Alex Bain's Blog

What's been in my ears

Lately, whenever I turn on my iPod, it's to listen to one of three things:

1. Adam Carolla
2. Ken Burns' Jazz
3. Bill Simmons' iMixes

We'll go through them one at a time.

Adam Carolla's radio show can be downloaded automatically through iTunes, one segment at a time, commercial-free. His style of comedy is not for everyone, but I think he's a genius. Not only is he great at pointing out hypocrisy, like when he rants about how he hates the lottery, but he's also got a very inspirational rags-to-riches story, a community college dropout who fought his way into fame by working his ass off. There's a great LA Magazine article about him, with a quote I think about a lot. He said:

“It’s action that matters. If you don’t like your life, change it. You can change your life. You may feel the same, but if you change your behavior, you will be different.”

Ken Burns' jazz collection has served as a terrific introduction to the world of jazz for me. I've been reading about the genre lately, and intending to listen to more of it, but I didn't know quite where to start. It's intimidating to me, like Starbucks was before I figured out that "venti" meant "large". I'm sure that a year from now, I'll have a good sized collection, and I'll know what I'm talking about, but it's a scary new world to me at the moment.

Bill Simmons is my favorite sports writer, but he also has extraordinarily eclectic taste in music. Whenever he's written about music in the past, I almost always either don't agree with him, or don't know the bands he's talking about. However, he does brag that he always controls the iPod on long car rides with his family or friends, so maybe he's onto something. He mentioned in a column once that he'd put together a few iMixes on iTunes, and when I checked them out, I'd never seen any of the bands before. I was going for a long walk the other day, and downloaded one of them to try it out. It's actually pretty good, and it's not stuff I'd have ever heard otherwise.

My current favorite Christmas songs

We've been listening to a bunch of Christmas music here on Putnam Ave, and I just can't get enough of these two that I found through iTunes Essentials:

• Old School: Christmas will really be Christmas, Lou Rawls
• Modern: Christmas is going to the Dogs, Eels

My "Interactive" playlist on my iPod

Lisa and I both rarely sing in public. The last time I got up to do karaoke, it was a complete falsetto train-wreck.

We both sing in the car though. We have a few decently rehearsed duets, and a few songs we aspire to nail, but haven't gotten there yet. I've put them all together on one playlist, and when we're on a long road trip, we practice our "set-list" one future show-stopper at a time.

Here's what we've got so far:

• Midnight Train to Georgia - I'm Gladys 99% of the time, and Lisa's the collective Pips. We've got this particular version down pat, but it falls apart at the end, and we found out the hard way a month ago that it doesn't work in front of a big group of people.
• That was a Crazy Game of Poker - We mostly only sing the chorus together on this one.
• Baby, It's Cold Outside - This is what we play as our encore. Not a dry eye in the room by the time we're done. We've only got one verse down, but we'll have more by the end of the holidays.
• Alone - We sing the Carrie Underwood version from bootlegged from American Idol, but we can do the real thing too.
• King of the Road - This is exclusively me. I change some of the words to make it topical. This sits nicely in my range.
• Roxanne - I touch the roof of the car on the word Roxanne, Lisa touches on "put on the red light". It's a fun spin on an old drinking game.
• Shoop - This is in early development stages. Lisa's not sold on it yet. I got the idea from the Dan Band. I think it'd be very funny if she did the girls' parts and I did the brief male rap in the middle.
• Surrey with the Fringe on Top - This comes from When Harry Met Sally. We also live next to a Surrey Street, which always makes us think of that scene.
• Copacabana - Lisa does a mean Spanish version of this tune. It's her time to shine we hear the opening bars of this diddy. She recently discovered this Spanish version on iTMS if you're interested to hear what she sounds like.

My favorite Muppet in action: Animal vs. Buddy Rich

I grew up watching The Muppet Show (in reruns), and my favorite character was always Animal, the drummer. He was out of his mind, and sick on the drums; a ton of fun to watch. Well, because YouTube is amazing, you can see a classic Animal clip now, for free. And if you like this one, there's also a great one of him playing the song Fever.