Candleblog

Reinhardt. Not Fett.
Today is guitar genius Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt’s 100th birthday.
Treat yourself and listen to some of this music. Django was incredible — and only had two usable fingers on his left hand (that’s the hand that makes chords). Django is on my short list of greatest guitar players of all time.
Seriously, take a [...]

CaseyContrarian is compiling some year-end lists about music for his blog from some of the blog’s contributors, of which I’m one. Along with some best-of lists, Casey asked us to consider who our favorite underrated guitar players are. Here’s what I wrote to him in an email. Your thoughts, Candleblog readers?
Underrated guitarists:
Bruce Cockburn – amid [...]

Time to weed out some of these pesky Firefox tabs and share the linky goodness with my loyal readers! To wit…

The Trouble With Twitter is another ill-informed anti-twitter pronouncement, this time from a journalism professor. The comment at 6:41 from “lisarosenthal” nails my reaction to the piece exactly.
A realty company with a really bad PR [...]

I have a lot of free time today… hours and hours in fact, so I’m going to try and sum up the noteworthy events of the lest several days of my trip in chronological order:
Wednesday 7/15:

Flew from BTV to PDX. Arrived at 1AM local time. Sat next to ACM sisters and brothers from Great Neck [...]

This is the perfect blending of things that I love.

Back in the early 90s I used to sing funny songs with my friends Spine and Mazur. We called ourselves “Spamnation” and would entertain our friends at parties with a couple of original songs we’d arranged, with me playing the guitar and the three of us singing in three-part harmony. We toyed around with several [...]

I know I’m coming a little late to this party but OMG this is the perfect crystallization of the potential of the remix culture. An Israeli remixer going by the moniker Kutiman has taken clips from a bunch of YouTube videos and combined them to make amazing musical mashups. It’s not just a technological and [...]

So I’m listening to a new CD right now by a band I absolutely love and I’m enjoying the hell out of it. The thing is, it’s not “out” yet, meaning the band has not officially released the disk to the public. You can pre-order it (which I’ve actually done, BTW), but I still technically [...]

I don’t talk much about it on this blog, but I’ve played guitar since I was about 16 or so. I started playing to impress a girl and when that didn’t work out, I delved into the instrument anyway. I’ve always been mostly a solo player (I’ve never been in a band) and it’s only [...]