"Pleasant Valley Sunday" by The Monkees

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A formative song which I suspect is at least partially responsible for my current favored musical sounds was recorded and released before I was born,

My parents had purchased The Monkees' Greatest Hits for me because I really enjoyed watching re-runs of The Monkees on TV in the late afternoons after school. This would have been in the late 1970s or the very early 1980s. I was super dismayed to have my bubble burst in that they weren't currently really a band or making more TV, even in those days.

One of my favorite songs on their Greatest Hits record was Pleasant Valley Sunday, which was probably one of their more famous tracks, but I had no idea about their actual fame, their pre-fab reputation, or the popular influences they might have been incorporating or responding to.

So I knew nothing specifically about wall-of-sound techniques, or how much it had been done, and by whom, prior to that point in my life.

I was a kid. Some afternoons I would sit by myself next to my parent's Montgomery Ward console stereo, plug in a pair of dad's Realistic headphones and play records.

So. Peasant Valley Sunday has a very recognizable guitar riff and a clever lyric and that thing that happens at the end with reverb and repetition where you follow all of the elements of the song into a sort of cacaphony that ends in an orchestral drone. I used to pick an element, the guitar riff, or a vocal element, and see how long I could follow it until I lost track of it in the mix.

I wouldn't learn about Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound techniques or recording techniques and effects at all for another decade.

However, I note with increasing frequency, the music I really love today, shoegaze and nu-gaze and the things that sound that way, I have been thinking of that one track produced by a group of guys on an album where they really did play their instruments and wanted a little bit of credit for being more than goofy actors.

The fun starts with the drum roll at about 2:32.

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Merry Christmas!

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#solstice #yule

Working with the Forever✱Notes scheme in Apple Notes and I find that there are wonderful reasons to use Notes for the purpose. And I’m learning there are some things that I wish notes could already do.

I wish individual Notes had anchor tags, like old HTML, so I could have a sort of table of contents for a long note and jump from the top of a note to a specific section.

Links between notes work great, so I suppose the obvious solution is to break the long note into separate items that can be linked? Maybe now I understand the Forever✱Notes Hub concept?

Tonight I verified that tags work for the Apple Notes index and for searching, but not as links in and of themselves. The drawback is that instead of going from a note with a tag directly to other notes with the same tag, I need to scroll the list of tags to find the tag for the note I’m already on to go to the full list of notes with that tag.

Again, Notes is free for the price of your devices and the sync just works with the base iCloud functionality.

So, just like always, I’ve got a tool that mostly does what I want and need, but I’m looking at other tools once again. All the while I understand there are always trade offs.

Thank you for hanging with me while I think out loud.

Blogging about journaling is less meta than blogging about blogging, right?

Out of twenty things in the list, I have only not owned an encyclopedia, though many of my peers did. The rest of the experiences were all very normal at various points in my life. Just like sniffing freshly mimeographed worksheets at school. Remember worksheets, anyone? Carrying dimes and quarters for a pay phone?

There is lots of media with things that were once normal. I re-watched Christmas Vacation again today and was struck by normal things depicted that were such a standard part of life during filming but aren’t now.

I have a model that my dad’s father made in his own workshop of a working wagon with runners with a team of horses in yokes and full harnesses. It’s not beautiful, but accurate. He was bringing something to life from his memory of a way of life that had changed dramatically for him, too.

Thinking a lot of things that will pass from memory as we all change. I blame Lord of the Rings, but also December in Minnesota, and being 57 years old.

That feeling when you learn your phone is still in your car because your glucose monitor app is reporting a lack of communication with the sensor.

Stands to reason.

#mnwx #aurora #msp

#aurora #mnwx #msp

Northern Lights visible in Northern sky and overhead in St. Paul, MN. #mnwx