American Pie

I get songs stuck in my head.

The other day I was at a restaurant and they were playing Weird Al's parady of American Pie, which is called The Saga Begins. The latter is the story of Star Wars: Phantom Menace and it's really clever.

Got that stuck in my head and ended up buying both it and the original on iTunes, and now I have been playing the both of them over and over and over..... !

American Pie has some great lyrics, and Weird Al's version does a surprisingly good job of "copying" it. One of my favorite bits:

And the three men I admire most,
the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
well they caught the last bus to the coast

which becomes

And the Jedi I admired most
caught up with Darth Maul and now he's toast
now I'm down here and he's a ghost

Abracadabra! eBook About The Beatles Album Revolver

Ray Newman has released his free e-book Abracadabra! which tells the story of the Beatles 1966 album Revolver. It looks pretty detailed (though I just downloaded it now and haven't read it!)

I actually found out about this when I went to Amazon.com...interesting that they would point to this free book.

End Of OLGA?

OLGA (the On Line Guitar Archive) has been a resource for tabs and chords for songs for several years. Record and publishing companies have gone after them a few times (about a year or so ago they stopped including the complete lyrics to songs.) Now they have gone off line while trying to resolve issues with publishers.

I'm not really sure what the solution to this should be. I know there's at least one 'authorized' music service through which you can buy tab online (at about $1.99 per song) if they have the song you want. You can find tab and chords to music all over the web; if they close down OLGA, will they then start going after the individual sites? I wonder what will happen to sites like DMBTABS? I wonder if I should be saving as much as I can now, before it all goes away (and is it really ethical for me to do that?)

MartinFest Video Blog Day 4

and in the end
the love you take...

The last day of MartinFest 2006, and boy am I exhausted!

MartinFest Video Blog Day 3

Day Three: softball, song writing clinic, Kingston Trio, Group photo and Laurence Juber.

MartinFest Video Blog Day 2

The second day of MartinFest!

MartinFest Video Blog Day 1

It's MartinFest 2006!!!!!!!!

And just for fun - and because there's wireless at the Inn - I thought I'd take a bash at doing a video blog as something a little different. So here goes with Day 1.

(Be gentle folks!; I usually like to be behind the camera...)