2 guitars, 2 trombone, a clarinet, an accordion and a tuba. Right now they are playing something that sounds like calypso, but in French with occasional New Orleans references. Then they swung into "Everybody's Moon." Eclectic. They introduced themselves as "The Fireroasters" but they're usually known as The Fireroast Mountain Boys.

I almost missed it. Richard was working in the backyard and noticed that our neighbors across the alley were "making music again" on their front porch (something they did about once a week last summer). We meandered over there and discovered that it was a component of Porchfest, an annual neighborhood event. Someone found Richard a chair, so he parked himself at 4007 Pleasant. I got out my bike and cruised around the immediate neighborhood for an hour. Such a great neighborhood event!  I mostly took pictures of the performers, but the audience is the best part. Families pushing strollers, toddlers bouncing to the beat, flocks of bikers coming and going, a few familiar neighbors from the block (fun to run into randomly several blocks away from where we live). 



The best Porchfest acts are crowd-pleasing bar bands, but there are many varieties of those. According to the online program, this one is probably Trilogy Road doing "Americana Blues." Or maybe one of the other bands listed for that part of the block. With Porchfest you never really know. A lot of the acts just don't show up, and others swap out so many friends that it is hard to keep track. 


This one is clearly Mandy and the Backbar, a rocking lead singer and her lively backup band doing everything from "Jolene" to "I'm a Believer" (which sparked an amazing array of spontaneous dancing among the audience).


Four older guys with two guitars, a full drum kit, and a sax doing some kind of laid-back country blues rock, at least judging by their last two songs. Wish I'd found them sooner. Probably either Wilkinson James or The Melvilles.

I'm that person who always has a Plan B, but so far I have been mostly unable to even think about what will happen and what I should do if Trump wins. I haven't got any further than realizing that I should accelerate my mostly inadequate efforts to start getting rid of some of the vast amount of extra Stuff in my life that makes it impossible to ever go anyplace else. Because even if there were somewhere to flee to, I really can't do that without setting the house on fire or something. 

Thank goodness when I made up my pandemic playlist I also put together a large playlist of soothing songs call "All Shall Be Well Again." I just remembered that it was there, and started it up. Helps a little. Although "Don't Worry, Be Happy," is quite a stretch at the moment.

I finally got to one of the longterm items On My List today: putting away the stacks of CDs piled around the stereo in the living room. This required expanding the capacity of the available storage space, so was somewhat complicated. In the process I found this great CD called Joe's Cafe that I swear I have never seen before. It's a collection of story songs written by a British singer/songwriter but based on the stories of real people in America, performed by a wide range of performers (all excellent). Some of the songs seem really familiar, so maybe I did buy it, but I have no memory of it. And it hadn't been ripped into my iTunes, so it probably wasn't me that brought it home. Anyway, it's my new favorite album. 

I was loading songs on my iPod to listen to at the gym, when it occurred to me that it was Veteran's Day. I was listening to "My Son John," a heartbreaking and unusually subtle anti-war song, when it occurred to me to make a Veteran's Day playlist.

But the 44 songs I came up with run the gamut from that lovely, lugubrious song about Willie McBride to "The Battle of New Orleans."  I made no effort to prune or arrange them, leading to odd juxtapositions of boisterous Scottish war songs with plaintive anti-war tunes. Now I guess I'll go off to the gym and see if the ratio of marching songs to tearful protests is sufficiently rousing to get me through a workout.

( Full list behind the cut )

This is mostly the new songs I bought from iTunes after perusing online suggestions, padded with 4 more to fill the CD.  We start out with the usual Jimmy Buffet type song, then get distracted when we find that Kenny Chesney has recorded a duet with Uncle Kracker.  Then one thing leads to another and the next thing you know I'm ending up with Grateful Dead.  The segue is obvious, right?

Carol, you'll notice that I did find a few more Jim Hoehn songs, both of them a bit more upbeat than the two on your drinking song collection. 

1. Palm Tree Kind of Day  --   Jim Hoehn
2. Toes  --    Zac Brown Band
3. Knee Deep  --   Zac Brown Band, Jimmy Buffett
4. Island Song  --   Zac Brown Band
5. Bad Day At the Beach      --   Jim Hoehn
6. Jolly Mon Sing      --   Jimmy Buffett
7. Havana Daydreamin'      --   Jimmy Buffett
8. Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season      --   Jimmy Buffett
9. Coconut Telegraph      --   Jimmy Buffett
10. No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems      --   Kenny Chesney
11. When the Sun Goes Down       --   Kenny Chesney, Uncle Kracker
12. Follow Me      --   Uncle Kracker
13. Cinnamon Bay      --   Gene Mitchell
14. Tropical Island      --   Adam Green
15. Kokomo      --   Adam Green, Ben Kweller
16. (Put The Lime In The)coconut      --   The Hit Crew
17. Summertime     --    Lena Horne
18. Girl From Ipanema      --   Getz/Gilberto
19. Tales Of Brave Ulysees     --    Cream
20. Ripple      --   Grateful Dead

Hey, this is pretty cool. I found the old Byrd's song about D.B. Cooper that I've been trying to recall for the last week, and discovered that although I had forgotten most of the words, the tune was very close to what I remembered. It turned out to be called "Bag Full of Money."

Then I decided to listen to some songs by this band I've been reading about called "The Decembrists."  I think I like them, or would if I could figure out just what their songs are about. This may be the kind of album that really needs its liner notes.

Whoa. This service just passed my personal obscurity test: they not only have "Joy of Cooking," they have one of their albums that I'd never even heard of. On the other hand, they DON'T have the older albums, including my favorite: "Too Late But Not Forgotten." But still, that's pretty good.

We are having our annual Christmas Music Party at the usual time: the last Sunday before Christmas. This is a party for people who like to get together and sing traditional Christmas songs and carols together (all the verses!). Lyric sheets will be provided. If you have friends who like to sing Christmas songs, bring them along, the more the merrier! Accompanists welcome, but you'll have to bring your own instrument - we no longer have a piano.

It's an indoor party, mostly. If it's not ridiculously cold we usually send out an expedition to take a turn up and down the block wassailing the neighbors, but the party continues inside while this is going on.

Date and time: Sunday, Dec 19, 5-9pm
Your hosts: Sharon Kahn and Richard Tatge
Address: 4002 Pillsbury Avenue South, Minneapolis
Phone: (612) 827-3228

DIRECTIONS
The house is easy to find: right on the Corner of 40th and Pillsbury, decked out with many lights. This is about 1/2 mile west of I-35W halfway between the 36th St. and 46th St. exits.

Guess what!  The Crosstown Construction is finished!  All the entrances and exits are open again!

I decided I wanted to fill in the BPM field in my music library for a couple of reasons. I had long thought it would be helpful for setting up exercise playlists. But the thing that finally pushed me to do it was taking a refresher CPR class and being told for the umpteenth time that the easiest way to get the rhythm of 100 bpm was to hum "Stayin' Alive," a song that apparently everyone in the world but me is intimately familiar with. So I decided to go through my song collection and find one with the correct tempo that I actually knew.

Turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. There are tons of downloadable utilities that will calculate BPM for you automatically but NONE of them work with iTunes formatted songs. Mostly they require songs to be in mp3 format. So I spent much of the weekend figuring out how to use iTunes to convert the existing ones. It's kind of time-consuming, so I started a second iTunes Library and have been gradually populating it with mp3-formatted songs, one artist at a time.

Once a got a few hundred potential workout songs in the new library, I downloaded MixMeister, a highly recommended free utility for automatic bpm calculation and started applying it. OMG, what weird results! The slowest song in my library is... "These Boots are Made for Walking"??? But "Cruel War," a song that could easily be used as a lullaby, comes in at a rousing 131 bpm! Maybe I'd better find out what Beats Per Minute actually MEANS.

Ohhh, I see. There's a lot of stuff in the Wikipedia entry about crotchets and minims and complex time signatures, but ultimately it turns out that in modern usage they just count drum beats. This is relatively easy if you're classifying the kind of music that has a steady boom-shicka, boom-shicka, boom-shicka rhythm, but it falls apart completely when you've got 3 voices warbling along to a Travers pick on a guitar. But what about "Boots," a song with the kind of driving rhythm that could march you right up the side of a skyscraper if you tried to walk to it? I think the problem is that the first beat in each measure is so exaggerated in that song that the second beat just got ignored.

So I found another utility to correct the mistakes of the automatic tool - a simple little online thing that lets you find the beat yourself by tapping a key along with the music. Ah. Now "Boots" is at the top of the tempo list (160bpm) instead of the bottom with 80. And "Cruel War" drops down to a much more reasonable 99 bpm (which still seems kind of fast for such a soporific song, but more plausible).

This is fun.

Other than the "Sweet Violets" genre, that is:
 
"There once was a farmer who took a young miss
In back of the barn where he gave her a...
Lecture on horses and chickens and eggs
And told her that she had such beautiful...
Manners that suited a girl of her charms
A girl that he wanted to take in his...
Washing and ironing and then if she did
They would get married and raise lots of...
 Sweet violets, sweeter than all the roses
 Covered all over from head to toe
 Covered all over with sweet violets."

Does anybody but me remember the kids' songs in this genre?  "Suzy Had a Steamboat" is the one that other people seem to know. But my favorite is this one, which I actually learned in junior high from another kid. What I love about it is that it sounds like it's from the 1890's (birch beer?  Anti-Irish prejudice?) but was still being passed from kid to kid in the early 60's. The tune is reminiscent of "Suzy had a Steamboat" but definitely not the same.

"Two Irishmen, two Irishmen were digging in a ditch.
One called the other a dirty son of a ...
Birch beer, birch beer, ten cents a glass,
If you do not like it, shove it up your...
Ask me no questions and you will get no answers,
If you do not like it, you can go to...
Hello, operator, give me number nine.
If you cannot reach it, please return my dime."