🎵 Orville Peck has a really cool voice.

🎧 My speakers and headphones sound so clear and exciting again now that I’ve got my equipment stack up and running again!

My favorite piece of Schiit came back to me in the mail today. Now that my Magni 3 Heresy is repaired, it is as good as new.

Hmm…I don’t mind them myself, but I think the swears on Taylor Swift’s new album might be too much to expose my 8-year-old daughter—our family’s resident Taylor Swift fan— to. I don’t mind the f-bombs in “Hamilton,” but the meaning there is different.

My daughter is going to freak out when I tell her that a surprise Taylor Swift album dropped today. It’s getting rave reviews.

🎵 I am really enjoying the new album by “The Chicks”. That band wasn’t on my radar for a long, long time until the recent news that they changed their name.

🎵 I’m trying something different tonight: a K-Pop playlist of BLACKPINK. I think I like it. At times, my brain certainly is getting scrambled. 😅

Well, my Schiit Magni Heresy just got fried. 😢 While listening to it over headphones, it made a popping sound, then started humming and crackling loudly. I hope Schiit honors their warranty, because I loved that thing. I use it as a headphone amp and a preamp for my desktop speakers, the latter of which have just been rendered useless.

🎵 I have been enjoying the Breaking Singer/Songwriter playlist on Apple Music quite a bit today.

Tonight I’m taking a trip down memory lane with 10,000 Maniacs.

“MTV Unplugged” was a huge hit from 1993, when I was a sophomore in high school. Back then, I listened to ”In My Tribe” and “Our Time In Eden” (my favorite 10,000 Maniacs record) back-to-back all the time.

Another live performance, from 1998, was just released a couple days ago, too.

🎵 I am enjoying “Future Nostalga” by Dua Lipa.

🎵 Today’s listen: “I Miss Britpop.” So do I, Apple Music, so do I.

🎵 Today’s listen: “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships” by The 1975. I must be crazy because I did not like this album earlier (I thought it was wildly overrated), but I just had to listen to “Love It If We Made It” today, and the rest of the album came along with it. 🤷‍♂️

🎵 Today’s listen: The “Andrew Bird Essentials” playlist on Apple Music. I don’t know Andrew Bird’s music too well, but I’m really enjoying it so far.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Honeymoon” by Beach Bunny. I’m a big fan of the lead single, from way last year: “Dream Boy”. The rest of the album, which I’ve been waiting a long time for, is a fun listen. I love lead singer/bandleader Lili Trifilio’s balance of insecurity and poise in her both her lyrics and performance.

🎵 I like the new Nada Surf album.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Out of Time” by R.E.M. This is one of the foundational albums in my music collection. It’s 10th track, “Country Feedback,” is R.E.M.’s best song, in my opinion (and in Michael Stipe’s).

🎧 I haven’t been listening to all my awesome headphones nearly as much for the past week, because of some tinnitus-related problems (which I have discovered may not have anything to do with noise exposure). It’s uncanny how weird they sound all of the sudden.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Old Dominion” (2019) by Old Dominion. This is a pleasant country album with great playing and production. None of the songs really grabbed me, but I enjoyed the album nonetheless. It’s the sort of music I like to have on but not really listen too closely to.

🎵 Today’s listen: “WestWorld: Season 2 (Music from the HBO Series)” by Ramin Djawadi. I am getting psyched for season 3, which starts in March. Season 2 had some awesome atmospheric music as well as cool covers of “Runaway”, “Heart Shaped Box” (I like the piano one best), and “Seven Nation Army”.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Manic” by Halsey. Overall, I like it. But, after one listen, I don’t have a strong opinion about it or any track on it. I’ll give it another shot later this week.

🎵 Today’s listen: “Kiwanuka” by Michael Kiwanuka. With its mix of soul, Afrobeat, and psychedelia, it sounds timeless, or, maybe, somehow plucked out of time and brought forward about forty years to now.

I was thinking of “Russian Doll” and put on “Gotta Get Up” by Harry Nillson. Curious about the song, I looked it up on Wikipedia.

From Wikipedia:

In 2019, “Gotta Get Up” was prominently featured as the “reset” song in the Netflix series Russian Doll. The song plays each time the series’ protagonist Nadia (co-creator Natasha Lyonne) dies and returns to the same location – a bathroom at her 36th birthday party. Its use is similar to that of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” from the 1993 film Groundhog Day. Lyonne explained that in choosing the song she was struck by the “buoyant doomsday quality” of Nilsson’s life. The cost of using the song so many times took up a significant portion of the music budget. His estate also limited how many times the song could be used.

Reading this got me thinking about what nonsense music rights are for TV and movies. Why are song rights so expensive? Moreover, why should Nillson’s estate be able to limit “how many times the songs could be used? (Harry Nilsson died in 1994.) That sounds so frustrating to deal with. I don’t understand why more TV producers don’t just hire musicians to record cover versions and cut out, at the very least, the performance royalties. (I know this sometimes happens. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more.)

🎵 Today’s listen: “Free Yourself Up” by Lake Street Dive, which is a fun, Boston-based, blue-eyed-soul group. My favorite track on this album is “Good Kisser”, which is what I mainly choose listen to when building a playlist, but the whole record is worth a listen.

🎵 Today’s listen: “69 Love Songs” by The Magnetic Fields. This is an amazing triple album full of diverse, smart, and interesting songs-not just love songs, but songs about love, and even about love songs. There really are 69 songs, 23 per album, which make it almost a box set in and of itself.