Mike English dot Net

Local legend, Chance Jones has a new album coming out this month on vinyl, CD, and as a digital download.  It’s worth your attention.

From Revue’s coverage:

Primrose is both “the most accessible and the weirdest album I’ve put out,” says Jeff Vandenberg, owner of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Friction Records, which is releasing the album. “The recordings came out great and it reminds me of ‘60s and ‘70s rock, but in the best way. It’s got an old-school sound, but is still totally unique.”

If you love music, live in Grand Rapids, and you’ve never seen Chance Jones play, you really need to get out more.  Joshua Burge has tirelessly invested himself into rocker persona, Chance Jones, at every performance I’ve attended.  With “Chance’s” wildly theatrical mannerisms and  knack for melody, and the band’s tight backing, each show is thoroughly entertaining.  Why not come out to the album release at the Intersection on the 27th and see for yourself?

Still not convinced? Here’s a sample from the new album:

Chance Jones – Cute with a Knife

Wanted:

A small web application that can help log plays for vinyl records to Last.fm and also report them to Twitter.

It would draw album data (including track length times and track numbering) from Discogs.com after the user identifies the correct album (or if they’re a member on the site, selects it from their collection.)

Then it would allow the user to “play” the album, one side at a time, using a timer to “scrobble” each track at the appropriate interval to Last.fm. It would offer the option to “tweet” the play of the album to Twitter with a link to its Discogs entry. It would pause at the end of each side and wait for the user to flip the record and press play before beginning to “scrobble” the tracks on the next side.

Accurate track duration data is essential to the proper functioning of this application.  If Discogs does not have the necessary data, it might be possible to retrieve it from the MusicBrainz database.

http://www.discogs.com/help/api

http://www.last.fm/api/submissions

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/WebService

If anyone would be so kind as to help me out with this, it would be much appreciated.

The term earworm, referring to a song that’s stuck in your head, tends to carry a negative connotation. Often times however, it’s my favorite songs that get stuck in my head. Not always – it’s still possible to have an annoying jingle torment me for hours, – but usually the songs that pop into my head out of the blue and stick with me are tunes I rather enjoy.

I’d like to start sharing these gems as they come to me, but I’m still trying to decide the best way to do it. (As with most things.) I’d like to standardize it and make it more machine-readable so it can provide more useful information in the future.

I think that to post an earworm you ought to at least have the fields of Artist, and Song, but I’d also like to include an optional link to the Last.fm page for the song, as well as an optional quotation of the repeating lyrical phrase.

Today, I used FriendFeed and Twitter to assemble such information about this earworm. Is this the best way? Could this be streamlined or automated? Is there any interest in an earworm activity spec?