Slightly odway - a diversional diary of music trivia

I mentioned elsewhere that I'm adding my collection to discogs.com

I was just cataloguing Foreigner's first greatest hits set 'Records' and noticed that the runout groove had merry xmas messages engraved on it - so I thought I'd see how many times that had been done.

Thanks to discogs advanced search (and anal contributers) there were 38 times Xmas is mentioned in the matrix/runout

on a hunch I wondered how many times '****' had been used. About ten times as often....

Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – in full


Really enjoyed this piece on where music has been and is going - and how the internet removed the bits between the musicians and the audience.

Transcript here: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full

be back to read it...

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

From the Campus Morning Mail (I think reporter has misrepresented the figures - I don't think half of 'hip hoppers' are murdered).

Professor Dianna Theadora Kenny from the University of Sydney reports research showing that among US musicians country singers are least likely to be murdered (1.6 per cent) and hip hoppers the most (an astonishing 50.5 per cent). Perhaps the latter are boring the former to death.

I looked up the report:
http://theconversation.com/music-to-die-for-how-genre-affects-popular-musicians-life-expectancy-36660

Which contains this table:




Reading the text there some errors overlooked although the author makes a fist of explaining her rationale in the comments.

Comparing life expectancies across the US population for the same age group to the rappers/hip hoppers ignores a whole bunch of LSES variables.

I went down a twitter inspired rabbit hole at 3am this morning.

It started with a tweet that contained this Joni Mitchell anecdote about Don Henley:



Which mentions Vinnie Coluita (sic) – whose name is burnt in my brain due to Dale Bozzio ‘singing’ it in Frank Zappa’s ‘Catholic Girls’


Which made me wonder how Zappa’s drummer knew Joni Mitchell, so I took a look at his Wikipedia entry and was gobsmacked by his session resume: Ray Charles to Tori Amos, Barry Manilow to Megadeth.

His discogs entry lists all his known credits so far (as opposed to major contributions listed in Wikipedia shown below) has 907 distinct recording credits.

With others
• 1981 Nightwalker, Gino Vannelli
• 1983 Dirty Looks, Juice Newton
• 1984 Emotion, Barbra Streisand
• 1985 Soul Kiss, Olivia Newton-John
• 1986 The Bridge, Billy Joel
• 1987 John Patitucci, John Patitucci
• 1987 Northern Nights, Dan Siegel
• 1987 Portrait, Lee Ritenour
• 1987 Swing Street, Barry Manilow
• 1988 Close-Up, David Sanborn
• 1988 Last Days of the Century, Al Stewart
• 1988 Talk to Your Daughter, Robben Ford
• 1988 The Real Me, Patti Austin
• 1988 Voices of the Heart, Eric Marienthal
• 1988 Y Kant Tori Read, Tori Amos
• 1989 Mr. Jordan, Julian Lennon
• 1989 Music, My Love Jean-Pierre Rampal
• 1989 Secrets, Allan Holdsworth
• 1989 The Warmer Side of Cool, Wang Chung
• 1989 Upright, Philip Aaberg
• 1989 Other Places, Brandon Fields
• 1990 Beth Nielsen Chapman
• 1990 Blue Pacific, Michael Franks
• 1990 The Works, Nik Kershaw
• 1991 For the Boys, Bette Midler
• 1992 Fat City, Shawn Colvin
• 1993 My World, Ray Charles
• 1994 Emperors of Soul, The Temptations
• 1994 Heart to Heart, Diane Schuur
• 1995 Good News from the Next World, Simple Minds
• 1995 I'll Lead You Home, Michael W. Smith
• 1995 Soul Survivor, Bobby Caldwell
• 1995 The Promise, John McLaughlin
• 1997 Blue Moon Swamp, John Fogerty
• 1997 Blue Tav, Steve Tavaglione
• 1998 Traeme La Noche, Gustavo Cerati, Andy Summers
• 1999 Deja Vu, Frank Vignola
• 1999 The Whole SHeBANG, SheDaisy
• 2000 Chaka Khan - The Jazz Channel Presents Chaka Khan (DVD)
• 2000 Celebrating the Music of Weather Report, Jason Miles
• 2000 Fingerprints, Larry Carlton
• 2000 Isn't She Great, Burt Bacharach
• 2000 Live From Blue Note Tokyo, Chick Corea
• 2000 Two Against Nature, Steely Dan
• 2001 “Alejandro Sanz unplugged”, Alejandro Sanz
• 2001 Night Sessions, Chris Botti
• 2001 Trouble in Shangri-La, Stevie Nicks
• 2002 From the Inside, Laura Pausini
• 2002 Cry, Faith Hill
• 2002 Morning, Noon, & Night, Bob James
• 2002 Queen of the Damned: Music from the Motion Picture
• 2003 1, 2, to the Bass, Stanley Clarke
• 2003 Big Fun, Bill Evans
• 2003 Michael Buble, Michael Bublé
• 2003 9, Eros Ramazzotti
• 2004 Earth + Sky, Andy Summers
• 2004 Renee Olstead
• 2004 The Futurist, Robert Downey
• 2004 Speak, Lindsay Lohan
• 2004 The System Has Failed, Megadeth
• 2005 American Made World Played, Les Paul
• 2007 Do svitanja, Vlado Georgiev
• 2008 Jeff Beck: Performing This Week... Live at Ronnie Scott's, Jeff Beck
• 2009 My One and Only Thrill, Melody Gardot
• 2009 Tide, Luciana Souza
• 2010 ...Featuring Norah Jones
• 2010 Emotion & Commotion, Jeff Beck
• 2010 Singularity, Robby Krieger
• 2010 Truth Be Told, Mark Egan
• 2011 Daydream, Katherine Jenkins
• 2011 Centrifugal Satz Clock, Morning, Steve Kusaba
• 2012 5th House, Dominic Miller
• 2013 Unstoppable Momentum, Joe Satriani
• 2013 Daljina, Vlado Georgiev
• 2014 Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro, Billy Childs
• 2015 No Pier Pressure, Brian Wilson[13]
• 2016 The American Dream, Damian Drăghici
• 2017 Alone, Toto
• 2017 Se que tu estas, Davi Wornel
• 2017 Cosmopolitain, Kamil Rustam
• 2018 Traces, Steve Perry
• 2018 " Saab Guitar Project, Douglas Saab

One of the many blogs I follow for eclectic music is Opium Hum.

This description almost had me downloading out of curiousity:

Swedish leftist vegan straight-edge death metal.

A special treat for those of you who have been wondering 'what would happen if you merged the lyrical theme of Rod Stewart's 'Maggie May' with a backing track from Fat's Domino's 'Blueberry Hill'

Another intriguing review from one of my favourite music bloggers, Opium Hum. Probably the first time this sort of review has not tempted to me to listen. Must be getting old.



If you are braver than me - here's the link http://opiumhum.blogspot.com/2023/08/mastery-valis-2015.html

File under "I wasn't expecting that"