Aside from the usual Pandora, Last FM, Pure Volume, Lala and other music aggregators, there are loads of places to get streaming music…Radio Stations!
Real, old fashioned radio with DJs and all! But the only way that RADIO is bearable is for it to be foreign. Overseas radio is even interesting with ads because of accents and languages, and a lot of our socialist neighbors have taxpayer funded stations with NO ads at all! Bonus.
The downsides are the weird time alignments. UK radio starts the night shift as I am driving home from work, and Australia is always a day ahead (hearing “How is your Monday Afternoon” on a Sunday evening is depressing)
But here are the stations I listen in to Absolute Radio : UK (London)
Great music, funny DJs and news. Lots of ads are balanced out by lots of music. Their website is a great source for band interviews and podcasts. Triple J : Australia (Sydney)
Public ‘Youth’ radio so completely ad-less! Cutting-edge, indie, and sometimes quite weird, you won’t hear these songs elsewhere. Famed for their early backing of Florence and the Machine, Tegan and Sarah and others, they have heard of all the cool bands before you have. NRJ France (Paris)
Yah, it’s in French, and they speak 100mph, but they play good solid pop and have great dance hits party songs on the weekend.
Girls want to be that girl on a vintage bike, skirt or floral shorts flapping around your long taned legs. You may have cool sunglasses on, or a vintage scarf, or possibly a baguette in a basket.
You are carefree and stylish and your look alludes to a unique and creative lifestyle, filled with organic food, intelligent friends and unusual pursuits. You travel a lot and the man in your life probably has a beard and plays in a modern rockabilly band.
And yeah, I wanna be one. I wanna be that chick, on her vintage cycle, cruisin to the market, and maybe go to the local craft brewery later on to hear some live music.
Pity I would only wear it once a year, cos I’m in love
UPDATE! After I got the ‘new job’, and found out I was going to NY, I ran straight to Burlington and bought this beaut! There was one left, in my size! Destiny!
And of course, she kept me warm and stylish all week!
NME put out their list of the best albums of 2009. As I expected, it’s full of noisy, obscure Indie bands whose hipster factor outweighs their actual musical talent. I hadn’t heard of most of the bands (not surprising. I’m not British and I don’t read the NME) but I had a few of the albums on the list. Here’s my rankings, based on the music and how much I listened to that album:
Artist
Album
My Rank
NME Rank
Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand Tonight:
1
43
Lily Allen
It’s Not Me, It’s You
2
25
Kasabian
West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum
3
11
Arctic Monkeys
Humbug
4
12
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It’s Blitz!
5
3
Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
6
34
Florence And The Machine
Lungs
7
26
Empire Of The Sun
Walking On A Dream
8
42
Passion Pit
Manners
9
37
Bat For Lashes
Two Suns
10
22
So me and the NME don’t agree… At all. I listened to the top 10 and was not impressed. Methinks their writers are just trying to one-up each another in an inter-office indie battle of artfullness, disregarding what the listeners think.
Backstory:I got my Greencard in 2006…and just became eligible for Citizenship this year.
So many people think that you get handed a passport a few months after you marry an American. That could NOT be further from the truth!!
The Greencard process involved an expensive Lawyer, and Mike proving that he could ‘sponsor’ my Residency. We had to produce tax Returns and paychecks, I had to go for a physical to test for AIDS and Tuberculosis, and then we had a swift interview where we had to prove the validity of our relationship. Continue reading Becoming an American→
Wildly funny. No seriously, the pun is a disgraceful homage to Wilde’s wickedly witty play…that I just discovered…”The Importance of Being Earnest“.
It’s one of those ubiquitous literary titles that makes you groan with the memory of 11th grade English, lengthy essays and head-bashingly complex prose. But banish that thought! It’s hilarious, light-hearted and silly. And it reads easily, despite being a play.
