Towards the beginning of my career, when I was first getting to know a coworker of mine, Tim, he mentioned that he liked the band Built To Spill. I had never heard of the band before he told me about them, but I was curious to check them out based on other bands he said …
My buddy Justin turned me on to the band Amon Düül II shortly after we met. He gave me a copy of their album Yeti, and I liked a majority of the record. Many years later, I had a couple of Amon Düül II records come across my desk, Hijack and Made In Germany. I …
We used to have the ability to buy music through work from a rotating but limited selection of our catalog. It was a bit of a crapshoot, however, if everything you ordered would actually come in or not. I would usually browse the catalog every few months and see if anything new was listed. One …
A number of years ago now, back when I was working on some Wilson Pickett albums, I remember coming across one that had the song “Sugar, Sugar.” I was familiar enough with the song to know that he didn’t do the original, but I wasn’t familiar enough to know who did. When I started to …
Part of my job involves verifying various pieces of information, such as artist names, album and song titles, and selection numbers. The reference material for what we consider correct is typically the labels that appear on the records themselves, the idea being that this information always travels with the music. Additionally, we’ll compare the way …
I feel bad any time one of my relatives in Michigan asks me how the weather is in California during the winter. Like anywhere else, it’s cooler, of course, but certainly not anywhere close to the bitter coldness of Michigan. It’s always nice, however, when I hear that they’ve had some days consistently in the …
When I was starting to get into the band IDLES, I gave some friends in the UK a heads up about them, thinking that they might be interested in checking out the band. I followed up with one of them, my buddy Mat, a little later to see if he had had a listen and …
Last night, one of the featured NBA games was between the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks. During the game, the announcers talked about Klay Thompson, a top-tier player for Golden State who has been injured the last two years, and how he was close to returning from injury and being reunited with his …
My second year of college I worked as a dishwasher part-time in our dorm cafeteria. One great thing about the job was that, because we were in the back away from everyone else, we usually had music playing on a small radio while we worked. We never changed the station, so you would tend to …
When my family eventually got cable TV, we also got HBO, something I considered a major score as a kid. HBO invariably had the best movies of the year, regularly premiering them on Saturday nights at 8 p.m., and I would always look through the TV Guide weekly to find out what the new movie …