158 STGOOBF - Folk Arc (Part 2)

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Dick Gaughan - Ewan and The Gold

For there's some who use their dreams to tear themselves apart

And some who never find their dream at all

But how many find the courage to look deepest in their heart

And find a dream they can follow till they fall

Moving from Irish to Scottish folk, Ewan and the Gold was written by Brian McNeill, I've included here the Dick Gaughan version, though in fact, tying this to the last song of the previous post, it was the Mick Thomas version on The Horses Prayer which I first heard and became enchanted by.

I've only seen Mick Thomas play the song once, and as an introduction he explained that having seen St Kilda lose to Adelaide in the 1997 AFL Grand Final and as a result wanting be as far away from Melbourne as possible he went to Scotland, only to be reminded of his recent sporting disappointment by the presence of St Kilda, an archipelago containing the western most islands of the Outer Hebrides, after which the (now) suburb in Melbourne was indirectly named (via the schooner Lady of St Kilda, itself named for the islands).

Unfortunately Mick's subsequent decision to embrace his despair and visit the islands was thwarted by the fact that St Kilda is now permanently inhabited only by military personnel, and your average punter can only go there during northern summers as a volunteer to conduct restorations to the historic buildings which get knocked down each winter by the atrocious weather. Not to be completely denied, Mick took up the cause of this song (written about Ewan Gillies, a St Kilda native who emigrated to Australia) a process which, Mick assured us, took almost as long as if he actually had had made it to the islands.

The history of the island though, inhabited for 2 millennia until 1930, is fascinating. You can read about it here and hear the song (with accompanying slide show) here.

Stan Rogers - Barrett's Privateers

Across the Atlantic to Canada, but connected to Ewan and the Gold by being another song Mick Thomas performs a mean cover of (in this case from the Weddings Parties Anything days), Barrett's Privateers was released by Stan Rogers on his 1976 album Fogarty's Cove, and despite being the style of a sea shanty regularly switches between common time and 5/4 time (I love a good change in time signature) which I learnt here.

I've got two Stan Rogers versions, of which I prefer the looser, louder, live offering, though to be honest neither matches the delicious raucousness of the opening track on WPA's legendary live recording They Were Better Live, and it's only my aversion to inter-compilation artist duplication which stops me getting out of bed for the for the Wedd's a capella effort, so to speak.

This video of Stan Rogers has about the right amount of belly-fire, in my opinion, plus some good beards, and an awesome Monty-Pythonesque facial expression at 1:09.

Simon & Garfunkel - So Long Frank Lloyd Wright

Other than the fact I'm not the first person to put this song and the previous together in a playlist I haven't found any compelling link between the two, but I'm not going to let that stop me including them in this order.

Popular interpretation of this song is that it's Paul Simon saying goodbye to Art Garfunkel as it comes from their last album together, with Garfunkel's intended (or perhaps even realised) study of architecture driving the elaborate nickname by which he is referred to here.

Now, I'm not sure if my tendency to live in the past or dwell on decisions long made is greater or lesser than your average man on the street, I'm pretty sure in general it's better to do less of that than more, but however much I'd like to minimise my 'what might have been' time, I get a an unavoidable bout of it whener I listen to this entry in the STGOOBF.

With a connection driven by my only (conscious) exposure to Frank Lloyd Wright's work, the resigned wistfulness of this song always makes me think what might have been, and the experiences I might have had, all the way from the fairways where the wind of freedom blows to a party in Fitzroy and back again. YMMV.

Counting Crows - Blues Run The Game

No, that's not an error, it is Counting Crows, it is folk, and I think I'll repeat here the text which accompanied this song (though the original, Jackson C. Frank version) the last time I put it on a compilation CD:

The Counting Crows covered this the first time I saw them play live, and it was one of those songs I just absolutely loved the first time I heard it. This guy had a very interesting life story, including a schoolyard fire, huge insurance payout, production of his only album by Paul Simon, and a long period of homelessness before being ‘rescued’ by a fan for the last few years of his life.

I don't often love songs the first time I hear them, but as mentioned above I sure did this one, and this remains my favourite version of the three I have, Counting Crows, the original, and, as he covered it as well as producing the album the original was from, Simon and Garfunkel.

The first time I saw Counting Crows play live (of two times I have) was on February 27, 2003 at the Enmore Theatre, and this track was clearly the highlight for me. The second time I saw Counting Crows was a week later at the Hordern Pavilion, and that night we met a couple of chicks who were students at Macquarie Uni, one of who became quite infatuated with the close friend I mention in this post, (as, it must be said, chicks are often wont to do) and over the course of the next few months he replied to every SMS he received from her with a Counting Crows lyric, which in most cases were eerily appropriate.

Ah Reidy, I miss you mate. (Not dead, he just caught a boat to England baby, maybe to Spain.)

Continuing the theme of not always linking to the version I chose in the STGOOBF, here is the original.

158 STGOOBF - Folk Arc (Part 1)

Intro

The Pogues - The Auld Triangle

What a great way to start. Written by Irishman Domenic Behan for his bother Brendan's 1954 play The Quare Fellow, this song has become an Irish folk standard, and in addition to great versions by more traditional performers such as The Dubliners, it's also been performed acts as diverse as Dropkick Murphys, Bob Dylan, and The Doug Anthony Allstars.

I love the Pogues version because of the guttural, painful desperation in Shane MacGowan's delivery - there's an admission of defeat, saved from utter hopelessness only by the very recognition that it is in fact an admission of defeat.

Wow, can you imagine having to put up with 158 comments of that pretentiousness? They'll make a Pitchfork contributor of me yet! Seriously though, that'd kill us both, so I'll try to tone it down. Honest.

I'll also try to resist the temptation to have Graham's number of hyperlinks through these posts, because even above I could have linked to a large number of great alternative versions of the song, but I feel once I head in that direction it'll be a very slippery slope, so I'll just link to one here, a beautiful version by The Dubliners and friends, where the latter includes, amongst others, The Pogues. Listen to me here!

Christy Moore - Nancy Spain

Also appearing in the video linked to above is Christy Moore, whose first album was recorded with Dominic Behan, and who's brother Barry performs under the stage name Luka Bloom. I was introduced to Christy Moore by Mr Hero, (who has Irish ancestry) during 1998 at Miller St. Happy, happy times. The version I first fell in love with is from Christy's truly wonderful 1994 album Live at the Point, featuring Seamus Begley from Dingle, and Stephen Cooney from Australia (the latter of whom Mr Hero and Mr Hero's old man were lucky enough to see perform last year). The version from Live at The Point can be found here.

Juliet Turner - I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You

Too late for that Juliet, as you continue the Irish theme of my folk songs TGOOBF with surely the most heartbreakingly beautiful voice I've ever heard, and your treatment of this Tom Waits classic is simply breathtaking in the power of emotion conveyed.

If this song wasn't awesome enough as it was, it also appeared in the final episode of one of the greatest TV shows ever (BBC's Life On Mars). The first half of this link is a demo version Tom Waits recorded in 1971, 2 years before the studio album it appeared on. Interesting that 2 of the 3 actual song links I've included so far are for versions which aren't the version I picked in the 158 songs...

Mick Thomas - The Cap Me Granda' Wore

Finally from an Irish point of view, here in subject matter if not performer, Mick Thomas, who was, to quote Bert Newton a 'founding member, singer, songwriter, for Weddings Parties Anything', and is the single artist I've seen perform live more than any other, performed The Cap Me Ganda' Wore the first time I saw him play, at the Annadale Hotel on December 19, 2002.

In the MT link above I threatened to include the body of the e-mail I sent the day after that performance but couldn't find it. Well, I've found it now, so here it is, and whilst it doesn't specifically mention The Cap Me Granda' Wore, the tone of the e-mail is certainly consistent with my feelings about this particular little ditty:

So, I went to see Mick Thomas and the Sure Thing last night at the Annandale Hotel. Mick Thomas was the lead singer/songwriter of Weddings Parties Anything, a band I’m sure you’ve all heard me crap on about at least a bit.

Basically it was the best concert I’ve ever been to in my entire life. Certainly over the course of 2002 there is no band I’ve listened to more than WPA, and being someone that doesn’t mind my live music, I had bloody high expectations, despite the fact that WPA doesn’t even exist anymore, whilst I like the stuff Mick has done since I don’t like it as much as the WPA stuff, and I didn’t expect him to play much, if any, WPA stuff, and he was only scheduled to play for an hour. Still, I was just absolutely blown away, by both the songs I knew and the songs I didn’t. There was only one WPA number in the set, ‘For a Short Time’, which has, I understand become his standard closing song, and was just awesome last night, particularly because it included the 4th verse I’ve only ever heard before on live performances. Also just amazing was a version of the Sure Thing song ‘You Remind Me’, around which Mick wove a fantastic story about being confused for Things of Stone and Wood.

I won’t crap on for ages about how good it was, cause I couldn’t really so [sic] it justice, but I have to tell you about the encore. www.ubl.com describes WPA’s music as: ‘One part rock, one part punk/alternative, one part country, and one part whatever strikes their fancy’ I think there should be folk in there somewhere as well, but anyway, after playing ‘For a Short Time’ and going off, Mick came back and played a one song encore, which, if you’ll fucking believe it or not, was ‘Made of Stone’ by the FUCKING STONE ROSES! FUCK ME! And when Mick was signing my T-Shirt after the show he said they’re going to put it on their next album.

I’m going back again tonight and seriously considering driving to Gosford on Sunday night as well.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that with you all.

[Apologies to the Que].

PS – I was particularly struck that as I stood in a TISM T-shirt listening to the singer from WPA sing a Stone Roses song that three of the four bands making up the posters in my room were at that moment featured in a juxtaposition that could only be described as – [Apologies to the Que]!

Well, all that and I've only got through 4 songs! This could take a while. (Or I could just lose interest and end up listing the last 120 odd!)

Apologies to the NeoCube

First, some preliminaries.

• Apologies for the poor picture quality - the webcam on my laptop isn't great;
• Apologies for the clunkiness and poor quality audio - this is my first ever attempt at editing video, and not only did I think I'd leave changing the audio track till lesson two, I do like the cool clicky sounds the magnets make when they join;
• Apologies to Wilco for any copyright infringement on the sound. Go buy Being There so I don't feel so guilty;
• Apologies to szakiii, whose YouTube videos are at least 216 times better than mine!

But now that's out of the way, the point of this post is to put up a NeoCube video. Described on the website as '216 individual high-energy rare-earth magnets, the NeoCube allows you to create and recreate an outrageous number of shapes and patterns', this is in my (rather geekinsh opinion) seriously cool, and would be even if it weren't for the fact that as you get eight spares and I bought three, I actually have a total of 672 (3 x [216 + 8]) spheres.

The strength of the magnets, the effect on their polarity when they're joined together in one, two or three dimensional forms, and the impact of the combination of these first two factors in the process of making shapes makes this an intellectually stimulating and incredibly fascinating toy (though not for kiddies - swallowing these bad boys [especially more than one] would be seriously bad).

My analytical nature leads me to being a big fan of symmetry, and so some of the shapes I've most enjoyed creating with the NeoCube are the Platonic solids or variants thereof, such as the dodecahedron frame I construct in the following video:

Just one more point before I go, which is that another brand of these small spherical magnets is Zoomdoggle's Bucky Balls, and in my travels around the wide wide world of web I have noticed a couple of questions raised as to the relative merits of the two brands. I actually bought a set of Bucky Balls prior to purchasing my NeoCube (x3), and in my opinion the NeoCube magnets are superior by a significant margin; they just seem stronger and more obedient, making a much cooler clicking noise when they join together, but more importantly being far easier to manipulate.

158 STGOOBF - Intro

Whilst listening to alternative Australian radio station JJJ's Hottest 100 of 2008 on Australia Day this year, I was tickled to hear that in 2009, the 20th anniversary of the first Hottest 100, (if we only start counting from when 2JJ became a national broadcaster) JJJ would be running a Hottest 100 in the middle of the year, replicating the format of 1989, 1990, 1991 (and another mid year emprise in 1998) by not restricting the voting activities of participating punters to songs released in the previous 12 months, but rather offering open slather to champion the cause of any song from any year in the creation of a Hottest 100 Of All Time.

I'm sure I wasn't the only listener prompted by this announcement to consider creating their own, personal, Hottest 100 Of All Time, and in fact you need look no further than JJJ stalwart Richard Kingsmill to find an example of the very same.

However, when I did sit down to my iTunes library (sitting at 10,851 songs at time of writing) with this concept in mind, I quickly reached the conclusion that for in my case a personal Hottest 100 Of All Time was impractical, for at least 3 reasons:

• First, I have a strong and potentially unreasonable aversion to including two songs by the same artist in any compilation I create, be it a disc I give someone to introduce them to bands they haven't heard before, an excuse for some low budget photoshopping of a CD cover, or a collection of soppy faves for some chick I'm in lurrrrrve with. And that really stuffs things up, because The Hold Steady are certainly responsible for more than one of my favourite 100 songs ever.
• Secondly, in my mind the ordering of a personal list becomes pretty meaningless once it gets to this length - I mean, how could I really choose which was my 87th favourite song of all time and which was my 88th?
• And for that matter, how could I choose which was my 100th favourite, and which was 101? Why Hottest 100? I think picking 1, or 10 (as you actually had to to vote in JJJ's poll) is reasonable, and obviously an ordering based on a count of votes gives a completely objective number 100, but when it's just little old me the pain involved in trimming some longer list down to exactly 100 is, in my mind, simply unnecessary, and easily avoided just by coming up with a list of whatever length seems right.

So, for those reasons, I just started going through my iTunes library, restricting myself to one song per artist, and picking songs which have been of significant importance to me, which I've gone out of my way to listen to, or which I just think are really cool, and came up with a list of 158. A couple of things I noted during the process were:

• I don't think I've included any songs I only heard for the first time in 2009 (giving me comfort my 158 songs are songs with long term appeal).
• One of the beauties of not restricting myself to 100 songs is being able to add new songs as required, I was comfortable I'd finished with a list of 156, but at time of writing it's now at 158.
• I did buy some songs from iTunes in order to be able to have a playlist of the 158 songs on my iPod, and there are other songs I don't own which if I did I would have included, but which I didn't buy. Confusing? Inconsistent? Irrational? My compilation. My rules!
• Mucho cover and alternative version action, but more on that later.

I needed a label I could use to refer to the list, and have settled on 158 Songs to Get Out Of Bed For (158 STGOOBF) an acronym which, should you by some most unfortunate stroke of luck have cause to read more than one of my blog posts, you'll probably be seeing a bit over the next few weeks, as I attempt to set our a few posts detailing the list of 158, and a label I felt was a suitable indicator of the effort-to-listen-to inducing qualities of the contents of said list.

(And at this point I should just say that as much as I appreciate the flexibility of being able to add or remove songs as I go, I hope I don't too much while I'm banging out this series of posts, I've already used the number 158 eight times - it could be a pain to update all of them should I make any changes!)

Despite my incredibly low post count of late I'm not giving into the temptation to have a post for every song, I've actually split the list into 10 groups with some themes that seem sort of sensible to my listening history, it feels like one post per group (and this post as an intro) is probably about the right balance, and I'm going to be flexible about the amount of commentary I add to each song. It also would have been cool to have streaming mp3s for your (both of you) listening pleasure, but anticipating some combination of bandwidth, technical and legal issues I'm gonna let that one slide.

Enough of an intro, onto the list!

Any way you look at it my popularity is waning - please send me your cookies!

In December 2007 I wrote typically self-referential post, which, amongst other things, noted the presence of the tracking code of two web analytics vendors on this here blog.

I just re-read that post, and it reminded me of better days, well, not necessarily better, but certainly different, days where my prosaic verbosity flowed seemingly unchecked, Yorkshire puddings rose without a care in the world, and I still owned some cows.

It cannot be argued, however, that my post count is down, and so it should have come to no surprise to me when I looked at the data from my two analytics vendors this morning that traffic to my blog is heading in the same direction.

Due to different technologies I wouldn't expect Google Analytics and StatCounter to give me exactly the same data, but you'd hope they would be close, particular for a simple metric such as 'Pageviews' in Google and the analogous 'Page Loads' from StatCounter. Both of these metrics should be a simple count of the number of distinct times pages have been sent to my audience's browsers, should only include pages displayed completely (as the tracking code which registers a pageview/load is at the bottom of the page), and should also include pages loaded from caches and via F5, as both of those would cause the tracking code to fire again. As shown in the chart below, the monthly totals of these metrics are pretty similar, at least since Jan 08 once I'd re-installed the Google tracking code. (Click for larger, more legible, version.)

To be honest though, with such a simple structure to my blog, I'd expect these metrics to be even closer than they are. I mean, it's not like I've got any Ajax elements installed inside Flash modules which have slide shows that default to auto advance but actually skip back a frame on mouse over, have a pop-up of college football scores on left click, launch a brand effectiveness study on right click and make you poached eggs on sourdough if you hop in three clockwise circles on your right leg with your left index finger on your nose, so differences of 10% in February and April this year, are, in my mind, sub-optimal. But then again, as Rick Stein would say, you pays your money, you takes your chances.

A statistic less often comparable between web analytics vendors due to the complexity of its calculation is the number of unique 'people' reading my blog in any given time period. I put 'people' in inverted commas, not because I think there are any cats reading my blog (though if there were they'd presumably do so whilst eating cheezburgers), but because, despite both of my vendors using the label 'Unique Visitors' for the metrics I'm about to compare, they are not, in reality, a precise measure of 'visitors', or, for that matter, 'people'.

Google Analytics, StatCounter (if you want to learn more about them there are links to their websites in the post linked above - go on, click it to get those links, it'll get me another page 'view'), and the vast majority of other web analytics vendors use cookies to identify 'uniqueness' of anyone reading any website their codes are placed upon, and base their calculation of 'Unique Visitors' on the total number of cookies on all of the browsers of people reading those websites. There are, however, many reasons why a count of cookies can be significantly different to a count of people/lolcats:

1. If you look at the same website on two different computers you'll generate two cookies, but you are only one person;
   
2. If you look at the same website on different browsers you'll generate distinct cookies, but you are only one person - at home I regularly use all of IE, Firfefox and Chrome;
   
3. If multiple people look at the same website on the same browser on the same computer they will only generate one cookie despite being two people;
   
4. If you delete your cookies and then look at a website you've been to previously you'll generate a new cookie despite only being one person;
   
5. If you block cookies on your browser you won't generate any cookies at all, despite being a person;
   
6. If you have JavaScript disabled tracking tags which don't have a 'noscript' option will not work.

The first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth of these would, in general, significantly outweigh the third, so one would expect a count of cookies to be significantly higher than a count of people, and there is really nothing any web analytics vendor can do about the first three without having direct contact with the audience member themselves.

Some vendors attempt to combat the fourth by using a combination of cookies, IP address and some other 'unique' identifiers (like some quasi-cookie thing that you get when you install Flash that doesn't get deleted when you delete your cookies), but the main difference between unique visitor/browser/users counts from various vendors is their treatment of the last two, which again vary for a number of reasons, not all of which I'd even pretend to begin to understand, but which include:

• The use of 1st party vs 3rd party cookies and the relative blocking rates of each;
• Capture, analysis and treatment of 'spider' and 'bot' traffic;
• Having a 'noscript' option to capture data from browsers with JavaScript disabled;
• Adjusting raw cookie counts (cooking probably not really inappropriate!) to take account of cookie blocking, spiders, bots etc.

Being fairly small 'v' vanilla web analytics solutions (with a price point to match), Google Analytics and StatCounter both employ very simple, albeit different, methods to deal with cookie blocking. Google Analytics ignores it, so if you block cookies as far as GA is concerned you never read my blog (from a 'Unique Visitor' perspective - the 'Pageview' still counts, and StatCounter regards each 'Page Load' from a browser with cookies blocked as a new 'Unique Visitor', which I expect is the major driver of Statcounter's monthly 'Unique Visitor' metric being, on average, 18% higher than Google Analytics', over the period January 2008 to April 2009:


But really, far more important than the absolute measures here are the relativities, and the undeniable conclusion that my traffic is trending southward. Always keen to extract the 'so what' from any burst of frenetic analysis I undertake, the obvious direction to head here is to identify options to end this fame slump, turn things around and get those graphs heading back up baby.

And the best option?

DELETE YOUR COOKIES AND THEN COME BACK! You'll count twice and before you know it I'll have more traffic than Nat over at Community Channel.

But really, that would be about as satisfying as low fat cheese, so the only real thing to do, is come up with some content, some posts discussing meaningful, interesting topics which people will want to read, which they'll send to their friends, which they'll put on Internet message boards. (I have actually had that happen a few times, only once by me[!]).

And let's face it, a post like this one about the traffic to my blog should do exactly that.

As should randomly including references to obscure internet memes. Chk chk boom!

Seriously though, thinking about this whole traffic accident that my website traffic has become has re-enforced what I already knew - I've only got myself to blame, and I just need to pull my finger out and write some stuff, because I still do things equally as interesting relevant as all the crap I've written about in the past!

Last week I went to the Australia's 1st Annual Pinball Expo, and I've seen some awesome concerts recently - Mraz, (where playing Rand McNally was enough to make it awesome), The Grates, and OMG OMG OMG Okkervil River (Read Wayne's typically top notch review of the Friday show, where he got to see A Stone). Here's Rand McNally:

The Grates would prefer I don't embed their videos, so go here to see one of their best songs, and I found this witty and insightful blog with a couple of great posts about Okkervil River here and here. Bet the guy who writes that is great in bed too.

But I didn't write posts about them, and the only post I wrote about my road trip trip incorporating CMC Rocks the Snowies was just a series of photos of Old Crow Medicine Show interspersed within the lyrics of one of their songs. Not only do Old Crow Medicine Show deserve to have universes of blogs written about their greatness with some actual, honest to God, original content, but heaps of other cool stuff happened on that trip too, for instance I saw Corb Lund play three times, and got a photo with him:

I also saw Catherine Britt play Fred Eaglesmith's Drive In Movie. She played it whilst supporting Corb in Sydney, and when I was speaking to her afterwards I told her if she hadn't played it I would have driven out to Orange the next night to see her again so that she might (which was obviously a lie, as I was going out to Orange anyway, and to be honest more to see Corb than her). So I guess it serves me right that even though she said she'd play it again in Orange, she didn't!

But it doesn't really matter, because at least I got to see it once (see also Rand McNally above, A Stone here, Caring is Creepy here and Ask Her for Adderall here), she has a beautiful voice, writes great songs as well as doing great covers of other people's, seems really sweet, and is absolutely gorgeous - I have quite the crush on her. Got a photo with her too:


Hmm, maybe if I sent her some cookies she'd go out with me...

The Ash Pole

Which Ash song is better?

Wagon Wheel (Pork and Beans) (Old Post Thredbo Show) (Bob and Ketch)

Headed down south to the land of the pines
I'm thumbin' my way into North Caroline
Starin’ up the road
And pray to God I see headlights
I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Pickin’ me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I'm a hopin’ for Raleigh
I can see my baby tonight

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

Runnin' from the cold up in New England
I was born to be a fiddler in an old-time string band
My baby plays the guitar
I pick a banjo now
Oh, the North country winters keep a gettin’ me now
Lost my money playin’ poker so I had to up and leave
But I ain’t a turnin’ back
To livin’ that old life no more

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

Walkin' to the south out of Roanoke
I caught a trucker out of Philly
Had a nice long toke
But he's a headed west from the Cumberland Gap
To Johnson City, Tennessee
And I gotta get a move on fit for the sun
I hear my baby callin’ my name
And I know that she's the only one
And if I die in Raleigh
At least I will die free

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me