Category: Great Big Sea

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Is this plan awesome or what?

Today’s Excellent Plan of Excellence:

  • Go to store
  • Get moneys
  • Purchase tasty things
  • Bring them home and load them up in the cooler
  • Go to zoo with and
  • Rendezvous at the zoo with and the children
  • Look at critters for a couple of hours
  • Join the ZooTunes line at 4pm
  • Commence fangirling, general bouncing, and bursting into random bits of song
  • Enter the show area around 5pm
  • Locate swag table and buy swag, on account of I’ve lost 25 pounds and I need me a new Great Big Sea shirt, by gods
  • When B’ys appear on stage, commence serious fangirling
  • VERTICAL MOVEMENT!

I love this plan! I’m proud to be a part of it!

And now, off to the store to put my plan in motion! ETA: Store accomplished! Soon there will be ZOO!

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And speaking of Great Big Sea

T minus 7 days and counting until the B’ys are HERE for the Zoo show next week!

, , and I will be gathering Team Cascadia for a mighty gathering! and and and and and and and Clint (whose LJ I forget DOH) and are all joining us!

The Cascadian Vertical Movement team (which y’all may recall totally took the Gold medal this past February) will also have the Junior Auxiliary of Lillian and Moira! I am looking forward to this with great, great glee. These are the children who beg me to play “Donkey Riding” on the Great Big DVD whenever they come over to my house, so I am VERY much anticipating the looks on their little faces when they realize holy crap Great Big Sea is real!

This is going to be huge, huge fun. And I’m taking that day off from work, too, so will be looking into a pre-show lunch and zoo thing of some sort! If you’re not directly involved with the herd I’m organizing but you are planning to be at the show, keep an eye out for me! Better yet, drop me a comment and let me know when and where you’ll be so I can keep an eye out for you, too!

*runs around in anticipatory circles* *practices her Vertical Movement* *puts SRS BZNZ consideration into what new swag to buy now that she’s dropped 25 pounds and TOTALLY needs a new, smaller GBS shirt*

I am ready, B’ys! BRING IT!

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Great Big Sea Karaoke contest!

Check this out, you guys: my beloved B’ys have announced a video karaoke contest! They are handing out instrumental tracks for three of the songs off the new album and telling people to get creative with video responses!

Anybody local want in on this with me? :D

(I wonder if it’d still count as karaoke if you actually learned the chords to the songs… *eyes guitar meaningfully*)

H/t to who spotted this even before I did!

ETA: My favorite part of the whole contest description: Do you ever sing along with GBS when no one is looking? Yes. YES I DO. Also when random passersby are looking, when an entire crowd of my fellow GBS fans are looking, when and I are busking, when I’m boinging down the street with my iPhone’s earbuds on, when I’m going past the fruit stand at Pike Place Market with the cute market men, when I’m browsing the shelves at bookstores, when I’m noodling around on the guitar, when I’m on the treadmill, and when I’m feeding the cats!

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Safe Upon the Shore album review!

RIGHT THEN! texted me when I was on my way home this evening to alert me that the desperately awaited Safe Upon the Shore had finally arrived in the mail. It should surprise none of you that I ripped that envelope open as soon as I kicked off my shoes and changed clothes and got some dinner in me! And I slapped the disc into the actual stereo with actual speakers, not just the penny-ante little speakers on my laptop. ‘Cause if I’m going to listen to a shiny new GBS album for the first time, I’m going to listen to it right.

My review, overall? Um. Fair warning that if you didn’t care for Fortune’s Favour, you probably won’t care for this album either. There’s a lot of the same feel to its production and mixing, in that it feels slicker than older GBS albums have done, and the B’ys are experimenting with vocal styles and types of songs they haven’t historically played with. Which is awesome if you’re a band that’s had ten CDs and you need to mix stuff up a bit to keep it fresh–but if you’re a long-time fan who signed on for the tasty, tasty trad, this takes quite a bit of getting used to.

That said, there are so far two confirmed tracks I’ll be coming back to in regular rotation, “Nothing But a Song” and “Safe Upon the Shore”. There are four others that are potential repeat plays. This is about the same for me as Fortune’s Favour, which gave me ultimately only five songs I regularly go back and replay on the Favorites playlist. And both of these are pretty low overall for GBS albums for me. I’ll have to see how my opinion changes as I play through the album a few more times!

Track-by-track reactions behind the cut.

Continue reading “Safe Upon the Shore album review!”

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Vertical Movement is ON

This just in, for those of you who aren’t members of greatbigsea.com and/or not on the band’s mailing list: they’re playing the Woodland Park Zoo again this summer! The show date is July 29th, and tickets go on pre-sale for members of greatbigsea.com this Friday the 23rd!

I am of course ALL OVER THIS. Any local people want me to snag tickets, please to sing out NOW. I’m pretty sure I’ll be limited to eight, and three of them will already be spoken for since I’ll be buying for myself, userinfosolarbird, and userinfospazzkat.

Anybody who doesn’t need me to buy tickets but will be at the show anyway, please also sing out because I’d love to know who to look out for. If you didn’t go to the zoo show they did in 2007, seriously, consider going to this, because it’ll be a kid-friendly setting AND outdoors and the zoo is an awesome place to see the B’ys perform. Do please note that July 29th is a Thursday, if you need to rearrange your work schedule–and according to the band’s site’s tour page, the doors (well, the concert area, in this case) will open at 5pm and the show will start at 6pm.

Looking forward to seeing you all there! :)

ETA: All of my ticket slots are claimed now! But don’t let that stop you from joining the greatbigsea.com site and jumping in on the presale yourself. Signup’s free, and sometimes being a site member means you can get advance goodies on album releases as well!

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Song prequel giggles

Those of you on Twitter may have seen the #songprequel trending topic, wherein the idea was to post titles of songs that came before actual songs. Much hilarity ensued!

With a hat tip to userinfotechnoshaman, userinfospazzkat, userinfosolarbird, and userinfofredpdx, here are the Great Big Sea ones we all came up with so far:

  • Young Brown’s Mother
  • Acting Third Lieutenant Taylor
  • The Day Pat Murphy Got Sick
  • Nagging Girlfriend
  • Showing Up At the Kitchen Party With Mrs. White

Dara and Paul and I also came up with these:

  • Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Bedtime” and “School is Just Starting”
  • Simon and Garfunkel’s “Construction Crew Arriving at Bank of Troubled Water”
  • Elvis Presley’s “(You Ain’t Nothin’ But a) OMG PUPPY” and “I’ll Do Anything to Get Into Some Blue Suede Shoes”
  • Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the Colonies, I Was”
  • The Day the Music Bought a Cheap Ticket on a Small Plane in Bad Weather
  • Slightly Darker than Usual Day of the Heart
  • Radio Killed the Vaudeville Star
  • From O Brother, Where Art Thou?, “Boy of Periodic Sadness”
  • Kenny Rogers’ “You Picked a Fine Time for Our First Date, Lucille”
  • Duran Duran’s “Peckish Like the Wolf Cub”
  • Kiss Him Hello (may be more obvious if you sing “na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, HELLO”)
  • And last but definitely not least, from Dr. Horrible, “Misbehaving Pony Solo”

Got more? Drop ’em in the comments!

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Great Big Sea at Olympics Victory Ceremonies in Vancouver, BC, 2/26/10

Most of the rest of the world may have converged on Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics, but userinfosolarbird and me? We were there for Great Big Sea, baby!

I do have to admit it was very awesome that they got dinged to be the headlining performance at the Victory Ceremonies last night–which featured a celebration of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. (For those unfamiliar with Canadian provinces, Newfoundland and Labrador are officially one big province.) You couldn’t have chosen better ambassadors, really!

Continue reading “Great Big Sea at Olympics Victory Ceremonies in Vancouver, BC, 2/26/10”

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And now, a gratuitous icon post!

It occurred to me that if I was going to go around calling my LJ “Ordinary Day”, I should damn well have a default icon that reflects that. So for the benefit of those of you looking at this on my various LJ-flavored sites, check out the Alan and Sean loverliness. That shot is of course from the video for the song. The icon is by userinfoturple_purtle, who was the provider of just about all of the GBS icons I use.

And if you’re looking at this on annathepiper.org, here!

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Some end-of-year site housekeeping

So just because I can, I’ve been waking up old broken parts of this web site (annathepiper.org, for those of you reading this on LJ or DW), bits that were never properly integrated into WordPress. Since I’ve got a handy link-checking plugin installed, this has been a lot easier than I thought it would be; I’ve just had to go through and fix a lot of broken links, and in some cases, restore content that’s been absent for some time.

Right now, this primarily means reinstating my Great Big Sea page, and a couple of its child pages as well–most notably, the Pictures page, since I found a nifty plugin that lets WordPress easily talk to Flickr. And I do still have several lovely collections of pictures from various Great Big Sea shows which some kind folks had given me permission to post (userinfomamishka and userinfofredpdx, I’m lookin’ at you!). You can see a nice example of the plugin in action, not to mention some nice pics of Great Big Sea in Vancouver from 2003, here.

I’ve also reinstated the Sitemap, the Credits page (with proper updated references to nifty plugins and things I’m using these days), and the Journal section (although this is primarily a pointer off to my LJ and a place to link to posts I wrote before I ever had a proper blog).

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For those of you not on Twitter

Here are a couple of quick pics I snapped today!

Last night, like I am wont to do, I was whipping through my “Anna’s Set” playlist on my iPhone, which is the various songs I can play to one degree or another on the guitar. And while there’s even stuff that isn’t Great Big Sea on that list, it was somewhere just after “Lukey” when I looked at my pick and realized it suddenly had extra points on the end. Oops!

GBS Kills Another Pick

Meanwhile, the cats have gotten very fond of parking on the windowsill in the kitchen and staring out to the walkway just behind the house. I still don’t know what they think they see back there. And by “they” I mean “Fred”, because George is clearly a slacker when it comes to being a watchcat.

Kitties on Watch