Oil Can Boyd

Been listening to this recently, partly because singer/guitarist Paul Janovitz (younger brother of Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz) died recently. It's pretty solid 90s grunge-era rock. Trivia: drummer Paul Harding went on to write Tinkers which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Nice choice. Love that one.

Me too. And The Blow Up.

No - I've been meaning to. Maybe I'll listen right now ...

I just read Frankenstein. It was great - and really different than what I was expecting (based on comic books and cartoons). I read it, in part, because I recently read Rob Delaney's really good but sad book (A Heart That Works) about the death of his young son. He references Frankenstein a number of times in talking about loss and grief.

Lucy Dacus - Home Video

Billy Bragg (who co-owned Fort Apache at one point) wrote a nice piece on Facebook and also noted "The Mermaid Avenue tracks that just feature Natalie Merchant and myself were recorded under Gary's supervision at the Fort."

Gary Smith - producer and manager of a ton of bands I love - died the other day. He ran Fort Apache Studios in Boston, and produced Pixies, Throwing Muses, Tanya Donelly, the Feelies, Blake Babies, The Connells, Juliana Hatfield, Scrawl, 10,000 Maniacs/Natalie Merchant, and Billy Bragg. A lot of great stuff was produced at Fort Apache including Uncle Tupelo's No Depression, Radiohead, Weezer, Dinosaur Jr, Buffalo Tom, Superchunk, and Yo La Tengo. Sad day.

Related to this topic, I recently saw Time Out of Mind referred to as a "mid-period" Dylan album. That struck me as laughably wrong until I realized it came out 25 years ago (and 35 years into his career).

My parents live pretty close to that nature center. It's a beautiful spot.

I was listening to the latest season of the Deadcast and they were talking with some of the people from the Stanford AI lab. After a minute I realized one of them is the dude who lives across the street from me. He's away for a bit but I can't wait to see him when he gets back. I had no idea about his involvement in early online Dead stuff.

Dan Zanes is writing a book about Nebraska.

That's too bad. I'm going to see them in a few weeks.

Well really "Live! The Other Night!" but I saw the Feelies last Friday in Jersey City. They opened as themselves under the name the Willies where they played all instrumentals and mostly covers (a couple of Eno songs, two Bowie songs, Kraftwerk, Hendrix). It was great. And then they played their own amazing Feelies set. It was lots of fun.

Just finishing my brother-in-law's latest book. He built (or had built) a wooden flatboat and went down the Ohio River and Mississippi River down to New Orleans

I enjoyed the new version of A League of Their Own.

I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere but has anyone heard Jeff, Spencer, and Sammy on the "Listening" podcast that came out last month? The premise of the podcast is that musicians talk about their process for writing/making music and then they create a piece just for the show. It's pretty cool to hear the three of them talk about working together and how they all listen. I enjoyed it. The podcast Their soundscape

I saw the David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, the other night. I'm really glad I saw it but wasn't crazy about it. The live footage was incredible but, for me, the overall experience was sort of frenetic and monotonous. I knew it wasn't a standard biopic but I would have liked hearing from someone other than clips of Bowie in interviews.

Lucy Dacus

I love it - and yes, was surprised at how good it is. And in saying that, I don't mean to imply that I think she's not talented; it's more as a concept, that can be hard to pull off. Live she did everything on the album, except for 12 minutes of Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. And she added several others: Don't Think Twice, Sweetheart Like You, Not Dark Yet, Just Like a Woman, Visions of Johanna (which she said was her and Robyn's favorite Dylan song).

I saw Emma Swift (with Robyn Hitchcock) do her Bob Dylan thing last night. It was fantastic.

He talks about the title track on this episode of Song Exploder: https://songexploder.net/kevin-morby

Gotcha. Wasn't sure where you were (though the hockey stick should have been a clue).