Pandora 2.1 has been released, and it has some fancy new stuff. You can add songs to your “favourites” list, which is available online (mine is here). Note that I just started updating this today, so there are very few songs there right now. There are other fancy things like an RSS feed to the most popular songs / artists.

Hmmm… the Pandora computer must be on an 80’s thing today. I’ve already heard songs from Whitesnake, Loverboy, and Honeymoon Suite.

I ordered Heather Hill‘s CD from cdbaby.com, and got this email once it shipped:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Saturday, December 10th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

The subject of the email was “CD Baby loves Graeme”. It’s nice to be appreciated.

We received a Christmas card the other day from a couple with whom we exchange cards every year, but we haven’t actually seen them in a number of years. We knew he had started his own company, but we had no idea how it was doing, so just for fun, I googled him. After finding some stuff about him, I asked Gail if there was anyone else she wanted to look up, and she said she was wondering about her first-year university roommate, Heather Pirie, who we lost touch with a number of years ago. We knew she had gotten divorced, but nothing else. The first search turned up an entry that started “Heather Pirie became a full-time singer/songwriter…”. Gail was immediately skeptical that I’d found the right one, until I read the rest of the entry: “…after leaving an executive business development position in the corporate world of Internet software publishing”, which describes what Heather was doing the last we heard. Then Gail thought for a second, and remembered that Heather was a very good piano player and did like to sing, so maybe… After some more searching, we found that this was indeed the Heather Pirie that Gail had roomed with, and she had changed her name (presumably she is now re-married) to Heather Hill. We found her web site, listened to a couple of tracks from her debut CD, and then ordered it. I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, but good for you, Heather, for following your dreams!

Note about the title of this article – it’s from “Lucky Ones” by Loverboy, and the complete line is “Don’t ask me how, but guess who hit the big time”. Just wanted to say that the “Don’t ask me how” part doesn’t apply here. I’ve only heard a couple of the songs, but she sounds like quite the talented singer.

I discovered a cool music web site the other day (again, through wilwheaton.net) called Pandora.com. It allows you to set up “stations” which play a variety of music. The cool thing is that you can give it a band or song and it will choose songs from its huge catalogue that are musically similar to the one you chose. By “musically similar”, I mean it ignores the “style” of band or the popularity of the band, and just goes by the song itself. It even tells you why it chose a song — one such description was “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features mild rhythmic syncopation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.” Several were chosen at least partially because they contained “a dirty electric guitar solo”. :-)

My first station started off with Dream Theater, and it chose bands like Dio, Chris Cornell, Korn, Anthrax, Three Days Grace, Triumph, Tool, Obituary, Ozzy, Sevendust, and a few bands I’d never heard of like Angra, Shadows Fall, Avenged Sevenfold, Further Seems Forever, and Soak. Some of them were a little heavier than I like (Dio, Ozzy, Korn, Anthrax — the Obituary song (Dying) was very cool musically, but the vocalist was a little too death metal for my tastes), but in general, they were all similar. I just added Rush to the station, so it should start choosing songs that are similar to both Dream Theater and Rush, and perhaps get a little further away from the death metal stuff.

It’s free for 10 hours, and then you pay $36/year. I’ve been listening to this all day, and I think I may subscribe.

A band out of Seattle called Harvey Danger has released their latest album “Little by Little” on the internet as a free download. I’ve never heard of the band at all, but I downloaded it anyway because (a) I can, without feeling guilty, (b) if the band is keeping track of how many people do this, higher numbers might push other bands to do the same thing, and (c) maybe they don’t suck.

Turns out that they don’t suck. I’ve only listened to it once, and I don’t know if I actually like it yet, it’ll take a few more listens. But they’re competent musicians, the singer has a pretty good voice, and the production is pretty good (i.e. it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in someone’s basement).

I read about this on wilwheaton.net. Actually, it was on Wil’s temporary blog site, since his main site is experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.

We went to see Les Misérables last night in Toronto. I really like that show; this was my fourth time seeing it, and Gail’s third. Most of it is not especially upbeat or happy (as Gail mentioned to Kerri last night, Mamma Mia this ain’t), but it’s a very powerful story, and is all about love – Fantine’s love for Cosette, Valjean’s for Cosette, Eponine’s for Marius, Cosette’s for Marius, Marius’ for Cosette, and eventually even Marius’ for Valjean. The actors playing Valjean and Javert were both excellent (I saw Michael Burgess playing Valjean a few years ago, and he was amazing – this guy was about as good). Cosette was more of a soprano than I’m used to (my parents used to play the soundtrack CD a lot when I lived at home, so I’m very familiar with the music), but I wasn’t that thrilled with Eponine. She was pretty good, but not at the same level as the rest of the cast.

The title of this post refers to a song sung by the young Cosette. It, along with Hold On by Sarah McLachlan, is one of the saddest songs ever:

There is a castle on a cloud
I like to go there in my sleep
Aren’t any floors for me to sweep
Not in my castle on a cloud

I know a place where no one’s lost
I know a place where no one cries
Crying at all is not allowed
Not in my castle on a cloud

Call me a wuss, but I get choked up whenever I hear that song. No child should ever have to feel that much depair.

* This song is sung shortly after Fantine (Cosette’s mother) dies – during her death scene, she wears a white gown, and has a bright white spotlight shone on her.

I used to work for Harvester
I used to use my hands
I used to make the tractors and the combines
that plowed and harvested this great land
now I see my handiwork on the block
everywhere I turn
and I see the clouds cross the weathered faces
and I watch the harvest burn

I went into town of the fourth of July
watched ’em parade past the Union Jack
watched ’em break out the brass and beat on the drum
one step forward and two steps back
and I saw a sign on easy street,
said “be prepared to stop”
pray for the independent little man
or I don’t see next year’s crop
and I sit here on the back porch in the twilight
and I hear the crickets hum
I sit and watch the lightning in the distance
but the showers never come
I sit here and listen to the wind blow
I sit here and rub my hands
I it here and listen to the clock strike,
and I wonder when I’ll see my companion again

What an amazing song.