My Summer Song

So every summer there's one song that will capture my imagination force me to fall in love with it. It doesn't have to have come out that particular summer, but if I heard it during the summer and it got into my head in such a way that it crowds out love for other music, then it becomes the summer song. That one up there has the title for my 2009 summer song. It's "Parentheses" by The Blow. About three days into the summer, I knew this simple little pop ditty was it. I love her voice (I have a soft spot in my heart for female vocals, which is my explanation for my obsession with Karen Carpenter, which we shall now never speak of again) and the lyrics make me smile. The video could be better. I'm not too into the animation. None of the fan-made ones were much better, so this is what you get.

Past honorees of the hallowed summer song title have been "Where it's At?" by Beck, "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5 and Esquivel's "Mucha Muchacha."

Other music that has been getting me through late night drawing sessions:



Architecture in Helsinki: I didn't know I loved this band. I know that now. I also love this simple video.



Fleet Foxes: These guys are really awesome. They harmonize very well and the songs have an earthy quality to them. This video in particular kind of blows my mind.

There's way more, but this post is getting long.

I'm going to go eat.

Carrot Rope

Anybody wanna start a Pavement cover band with me?

Anybody?

Tapes n' Tapes

I've been listening to Tapes n' Tapes "The Loon" LP recording pretty obsessively lately. It's very good. I hear tell then have a new album out, or coming out or something. I may have to pick it up.

Explosions in the Sky

I'm out of the musical loop. I've made an almost conscious decision to be there too. I stopped reading music magazines a long time ago. I haven't been by Pitchfork in quite some time because I was beginning to choke on the snarky, too cool for school-ness of the whole enterprise. And honestly I just stopped caring. I came to the point where I just liked less and less of the new music I heard various reviewers touting as divinely inspired (for that week anyway, beware the sophomore album!) and found it really hard to get excited about anything I was hearing. I call this point "getting old."

"Getting old" is great because it never matters what's cool anymore, you just listen to what you like. (Heck yeah I've got the Carpenters on my iPod, without the slightest whiff of irony) As all that angsty indie snobbery falls away you can even start to enjoy older music that wasn't deemed kosher by the keepers of musical purity and integrity. Seriously, nobody ever told me that ELO was awesome, I had to figure it out for myself.

All that being said, I have a new favorite band, as of about 2 hours ago. Explosions In The Sky.

I honestly don't know almost anything about them. I vaguely remember catching about a minute of their performance on Austin City Limits back in twenty aught seven. I thought they sounded cool, but did no further investigation. Today, I was reading the internet and for some totally unknown reason, remembered this band. I looked them up and holy schmoley, they're awesome. Now I don't know if these guys have been popular with the indie reviewer set, and I don't care. I may be the last person in the world to find out about this band, and that's fine. I just dug them so much that I felt compelled to post. I've been really listening to instrumental music lately (another post for another time) and these dudes will now be in heavy rotation. You can download one song from each album and the whole EP "The Rescue" from their website. I think you should, if you like things that are cool. But remember, not cool because I or anyone else said so, just plain cool.

The above video was created by a fan for a "make us a video" contest the band held a while back. I hope you love it!

Mojizu!

I finally got around to joining the Mojizu

character design community.

It's pretty cool and there are a ton of awesome little characters that people have submitted. I posted two myself, one of whom is none other than Fireworks and Karate Supplies regular, The Professor.

If you're like me and you like to create little dudes and dudettes all the time for the heck of it, Mojizu is the place for you.

Bob Staake's new book

Bob Staake's new book, The Donut Chef

is out and I can't wait to get me a copy. I love Staake's

art. His colors are great and he really gets a lot out of his characters even thought they're just built with deceptively simple shapes. I personally only discovered his artwork a couple of years ago, but I've been trying to get my hands on his books ever since. The Red Lemon

and Hello Robots

come to mind as other favorites.