First of all, welcome to my new blog. Hosted this time on WordPress. I’m hoping that this will be an improvement on Blogger which I wasn’t such a fan of, mainly because of its difficulty in posting images (I have yet to see if this will be any better in WP) and its minuscule editing window.

Anyway, on with the blog.

The weekend got me thinking about music. This past Friday, my family and I went to the birthday party of a friend of ours who is the principal bassist of the National Philharmonic and a talented luthier.

He and his wife have also managed to give their 3 sons classic Swedish names: from left to right Ludvig, Gustav, and Sixten. And all three share names with famous composers/musicians/conductors. (Beethoven, Mahler/Holst, and Sixten Ehrling)

On Saturday, the National Philharmonic performed Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, 5th piano concerto, and 5th Symphony. The pianist for the concerto had returned from over thirty years of silence after a degenerative nerve disorder took his ability to use his right hand. Through miraculous surgery and doubtlessly a great deal of hard work, he was able to regain his past virtuoso.

 In my last post, I mentioned the place we had breakfast (which also doubles as a concert venue) in St. Augustine Beach, Fl last spring break, but couldn’t remember the name, and a Google maps search wasn’t helping me out either. Well, at some point this weekend I started looking up some of my favorite bands to see when they had new albums coming out or when they might be touring nearby. Soon enough, I found myself on the website of the band Man Man, a band that I heard for the first time last year when they opened for Modest Mouse in Greensboro. I think Donny and I might have been the only ones in the arena who liked them, but that was just fine with us. On their website, I saw that they were playing at Cafe 11 in St. Augustine Beach, the very place I had mentioned in my blog a few days earlier. Here’s where it gets trippy: Man Man is playing there on March 8 and 9, which is the second weekend of NC State’s spring break, which is exactly when we were in St. Aug last year. Meaning that if Donny and I were still on the team, we would be at the concert this year. As Donny put it “reason #156.1(f) we should have stayed at NCSU.”

Speaking of Donny and Music, I have to mention that his musical taste has had profound influence on me over the last two years. (So, of course, has Greg’s, though he and I shared an erstwhile appreciation of  rap) Before moving in together, Donny and I shared one musical interest: Green Day. He has since introduced me to Modest Mouse and Fall Out Boy, and we both re-discovered Bowie, thanks in part to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

And finally, a list of recently-released and upcoming albums I’m excited about:

Cat Power – Jukebox

Man Man – Rabbit Heads

Sigur Ros

Jack Johnson – Sleep Through the Static