per aspera ad astra

I found an email from L-Tracks in my inbox this morning, reading:

Hey everyone,

today is the day: October 10, 2008. Faderheads - FH3 is hitting the streets in Germany and the UK as a physical CD release and is available worldwide as MP3 download.
The US and Canada will sadly have to hold out a little longer until FH3 is released on October 31, 2008 in North America. The album has already gathered rave reviews and we are very proud to have an album of this caliber as our first L-Tracks release ever.

Please head to http://www.faderhead.com to find out  where exactly you can get the CDs or Downloads or check with your favorite online retailer.

Rock,
L-Tracks

Nice! I plan on purchasing the physical CD [idk, the idea of paying for .mp3s annoys me; if i'm paying, i want something to show for it, too. x3] when it comes out around Halloween…I just hope I can find a place that will be carrying it, or an online merchant who won’t gouge me for shipping. Admittedly, it’ll be one of the few physical CDs I do own, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it. Meantime, I am going to hunt for a physical copy of FH2–and probably FH1 although I haven’t heard all of it.

So, UK and Germany kids… are you planning on buying? :D?

I was re-organizing my music stuffs because I’m asinine about it, and I came across Scarlet from the Ayashi no Ceres soundtrack.

“Hey! I remember that song. It’s beautiful…I haven’t heard it in a while.”

So I open it and find myself, after a minute or so into the song, singing it. I was almost certain I had forgotten the lyrics, and I couldn’t tell them to you before the music started…when I thought about it, I was amused, but it just flowed so well.

It turned out nicely…
And I [obviously] don’t even speak Japanese! [Hence why it is more intriguing.]

It’s all in jest and good play, and there’s no real hurt involved, but it really makes me giggle when I actually manage to best Jeremy at something.
It’s an incredibly rare thing. Don’t mistake me; being able to have someone *to* prove me wrong is great. My ego needs to be brought down some.

But a change of pace is fine, too.

It’s always something very silly and inconsequential, but we laugh about it, and I have my “A-HA! I win!” moment, he calls me a dork, and we continue our conversation.

The other day, I was listening to California Dreaming. Y’know…the Mamas&Papas…

All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
On a winter’s day…

I was on the phone; he asked what I was listening to. I simply said, “California Dreaming.” He then asks if it was DJ Sammy’s cover or the original Beatles.
I had a pretty good laugh at that one.
Doesn’t even sound like the Beatles…

Ah, well. I have to have a small victory sometime, even if just in play.

Yesterday, I was scheduled to make up a guitar lesson that I missed. We park in the lot at the ‘bottom’ of downtown and I walk the four blocks up to Pickers, the little guitar shop I take my lessons at. Upon checking in with the receptionist, Jeffrey [whom I had called twice beforehand to ensure that doing this would be alright], I am told that I couldn’t make up my lesson and that I would just have to resume with the next one. I told him that was fine…and to schedule my final two lessons as well.

I’m not renown for my patience.

My teacher, while a very nice guy, is slow and repetitive. His teaching style is geared toward younger children and doesn’t benefit me. I’ve tried to explain this to him, but to no avail. The atmosphere is just awkward and there isn’t a good sense of communication there. I don’t feel as if I’m going to benefit from these lessons without being able to explain what I feel that I need to work on or to ask questions.

My lessons have had that tone typical of academic pursuits…I hate that. To me, music shouldn’t have that classroom feel…things should be far more lax. So, the environment has completely put me off. It’s just made me disinterested and dispirited…and I hate that.
Upon discussing this with my friend, Kelsey–who bought a guitar around the same time I did but can play less than I–we decided that we would probably be better off learning from someone closer to our age–my teacher is probably around fifty?–and that trying this together would be easier and more fun than alone. We have a handful of friends who play, so we just need to figure out who would be the best teacher and then accost them to teach us at some point in time.

There isn’t a moment I can really think of where my brain is not possessed by a song–or, rather, a myriad of them.

At the moment, Kylie Minogue is the criminal, here. The Australian soap-opera-actress-turned-dance/pop-singer is pretty delicious. I was in a convenience store to grab a soda, today, and Red Blooded Woman was playing on the radio…and has been stuck in my head since, along with Slow.

Linky to Red Blooded Woman vid. Rawr~

You’re familiar with the game, aren’t you? [If you are, you just lost.] Y’know, the game that…once you’re aware of, you’re playing–always playing. The ‘goal’ of the game is not to lose the game, which you do by consciously thinking of it. When you lose, you are obligated to announce your loss to your surrounded folks in any number of ways in order to cause them to lose, therefore making your Personal Loss to Caused Loss ratio weigh in your favor.

So can you imagine how frustrating it is to lose the game to a J-Pop singer?

I’m sitting here, with Winamp shuffling through songs when I hear Ayumi Hamasaki. “Oh, gee,” I think. “I can’t place the name of this song.”

So I run my mouse over the little tooltip in FoxyTunes here in Firefox…
It reads, “Ayumi Hamasaki - Game.”

GODDAMN YOU, CATCHY JPOP.

I was terribly late for my guitar lesson today, dad kept procrastinating. Then the dropped me off like five blocks from where it was, so I had to lug the beast down…oh well, it wasn’t so bad. It was raining, which was nice. Good thing I have a hard case.

So I get there, Jeff’s [the receptionist] like, “Oh, good, we were worried you’d died.”

Ascend the evil staircase to my lesson, and we review what we did last week.

Lemme tell you…I’m no Green Day fan. I could tolerate their old stuff, but I’m really starting to hate When I Come Around. It’s an easy beginner’s tune because they, like all the emo/wannabe-punk morons nowadays abuse powerchords.

So I related this to him, and he’s like, “Oh, I figured you’d want something more modern.”
“No, not really. I told you I had diverse tastes, and I was reared on much older stuff.”
“Any decade preference?”
“Not really, but from how he sounds, Buddy Holly sounds like a non-frustrating choice.”
“…well, he isn’t. But are you serious?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Well, I tend to teach some Buddy Holly regardless of suggestion…and every younger person I’ve taught goes, ‘Who?’ Not only did you not go, ‘Who?’ did you suggest him. Most kids these days don’t know that The Rolling Stones were responsible for Start Me Up, and if you mentioned Paint It Black to them, they’d sit there with a question mark hovering over their damn head…if you said, ‘The Who–’ it’d end in a series of confused questions on their end, and–”
“I know. Tragic youth these days and their lack of culture and taste. Shame on them, shame on their parents. Less ranting, more playing. How abouuut…’It’s so ea-sy to faaaall in lo-ove,  it’s so ea-sy to…’ It sounds like…A A  E E  DD  E… A A  D D  EE  A… Yes?”
“That’s what I was gonna have you play. And you’re right, by the way, good ear. ”
“I’m psychic.”
“…maybe psychotic; that was weird. This isn’t a bad progression, but you have to be fast with it…”

–simply put, I rock.
I share his lament of this generation’s–and the previous one’s, actually–lack of taste.

No, the iPod Nano commercial did not inspire this post, although I only recently came to enjoy her. 1234 was not the first song I heard from her, either. Actually, the first two songs–I heard them back-to-back on a radio station earlier this year–I heard from her were, “One Evening,” and, “Secret Heart.” They’re nice.

She’s very easy and nice listening, she’s probably got a song that’ll cater to any mood you’re in. Well, if you like folk-y or indie-eqsue music. Well, so she’s labeled. I’m not really sure what to categorize Feist as.

I’ve found many Canadian artists to be talented. It’s refreshing. It seems, nowadays, that things are so stale in America, musically. Meh.

A friend of mine said that my new bangs–which I didn’t mean to end up like this, but that’s another post–reminded her of Feist from the 1234 video.
Eh, thanks…she’s pretty, but she doesn’t seem appealing in that video. Oh well, it was just the hair, I suppose.

And here I was under the impression that I would have decently nimble and able fingers for this!

Piano keys =/= Guitar strings. I mean, not that I expected them to be, I just thought that maybe I wouldn’t have to be fighting with my hands.

When I was five, I taught myself to tickle the ivories. Well, not really the ivories–I didn’t have a real piano [and besides...do they actually make piano keys from real ivory anymore?] and I still don’t–but the shiny white plastic keys of this decent Casio electric keyboard that I had gotten for Christmas, echoing my wish to learn to play. Didn’t really have the money or time [on the parents' end] for me to take lessons, though, so I sat down with it almost every day, and soon I began reproducing piano versions of songs I heard on the radio or classics or…all sorts of things!

Over a decade later, this is a task not as easily accomplished. I don’t have the patience to try to figure it out on my own. I don’t have the time to do it all alone from square one.
Honestly, I would rather talk to Jeremy than play the thing [although, hehe, I think I may end up doing both, soon. :3]. School, obviously, is significantly more demanding. I have a much younger sibling who’s often left in my care. I’m in pursuit of a job because I’m in pursuit of a car so I can get my license…so many things.
These things aren’t going to stop me from learning–but they would’ve hindered me had I done it alone.

Another bit about taking lessons as opposed to my independent study of sorts is that I actually want to to it *right*. Apparently, according to my former Choral instructor, I play piano in a way that is ‘entirely wrong’. Wrong? If it produces the song and sounds right, why is there a problem? The whole bit about form…yeah. I’m just glad I’m not left-handed so I don’t have to flip my guitar and string it upside down…haha.
Also, I need to learn to read and play from tabs–or even to play from normal sheet music.
I didn’t learn to read sheet music until I was nine, and by then I was so set in my way of doing things [as far as piano] that I can’t play from a sheet. I’ll have it in front of me and understand how it should sound, tell you every note on the damn paper, sing [hum] it in the correct pitch[es]…but I have to really look at it for that. I cannot just glance at the fleeting notes and force my hands to produce them on the keys as I read along. I mean, in the end, I can still play the song after going through it in my head, but…yeah!
It’s problematic, to say the least

And I’m still really not used to not having fingernails on my left hand. x3

Oh man, I was just Rick Roll’d.

For those of you unfamiliar with the expression, it is to [when talking about videos] link someone to the, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” video by Rick Astley when previously promising them a different video/file/site/etc. It can be done for many reasons. It is easily modified for music by just linking them the song.
I’ve even heard of a case where there was some he-said she-said tomfoolery and a victim was given a phone number thinking he was going to setup a hookup…and was Rick Roll’d.

It’s so…mindless. It’s absolutely silly.

And yet…I can’t stop laughing over it.

How sad is it that I actually like the song? xD!