Songs of the Day

Here’s my New Year’s Resolution: I’ll try to try to publish a short piece every day recommending a song that I think is excellent, and apt to please at least some readers. Let’s see how far into 2018 I get; a quick run through the collection turned up around 240 candidates, so a whole year’s worth of songs would be a stretch goal. Read on for motivation, logistics, and mechanics. Or just read the song notes, starting tomorrow. Or don’t.

Why? · 2018 will be this blog’s fifteenth year, and the fragments don’t flow as fast as they used to; I have to reach back pretty far sometimes to achieve even three or four microessays a month. Which is weird, because ongoing centers on computing, and I’m intensely engaged at the white-hot core of Cloud, which as interesting a technology segment as there is. Especially if money is your measure.

But… there’s this term “insider” and I’m one of those, de jure and for real, and I could write any number of authoritative and amusing pieces on Hybrid Cloud or Serverless Economics or competing with Azure vs Google or, well, you get the idea, but I couldn’t convincingly claim they were uninfluenced by my work at AWS or didn’t reflect views held by at least some senior people. And that wouldn’t do at all. Might even be illegal.

I still find space to technologize here now and again when I think it can’t go wrong, but there’s writing energy curdling in the back of my brain. And I used to have fun here with the 5★♫ series, and music’s been a primary recreation for way more than 38 years. So welcome to “SotD”, a tiny song-discovery service.

Rules ·

1. “Song” doesn’t strictly imply a singer. I should strictly say “track of the day” but “song” is a better word.

2. It does imply some virtues of brevity and coherency; I won’t be recommending abrasive free-jazz jams or 70-minute minimalist drones or gamelan explosions.

3. A lot of it is going to be kind of old, because I am, but let’s see if we can have regular visits to this century. And I’m determined to find something in 2018 to feature in 2018.

4. I’ll work on diversity, but Canadians, males, and electric guitars are going to be over-represented.

5. I’ll restrict myself to things you can actually get, which sadly means I’ll have to skip that dub compilation on a skeevy-looking CD I got in a skeevier-looking part of Sydney in 1991.

6. You’re probably gonna hate some of the SotDs.

7. I reserve the right to re-use some previous 5★♫ tunes.

8. Other things being equal, I’ll lean to great songs from the lesser-known, and lesser-known songs from the great. Which means, expect a few one-hit wonders. But big hits get to be big hits for a reason, and anything that was a big hit before say 1990 comes from another planet anyhow.

Logistics · This is the World Wide Web, y’know? So I would very much like to link to every song. There are a lot of ways to access music these days and in principle they should have links. At a minimum, I think I ought to be providing iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and Amazon links, and would gratefully consider suggestions for other channels.

Of those, Google Play is the only one I use (here’s why) but so far I haven’t figured out how to extract song URLs from its JavaScript maelstrom.

I believe firmly that Live Music Is Better, so wherever possible I’m going to link to live video. Things being what they are, this means a lot of YouTubes; oh well.

Contributions