Music

  • Top 40 Over 40.7: Egypt by Youssou N’Dour

    This album was one of a few that made me want to try putting strings on my next record.  I don’t like how strings are often used in western pop as a soft bed of sound in the background.  I do like how they carry the lead parts on much of this album.  The Egyptian…

  • Other John Davises.2: Practice Space Music

    In a parallel lifetime, I moonlight as the lead singer of Korn.  If you haven’t seen me recently, the ‘locks may seem like a bit of a stylistic departure from the shorter look you can see below at left: Chris from Refrigerator wrestled me to the ground until I promised to grow my hair out…

  • one small letter, one big difference

    I love the smell of geraniums in the morning… …and I love the sound of Germaniums at night!  

  • Top 40 Over 40.6: Unplugged Youth

    I can think of few artists more identified with the electric guitar than Thurston Moore.  Unlike the guitar god of classic rock, Jimmy Page, who layered his hard rock records with gobs of acoustic fretted instrumens, the guitar god of post punk / undie music always stayed electric.  The only exception I can think of…

  • To the victor go the spoils…

    The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio.  When Boyd asked…

  • Top 40 Over 40.5: Sun Ra, live in 1989

    One of my great regrets in life is that I never got to see Sun Ra and his Arkestra live before the great man passed.  If I had arrived a little earlier, I would have.  They played the campus of the University I attended the year before I got there – which was in fact…

  • Prarie Wind P.S.

    As an addendum to my post of April 8th on Neil Young’s album Prarie Wind in general, and song “It’s A Dream” in particular, I’m posting this video clip of the late Thai monk Achaan Chah, in whose lineage many of the Western Insight Meditation teachers I have studied with over the years trained..   “(One…

  • Top 40 Over 40.4: Prarie Wind

    I don’t usually pay much attention to stories about the circumstances in which a particular record came to be.  However, the stories about the timing of this record are an exception.  Neil Young made this record in Nashville in 2005, shortly before going to the hospital for surgery for a brain aneurysm.  Combined with the…

  • Top 40 Over 40.3: Dimanche a Bamako

    My next fave record in this series is Dimanche a Bamako by Amadou & Meriam, which came out in 2005.  I have to thank this record for introducing me to the amazing music that has come out of Mali over the years.  I heard this album on the radio after it came out on WERS…

  • Top 40 Over 40.2: Let England Shake

    When I quit making records in 2001, I had a lot of different thoughts bolting around my brain.  One of them was that since musicians almost always do their best work in their 20’s, I was heading for a period of diminishing creative returns, even if that didn’t mean diminishing rewards in terms of money…