My homebrewing blog lives at www.barlowbrewing.com
But here lives my For Dads About to Rock re-posts.
Dean wrote a great post a few weeks about making the right decision when it comes to shows: Pride: Eating It
Life isn’t a simple question with either A, B, C, or D being the right answer. Life and family is full of hand-wrenching questions where you have to choose the best answer. Yeah,…
Source: 4dadsabout2rock
When was the last time you made a mixtape?
Ok, yeah, no one makes “tapes” anymore. But once upon a time, before Dropbox and before we could share our “playlists” with the world, making someone a mixtape was the coolest thing you could do. Back in the 80’s, I wasn’t the best looking guy in the…
Source: 4dadsabout2rock
Having daughters has been a steep learning curve for me.
I’m an only child, so I didn’t have the deeply immersive experience of being around little girls until I had kids of my own. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a difference between boys and girls for the first few years. Babies are babies,…
Source: 4dadsabout2rock
Sometimes you just miss an artist by a matter of days.
It pained me to miss the two The National shows last year at The National in Richmond. (Yes, that artist/venue is a bit confusing. A Mandelbrot set of a show, but I’m getting off track.) I was into the band and had a few of their CDs,…
Source: 4dadsabout2rock
We all want grow to older, but we never want to grow up. And when you are young the trick is to get just a *little* bit older. We want to be 16 so we can drive, we want to be 21 so we can drink alcohol (well, legally), and then, maybe, a few years more just to lower your insurance. But, unless…
Source: 4dadsabout2rock
Going the Way of the Dodos
I’m probably going to be the outlier on this blog.
Sure, I saw plenty of Grateful Dead and Phish shows in my day, but I’ve fallen away from jam bands of late. I respect what they do, but what they do hasn’t been what I’ve been craving for a very long time.
As I get older, and maybe I just have less time to listen, I want things that are a bit more concise and structured. The buffet of noodling and trippy meanderings is nice sometimes, but what I yearn for day-in and day-out is nice plate of succinct rock. On point, to the point, and clever.
I’m throwing out a song today from The Dodos called Black Night. There’s a lot of random music that flows through my car and headphones on a weekly basis, but The Dodos’ No Color disc has been anchored in place for several months. These guys are catchy, melodic and fun.
And The Dodos is a very drum-centric band, which is unusual nowadays. For some reason I feel more comfortable playing the air drums than I do the air guitar. Maybe because I played guitar, very badly, in my youth and I kinda feel like an asshole in making those fake motions. Whereas I know nothing about the drums, and I’m quite sure I’d be terrible at playing them. So, you know, no pressure.
And, as icing on the cake, Neko Case did the backing vocals for half of the tracks on the CD, too. Are you freaking kidding me? Neko is a whole other post that needs to be written when I can calm down my schoolboy crush.
Will hearing about great music from these guys bring me back into the jam band fold? Maybe. In the meantime, I’m going the way of the Dodos.
Source: 4dadsabout2rock
But I am not.
If you want to read some of my homebrew ramblings, go to www.barlowbrewing.com
