Song of the Day – “Name’s the same” Tuesday – “The Power of Love”

Huey Lewis and the News – Gary Wright

For a good song from a great movie, this is the lamest of videos. Doc Brown tries to get into a News performance, and the DeLorean…does something? Bad, bad framing of a pedestrian performance video.

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I was surprised by this song. I wouldn’t think of Gary Wright having that hard an edge.

That’s Ronnie Montrose on guitar? Oh, well, that explains it then.

Song of the Day – “The Stand” – The Alarm

You might think this anthemic rocker from Welsh band The Alarm is just another get-off-your-butt-and-do-something song. But you’d be wrong.

When you peruse the lyrics and the references to “the walking dude” and “Trashcan Man”, you realize that it’s a retelling of the Stephen King opus The Stand. I didn’t realize it until now, more than 30 years later.

Song of the Day – “Following the Sun” – The Everly Brothers

Now that we’re into autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, a lot of people are already thinking of following the sun.

The Everlys had a wonderful comeback album thirty years ago – EB 84. On it, Don Everly put this gorgeous song that proves he knew just how to write for his voice paired with Phil’s. Phil is gone now, but we still have the memories.

Song of the Day – “The Party Broke Up” – Was (Not Was)

Time to break up the party that is Lionheart’s production of “Moon Over Buffalo”! It’s been fun!

This odd piece is from Born to Laugh at Tornadoes. Needless to say, I love it.

One drink of that stuff and -Zam!-
The walls became floors
Became ceilings became doors
The singer just kept singing “Feelings”
That’s right when I snapped

Needless to say, the party broke up

Song of the Day – “Autobahn” – Kraftwerk

It’s difficult to overstate how odd this was to American listeners in 1974. Creepy electronic music, sung in German, that nevertheless sounded warm, in a way.

According to the notes on the video, the English translation goes as follows:

We are driving on the Autobahn
In front of us is a wide valley
The sun is shining with glittering rays
The driving strip is a grey track
White stripes, green edge
We are switching the radio on
From the speaker it sounds:
We are driving on the Autobahn

Song of the Day – “The Trouble with Boys” – Little Eva

The trouble with boys when they know they got you
They start to give other girls the eye
The trouble with boys if you love them enough you
Gotta be prepared to cry

Oh, those boys. What’re you gonna do?

This song definitely wasn’t a hit for Little Eva – “The Locomotion” was her only claim to fame – but it’s a fun number nonetheless.  From 1963.

iPhoneography Apps: iColorama from the beginning – Part 1

iColorama is a full-featured art app. Do you want to base your art on an image? iColorama allows you to change the tone, the colors, the grain, the noise, the size of the image before creating art with it. Do you want to distort the image? Well, it’s got Distort and Glass to help you do that. How about combining images to make a composite or collage? Blend has got you covered. Artistic treatments? iColorama’s effects run from oil to water and many, many in between. Add text? Yes.

What about if you want to start from scratch? Create something totally new? Well, iColorama can handle that as well, with gradients, hundreds of built-in brushes and the ability to import your own.

With all that iColorama can do, there are two things it just can’t be. Those two things make it necessary for me to write a beginner’s tutorial for this app that I’ve covered so often before. One, it cannot be a simple app. Although it’s possible to slap on a filter and export the saved image to Instagram, that is using less than 1% of its capabilities. Two, it is not a layering app. For those who were introduced to digital imaging with desktop behemoths like Photoshop, this means that you will have to rethink the way you do things. This tutorial will help you make the first steps towards using this feature-laden app efficiently, yet playfully. Yet it’s long; too long, I fear, to be contained in a single article as I would have liked.

iColorama’s splash screen is artwork created in iColorama by various talented artists. The splash screens stay in place for several months, then are replaced as part of a new release that adds multiple additional capabilities to the app.

Song of the Day – “New Music” Wednesday – “Blue Rock” – SuperTempo

SuperTempo is an Italian punk-rock group. I can’t really detect an Italian accent, but that doesn’t mean that I can quite pick out the lyrics. Their sound may be punk-like, but that is contradicted by the video of young ladies play-fighting in a sunny meadow.

Song of the Day – “Name’s the same” Tuesday – “Money”

Pink Floyd – Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

Possibly the most famous song off their trillion-selling album Dark Side of the Moon.

I’ve never done it; can anyone tell me how this syncs up to the movie The Wizard of Oz if you sync them up?

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Blues rockers Grace Potter and the Nocturnals included this song on their debut a couple of years ago.

Song of the Day – “Under the Milky Way” – The Church

I wish I knew what you were looking for
Might have known what you would find

Australian band The Church is still going strong after more than thirty years – good for them! In addition to this classic, check out their covers album, A Box of Birds.