Tag: GBS

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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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That promised post about stuff besides books

So yeah, I’ve actually been doing things besides purchasing books lately, I swear!

The Great Enshrinkening of Anna proceeds apace, even if not quite as quickly as initially planned. As I enthused on Twitter and Facebook this morning, I hit 164 pounds today! Which is well and easily the lightest I’ve been in five years, and which gets me into territory before I’d started the Walk to Rivendell in 2005. (Which was when I started regularly tracking my weight.) 162 pounds is the 30 pounds lost mark. I’m still aiming for 150, so I have 14 pounds to go!

It’s a bit amusing as well to realize that if I count from my actual high point of weight last year, I’m actually down 29.5 pounds, not 28. But I’m still counting from when I actually started using the LoseIt app, so!

Work’s been a bit crazy lately since we’re hardcore face down on a huge project for the next few weeks–and my team’s having some QA shuffle going on as well, so we’re essentially down to two full-time QA people right now. But so far it’s all still good. And on Friday, we even finally got us an official Big Fish Games sign in front of our building! Check it out:

userinfosolarbird has gone to Oregon to play a gig down there, and I shall miss her, but wish her luck as well! In the meantime userinfospazzkat and I went to have tasty sushi in Woodinville tonight, saving me from having to figure out what the hell to make myself for dinner.

I am very, very happy that the heat wave from last week has passed. I don’t mind the hot so much, but I do mind the part where I don’t sleep well in heat waves. Today was lovely, though, once the clouds cleared up, and I had a great walk down to the shops.

I should also mention that userinfospazzkat has been getting into Leverage lately and I’ve quite enjoyed what I see of it so far. I can even tie this into Great Big Sea by noting that in the promo photos associated with the new album, Alan looks suspiciously Christian-Kane-like. This is not a bad thing. ;)

And speaking of GBS, NEW ALBUM COMING OUT ON TUESDAY! <3 <3 Brace for the squee, folks. You know it's coming!

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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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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

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Songs about horses falling through ice!

userinfosolarbird asked me if I had the chords to two of the ditties off the mighty GBS album The Hard and the Easy: “Tickle Cove Pond” and “Concerning Charlie Horse”. I’d pulled “Tickle Cove Pond” off the OKP at one point but did not have chords for “Charlie Horse”, and so I’ve spent a chunk of my afternoon with my guitar, working those out!

“Charlie Horse” is a fun ditty in no small part because it changes keys, which is unusual for a Great Big Sea song. So in order to accommodate the key change and the key they recorded it in, I had to figure out what would work best for chord transcription. This led me to do two sets of chords, a set with the capo on 3 and modulating from D to E in the chords, and a set with the capo on 5 to modulate from C to D. Persons way more comfortable with the key of F than I am could go completely capo-free, since the ultimate goal here is to get from F to G.

Anyway, here are some chords! Enjoy!

Tickle Cove Pond

Charlie Horse Capo 3

Charlie Horse Capo 5

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Great Big Sea at Malkin Bowl, Vancouver BC, 9/12/09

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the highlight of userinfosolarbird, userinforavyngyngvar, and my trip to Vancouver: the Great Big Sea concert at Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park, Saturday night, September the 12th!

Fangirly squealing behind the fold, and this time, y’all, thanks to my beloved Dara, I am bringing pictures. There are links off to suitable tasty videos as well, and mad props to OKPers sticckler and katy for those!

Continue reading “Great Big Sea at Malkin Bowl, Vancouver BC, 9/12/09”

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Great Big Video Goodness

For those of you who didn’t see me tweet these yesterday and this morning, I must share with you two delightful videos from a young lady I met on the way out of the Great Big Sea concert on Saturday night. She had attended both shows in Vancouver and had the great fortune of being up near the stage, with a camera! I therefore bring you the work of fellow OKP denizen sticckler:

Here’s her catching Sean McCann doing the Extended Remix Edition of the Mermaid Dance! Watch for where he completely forgets the next verse.

And, from the show I attended, The Mighty Doyle nailing “River Driver”. To wit, YUM. <3 Also, Doyle fans, note the presence of the beard! My own Extended Remix post for the concert is on the way, y'all. ;)