intothefuzz

As part of my New Year’s resolution to be a better blogger in 2010, I’ll occasionally be posting about things that have nothing whatsoever to do with Firefox…like old musical clips from YouTube, for example.

To kick things off, here’s one of my all-time favorite YouTube moments – the greatest American band ever, R.E.M., in their first TV appearance (on Late Night with David Letterman, nonetheless). It rocks:

On that note (no pun intended), this is a really cool post about how the song was constructed.

This is a few months old, apparently, but I just heard the about:robots song this morning and it totally made my day. I really can’t explain how happy it makes me when people take our stuff and put their own creative twists on it.

Check it out:
about:robots

(via Justin Dolske)

Neil Young rules. ‘Nuff said.

Asa tipped me off to this interesting post by Isriya Paireepairit in which Isriya notes certain similarities between the Firefox 3 robot and one featured in Coldplay’s “Talk” video. Funny stuff.

I’ll go on record, though, as saying that our badass open source robot could beat up Coldplay’s wimpy soft rock robot any day. Chris Martin, if you’re up for the challenge you know where to find me.

Three or four years ago my band played a show with the Dying Californian and I’ve a been fan ever since. A very, very casual fan, I should say, because I didn’t get around until buying their CD until this month. I’m glad I finally did, though, because it’s full of rambling, shambling, Neil Young-esque folky tunes (which is a style I have a soft spot for).

Here’s a track off their album ‘Coarsegold’…if you like the song you can buy the whole thing here.

The Dying Californian – “The Martyrdom of Perpetua”

P.S. When I ordered this CD (yes, very old-fashioned of me), there was a slight problem with the processing, and as an apology for my minor inconvenience, Jeff at Turn Records hooked me up with some free albums by other bands on his label. It was some good stuff, so I definitely recommend checking them out if you’re an indie rock fan.

Obviously I’m not very good about living up to the “of the week” aspect of this whole MP3 posting thing, but in honor of Wilco’s recent performance in Berkeley, here’s one of my favorite alternate Wilco tracks. The “real” version can be found on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which you should definitely buy if you don’t have it already.

Wilco – “Kamera 2″

After a two month break, I’m trying to get back in the habit of posting a weekly MP3. Since it’s been so long, here are a couple of tracks from one of my favorite duos, Brian and Chris. The first, “Untitled” (happily the music is much more inspired than the song title), is off their album Vectors and the second, “Action Packed Vacation”, is off their latest one titled 3:

Brian and Chris – “Untitled”

Brian and Chris – “Action Packed Vacation”

Ok, not exactly an obscure band, but this is a pretty obscure song so I figured it was worth posting. It’s Radiohead’s live cover of “Cinnamon Girl”, one of my favorite songs.

They do a good job of it – it starts off especially strong – and if not for a few flubs here and there it’d move up a few notches (then again, it’s sort of reassuring in a weird way to know that Radiohead botches notes every now and then). It’s from something called the EMI Canal Promo, although I couldn’t track down much more information about when or where it was recorded (if you know, please post a comment).

Radiohead – “Cinnamon Girl”