Sure. I’ll always enjoy the music that I grew up on - Beatles, Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd… But as I age I see no
reason why I should stop searching for news favorite bands. So, this year, armed with my streaming service, I made it a
point to create a playlist with new songs from artists I had never heard of before. I must say, I have really enjoyed the
result.

My strategy has been to monitor NPR Music, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone Magazine for newly released albums. I plug in
songs to my streaming service and give a tune about 20 seconds to move me somehow. I’m not a music critic nor are my
tastes particularly mature. I just wanted to find new stuff.

Often it takes a few listens for a song to grow on me. So, I tried to be pretty lenient when I took on new songs. I add
them to my playlist which is forever on random. Eventually, as I play the music in the background as I work or exercise
a song will settle in as something I like or not. If I don’t like the song I don’t fret over tossing it out of the list.
If I get tired of a song, I may struggle a little harder to toss it.

Whatever… It’s all good.

Here are some of my favorite discoveries over the past year…
**note: “discovery” may imply that I am just very late to the game…

Favorite Band:

HAIM

Actually, I did not find a great affinity with the first song that I came upon. However, the more I listened, the more I
liked. I’d see them in concert…

Favorite Song:

Wild Heart - Ada Lea

Great songcraft!

Protest Music:

With a year like this, there must be some great protest music. Thank god for rap and hiphop.

Favorite Voice:

Waylon Payne

This definitely falls out of my normal music preferences, but, wow! what a great voice!

Song I can’t stop listening to:

Le Vent Nous Portera - Sophie Hunger

This song is a cover and fairly old. But it represents an effort to listen to more non-English songs. Also, in the first
few bars, I swear it’s a Radiohead song. That never hurts.

gprnt introduces…

The Old-Timey Music Video Box

I decided that I wanted to add a little visual stimulation to my current “Hot 100” playlist. So, I went out to youtube
and found videos for every song on the list. Sometimes the “video” is no more than a static image, but whatever… You
can find just about any song you want out there. I then wrote a little application in javascript to play my collection
in a random order.

The Old-Timey Music Video Box

When I was young, I dreamed of being a radio DJ. I never acquired the gift of gab, but I was always keen to dictate a
music list. Now, I am able to fulfill that desire! Here is my music video radio station. Perfect for playing in the
background while working. I generally update the songlist weekly.

Every song is a surprise. Every song is an adventure!

Here is my most recent video:

I’m not sure what why I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about badly animated Saturday morning cartoons from my childhood. Regardless, the above video is the result of my bout of insomnia.

To make the animation cheaper, the animators limited the movement and what movement existed was generally repetitive. I tried to convey this to my “actors”, but they ended up more expressive than I envisioned. No big deal. When you are entertaining your kids on a day off from school in a pandemic, you should always just go with the flow.

I looked up a couple of examples of crappy, old cartoons…

You have to love this clip from Star Trek. Captain Kirk threatens to pour acid on a poor tentacled alien named Winston masquerading as an examining table. That’s just horrifying - an alien named Winston!

The style of animiation in this Clutch Cargo clip totally horrified me as a kid. Rather than deal with the painfully tedious act of animating the characters’ mouths as they talked, they used real mouths.

The result must push me over into some form of uncanny valley of animation.