Coffee Cups -- April 24, 2008

Self Helpless - Her Space Holiday
What Am I to You? - Norah Jones
The Youth - MGMT
Don't Deconstruct - Rilo Kiley
All At Once - Jack Johnson
Young Folks - Peter Bjorn and John
Hills - Thao Nguyen
Typical Situation - Dave Matthews Band
Glass Figurine - Andrew Bird
Words Cannot Describe - Mirah
Dreaming of the Plum Trees - White Hinterland
Fidelity - Regina Spektor
Dry Lips - Lightspeed Champion
The Past and Pending - The Shins
Bathwater - No Doubt
Asleep on a Sunbeam - Belle and Sebastian
Good Day - Jukebox the Ghost
The Perpetual Self, Or "What Would Saul Alinsky Do?" - Sufjan Stevens
Fancy Footwork - Chromeo
I Will Possess Your Heart - Death Cab for Cutie
Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig - Jens Lekman
Little of Your Time - Maroon 5
It's a Disaster - OK Go
Off the Hook - CSS
It's a Fact (Printed Stained) - Matt & Kim
Bluegrass Stain'd - Mark Ronson, Nappy Roots, and Anthony Hamilton
The Girl You Lost to Cocaine - Sia

"You can't build cathedrals out of finger steeples"

Thao Nguyen's song Tallymarks off her solo album "Like the Linen" has some of my favorite lyrics ever. I'm normally not into meta songwriting, but the song is so adorable that I can forgive her and embrace the embarrassed, sweet little chorus.

"But I think I might miss you enough to say so,
and I think I already did.
Well, I think I might miss you enough to say so.
There you go, I just said it again."

Tallymarks - Thao Nguyen

Although I generally prefer her work with the band on "We Brave Bee Stings and All", this track is well worth a listen (or twelve, in my case).

Damn the man

Vampire Weekend's first album is a decent amateur effort that hipsters the world over have been eating up like organic vegan soy chips. There are a couple of stand out songs, namely "Oxford Comma", which I have been aching to play on my radio show. Unfortunately, the first line of the chorus is "Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?", planting it firmly in the "unplayable" category. So, subversive anarchist rebel that I am, I'm posting it here for your enjoyment.

Oxford Comma - Vampire Weekend

And, in the spirit of censorship, Adam Buxton's hilariously clean version of "Fuck tha Police" by NWA.

The jazz monster

So, I know what some of you are thinking.

"I wish Sarah would write more about obscure jazz music instead of this indie folk bullshit."
"This blog simply does not contain enough name-dropping and pretentiousness."
"While reading this blog, I feel that I am not simultaneously belittled by a self-righteous music student often enough."

Do you like jazz and feeling bad about yourself? Boy, do I have news for you!!

My friend Callum has a new jazz music blog called "The Jazz Monster", which can be found at jazzmonster.blogspot.com. In all honesty, Callum is a brilliant writer, putting yours truly to shame. He is an incredibly talented musician as well, currently studying at Berklee, and he is also ridiculously knowledgeable about his genre of choice. Best of all, Callum is a pretentious son-of-a-bitch. Read his shit.

Coffee Cups -- April 17, 2008

Lover Lay Down - Dave Matthews Band
Sunworshipper - Mylo
3x5 - John Mayer
Be Born - Tally Hall
I'm a Cuckoo - Belle and Sebastian
Experimental Film - They Might Be Giants
The Fix Is In - OK Go
Kids - MGMT
Victoria - Jukebox the Ghost
Radio, Radio - Elvis Costello
Campus - Vampire Weekend
Electric Demons in Love - Electric Six
My Girl is Calling Me (A Liar) - Chromeo
Too Little Too Late - Barenaked Ladies
My Moon My Man - Feist
Hanginaround - Counting Crows
Late Sunday Evening - Art Brut
Six Feet Under - No Doubt
Happy Birthday - Sufjan Stevens
The Happy Birthday Song - Andrew Bird
Expo '86 - Death Cab for Cutie
Fear and Convenience - Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
Sand in My Shoes - Dido
Doctor Monroe - Casey Dienel
Tech Romance - Her Space Holiday
Eleanor Put Your Boots On - Franz Ferdinand

Bandwidth issues

For reasons [kind of] unknown, people are getting an error message when they try to download songs -- "bandwidth quota exceeded". The main reason, as far as I can tell, is that the files are around 5MB, and I probably only have 10MB of bandwidth, so if more than one person is trying to download at once, we'll probably run into problems, especially if other people are browsing the site at the same time. The thing is, I'm pretty sure I'm not popular enough to actually merit this kind of problem. I have been trying to figure out how much bandwidth I have on this free account (I don't know if my cheap-o domain name factors in at all) and whether or not (and how) I could upgrade the site. Also, I don't even know if this is really an issue or just a false error. So, stick around, I'll keep writing, and I'll get downloads back to normal as soon as possible. Until then, if there's a song you desperately desire, leave a comment with your email address or AIM screen name and the songs you would like and I'll be happy to send you the files. Sorry!!

Coffee Cups -- April 10, 2008

100 Knives - Mirah
A Long December - Counting Crows
Just Apathy - Tally Hall
Dark Matter - Andrew Bird
Tallymarks - Thao Nguyen
Someday You Will Be Loved - Death Cab for Cutie
Natural Anthem - The Postal Service
1 2 3 4 - Feist
Toes - Norah Jones
Absolutely Nothing - Lily Allen
Get on the Ball - No Doubt
If You Find Yourself Caught in Love - Belle and Sebastian
The Henney Buggy Band - Sufjan Stevens
No More Long Years - Matt & Kim
Post Soothing Out - Art Brut
A Million Ways - OK Go
Symbol in My Driveway - Jack Johnson
Academia - Sia
I'm Wrong About Everything - John Wesley Harding
What is Hip? - Tower of Power
A Postcard to Nina - Jens Lekman
On the Radio - Regina Spektor
You're the Reason I'm Leaving - Franz Ferdinand
The Only One I Know - Mark Ronson ft. Robbie Williams
The Luxury of Loneliness - Her Space Holiday
Pictures of Success - Rilo Kiley
Metal Heart - Cat Power

Title of the post

As you may have noticed, music is one of the greatest loves of my life. For those of you that don’t already know, I also have a profound relationship with comedy. And there’s one other thing: I’m having a serious love affair with musical comedy. Here are four of my recent trysts.


I saw Tim Minchin for the first time a month ago in New York, where he had a six-week run at New World Stages. The man is a genius, if a bit mad. He is a talented pianist and witty as all hell, and I was hurting from laughing by the end of the show. His style is often dark and vulgar, but he performs with such eagerness that it’s difficult to be offended.

You Grew On Me - Tim Minchin
Inflatable You - Tim Minchin


After the show, we walked down to the UCBT (Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre) and saw Olde English’s variety show, Very Fresh, where they debuted a brilliantly made video, “Akon Calls T-Pain”. If you’ve ever heard a song by either of them and thought, “I can appreciate this very original music and the artist’s clever use of vocoder,” this is not the video for you.



(The three songs parodied are “Buy U a Drank” by T-Pain, “I Wanna Fuck You” by Akon, and “Sexual Eruption” by Snoop Dogg.)


Improv Everywhere is a project headed by Charlie Todd (or Agent Todd, in IE terms) that he started with fellow comedy students of the UCBT improv school. (Todd now performs and teaches there.) Their goal is to “cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, which they have been doing since August 2001 with over 70 missions. One of their recent missions, executed in Los Angeles, struck me as particularly great.

I’ve been known to have a slight problem with suspension of disbelief. I walked out of “Superman Returns” because I found it so implausible that Lois Lane did not die in the opening scene that I physically couldn’t sit through the rest of the film without shouting obscenities at the screen. So I definitely understand the problem many play- and movie-goers have with musicals. Strangers shouldn’t be able to effortlessly harmonize after breaking into song about something that, let’s face it, doesn’t deserve to be sung about. Like, say, spilled lemonade:




A bit closer to home, I managed to get a taste of musical comedy on campus at the latest Mixed Company a cappella concert. They invited the Johns Hopkins Mental Notes, and both featured a comedy song; Mixed Company sang “Title of the Song” by Da Vinci’s Notebook, and the Mental Notes sang “Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor)” by former Da Vinci’s Notebook members Paul and Storm.

Title of the Song - Da Vinci’s Notebook
Your Love Is (Love Song with Metaphor) - Paul and Storm

I wish I had a recording of the performance to share-- the soloists, Nemo Swift ’11 of Swarthmore and Tom Murphy ’09 of JHU, did a wonderful job. But the real beauty of these songs is in the lyrics. I’ll leave you with verse two of “Your Love Is”:

My love is a sailing ship
Seeking out a friendly shore
To cast out my anchor, happily never to sail no more.
And your love is the ocean that drowns me
Leaving my bones to be picked at by crabs
And bringing settlers to the New World with smallpox and influenza
And wiping out the indigenous population.
Smallpox
Your love is smallpox.

Coffee Cups -- April 3, 2008

Lonely Night in Georgia - Marc Broussard
Forever and a Day - Her Space Holiday
The Mistress Witch from McClure (Or, the Mind That Knows Itself) - Sufjan Stevens
Told You So - Barenaked Ladies
Fair - Remy Zero
Don't Leave Home - Dido
Big Kid Table - Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
At the Dept. of Forgotten Songs - Jens Lekman
Nobody's Hippie - Kimya Dawson
Knock Yourself Out - Jon Brion
Sunrise - Norah Jones
TV Trays - Death Cab for Cutie
Crazy Life - Toad the Wet Sprocket
Me and the Major - Belle and Sebastian
World Go 'Round - No Doubt
Mercury Tears - Chromeo
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight - The Postal Service
Crash into Me - Dave Matthews Band
Engine Heart - Mirah
The Water - Feist
Science vs. Romance - Rilo Kiley
A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left - Andrew Bird
Summer in the City - Regina Spektor
Raining in Baltimore - Counting Crows
The La La Song - Casey Dienel

Seeing Sia

Take that smile, and multiply it by twelve. That should give you an approximate level of Sia's energy for her entire show a month ago at Webster Hall.

Watching her was like watching joy personified. She was so thrilled to be on stage and singing (and damn, did she belt):


It came as somewhat of a shock how strong and clear her voice was, nearly replicating the sound of her album. Listening to her CDs first, it is easy to overlook that while she has a produced-pop feel, her voice is natural and honest to her talent in the recording.

I don't know if I've ever met a true star so concerned with everyone else in the (very packed) room. Sia paused between songs to ask how everyone was-- but without the "How's everybody doing New Yoooooork?" that so many artists deem an acceptable form of banter. "How is everyone? You're all good? You sure? Does anybody need anything? Let me know, okay? Write me a note or something." Sure enough, one group of fans did, to profess their love and request a song which the band had unfortunately not prepared for the concert. One of the girls asked to trade scarves with Sia, a proposition which the singer accepted with glee, and slight hesitation: "I like yours a lot! Are you sure you want to give it up?"

Sia also revealed a project called The H Crusader: it's an alter-ego of sorts, the H standing for humanitarian. With the character in mind, she wrote an upbeat album as a sophomore effort and presented it to her record label.

Sia: Look what I made! It's pop!
Label: This is no good. Your last album was downbeat. You have to maintain your fanbase.
Sia: But I worked so hard!
Label: You can't confuse your fans.
Sia: What fans?
Label: Good point. Well, you still have to record another down tempo album first.
Sia: This is what I made! This is what you get!
Label: We're dropping you.

Since then, she says, she's learned to listen to people, and she put H Crusader on hold to write "Some People Have Real Problems". But now that she has fans that are loyal no matter her genre, she is working on H Crusader again, and she debuted a wonderful song called "The Co-Dependent". The best version I could find is this youtube video.

After her last song, Sia returned to thunderous applause for an encore, and swiftly apologized. "I didn't want to have an encore," she lamented, "but they told me that's how they do it here. I don't like encores because I don't believe in making people beg. So if you come see me again, you don't have to clap if you don't want to. I'm coming back anyway!"

Coffee Cups -- March 27, 2008

I have been really occupied the last couple weeks, please forgive me! Everything will be back to normal with real, timely posts as soon as possible.

Limit to Your Love - Feist
Naive (Kooks cover) - Lily Allen
Stars of Track and Field - Belle and Sebastian
Traffic in the Sky - Jack Johnson
Big City - Antsy Pants
Paint's Peeling - Rilo Kiley
Life for Rent - Dido
Phantom Limb - The Shins
I Was a Kaliedoscope - Death Cab for Cutie
Death by Chocolate - Sia
Minute by Minute - Girl Talk
Brand New Colony - The Postal Service
Synthesizer - Electric Six
Let the Music Get Down in Your Soul - Marc Broussard
I Will Survive - Art Brut
Oh Lately It's So Quiet - OK Go
Skin Is, My - Andrew Bird
Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois - Sufjan Stevens
All the Way Down - Glen Hansard
Geography - Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
Frankie and Annette - Casey Dienel
The Bidding - Tally Hall
Around the World - Daft Punk
Key Stroke - Her Space Holiday
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - Cat Power
Luxembourg - Jesse Harris
Hotel Song - Regina Spektor
Bonafied Lovin' (Tough Guys) - Chromeo