Heard this guy for the first time on the radio this morning, and it made this sleepy white lady’s hair stand on end.
If I heard right, Son Little descrbes his music as a Wu Tang Clan sea chanty with Beatles singing backup. I haven’t bought an album in about ten years, but I think it’s time to change that. Woo!
From my new article in Our Sunday Visitor about Sam Rocha and his new album, Late to Love:
[Rocha] experienced his first high liturgy at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and a whole new aesthetic world opened up. “I felt like I walked out of the folk tradition and walked into a marble hall,” he said. “It helped me process the idea that there is a bigger Church out there.”
But stark aesthetic contrasts can sometimes be deceptive. “Whenever I heard a High Mass,” Rocha said, “I would say, ‘No more guitars at Mass for me!’” But then his family moved to a tiny town in Indiana, where the Mass had no music at all. “It was so sad and little,” Rocha said. So he brought in his guitar, and returned once again to his Mexican roots.
Since then, he’s been trying to reconcile all his various aesthetic experiences of the Church — the folk music of his Mexican parents, the slicker sound of Life Teen and the charismatic movement, and his hard-won love of jazz, which he deliberately cultivated out of a desire to understand as much about music as he could.
Read the rest at OSV and check out the Augustianian funk of Late to Love here.
In contemporary Gospel music, people like Israel Houghton are making amazing music with the best studio and stage musicians around. Consider this: most popular artists in soul music honed their craft in the Black church. Perhaps the question, then, is why do Catholic churches not produce artists of this calibre in any popular medium?
Read the rest of my interview with Sam Rocha at the Register.
How did I miss this? Dolly Parton has a new album out — her 42nd studio album! — and it is great, of course. Blue Smoke was released this year, and it is solid. Here is the song I’m fixated on at the moment: her utterly natural take on Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice”:
Love Dolly Parton. 68 years old and hasn’t started phoning it in yet. The older I get, the more I admire people who know how to work and keep on working, and who know exactly what their gifts are and how to use them.
Speaking of gifts, this is as good a time as any to remind you guys that I am an Amazon Affiliate, which means that every time you buy something on Amazon through my links, I get a small piece of the purchase price. It really adds up, and is, frankly, a big help in supporting our family.
If you click on the Blue Smoke link above, you will arrive at the album’s page on Amazon. If you don’t buy that album, but continue shopping and end up buying a table saw, a squirrel harness, and eleven gallons of extra virgin linseed oil, I will still get a cut of the purchase price. The key is that you got to Amazon through one of my links. I also have a tab that says “SHOP AMAZON HERE!” at the top of the page, and a blue Amazon block ad on the right sidebar. If you are ever going to buy stuff through Amazon, I would so appreciate it if you could take the time to get there through my links! Many, many thanks.
No reason, just curious! We really wanted “I Walk the Line,” but with a music budget of zero, and in those dark pre-internet days, I couldn’t find a copy of it in time. It would have been a good pick, though.
My husband told his friends that we were planning to dance to “Under My Thumb” (and it’s possible that it even made it into the local newspaper’s wedding page this way. It also said that we honeymooned at the Hotel California. Ah, yoot).
Ho ho, very funny, ha ha, it is to laugh. (How did I miss that in my Looney Tunes post?)
Anyway, in real life we went with “In My Life” by the Beatles, which still gets me every time
because this guy still gets me every time.
How about you? What did you dance to? If you’ve been married for a few years, would you choose a different song for the theme of your married life thus far? Tell!
I don’t know which I like more, the fact that these guys pulled over and played jazz for cows, or the fact that the cows were clearly digging it.
The dairy farm we visit always has the radio on in the cow barn. I don’t know any music-deprived cows to which to compare our local cows, but our local gals do always seem calm and happy.
Apparently it’s an unsettled question, whether or not slow jams make cows give more milk. Here are some scientists doing their best to find out:
PIC music for cows
From an NPR story:
Alas, the science of music and milking remains sketchy at best, says Anne Marie de Passille, a Canadian research scientist who studies cow behavior and welfare.
No one has been able (or willing) to replicate a 2001 study that seemed to indicate that milk production goes up when cows are serenaded with soothing music of 100 beats per minute or slower.
“When you think about it, the chances that all cows would like the same music are really slim,” [de Passille] says. “I think they are individuals, and we didn’t select them for their taste in music. … Why would they all like the same music?”
I feel, at any rate, that it’s probably good for people to spend more time playing music for cows. I don’t know why I feel that way; I just do.
The other day, I was amazed and delighted to hear that I had won second prize in Catholic Vote’s contest. First prize was a trip for two two Rome for the upcoming beatifications, which would have been niiiice, but I am beyond thrilled at what I did win, as top referrer: a spiffy new iPad Mini!
PIC iPad “At first I was going to give it to someone, and then I thought I would raffle it for a good cause, then I thought it would make a great prize, and then I realized I WANT THIS.”
I understand its microwhatever is roughly as powerful as the International Space Station and that the touchscreen can, by analyzing the electrolyte content in my fingertips, predict the very moment of my death; but I mostly want to use it to read books and play music and movies.
My first plan is to load it up with free or very cheap books, preferably good read-aloud books. I can’t tell you how many books we’ve gotten 3/4 of the way through, only to lose track of them and never find out if Curdie rescued the Princess, if Pip’s sister ever found out who took the meat pie, and of course what the heck that Trinity thing is about. Seriously, one of the main reasons we quit homeschooling was because we just plain lost all the books all the time.
So, help me get started, eh? What’s cheap or free and great?
In which I heroically refrain from making fun of bad hymns and instead suggest some good ‘uns for Lent.
Listen to this.
Songs on butts, every garden grows one! Oh, Neil Diamond, you always come back to me at just the right times.
Yes, so, speaking of sweaty music, a student at Oklahoma Christian University has transcribed the music that was written on the butt of someone in Hell, which is why you need to stop making fun of people who major in art history.
Here is the butt:
And here is the larger picture by Hieronymous Bosch (“The Garden of Earthly Delights”) which includes many things equally as strange as music written on somebody’s butt in Hell:
PIC Garden of Earthly Delights
And here is how the music sounds when hastily transcribed by someone who didn’t expect everyone on the internet to be listening to it, despite the fact that, duh, it’s butt music from hell:
And here is someone who of course went ahead and arranged that hell butt music for choir, and posted it on his website which has some kind of yellow pony/fox creature for a cursor.
In conclusion, YES, I get paid for this kind of thing.
