If you notice, I haven't written anything in three weeks, and that's because there hasn't been anything much to write about.
On a personal front, the major things going on is I'm facing partial unemployment -- my company just cut everyone's hours and salaries to 40%, and we go on employment for the rest, which means I'll be making about 70% of what I was before. This is doable, at least in the short term, provided I can ever actually get registered for the unemployment. I've already put about 5-1/2 hours into the process, but apparently I'm the one person out of the eight or nine at my company who are doing this (all the full-timers) who still isn't fully registered. Have I ever told you guys how much I hate the various branches and departments of our government. (At one point in the process, they transferred me to someone who was supposed to be a specialist for the program I'm going on, only to find myself talking to the New York State Police. The unemployment people have been transferring people to and giving out the wrong number!)
Last weekend was kind of weird, as my family headed upstate to celebrate my niece's birthday/high school graduation. It was the first time I've had the house to myself (with just the three cats) since pre-COVID days. It was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was delightful to be able to go to the bathroom any time I felt the urge without being doo-dee-dooed (our family's term for when you're just about to head into the bathroom, but somebody cuts you off and gets in there before you). It was also nice to be able to hit the bed for a nap without having to negotiate a room change with my wife. (She usually works out of the bedroom and I work out of the living room, so if I want to take a nap, she has to move her whole base of operations. More often than not these days, if I get hit with that sudden urge to sleep, I just drop off uncomfortably in my recliner rather than go through the whole room-exchange process.) But I also missed them, and after five months of togetherness, it was unusual to be home alone. I was worried I might have to fend off Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern.
I have been listening to a lot of music, especially stuff from 2020, as I work my way toward my 2020 Best-of-the-Year lists. I guess the most interesting albums I've heard lately were Auri by Auri, and Every Bad by Porridge Radio.
Auri is a side-project type band that includes Tuomas Holopainen and Troy Donockley from Nightwish and the Finnish vocalist Johanna Kurkela. The band is a little folkier and a little less grandiose than Nightwish, but retains many of the elements I like best about Nightwish's music. (Holopainen must be an interesting character. He seems to only love operatic female vocalists, but he also must be hard on them -- he's burnt through three of them over the course of nine Nightwish studio albums.) The Auri album is from 2018.
Porridge Radio (PR) is a British indie rock band from Brighton, UK with a sassy female vocalist. In some ways, they remind me of Florence + the Machine, except that vocalist Dana Margolin is less of a belt-out-it vocalist than Florence Welch - she talks as much as sings - and at least on this LP, PR is more consistent in their songwriting. (I've often described Florence + the Machine as being Annie Lennox in desperate need of a Dave Stewart.)
The only other musical thing I have to tell you about it is a recent live YouTube concert. Last weekend, with the fam away, I really had only three things on my calendar. I had a work meeting scheduled on Saturday morning (which is one of the reasons I didn't go upstate with the others); I had a televised UFC card on Saturday night (which my DVR didn't record for some reason, but to tell you the truth, I didn't really miss it); and for Friday night, I had an EP-Release Party by Mree, broadcast on YouTube.
Now Mree is actually Marie Hsiao, a young singer-songwriter from New Jersey. Her music falls somewhere between the genre's of indie-folk and dream pop. It's soft, with lovely, ethereal vocals. In 2019, her song "In the Kitchen" from the EP The Middle came in at #5 on my Top 20 Songs of 2019 list. She has a new EP out this year called The Bloom, which I really like. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about this concert.
One of the things that's been driven home to me time and again over the last decade or so since the closing of The Pisces Cafe was just how high the level of professionalism there was compared to some things I see from other parts of the country. A lot of the artists there were young, but I guess they watched and learned from the more experienced artists who performed there regularly, so that whatever level they were at as songwriters and musicians, their shows were at least generally run in a pretty crisp fashion.
I don't want to trash Mree. I think she's immensely talented, and as far as I can tell, she seems like a really pleasant young woman. But here's what happened.
First off, although the show was scheduled for a 9PM start, it was at least 9:12 or so before she came on the air. (It could have been later - I don't remember anymore.) I figured there must be technical difficulties going on, and I almost gave up on the show entirely when the dead screen finally came alive.
OK yay! Time for some music. Well...not so much. Mree still wasn't set up properly to start. Apparently she was trying to broadcast to Twitch and YouTube at the same time, and her video monitor was going back and forth between them and confusing the hell out of her.
Now I'm going to give her a little bit of a break here. These online concerts are still pretty new for most artists. A lot of them had never even tried such a thing prior to the COVID, so they - and the people who are trying to help broadcast them - are learning as they go. I haven't watched a lot of live shows on the Internet, but I've seen both Leslie Mendelson (and My Father's Place) and Blackmore's Night have problems with them. I guess the person who has done the best so far was Jeremy Gilchrist, and from what Denise tells me, he's got some other stuff going on right now and probably won't be on again anytime in the near future.
But the gist of the problem was this - for most of this show, Mree spent a ridiculous amount of time talking off the top of her head between songs and getting totally distracted by watching the chat rooms. When you could actually get her singing, the music was beautiful, but the delays, and the absent-minded chatter drove my poor little ADD brain berserk, to the point that I couldn't wait for the concert to be over. In all, it lasted about an hour-and-a-half from when I first tuned in until she played what she announced as her last song. She was going to stay on the air afterwards for a question-and-after session afterwards. And unless her audience talked her into going back on her word and playing more music at some point, it must have been a hell of a question-answer session - the show is up on YouTube now, and it's listed as being two hours and forty-two minutes long.
My point in all this isn't to bury Mree. I kind of hope she never reads this. (Of course you know how those things work out - witness the Wonderous Stories-Tommy debacle.) Or if she does read this, I hope she takes it to heart and realizes that what I'm really writing about how to not your fans crazy during live (or live broadcast) shows.
My point is to tell young artists to try to think about how things feel from your audience's point of view. People are there to hear the music. If you have an interesting story to tell about the song you're about to play, excellent. But if you take a ton of time between songs, and if you just talk off the top of your head, or chatter on because you're nervous, it's going to be a frustrating experience for those listening at home. If there's a chatroom going, great - get somebody else to run it for you, so you can concentrate on the music.
Having said all of that, let me just repeat that Mree's new EP is excellent, and if you at all like her style of music (she's very Enya-esque), pick it up, and give it a listen. Having heard her two most recent EP's, I'm definitely going to pick up some of her earlier albums and check them out. If you want to hear this concert, it's there on YouTube, but don't judge her by that - she is much, much better than you'll see her here.
That's about it for now. The only Sputnik Music contest I've been involved in lately is a '90s One-Hit-Wonder contest. So maybe I'll tell you about it once it has concluded.
Anyway, I have to pee something fierce, and Denise just doo-dee-dooed me again it. Dammit! I've got to go!
