I remember times when I was younger and used to practice many, many hours a day (I wish I had the time to still do that now). I would feel like I can really play and then go and do a gig and none of what I practiced came out, or, even worse, I would feel I played very badly and wouldn’t understand how it is that after all those hours of hard work I still sucked. Well, here’s my theory:

The song shuffle function in iTunes is one of the coolest features of the application because I end up listening to a lot of songs that I normally wouldn’t seek out in a listening session.  A few nights ago, I was traveling home from a gig and several different songs came up in my iTunes that sparked an excursion into the jungle of the last couple decades of shredding, gained up riffage, and metal.

 

Metal has become such a broad term and the tracks discussed below certainly run the spectrum of metal.  A lot of bands that used to be considered “metal” have been reclassified as rock by a lot of modern listeners.  I think this is largely due to how the genre has progressively become heavier and heavier as the decades have rolled over.  Certain characteristics within the music and time periods have created sub-genres of metal, (like glam-metal, grindcore, metalcore, Nu metal, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, mathcore, etc.) which is great for classifying different bands more accurately.  All of...

I had the very good fortune to receive reissues of the entire Pink Floyd catalog, including"Experience" editions of Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon (thought, alas, not the big "Immersion" box sets).

Mr. Jake rolled back into town this past weekend, although not in exactly the same fashion as most musicians who are unquestionably at the top of their field.

While I was in Los Angeles attending the Billboard/Variety Music for Film & Television Conference a few months ago, I met Ritch Esra, who was promoting directories published by the Music Business Registry, as well as numerous other industry related publications, including the encyclopedic Indie Bible. We spoke for nearly an hour about the current state of the music industry, where it might be heading, the ways in which technological and business innovations were affecting its evolution, etc.—and afterward he offered to send me review copies of several directories.