Spitball Army

I’ve got a pile of these lists, going back decades, and it’s sometimes an unwelcome jolt to see the music I was championing back then. Other times, it’s the trigger that forces out a barely audible “Aw,” then a scramble to find that recording I haven’t heard in ten years.

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As expected, the record made a multitude of Best of 2007 lists, which are kinda hard to avoid this time of year. Not that I make an effort to avoid them – I have a perverse fascination with lists, anyway, and to deride them would make me a hypocrite when I post mine in a couple of days.

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It is charming, quirky, sung not entirely in tune, and contains the phrase “shook a little turd out of the bottom of your pants.” How many songs can claim that?

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Every year I look forward to watching the broadcast of this annual event, then do a Homer Simpson DOH! when I hear about it the day after it aired. Not that it should be difficult to catch – the show traditionally airs during the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. But my brain gets wiped clean after the Christmas retail season, and the week after is spent stumbling along, trying to remember my name and where I put the car keys.

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So it was no surprise to see his recent article in Wired magazine, entitled “David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists – and Megastars,” in which he attempts to simplify the ridiculously complicated new world of music production and dissemination.

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Daniel Tashian, a musician I admire, posted this new Christmas song on his website yesterday.

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Philip Glass performing at Change Your Mind Day in Central Park in NYC (1999)

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This evening, after finally locking the doors, we were cleaning up with the store iPod playing in shuffle mode (yes, we use an mp3 player at a CD store…what of it?! 23,191 songs, by the way), when this came on:

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Did I say how rabidly anxious I am to see I’m Not There? I am. Anxious. And rabidly so.

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Fogelberg, who was ridiculously successful during a nearly twenty-year period when his hyper-romantic ballads were in constant rotation on radio stations throughout the nation, was frequently derided for being either (a) sappy, (b) wimpy, or (c) sappy and wimpy.

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