We Get Out – Niall Horan at Fillmore Silver Spring, Nov. 4, 2017

I would like to write a long, chatty post, and catch y’all up on recent musical doings, but I’m preparing for some travel and time is tight. So I’m just dropping in with a link to my latest review – Irish cutie, Niall Horan, once (and, hopefully, again in the future) of One Direction. I took pics and wrote words for AXS.com.

Niall Horan at Fillmore Silver Spring.

At the show, I gave out a few CPF biz cards to a few nice fans, and I want them to see the review if they drop by the site. More soon!

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Here It Goes Again

(Days Just Past)  As a popular dorm poster once declared, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” While you could say this on any and every new morning, New Year’s Day is certainly the traditional time to commit to a fresh start in life, love and general happiness. I try not to put too much pressure on this day of new calendars and metaphorical page-turning but yeah, I’m looking to hit the reboot button and get some cool new things happening in 2016. (Note that I’m posting this on January 2, but I wrote most of it on 1/1/16.)

First off, I hope your December holidays, whatever you celebrate, were as happy as our family’s Christmas was. At our annual open house, the Fezziwig Ball, we had 81 people stop in to share food, drinks and fun. Christmas morning was the usual bacchanal of good cheer and not-entirely-cautious consumerism. I had much musical bounty to enjoy, including cool new print matter like “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Day-by-Day Trivia Calendar;” Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl;” Elvis Costello’s “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” (book edition; the digital download of music arrived earlier this year) and “Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting,” a massive tome that, among other purposes, serves to prove to my husband that he could have it much, much worse when it comes to how/where I store my music.

As for actual playable new tunes, I am the proud new owner of  The Unthanks Memory Box, a bee-you-tee-ous collection, requested from and obtained by my British-resident (for now) PhD graduate. It includes a vinyl 7″, a CD, a DVD, postcards, recipes and much more, all letterpress printed with love. There’s even one piece signed by the band members.

My other daughter, a Toronto resident (for now), took my request for cool new music to heart by  sharing a local favorite with me, The Meligrove Band, in two formats – Shimmering Lights (vinyl album) and Let It Grow (CD).  I also got Ryan Adam’s 1989 on gorgeous sea-foam green vinyl, given to me by my 89-year-old mother. (No, she’s not as hipster as all that. She gave me a check for $25 and I ordered it for myself, but it’s no less appreciated.)

Meanwhile, my Beatles fanboy husband scored the #1’s CD/DVD set and Ringo’s photography book, and a copy of Mojo with a CD collection called Songs the Beatles Taught Us.  Also, a gift from me to him that’s really for the both of us – Laurie Anderson’s soundtrack to Heart of A Dog.

(Looking Ahead)  As this new year begins, I post here in hopes of better organizing my social media presence. I’m currently most active on Twitter (@mariannemeyer) and plan to revive my Instagram account (ClosePersonalFriend) since my high tech research team (two neighborhood teens with good taste) tell me that IG is where it’s at. Nevertheless, I remain an active Facebook user, though I intend to cull my friends list to remove people whose negativity drags me down. (Nonetheless, here’s the Facebook link if you want to reach out.)

I’m still writing as a pay-by-the-click digital lackey: Digital Music Examiner (national music news and free, legal downloads), DC Concert Photography Examiner (DC local news and concert reviews with photo slideshows) and AXS Contributor  (general tour and video news).

And then there’s this...(Read on for a Freebie)

Since nobody’s beating down my door with offers to write about music for real money, I have been exploring the world of self-publishing, both POD (print-on-demand) and e-books and plan to get way more involved in the coming year.

My first foray into the latter, e-published in December, is a simple concert photo book of Aussie pop/punk boy band 5 Seconds of Summer, shot when they opened for One Direction in 2014 at Nationals Stadium. I originally intended to create an ebook of 1D photos, and still plan to do so, but decided to start with 5SOS as a simpler effort, since I had fewer photos and, frankly, wanted to tackle the learning curve with a band I didn’t love like I do my 1D boys.

Admittedly, the 5SOS nation has not, so far, risen to my bait. I am not selling well, with mostly just friends and family shelling out the $2.99 (hey, it would cost them more to buy me a holiday latte!) or using promo download codes the iBooks system gave me to toss about. Speaking of which, the first five people who send an email to my new eddress – Marianne@closepersonalfriend.com – will get a free download code of his/her very own.

Maybe not the holiday gift you were most hoping for, but what they heck – Happy New Year, m’dears!

 

Short month, long winter

February is the shortest month and yet it can easily feel like the longest, with the early-setting sun and bitter cold standing between me and spring – and my birthday, on March 1st. (Start planning now!)

At least this February, I have the sweet face of Harry Styles looking over my shoulder as I type, as his 21st birthday (can I buy you a drink, handsome?!) on February 2 makes him my calendar boy of the month.

Yes, my possibly inappropriate 1D fangirl obsession continues, but I was able to make it work with a recent story posted on AXS.com, when respected indie troubadour Martin Sexton covered a 1D song for his daughter, after she found out that Harry was following him on Twitter.

Other recent stories for that site include:

Courtney Barnett’s new single/video and upcoming album. Very excited for this as I loved her album and the show I caught last year, at the Black Cat. She was also very gracious afterwards, meeting fans and signing albums. Here I am with the cool lady. 

Sufjan Stevens’ new album and upcoming tour.

Rapper/singer Lizzo gets coveted spot opening for Sleater-Kinney’s tour.

I’ve had a few other items posted recently, so here are some other links for your pleasure:

Jukebox the Ghost and Twin Forks giving away free music and touring together.

A review of The Black Cadillacs, and Knox Hamilton (a new favorite band) at Jammin Java.

A review of (charming Southern boy) Christian Lopez, also at Jammin Java.

To recap, here are places you can find me and links to a whole lotta love:

AXS.com

Examiner.com – National Music news

Examiner.com – DC Concert Photography (reviews, previews and slideshows)

 Whatcha Gonna Play – the set list site

Thanks for dropping by and please come back soon. It won’t all be listicles (a horrible trend in journalism, with an ugly word to match!).

1/5/15. And Here We Go Again…!

Being laid up in bed for much of January 1 and 2 (not a hangover, just an insidious cold), I quickly said goodbye to ye olde Gonna-Post-Everyday-This Year resolution, which is just as well ‘cause it wasn’t going to happen anyway. As much as I love the New School Year/Tabula Rasa element of opening up a fresh datebook for 2015, there’s something unhealthy in tying all good intentions (and we know what the road to hell is paved with) to one fixed point in the year. Why not start a brand new year of great things on May 17^th (totally arbitrary date)?

That said, I do want to be more consistent in tracking my musical (and some non-) doings in this hopeful new year. Towards that end, we reset the counter for the annual O/CD Music Tally. On a visit to Best Buy on Saturday, Jan. 3, I came home with the first three music purchases of 2015:

1. ONE DIRECTION – Where We Are: Live From San Siro Stadium (DVD) Go ahead and laugh all you want; I’ve got my philosophy, and it includes giving into the joy of cute boys and happy pop music. In the post-Beatles/Monkees redefinition of what makes a Boy Band, I dare say 1D are the best yet. I thoroughly enjoy sharing them with my daughters (who are in their 20s) and by myself. Seeing the stadium show in 2014 at Nats Park here in DC was great fun. I look forward to reliving it on DVD, and “Steal My Girl” is still in heavy rotation on my current playlist. (ICYMI, Harry’s my favorite, with Liam running a close second.)

The 1D DVD was on my Christmas list, so it was inevitable I would buy it when Santa didn’t deliver (he had bigger fish to fry) and, with a $35 gift certificate from Best Buy (we bought a new fridge and got beaucoup bonus points), I was ready to take a chance on some new stuff, too. Two album that I’d been hearing a lot about caught my eye, especially in cool packaging and at low prices:

2. BANKS – Goddess ($8.99) The jewel case was a sharp, dark red, which gave this CD an edge over FKA Twigs, whose album cover is a mess. Though I’ve had a taste of Banks’ music on my drives with Sirius XM radio, I was surprised by how not very excited I was to hear the whole thing. Played in the kitchen, while hubby was cooking, it made for a pleasant background experience. Revisited last night with headphones while I was falling asleep, there were some interesting blippy/bleepy arrangements but it didn’t have the original spark of a Lorde or an Adele, both of whom could be comparison points. When Banks strips away the excess stuff and you can hear her unadorned voice, it’s actually quite good, but it’s mostly buried in tracks that slither and slide around, never quite finding a hook or a groove.

3. ROYAL BLOOD – S/T ($7.99) Been loving this gothic beauty of a cover since I first saw it, and the title kept popping up on Top Ten lists, so I figured why not? By the song titles – “Blood Hands,” “You Can Be So Cruel,” “Ten Tonne Skeleton” – I should have guessed that this was going to skew harder than my usual taste, but I can use a good kick in the head once in a while, and these guys have a knack for putting some blues and grunge in their heavy sound, more like a White Stripes or The Edge with more edge than a metal band. No regrets.

And this just in…

4. BOMBAY BICYCLE CLUB – So Long, See You Tomorrow  If you’d been around the electronics department of Reston’s Target store this afternoon about 5pm, you would have heard me squeal in sheer delight. In the clearance area, where most of the stock consisted of odd lot toys and old iPhone cases, I found this album – on vinyl! – for a mere $5.06 (down from $19.99). This particular Target store hasn’t had vinyl in months and even when it did, it was powerhouse names like Beatles, U2 and Justin Timberlake. Yet somehow, this scrappy little Canadian band, which I happen to know and like, had found its way to me. I really did give a gasp of joy, like I had won a small, sweet lottery prize.

Little things. Happy things. Welcome to 2015.

I went. I saw. I wrote about it.

It’s a rainy Wednesday night here in the Adirondacks (vacation time!) after what was a delightfully busy week, last week, beginning with the massive One Direction lovefest at Nationals park (it was raining then, too) and ending with a mighty impressive Arcade Fire show at Verizon Center.

Throughout these adventures, I was handing out bizniz cards right and left, telling folks they could catch up with me here at CPF. So, if that includes you, dear reader, thanks for dropping by and welcome! (That applies to new CPFs and old ones, too.)

And so, here are  links to the places I’ve been recently and some thoughts on same:

Arcade Fire at Verizon Center

One Direction at Nationals Ballpark stadium   (I also did up a page on 1D for WhatchaGonnaPlay)

5 Seconds of Summer (opening for 1D)

Also, on Saturday night, I saw a great young talent, Christian Lopez, at “my local,” Jammin Java, and he’s got a page on WhatchaGonnaPlay, too.

All of the above links have a bunch of photos included, so I’m being lazy here and not posting pics here. But since I know that you want it (that’s what makes you beautiful), here’s a pic of 1D to bring a smile…

Five cute guys on a big stage.