Rubénerd!

I'm unreasonably excited! And the art is beautiful! From the official mailing list:

Hi Everyone,

Michael's new album, "Time Together," was officially released officially yesterday. It is available online from most retailers including Amazon.com as well as in music stores around the country. Digital downloads are available from most services including iTunes.

Michael Franks has been my favourite singer/songwriter since before I could walk; my beautiful late mum passed on her enthusiasm of his offbeat, interesting and just a little cheeky lyrics and unmistakable smooth jazz sounds. This will be the first of his albums we won't be sharing together, though I'd like to think she approves that I'm carrying on the family tradition :").

I just ordered his album on Amazon so I can rip it as FLAC and Apple Lossless. They estimate shipping to take two weeks; I hope I can survive that long without it! I suppose I could buy a few digital download tracks, just to keep me going, right?

If you'd like to buy the album, you can use the link below which will earn me some referral commission, or if you'd prefer you can skip it. Cheers! ^_^

Sometimes its very easy to tell a website has been dynamically generated with virtually no human oversight, presumably so as big a site can be made in the shortest time for serving ads.

Michael Franks - Don't Be Blue lyrics
Send "Don't Be Blue" Ringtone to Cell Phone
Don't Be Blue is a the song from the upcoming album Sleeping Gypsy by Michael Franks which was released Dec 10, 2008.
~ LyricsMode.com

I had no idea my mum was a time-traveller who visited the recent past from 1977 just to buy an LP and go back! She was even more awesome than I thought ^_^.

I tend to listen to Whole Wheat Radio during the early afternoon, and my own music later in the evening. Since using Libre.fm to scrobble music I've noticed many artists I listen to haven't been in their database before and are subsequently automagically added. What a mouthful.

The latest such artist is Michael Franks! Currently if you click any of these covers, I'm the only one who's played him, even Popsicle Toes and Tiger in the Rain. Unfortunately I don't have all his music in CD form, I inherited from my mum all his classics on original LPs but as far as I know I don't think any scrobbling client currently supports such archaic devices :).

The great thing about being an early adopter of a service is you get to be part of the site during important milestones like this. Well, at least I consider them important. As Michael sang in one of his songs: "Just continue reading me..." which doesn't make sense given he's a singer/songwriter not an author. I guess I could read along with the lyrics. Why do I talk to myself so often here now? Can senelity set in when you're 23? Don't answer that.

I wrote my Michael Franks music review back in January 2007.

Given Last.fm's probably necessary but poorly executed recent move to charge people living outside select countries, Ruben relegated it to the roll of just keeping track of music he's played via it's scrobbling client in order to generate his own music charts.

He wondered where they got the word scrobble from in the first place. He thought it sounded like a budget brand of oat cereal. You know, the one with "clusters" or "pieces" or "sultanas" or whatever it is the blasted granola lobby calls them these days. Scrobble is a part of a nutritious breakfast, along with Eggo and Pop Tarts. Yeesh.

Upon updating his profile to reflect this narrowing of use of his Last.fm account, he noticed his sister had a graphic displaying her most played artist along with a percentage breakdown of said artist and her two runner-ups. He also noticed he started referring to himself in the third person for some reason beyond him.

Ruben decided the graphic his sister had looked just smashing, so he proceeded to direct his browser to BloGate's last.fm sidebar image generator to create one for himself. He entered his username and was presented with the graphic you see to the right of this text.

He was surprised that the living jazz legend Michael Franks was played a stupendously ridiculous (he liked the phrasing of that) 10% of the time. He knew he was obsessed with his music, but certainly not to that extent. End of communique.

Michael Franks and The Trashmen

I've noticed a reoccurring theme of posts on the J-Walk Blog wherein either John Walkenbach (or his stunt double) searches his music library for song titles based on the presence of a particular word. Given what today is, I figure it's only fitting I do something just as fun and utterly unproductive myself.

For example, here is a list of songs from my music library on my MacBook Pro that contain the following words. Granted I only have a few gigs on music on here compared to my desktop back in Singapore, but it's a start.

Shampoo

1. In Search of the Perfect Shampoo — Michael Franks, Burchfield Nines

Eggplant

1. Eggplant — Michael Franks, The Art of Tea

Toyko

1. Rainy Night in Tokyo — Michael Franks, Tiger in the Rain

Dragonfly

1. Dragonfly Summer — Michael Franks, title song

With all this talk about words in songs though, we mustn't forget that The Bird is the Word. The bird bird bird. The bird is the word. Papa-oom-mow-mow-mow. Papa-oom-mow-mow-mow. Don't you know about the bird? Everybody knows that the bird is the word!

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to find my way out of Sanpaku while in Search of the Perfect Shampoo. Here's hoping I don't get Popsicle Toes along the way.

Without realising it, over the weekend I passed 10,000 plays on my Last.fm profile. That's nothing compared to my sister who's up to 11,119 plays or my dad who's up to 33,154 plays but it's a start!

Let it be known that Rod Picott and The Renovators are independent musicians whom I discovered on Whole Wheat Radio; that Michael Franks is the greatest singer/songwriter of all time; that Paul McCartney is artificially high given I accidently played Dance Tonight on a loop while out of the house; and The Trashmen are at number 2 simply because I've intentionally played Surfin Bird over 470 times. Bird bird bird, the bird is the word. Thank you.

Now I just need to work on a less cheesy profile description. My Whole Wheat one is much better. I'm not Bill Kurtis.

Hello hello, I was born in Sydney and spent the first few years of my life in Australia, but grew up in Singapore and consider it home. I'm now studying in Adelaide Australia but I return to Singapore for holidays and such. Hope to move back permanently to start my own consulting bidness with a high school friend.

I enjoy jazzy music, computer programming, tinkering with unconventional operating systems and software, amateur SLR photography, drinking exotic coffee and tea, aviation, museums, economics, architecture, evolution and humanism, figuring out how things work, reading non fiction books for hours on end, nature hiking and doing all of the above at a good coffee shop... except for that last one!

I'm very quiet and reserved in public, but certainly not online :)

So today was a pretty dreadful as days go. I walked into my mums room this afternoon to see her face turning red and sweating; she couldn't breathe. So we got into a taxi and after one of the wildest traffic weaving adventures I think any of us have ever had we got to the hospital and had her admitted into the overnight care wing. She's okay now thank goodness, bit of a scare, but the nurses there are all really friendly and I'm positive she's in capable hands.

Anyway so this evening sitting back home my sister and I were feeling depressed, as you can no doubt imagine!

Now I've found myself getting more and more into Jazz and especially in the last few years, especially with artists like Kevin So and Chick Corea with their clean sounds, the huge volumes of Latin Jazz my dad has picked up on his business trips to South America and of course the Official Rubenerd Greatest Artist of All Time: Michael Franks.

But we needed something else today as well, so I whipped out some Eric Clapton, B.B. King, the Blues Brothers, Sam and Dave, Terry Callier... and a whole pile of other stuff. I love it!

Then it got me thinking: I looked at all the mountains of music I've accumulated over the years on my various playlists, and I have far fewer pop and "Billboard Top" and "MTV" and all that stuff than I thought. Am I turning into a music snob already? 10 years from now when I'm in my thirties will I be rocking in a chair talking to my kids about the "horrible" music they're playing on the radio? Heck that's what I think about most of it now!

Dang I need to unpack my mixer board ASAP, this is great rant material for a Rubenerd Show right here :).

Oh god... I have more J-Pop than western pop... oh god... I didn't see that coming.

So I was at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA to people in the know) for a long drawn out reason which I won't attempt to explain here, and I found myself trying their free WiFi access. Given my experience with TMNet's WiFi at the Starbucks coffee shops here I was a bit sceptical about how good it was going to be. As it turns out it was faster than out DSL at home in Gita Bayu!

As you would know if you read this site in any manner resembling regularity I love screenshots, so here are some from my WiFi adventures :D.

Here's the initial welcome screen when I logged on for free on my MacBook Pro:

Here's the welcome screen when I booted into Haruhi KDE FreeBSD ;):

And what better thing to do on free WiFi network in a Malaysian airport but listen to Whole Wheat Radio?

I've talked about and reviewed Michael Franks many times on the Rubenerd Show, but have never written anything about him. This is my attempt to do this amazing artist justice in the blog medium. Hope he would approve!

Michael Franks is an American jazz artist who sings songs with a great sense of humour and refreshingly interesting lyrics. If you have never heard of Michael Franks, you are missing out on hearing the greatest singer/songwriter of all time.

My family's frank obsession with Michael Franks (I thought the wording was clever!) started with my mum in the early 1980s. As the story goes, she was called over to a friend's house one afternoon after being told about an intriguing artist who sang, amonst other things, about cold toes and finding the perfect shampoo!

Since then, Michael Franks has quite literally been a family institution of the Schade family! Out of Michael's whopping 19 albums we have 8 on original records and the rest on CDs and purchased copies as MP3s on iTunes. I've personally got 1.8GB of Michael Franks music on my computer right now as I type this!

I really don't know much about music; I can't play an instrument, I can read scores and as I find when trying to articulate the sensation of drinking wine, I certainly don't know any of the fancy language people use to describe it, but what I do know is what I like, and I like Michael Franks' music.

My mum and I agree that whilst the tunes themselves are smooth and a pleasure to listen to in their own right, it is the lyrics in his work that really set him apart from any other artist. My mum says amongst other things it would probably be impossible to win an argument with someone like Michael Franks who obviously has such an extrodinary grasp of literature!

The wide and varying styles of his music are incredible, and really show off his versatility as an artist. His music ranges from the more up beat style in When Sly Calls, to the jazzy Monks New Tune and Sanpaku, to fun electronics in Now That Your Joystick's Broke, to the suave and sophisticated Alone At Night and Tiger in the Rain, the latter album by the same name still my favourite.

You can find out more about Michael Franks at his official website at MichaelFranks.com, his article on Wikipedia, on iTunes (do a search for Michael Franks), the aptly named Michael Franks Yahoo! Group and even his own CafePress store.

And now if you'd excuse me, I'm flying south for some snorkelling and sleep. Just leave your message when you hear the beep. :D