daily chats with Mystery Musical Man Killian Jones.

And then one day everything changes.

There’s a monsoon raging through New York, water hitting you no matter how bundled up you are in your rain boots and coats and umbrellas. The streets are as full of water as they are of people, and as much as she logically knows there’s no way Killian’s going to be performing today, she still stops in The Bean and goes to buy her coffee.

“Hey, Hannah, can I get the usual?”

“Uh, the guy in the gray beanie over there,” she points to the corner of the shop where there’s a man bundled up in plaid and jeans with the aforementioned beanie on, “he already bought your orders. Is that the boyfriend you’ve been buying coffee for all this time?”

“No boyfriend,” she answers automatically, still staring at the man to see if it’s Killian. She can’t tell from this angle. “But I’m gonna go see who this guy is.”

She nods to Hannah before walking away and walking toward the man in the corner. He’s pretty well hidden, which she finds suspicious until she gets a good look at his profile and can tell that it’s Killian. Her tense shoulders relax, and she sighs in relief before unceremoniously plopping down in the seat across from him.

“So you stalking me now?” she jokes as blue eyes look up to meet her. “Because I’ve got to say, I’m not sure the coffee I bring you every morning is worth all of the hassle.”

His hand reaches up to scratch behind his ear while his eyes crinkle as he gives her a lopsided grin. “I’m not stalking you. I, well, I can’t perform in all of this rain, and I still needed my coffee fix.”

“How’d you even figure out it was this store? You know this is a chain, right?”

He shrugs. “Google, some powers of deduction, and a whole lot of luck.”“Well color me impressed Mystery Musical Man.”

Killian barks out a laugh, loud enough that people turn to look at him. “I’m sorry. What did you just call me?”

Heat rises in her cheeks while the rain pours down outside. She’s dramatic, but she kind of wishes she could run away with the rain right now. “Um, nothing.”

“No, no,” Killian teases, leaning over the table and waggling his eyebrows while flashing her another smile, amusement stretched across all of his features, “you called me Mystery Musical Man. Swan, I didn’t know you had a nickname for me.”

“Yeah, well, I went a few months not knowing who you were. What was I supposed to do?”

“Ask me my name.”

“I did…eventually.” He smiles before sliding her coffee over to her, and she accepts it before taking a sip, the liquid cool enough that she knows he’s been here awhile. “So, um, can I ask you a question? And you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Sure, love, but I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t tell you unless you’re about to ask me some deep, personal secret like if I’ve ever dyed my hair.”

She snorts into her drink, shaking her head back and forth. “No, no. I’d never ask such a deeply personal question, but I do, um, what the hell is it that you do for a living?”

His brows furrow, and he clicks his teeth. “Didn’t we talk about this already? I’m a musician.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but do you do anything else besides performing before eight in the morning? I know this is rude, but I’m just…curious.”

“Tis not rude. What someone does for a living is basic conversation. But seriously, no. I’m a musician, and I do play more than the mornings. That’s honestly just for fun.”

“So where do you play? I’d love to come see you.” He raises his eyebrows, salaciously smirking at her in a way that makes her cheeks heat again. Is she just going to word vomit everything today? “To see you play. I’d love to see you play.”

“I know what you meant, love. I, um, I haven’t had many gigs lately, but I am playing next Friday night if you’d like to come.”

“Really? Where?”

Killian’s jaw ticks and his eyes look up at the ceiling like he’s trying to figure out what to say. Has she pushed too far? Is she making him uncomfortable? But then again, he told her he’d like for her to come.

“Tell you what, love, I’m going to get you some tickets for you and a friend, and the address will be on them. Does that work for you?”

“It makes you seem like the definition of Mystery Musical Man.”

“Yeah, well, that’s apparently who I am.”

They talk a little more before he walks with her to work, bypassing his regular playing spot and taking her right to the office. She doesn’t know what to say when they’re leaving, but Killian figures that out for her, leaning in and brushing a kiss against her cheek that lights her entire body on fire.

“So how exactly did you score these tickets?” Ruby questions as they walk into Madison Square Garden, people milling around in every direction and making it difficult to find their seats.

“You know the street performer who I bring coffee to?”

“Your Mystery Musical Man?”

“That’s the one.”

“Shit,” Ruby whistles as they find their way into a roped off section, only a few other people in their seats there. “He got you these? How?”

She shrugs, leaning closer to Ruby as the opening act for the White Sails sets up. “I’ve got no clue. He said that he’s performing, and I about flipped out when he gave me the tickets this morning and saw where they were. But I don’t know who the White Sails are, and honestly, I think he’s probably a guitarist for their opening act or something.”

“Do you think he was asking you on a date when he gave you these? Are you sure he’s even performing?”

“He told me to bring a friend so no, and he definitely said he was performing.”

“Huh. Curious. But hey, we get a free night out, so let’s go with it.”

The opening act is pretty good, someone she’s also never heard of, but that’s pretty much par for the course tonight. And Killian is most definitely not up there, so her confusion continues to grow while she tries to figure out what’s going on. Maybe she should have been more direct in her questioning. She’s never that wishy washy at work or with anyone else, but she never wanted to accidentally insult Killian in questioning his job when he may not have one. But he can get her nice seats to a concert in Madison Square Garden, so now she’s really confused.

And she also really wishes he was here so she could talk to him. She barely got to this morning, and they weren’t able to talk about the cliffhanger on The Good Place last night.

The opening act eventually finishes, and instruments on the stage are interchanged before several men, each of them in head to toe black, walk out on stage to the sound of cheers and wolf whistles.

And that’s when she sees him, front and center holding a different guitar with his hair bare of a baseball cap and a presence that’s totally different than the one he usually has while they’re talking on the street.

“Holy shit.”

“I know, right?” Ruby agrees, yelling over the crowd into her ear, “they’re hot.”

“No, Rubes, that’s him.”

“That’s who?”

“The singer, the guy up front.” She points up to him as he fiddles with the tuning of his guitars, “that’s Mystery Musical Man.”

“Holy shit.”

“Hello, everybody,” he begins, the familiar voice booming through the microphone, “I’m so glad you all can be here tonight. I know it’s been awhile since we performed, but it took a bit to get some inspiration for our new songs, though I finally found some lately. So I thank you for being patient with us. I’m Killian Jones, and we are The White Sails.”

Yeah, she needs to sit down or be pinched (or punched really) because all of the coffee has obviously destroyed her brain cells.

She and Ruby make their way backstage after what is a frankly incredible show, and while her brain managed to chill itself out about halfway through the concert, she’s still freaking out because she just doesn’t understand. Why would someone who performs in Madison Square Garden also perform on the sidewalk in Murray Hill? He said it was just for fun but still. And why does no one but her really notice him? Sometimes there’s a crowd, but it just…it doesn’t make any sense.

And she’s still waiting to wake up from whatever kind of dream this is.

But then Killian walks out of a backroom in a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt with a smile on his face entirely focused on her. He steps toward her, his hand scratching behind his ear, before he’s standing directly in front of her.

She doesn’t know what to say, so she blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. “I’m sorry I didn’t buy you a coffee.”

He shrugs while he laughs, his lips ticking up on one side. “That’s okay, love. I think maybe you can have a pass this time.” He leans forward and wraps his arms around her, embracing her. “Did you have a good time?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she pulls back, nodding her head and smiling, “that was incredible. You’re incredible. I’m just entirely confused.”

Ruby coughs behind her, and she’s brought out of her confusion and disbelief and a little bit (a lot) of a crush that’s been developing for weeks now. “And this is Ruby Lucas.”

“Nice to meet you, Mystery Musical Man. I came with to make sure my girl wasn’t going to get murdered tonight.”

“Totally understandable,” Killian laughs, shaking Ruby’s hand. “That’s why there were two tickets. To prevent the murder, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupts, shaking her head back and forth, “I just have a lot of questions.”

“Well, Swan, maybe I have some answers. Do you – ” he looks behind him where someone is calling his name “ – can you and Ruby wait here while I do a bit of quick business?”

“Sure. That’s fine.”

Killian jogs off, running over to whoever was calling him, and she and Ruby sit down on a bench behind them. Ruby fiddles with her phone while Emma tries to think through everything, connecting the nice, normal guy she’s come to really like with the man she saw up on stage commanding thousands of people with his voice. He’s still Killian, that much she knows, and when he said he was a musician, he definitely wasn’t lying. She kind of just thought he performed in bars.

“So according to Wikipedia, your new boyfriend is thirty-four, is from London, and he’s been playing the guitar since he was twelve.”

“I knew all of that, and he’s not my boyfriend.”

“He’s going to be.”

“Ruby.”

“Listen, Ems,” Ruby commands, hitting her in the shoulder, “out of the kindness of your heart you have been buying this man coffee and talking to him every day for months because you thought he was a struggling artist and really appreciated him as a musician and as a person. You like him. He likes you. What he does for a living doesn’t matter. It’s cool as hell, don’t lie to yourself, but it doesn’t matter to you, does it?”

“Not at all.”

“Then I say you take life as it comes to you, and you should go for what you want.”

So she does.

As soon as Killian comes back into view, she walks toward him with a purpose in her step, and before he can say anything, she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him. He takes a moment to kiss her back, but when he does, it’s soft and slow, his lips caressing hers while his hands thread into his hair and hers do the same. His whiskers are rough against her chin, and right before she pulls back, he growls, something that nearly makes her keep going as if she doesn’t need air.

But she does, would die without it, and pulls back, putting some space between their lips while their foreheads rest together.

“So the whole being in a band thing really did it for you, huh?”

“No,” she promises, quickly brushing her lips against his again, “I don’t care about that. It’s awesome, but I don’t care.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. All I really want is to buy you a coffee.”

Killian laughs against her lips, the vibrations moving through her. “You know what, Swan? I think I can buy this time.”

She and Killian go get coffee two days later. Killian buys despite her protests, but that’s okay. She buys the next time they go. And it goes on like that for weeks and then months and eventually years. As time goes on, they stop going out to buy coffee. Instead they get their caffeine fixes in their home, and she has several White Sails albums dedicated to her that she listens to on her way to work. It’s not quite the same as getting a live performance right outside the office, but she thinks she may like it better this way.

Actually, she knows that she does. She can get a live performance at home.

[demidemilitclub]

3 and 4 from the newest asks? 🌿but especially 3 and if that's still too wide please tell me something about one artist you just love right now! 😇

3. What is your favorite music genre? AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH. The problem with a question like this is as soon as someone asks, I completely forget every single song I’ve ever listened to.

However, I will endeavor to answer this to the best of my ability, though not so much as a complete list, but more of a general feel. Also, you can always ask me about specific artists/songs/albums/genres that I do or don’t include in this list. (Also, while I would normally hyperlink songs, that’s just so many and I’ve already taken long enough to answer this ask.)

Classical: I know it’s not the proper term for the entire genre if you’re a musician, but you generally get what I’m going at. Of particular note would be Chopin, Vivaldi’s “Winter”, Saint-Saens’ “Danse Macabre”, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, Beethoven’s 5th and 9th Symphonies, Mozart’s Symphony 40, Mozart’s Requiem, Strauss’ “Blue Danube”, Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War” Tschaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”, Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.” Stuff generally along those lines.

Ballet/Opera: Ballets include Tschaikovsky's Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, Bizet’s Carmen, Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore and “The Drinking Song” from La Traviata and “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto. Honorary mention goes to Verdi’s Macbeth because, I mean, it’s Macbeth, you can’t go wrong with Macbeth.

Musical Theater: I f*cking love musical theater, so if you want to send me more specific musical theater asks, knock yourselves out, but there’s just so much that I couldn’t even start. Just know that I define “Musical Theater” as basically Gilbert & Sullivan to present-day Broadway/West End.

Jazz: I specifically really like classic club jazz, the sort of swing/big band stylings of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, et al. I also really like East Coast Jazz (an informal term that refers to not-West Coast Jazz), like John Coltrane.

Big Band/Swing: Glenn Miller, Harry James, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day, etc. You get the idea.

Country: Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, John Denver, Dusty Springfield.

Metal: Dragonforce, Metallica, Black Sabbath.

Classic Rock: Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals (of “House of the Rising Sun” fame), Pink Flyod, Jimi Hendrix, Credence Clearwater Revival, Blue Oyster Cult, and all that other good dad music. The only exceptions are Jimmy Buffet (he’s fine, he’s just not in my rotation) and Grateful Dead.

Memes: If the song is a meme, or used in a meme, I like it.

Songs That Never Fail to Get White People Beyond Turnt: That whole list? BOPS.

70s/80s: Journey, Kansas, “Heat of the Moment” by Asia, Queen, David Bowie, Elton John, Tears for Fears, etc.

Hip Hop/Rap: I really like sort of “classic”/“old school” hip hop and rap, like N.W.A., The Notorious B.I.G., “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang, Tupac, and the sort of 80s-early 00s hip hop and rap. I also enjoy Childish Gambino, Chance the Rapper, Kendrick Lamar, and Lil Nas X. This is a genre that I really need to sit down and listen to more often, because it’s definitely something I’ve grown into.

Emo: Evanescence, My Chemical Romance, Panic! At the Disco, Fall Out Boy, Green Day.

Soundtracks: Movie and game soundtracks are awesome. Like with musical theater, ask me about specifics, but to give you a vague idea: Schindler’s List, Dark Souls III, Legend of the Colossus, Undertale, Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and pretty much 99% of Disney (specific shoutouts to Hunckback, Hercules, and Mulan). Plus, I love me some Hans Zimmer.

Honorable Mention: The sort of cinematic, Southern Gothic music that “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac or “Ghost Riders in the Sky” by Johnny Cash evokes. Check out the trailer for Netflix’s “Remastered: Robert Johnson” for another great example.

Misc/I Don’t Know How Genres Work: Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Supremes, Heart, Joan Jett, Billy Joel, Daft Punk, “Rhythm Nation” by Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Robert Johnson, saintmotel, Misterwives, Fats Domino, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Janelle Monae.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch of stuff I like, but that just shows how eclectic my taste in music is.

If there’s anything you think I missed, or want clarification or to ask a more specific question, feel free to ask!

4. Have you ever had a penpal? Not really, no. I mean, I’ve written various kinds of letters to people as part of school assignments over the years, but I never really went back and forth with one person. I always thought it would be kind of fun though.

[lovebunnie]

Do all the asks coward

1. what does your wallet look like?

-i got it as a present from my uncle for christmas and its really expensive but also so ugly im sorry uncle tom. its like that ‘southern fashion’ bullshit that white MAGA moms wear. but it was better than my old wallet, which looks like this and i got when i was 12:

2. favorite color?

- baby pinnk

3. do you own a pride flag, or more than one?

-heres the thing: my parents basically know im not straight but i havent told them. my brother has thought i was a lesbian since freshman year, i have a small pride pin on my backpack, ive never been on a date, its complicated. but no, i dont have one. maybe one day, hopefully.

4. describe your favorite outfit

-black pants, platform doc martens, hoodie under a jean jacket, one clip on earring, and holding my crushes hand :]

5. when was the last time a girl made your heart flutter, and what’d she do?

-okay so theres this girl in my theatre class who is really cute, and she put her head on my shoulder and shes pagan so she drew a little sigil on my arm that means “safe and homely” so like :)))))))))))))

6. do you use nail polish?

-i do, i mostly do black tho

7. do you keep organized?

-absolutely. i have things online filed accordingly, i pick out my outfits the day before, my binders are neat, i learned how to army fold my shirts, i keep my shit CLEAN

8. ever take naps?

-only accidentally. ill be laying in bed watching youtube and next thing you know my autoplay has me watching a markiplier video even tho i dont like him and its 4 hours later

9. who was your first crush?

-idk if this is a real person or not so ill do both. my first fake person crush was either troy from high school musical or frankie stein from monster high. and my first real crush was on a boy named dominic in elementary school. i told him i liked him at the end of 5th grade because i thought i was switching schools but then i didnt and we never spoke again.

10. what are your crush tendencies? fall hard or often?

-both both both. i am the worst with crushes. i have crushes all the time because im romantic and a fucking fool. i have 3 crushes off the top of my head rn and i like them all for different reasons. thats not to say that i want to date them, but its that i like them a lot and i kinda wanna kiss their cheek or hold their hand idk

11. describe your ideal day

-play overwatch with my best friend (u gonble >:) ) then hang out with my cat, go get a smoothie, buy some cool shoes or something, take a shower and be asleep by 9 :,)

12. describe your ideal date

-i have stated that build a bear is an amazing first date and im NOT BACKING DOWN. ITS CUTE AS FUCK AND ILL ACCEPT NOTHING LESS!!

13. whats your favorite food?

-either sushi or strawberries :3c

14. who do you feel most comfortable around?

-my theatre class, people from camp, and gobble

15. what is your favorite compliment to receive?

-i dont have a favorite, any and all are going to make my face go red so i have to cover it and maybe make me cry

16. did you/do you like highschool?

-the first 3 years fucking sucked but senior year has been amazing so far. mostly because i just kinda stopped giving a fuck but its amazing

17. favorite animal?

-i think its cats now. i really like cats

18. do you like your name?

-eh, its okay. its pretty but also it seems like there are 60 million fucking people named grace and its so annoying. i wish it was something more unique idk

19. what kind of weather is your favorite?

-a light rain. no swinging trees or thunder, just lots of rain. its nice to stay inside and feel secure

20. do you believe in horoscopes?

-absolutely not. but theyre fun if you like them

21. tell us about your music taste

-its horrific. to sum it up, my two favorite musicians are the gorillaz and frank sinatra. take from that what you will

22. have you had your first kiss? if so, what was it like?

-i havent had my first kiss yet. gonna be honest, i felt like i was going to, a few times at camp and recently when classes ended. but yeah, nothing yet

23. did you have a favorite stuffed animal as a kid?

-i went thro cycles of favorites. but one ive had for years is a plush shadow the hedgehog from universal studios i got when i was 6. i used to carry him around, even to a pool once

24. what time do you usually wake up and go to bed?

-if you know me, you know i go to bed ridiculously early. i usually get tried at around 6pm and fall asleep between 7:45 and 8:30. and i always wake up before 6 am. i havent slept past 6 am continuously since the end of junior year. please help me

25. what dream trip would you take with your wife?

-maybe to go explore new york, just the two of us that sounds like fun :]

26. do you have any pets?

-i have 2 dogs and a cat. the family owns the dogs but that cat is mine

27. what pair of underwear is your favorite?

-uhhhhhhhhhhh i have some with rainbows that are cool? i dont have favorites, none of them are cute anyway

28. what makes you smile?

-funny jokes make me smile real hard, and if you compliment me at the right time, i kind of pull my legs up and hide my face? its cute and charming i promise

29. what makes you feel heavy?

-in both the physical and metaphorical sense, eating bread

30. what makes you feel better?

-watching bo burnham always makes me feel better, hes my go to whenever im really depressed

31. how do you show your love?

-i show my love in everything i do. everything i do is for love, i love love so much its sickening

32. when is it time to get a haircut?

-whenever u want to lol?

33. where would you live if you could live anywhere?

-maybe san francisco, its beautiful and i love the city

34. do your friends and family take good care of you?

-as much as i allow them to. sometimes i go days without communicating and i know thats annoying but my friends put up with it (they shouldnt have to, i know) and my family is okay. its cliche to say, but they honestly dont understand what im going thro alot of the times, esp with my anxiety and shit

35. have you always used the labels you use now?

-back in the beginning of highschool, i used they/them pronouns and identified as asexual/aromantic. eventually, it didnt feel right, so i know identify as cis and bisexual and that feels right to me

36. what makes you laugh?

-my friends, when people shit talk gobble and i in overwatch even tho???? we didnt know him?????? and the mcelroys always get me

37. who is your favorite fictional character?

-too many options, see list here

38. who do yo admire?

-my father when hes not threatening to throw my phone into a fucking lake and my friends for putting up with me

39. describe yourself in three words

-i am baby

40. how long does it take you to get ready in the morning? 

-usually about 45 min, more or less as each day goes

41. what do you wish you could tell your younger self?

-listen: STOP GIVING A FUCK ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE. YOU WILL NEVER SEE THEM AGAIN, BE YOURSELF. STOP HIDING AND BEING SCARED OF YOURSELF, BE GENUINE!!!!

42. what would you do if you win the lottery?

-get my parents settled, see about other family members, and then distribute the money to charities accordingly, starting with flint and getting them water

43. would you call yourself a romantic?

-yes

44. what is your gayest childhood memory?

-my mom had cosmos magazines

45. do you have tattoos or want any?

-i dont have any tattoos but ive been obsessed with them since the 6th grade. id love to get tattoos, i just dont know what or where and also im afraid of pain

46. whats your worst habit?

-either biting my thumbs, starving myself, or ghosting my friends. prob ghosting my friends

47. what are you proud of?

-i guess coming out of my shell finally? idk, i actually have friends now and it feels amazing tbh. im in 5 group chats now. i havent been in a group chat since 6th grade. :))))))

48. did you know that youre actually a gift to the world, for real?

-hi i love you?

49. whats your favorite memory?

-there are so so many. but what comes to mind first is our dance night at camp where we all stood outside and i finally gave ian my tumblr and we all ran inside to dance to mr. brightside then ran outside again and we requested nightcore and rivers was fucking dancing their hearts out and we all sang along and im going to crying just typing this out

50. do you have a sweet tooth?

-i guess so. too much makes me feel like shit but i do really enjoy smarties

51. what do you like most about yourself?

-this is dumb, but my sense of style. since i got a job ive been wearing shit i actually like and its amazing. ill admit i have cool clothes

52. what makes you fall for a girl?

-besides acknowledging me, probably getting to know me and not like, putting me on a pedestal. idk its weird, ive met a lot of people this year who like to place me so high it feels like i cant make a mistake around them without disappointing them. idk, i want someone to call me out on my bullshit instead of assuring me im okay. i want to know what i do wrong so i can fix it

53. make a recommendation

-for what? uhh okay for music, listen to ‘clay pigeons’ by michael cera (yes i know michael cera) and for television, watch bojack horseman and for movies, watch the docuseries called ‘7 days out’ on netflix

54. have you ever had your heart broken?

-yeah, when i broke up with maddy because we werent ready to date. i cared and continue to care about her and i didnt want to hurt her but i knew its what we both needed. its what i needed, atleast. and i cant be a good girlfriend if i feel like im doing badly. but also ive had friends break my heart and family break my heart. but im okay now, this heart is ready to be broken again

55. when do you feel most yourself?

-def when i was at camp, that place is magical in the way it allows you to be yourself. but also when i talk to gobble because hes my best friend and when im at college, we can talk more and its gonna be dope as shit

56. name a gorgeous celeb

-jake gyllenhaal jake gyllenhaal jake gyllenhaal 

57. what are some of your favorite songs this week?

-fake happy by paramore, im not okay (i promise) by my chemical romance, tomorrow comes today by gorillaz

58. tell us 2 or your biggest hopes and fears

-biggest hopes: i publish a book someday & i get a job doing something i love

-biggest fears: i end up homeless and broke & something horrific happens in college

59. what flavor chapstick/lipbalm is the best?

-raspberry i guess

60. are you okay?

-i answered a lot more honestly then i shouldve for some of these and i start new classes tomorrow so im feeling really anxious so im doing alright i guess.

gobble you test me but i do love you

[nationaldoyoungday]

hi!! 💗 i really love your aus 💘 and i was wondering if you have any text au recs?

uwu hi??? thank you i’m glad you like them!! and yes i DO have recs, i have so many omg i just want to spread the love!! underneath the cut are some (a lot) of my favorites thank you so much for asking this 💖💞💝💘💕✨

complicated by @daisyong

19/19 (completed) / jaemin x reader - where both jaemin and y/n are idols and everything is more complicated.

↳ LISTEN. this is so cute i tear up thinking about it. it’s so FLUFFY idk it’s just really good if you wanna feel soft about jaemin

chlorine dreams by @dahyunmingyu

15/15 (completed) / jaehyun x reader - there’s been a long standing rivalry at your school between the basketball team and the swim team. the swim team has been undefeated for 4 years, whereas the basketball team hasn’t won a game in 3. every year the basketball team ends up with all of the funding for the athletics department whereas half of the school doesn’t even know the swim team exists. with a bet that jaehyun wouldn’t even be able to finish a swim practice, y/n threatens the existence of both of their teams

↳ this is such an original idea and um i’m weak for swimmer!nct and it’s just really good pls read it

three’s a crowd by @qiankulture

14/14 (completed) / yuta x reader, ten x reader - y/n and yuta are a dance duo who are often assumed to be dating by fans because of their intimate pieces and how they act around each other. everything is all fine and dandy until a certain model comes into the picture.

↳ i read this before i started this account i think? and just it’s really good words can’t describe how much i like it :(

what is love? by @qiankulture

13/13 (completed) / donghyuck x reader - when haechan pulls a prank on unsuspecting y/n, she isn’t too happy. she does her best to avoid him at all costs. but it seems the universe has other plans because everywhere she looks, haechan is there.

↳ hnnng this was so cute that i hate it? the way that donghyuck tries to tell her that he’s his soulmate? my heart. anyways it’s so good! pls my heart can’t handle it

love bot by @dreamloveclub

7/7 (completed) / mark x reader - mark lee was never good with words — except when it came to talking about you. hidden behind the sanctuary of anonymity, he uses the Love Bot to express his feelings about you.

↳ if you read only one thing on this list PLEASE read this omg!! ellie is a genius and this is quite possibly the cutest thing i’ve ever read in my life? it’s such a good idea and she didn’t get enough love for it :(

love bug by @dreamloveclub

4/? (discontinued) / jeno x reader - two computer science majors and self-proclaimed amateur hackers unknowingly race against each other to find out who their secret admirers are. true love is but a click away.

↳ i didn’t think anything after love bot could be so good but this? it proved me wrong djdjdhdh it’s just as good and as always they are both dumb pls read it

puppy love by @dreammutual

13/13 (completed) / renjun x reader - renjun accidentally likes a picture on y/n’s instagram from almost 2 years ago and, foolery ensues when their mutual friends try to get them together.

↳ this made me spill all my uwus its so cute and funny omg please! i’ve said this already but i really love this (i really love everything on this list djdjdj)

not me, not you by @dyngdo

22/22 (completed) / doyoung x reader - in which a rivalry since grade school never died. y/n has always hated doyoung, and he’s always hated her, or at least that’s what they claim. but when y/n and doyoung have been framed for a crime they didn’t commit, the two have to work together to find out the truth. but amidst all the chaos, they can’t figure out what that bubbling feeling inside their chest is.

↳ as i said before, i am weak for doyoung so uh! surprise another doyoung au djdjdj but whenever this gets updated my heart? i have so much love for this fic

destined by @godrics

22/22 (completed) / donghyuck x reader - the red string of fate exists, and only few families are able to see the string, and these few families can actually cut strings and knot other people’s strings in to alter the soulmate laws. your family have been able to see the red string of fate since the beginning of time, and you are no exception. when you come back to korea after spending your summer in america, you had not expected your best friend to have a boyfriend that wasn’t their soulmate. and you did not expect their boyfriend to be your soulmate. despite this, you want your best friend to be happy, and if that means not spending the rest of your life with your soulmate and being happy yourself, then so be it.

↳ i also believe i read this before making this account? but anyways i love soulmate aus and i have a thing for the red string of fate it’s my favorite!! but this was so realistic (as realistic as a soulmate au can be LMAO) and it was really good!!!

my first and last by @godrics

20/20 (completed) / jaemin x reader - in which na jaemin finally gets the chance he’s been waiting for.

↳ again jaemin fluff? here please just read it. words can’t describe how cute this was!!

fan by @markleeh

25/25 (completed) / jaemin x reader - in which idol!jaemin finds a cellphone number of a nctzen.

↳ hhhhh this was so funny? renjun is such a savage djdjdj i’m always crying when i read this i wish my friends were this funny

how can i love you? by @markleeh

18/18 (completed) / jeno x reader - in which y/n just wants to know how youtuber!jeno looks so fine and how he likes his eggs in the morning.

↳ this was so cute too uwu everything on this list was cute tbh but this was the cutest (i want to know how jeno likes his eggs in the morning too)

not my type by @nakajeno

25/25 (completed) / yuta x reader - y/n doesn’t fall in love, neither does yuta – instead, they make others fall in love with them.

↳ yeah anyways yuta needs more appreciation and love and this fic really. hit me in the feels anyways read this or :/ it was so good jdjdjdjd i’m saying that about everything but? it’s true!

home sweet home by @dreamboynana

22/22 (completed) / renjun x reader - maybe falling in love with teen model huang renjun was a bad idea….but then again when did you ever think things through?

↳ rei is such a good writer omg!! renjun as a model hell yes!! anyways this has the perfect amount of fluff and angst and if you don’t read it you’re a coward it deserves all the love in the world

need to know by @solecitojun

20/? (in progress) / yukhei x reader, taeyong x reader - friendships are all meant to be based on honesty, yet there are many things being hidden in yours. in which your bestfriend has to figure out his feelings, and college is sending everyone on a spiral.

↳ ok listen. so i read a few aus before i started this account but um. this was the very first au and i’m telling you. i hate it so much but i love it more ughghgh i hate angst but um this really is trying to get me to love it!! yukhei deserves more but i mean don’t we all?

too late by @solecitojun

3/? (in progress) / doyoung x reader - same upbringing, same neighborhood, same lifestyle ; but what he thinks is two different worlds. they’re both from the underground scence, one fighter and another a musician. years are left uncovered. could it be too late for him, or for you?

↳ doyoung. that’s all i have to say djdjdj. no but seriously your au ideas are so good and this one is no exception i love it :(

sunrise by @wereseoyoung

15/15 (completed) / johnny x reader - no. moon y/n is not in love with one of the university night time radio hosts. it’s just a crush! … kinda… but he’s not interested! … probably.

↳ if you hear me screaming about something? it’s this fic? listen there aren’t like. any johnny aus out there but this one makes up for it because its SO GOOD?? this is literally all i’m ever going to talk about for the rest of my life unfollow me if you haven’t read this djdjdjd i love it so much :(((

starstruck by @wereseoyoung

1/? (in progress) / yuta x reader - can you believe that every tuesday practice the yuta nakamoto — smu alumni and now striker of one of korea’s biggest soccer clubs — will come down to help assist with practices? y/n doesn’t really care though. her job is to be the manager. not be impressed by some soccer star. but maybe sometimes he’s kinda cool.

↳ anyways can’t believe you are a genius and really have an au planned out for every member? i wish i was as organized and talented as you!!! this hasn’t even really started and i’m already in love save me :(

black and blue by @1nomins

10/10 (completed) / jaemin x reader, jeno x reader - everywhere a soulmate touches leaves flowers, and everywhere someone else you’ve fallen in love with touches leaves bruises. you’re happy to suffer.

↳ spence did you know i hate you because of this. not really but i love everything you write and it’s always angsty and i always end up hurting afterwards but its worth it :(

10 step love by @1nomins

12/12 (completed) / jeno x reader - or, alternatively, lee jeno’s (and huang renjun’s) 10 step foolproof program to getting the girl.

↳ can’t believe you wrote something so fluffy? anyways this is like my guilty pleasure and i love the playlist for it!! with the frank sinatra songs sjdjdjdj

1-800-loveline by @1nomins

15/15 (completed) / jeno x reader - you never imagined that finding a phone number in a school library book could lead to anything. you were oh-so-wrong.

↳ loveline? yeah i hate it. only read this if you feel like hurting yourself! i’m kidding, it’s so good but so sad but worth it in the end, as it is with anything spence writes