Already Dark

My talented girlfriend Stacie Lee Bennett has started finishing off some of her songs and recording them for the world to enjoy, and so I'm going to embed the first one below. Enjoy!

High Hopes

Bruce is back and he's still dragging around that half-decent guitarist Tom Morello with him. Below is the first song from the new album. A joyous, rollicking New Orleans sawdust-and-spit rocker that infuses trumpets and wailing guitars into a sound that is similar to Wrecking Ball but seems to bring back some of the Seeger Sessions vibes too. Certainly gives me 'high hopes' for the rest of the album. Sorry.

YouTube - Kseniya Simonova - Sand Animation (Україна має талант / Ukraine's Got Talent)

Stunning what you can do with some sand.

More information here.

You're, You're, You're Gonna need a bigger boat

via youtube.com

So this is the point of Posterous...Seeing an insanely clever montage video of various clips spanning several genres and decades of film and television, that uses famous lines and quotatons from these pieces of film, and splices them together into a musical piece that is both catchy and well-produced...and being able to instantly share it at the click of a button from your computer. I remember being told we were the creative generation on my course at Cardiff. They weren't wrong.

Posted via web from danworth's posterous

Of course if you're reading this on my Blogger then the reference to Posterous makes no sense, but the rest is apt.

I is for...

Incident on 57th Street

C is for...

Creativity.

Have you noticed how creative everyone is? Everyone has a good idea, everyone is writing a book, or running a website, or painting, or writing music. Youtube is awash with talented amateurs singing, playing music and other such things. Any journalist you speak to seems to harbour ambitions of writing a novel or a work of non-fiction (I am no different) and so on.

What is creativity anyway? Where do ideas come from. The best book I have read this year was Leviathan (which I wrote several blog posts about). Where did the idea for that book come from? To write an entire book, a 400+ page piece of non-fiction, about whales. Whales. Why? In the bath? On a boat? Driving down the M4. Undoubtedly he had probably always thought whales were fascinating but to final conjure up the whys-and-wherefores of turning it in to a book is something else entirely.

I did creative writing at Cardiff for two years. I always did my best work when I was slightly hung-over, a bit punch drunk. I found my mind would be flitting around on to different subjects and more often than not one would become a credible idea. When I sat down to purposefully write something though, out of this state of mind, I would find inspiration impossible to come by. The shower is also a good place for ideas - although it's hard to write anything down when they do come. Paper goes soggy and laptops break.

And writing it down is the key. If you don't do that the idea always fades, even though when you thought of it, it seemed as if it was so good it would never leave you. I did National Novel Writing Month last year - 52,000 words in one month. It was hard work but the ethos of 'write anything, forget about how good it is' was an important one as it is much easier to go back and edit work you have written, rather than getting snow blindness but just staring at an empty Word document all day - 'you can't edit a blank page'.

Still, my book was terrible and has been consigned to the dustbin of history. But I've got this other idea...

Something to crow about

This is one of my favourite videos for a while: concerning the highly intelligent nature of crows - namely, their ability to tell human faces apart, even flying upside down to check if it is the person they think it is. The fact it's presented in a fun, well produced, and enjoyably drawn cartoon video is a nice bonus too.

Music men

Here is a little piece my brother and I recorded while at home for a few days. I quite like it. Enjoy!

Play us a song you're the ukulele man

Indulging

Still in a Bruce haze from Sunday's gig I found this fantastic video of the entire performance of Racing in the Street. It's quite beautiful and underlines the range and styles of Springsteen, far beyond his other 'fist pumping' stuff. The piano is simply wonderful. At 5.05 he raises his guitar in salute to the former member Danny Federici who was the organ player who would have been playing the part as it comes in.

The terrible power of music

Music, as I suggested below, comes in myriad forms, and has the power to uplift, inspire, and move. And it can also shock and appall.



Below: how to make one of the world's most recognised intros unrecognisable.

Cats and dogs

I've always been a bit unsure about Cat Stevens. Partly because he's called Yusuf Islam. Such a generic Muslim name, surely a singer-songwriter could come up with something with a little bit more invention? And Cat Stevens wasn't even his real name either.

Musically too he's a hard one to fathom. Some tracks, like Peace Train and Sad Lisa, are genuinely great while others, like Matthew and Son or even Morning Has Broken, I find disconcerting and musically a bit, well, all over the place.

But, on watching the recent show of his on BBC4, you can't say the man's not talented.

No George Formby jokes please

After all that talk of mandolins a few posts ago I now have a ukulele too thanks to my brother. Here's a vid of us. One take. Done.

Musical endeavours: Or how 175,000 people came to watch me play mandolin.

Ever since I first heard feedback I thought I wanted to be a rock and roller. Not a nu-waver, or landfill indie-er, but a genuine Jimmy Page, Rock and Roller. So I had guitar lessons and so on and got quite good, but found I couldn't sing, but could play a mean (ish) guitar. But I was no Jimmy Page.

Still, as I grew up and enjoyed playing music for itself, rather than as an ambitious way to make money, I became less bothered by this, and just enjoyed impressing people by playing Wonderwall by Oasis at parties*. Then the internet invented Youtube and suddenly people like yours truly had an outlet to record and share their music. I was intrigued. Around the same time I received a mandolin for my birthday. Being the sharing sort I recorded a brief ditty I had come up with, uploaded it to the Tube (as people were calling it then), and sent it to a few friends through Facebook (remember Facebook, it was really popular), and forget allllllll about it.

Then, about two months later I checked my video again (out of sheer vanity you understand) and, with my eyes shooting out on stalks like a cartoon character, I noticed it had been viewed...15,000 times. Wow. Now, that number is 175,000 and rising. It goes up about 200 - 1,000 a day, sometimes I get two/three comments a day, sometimes just one a week, and most are positive, and the average rating is four AND a half stars. FTW. Watch here if you wish.

It's bloody weird. To have played a made up mandolin piece to over 175,000 people is just bizarre. There's no way I could sell out Wembley stadium two nights running on the promise of a 1m 55sec mandolin piece, I'm fairly sure, but I've played to that equivalent number, right? It's a stretch......but the reality is true. I also think, perhaps, I should go on Britain's Got Talent and see how I do. However, I remain unconvinced that Amanda Holden, that paragon of talent dissection, is a mandolin fan.

The whole purpose of this post though, really, was to tell you that my brother, who clearly wanted to emulate big brother (emulate being the correct word), has become a guitar and piano player (show off) and can sing too. Bastard. He's starting to post his own Youtube stuff now, including an entire song he's covered, playing every single damned instrument on it. Watch below. It gets really good at 1m 45sec when the electric guitar kicks in. But then I would say that, being a flashy guitar solo obsessed guitarist wouldn't I?

Enjoy.



*. Note, this is a joke and I have never, ever, ever, ever done this.

Stairway to Lennon

Hallelujah!

I just saw the proclaiming of the second messiah. No, wait, it was the winner of a singing talent contest. My mistake.

Within a minute of the winner being announced and crying her eyes out they're advertising for the next series. Alexandra who?

This is better.

If only they'd listened

I'd not claim to know any of the ins and outs of the 'Credit Crunch', but this video is very illuminating. It's 10 minutes long but it's worth watching. It would be nice to know what those who laugh at Peter Schiff do now, and what they are suggesting now. If I was taking advice from them and saw this, I'd tell them to sling it.

Best Video On Youtube

Two months online, just short of ten million views - fantastic. I'd embed, but it's better to go to Youtube and then click 'watch in high resolution' on the bottom right of the video.

Shut It Man

This video of William Shatner "singing" Rocketman is utter genius. You need to watch it all to really appreciate the work that must have gone into this.

When he sings about "all the science I don't understand" the look of confusion is unbeatable. And when he answers his own singing...oh I do love YouTube for throwing up these gems.

Self-glorification

Yeah it might be a bit self-centered but after almost 100 posts, and finishing my journalism exams, I think it's allowed - Here is a link to me playing my birthday present, a mandolin. It's a lot of fun.