Ubee's Open Mic

Thanks to Nic Chimenti for a nice writeup on Trivianic about last week's open mic night at Ubee's featuring myself and two other songwriters.

MSA Open Mic Night at Ubee's

I played three songs at the Memphis Songwriters Association open mic night at Ubee's on Tuesday night.



You can find out more about my music at  http://www.last.fm/music/Wes+Raine.

Pandora, Youth and Music Enjoyment

Roxi downloaded Pandora on her iPhone a while back but I had never heard her use it until the other night. For those that are unfamiliar, Pandora is an amazing internet radio website. There aren't really stations per se but as you listen, it creates customized playlists on the fly based on your feedback (thumbs-up or thumbs-down) on the song currently playing. Anyway, Roxi has been using it quite a bit on her phone and this afternoon I started feeling very nostalgic and melancholy while it played in the background. My life has always been defined by music. Good and bad memories and feelings are unconsciously triggered by single familiar notes. In an instant, I'm somewhere in my life re-experiencing the sights, sounds, smells and emotions of those times that shaped who I am for whatever reason. Today was different though. Instead of a particular song, I realized that these feelings were due to the sound quality of the music coming from the iPhone's mono speaker. It took me back to my childhood listing to a very cheap radio waiting for a great song to play so that I could tape it for repeated listenings. That little me would be amazed with the almost 700 hours of digital audio on my computer yet I'm amazed that I find myself appreciating the poor quality sound coming from that mono iPhone speaker more than I've enjoyed music in quite a while.

An Upside to Communicable Diseases

All this talk of pandemics reminds me of a song I wrote during the monkey pox scare in 2003. I imagined a scenario in which a mandatory quarantine might not be such a bad thing...

My Music at Last.fm

For the past few years, I've been using Download.com to host the songs that I've written and recorded, but I got an email yesterday informing me that they are shutting down their music site in a few weeks. Today, I've gone through the process of migrating my music to Last.fm. You can see my page and listen to my songs here. I've also created a page for my once and future band, The Hek-Atomic Cherries. Check out our catalog here. Happy listening!

Another Celebrity Politician?

Last week, country singer Sammy Kershaw announced that he will be running for the office of lieutenant governor of Louisiana in the next election. He plans to run on the platform of expanding the entertainment industry in the state. In the past few years, Shreveport has become a hot spot of activity as several Hollywood productions have been lured to the city by industry incentive programs.

I'm not sure how to feel about Sammy Kershaw running. On the one hand, his position in the music business could help foster recording and music production facilities in the state. On the other hand, he recorded and released the song, "Queen of My Double Wide Trailer."

Everything That's Wrong With Music In 5 Minutes and 22 Seconds

I was surfing around the Internet and came across a link to a YouTube video from the movie "Before the Music Dies," an indie documentary about manufactured music. From the preview on their official website, it looks like it should be a pretty good movie. What I found on YouTube is this 5:22 clip from the documentary showing how a pop star/song is manufactured from start to finish. It's pretty amazing really; disgusting, but still amazing.