Great stock-footage inspired music video:

A recent instance of the recurring Reddit thread, “What is the most beautiful song you’ve ever heard?” is full of so many beautiful songs, you could get lost in it for hours.

When you hear something special in a piece of music, you want to others to hear it and to know that you shared that experience (“Hey, you’re alive? Me too!”). I once heard Sarah McLachlan refer to this shared experience as ‘resonating souls’. It sounds cheesy, but it’s the best way I’ve heard it put into words.

Two songs that came to mind for me were:

• “True Love Waits” by Radiohead – This live recording of the first live performance ever is particularly good. There are higher fidelity recordings, but this one is the most powerful I’ve found. Wait for the keyboard counter-melody to appear just after the 2-minute mark.

• “Lament for the Death of his Second Wife” by Niel Gow – This is a terrible quality clip I recorded from Tim Chaisson’s performance at Zap Your Pram in 2008. There is no “original” recording of this piece, as Gow died decades before audio recording even existed, but YouTube is full of hundreds of renditions.

Warning to those who watched the show Six Feet Under: you may end up hearing that song from the finale and having flashbacks. I even heard echoes of it (or rather, what it echoes from) in Philip Glass’ metamorphosis 2.

I’ve always liked the idea of using a live performance for a music video. Not necessarily concert footage – it could be live to camera just for the video. The band Hey Rosetta! (the exclamation mark is theirs) have done just this in their beautiful and affecting video for the song Bandages. It was filmed “in and around St. John’s, Newfoundland.”

In this interview with Chris Murphy from Sloan, he was asked about song-writing themes as the band gets older. Chris says:

“I’m trying not to write songs about how much I hate getting up at 5:30 am with the baby. It’s so boring but that’s all I know these days.”

Chris, I would love to hear that song.

This mix of dozens of YouTube clips of musicians covering Radiohead’s Paranoid Android is a remarkable editing job:

Thanks to Paul Kim for sharing.

On their 20th anniversary as a band, Sloan has release their best album in a while. The Double Cross arranges song order, bleeds one song into another, and calls back to hooks from other songs in the way that made their 1998 album, Navy Blues, so amazing.

Like all of their albums, The Double Cross can be streamed for free or purchased in digital form (even in FLAC, audio nerds) from their website.

There is also a great series of short interviews with the band about the new album, and with other artists about their love of Sloan over the last 20 years.

In David Byrne’s talk at the TED Conference, “How architecture helped music evolve”, he takes a walk though the history of venues and their accompanying influence on musical styles. Apparently birds adapt their music to the venue too.