Plucky Tree

My favorite musical artists: COVID edition

2020-08-03

Every few years I like to look at the list of songs I’ve liked in Spotify so I can see who my favorite artists are. It’s not that I don’t know who they are, it’s just interesting to quantify them and sometimes I’m surprised who is present and absent from my Top 10 list.

The last time I did this was just a year ago, but I think both Spotify and COVID have changed my tastes a lot more than a typical year would have.

Here’s where it currently stands, in order of total number of liked songs.

Enya
VAST
David Byrne
The Naked and Famous
Max Avery Lichtenstein
Ludovico Einaudi
R.E.M.
The Connells
Sia
Lucy Wainwright Roche

Changes since 2019 (with explanation)

Added: The Naked and Famous (went to see in concert and great new album in 2020), Max Avery Lichtenstein (new album and discovered old ones), The Connells (a band I liked in college that I rediscovered), and Lucy Wainwright Roche (known, but started liking more)

Removed: Brett Dennen (no new material and just grew tired of him), Iron & Wine (same reason), Beatles (George Harrison obsession died down), Two Lone Swordsmen (not liking newer material as much).…

2020-05-18

37 years after Mrs Devine was my 2nd grade teacher at Elm School near Chicago, I flew to Colorado to stay with her at her home for several days.

Before I go into all the details, I’ve always thought that her last name was so appropriate. That she was so devine. Then, I looked up “devine” in the dictionary.

a frequent misspelling of divine

It’s not actually a word! I’m shattered. Well, let’s look up “divine” instead.

informal excellent; delightful: he had the most divine smile | that succulent clementine tasted divine.

Now that describes her much better. (Side note: we used to give her a box of oranges every year as a Christmas present)

2nd grade, take one

In 2nd grade, I attended a school called Oak School. It was in the heart of the pretentious side of town and my homemade clothes and haircut from my Mom didn’t help making me very popular.…

2020-02-13

People always ask “what’s your favorite music”—a harder question to answer than it might seem. Rather than try to stab in the dark, I resort to data analytics. Obviously.

I recently found this wonderful website called Skiley that you connect to your Spotify account and it spits out all sorts of wonderful data.

In a previous post, I listed my favorite artists by play count. Skiley assigns a weighting based on recently played as well. This helps distinguish between all-time favorite into what I’m playing more at the moment.

So, what did I learn:

Ludovico Einaudi, Passenger, Of Monsters and Men, David Byrne, Iron & Wine have moved up, probably due to recent concerts and/or albums
Sia has moved up because I recently dug into her back catalog
Imogen Heap is a new discovery
VAST, Two Lone Swordsmen, and Enya have historically been favorite artists but I don’t listen much anymore

There is a lot of fascinating data on Skiley, but my favorite is where it breaks down the genres of music it thinks I like, some of which I’ve never heard of.…

2020-02-05

Just so people don’t think I only take pictures of birds, I thought I’d share what I consider some of the best photos I’ve taken.

There are 16 of them and they are all from trips to New Zealand, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and California.

Based on this, the most beautiful place in the world is the South Island of New Zealand.

…

2020-01-24

At one point recently, I had 23 parrots of 7 different species. How did I get here? I’ll start with an exchange with my Mom over Christmas:

Mom: So how many birds do you have now?
Me: I have 23
Mom: Oh, that’s not many

That should give you some insight into my family.

Grandfather

My grandfather lived in Florida and had a large aviary. It contained several hundred lovebirds, which he bred. He had pet birds as well, including an African Grey named Sammy, which he bought at an auction. More on that later.

My grandfather was a bird lover and hobbyist. He wanted to spread the joy of birds to others. He left that if more people enjoy birds, they will be more likely to care about the plight of them in the wild. Consider how dog owners feel about street dogs in Asia, for example.

In January of 1981, the letter below arrived from my grandfather.…

2020-01-12

Everyone likely has their list of greatest albums. But what I’ve always been obsessed with is the perfect album. We’re all probably familiar with buying the new album from our favourite band and being thrilled. Except for that one song. Or two songs.

I define a perfect album as:

An album you can listen to from beginning to end, at a medium to high volume, and you never feel like skipping a song.

To make it clear, a perfect album doesn’t have to be among the greatest. It just has to be consistently high quality. And conversely, a great album frequently isn’t perfect.

So I’ve been in search of the perfect album but never did an extensive analysis of my own large music library. So I did! And I came up with 10 albums that qualify and here’s that list.

I wish I’d kept my list of almost perfect albums as there were many.…

2020-01-07

I’ve had this idea for a long time to start a non-profit to promote bird keeping as a way to raise awareness about the plight of birds in the wild. Here is my business plan. I’m half hoping someone will just take it and run with it as it would be a huge undertaking.

I wrote a manifesto about it.

…

David Byrne playlist

2019-12-09

Photo: David Byrne at Coachella, 2018

Short version

I created a playlist of David Byrne songs spanning his career and you can jump to the end if you’re not interested in my ramblings. I could talk endlessly about him.

Before 1983

At the beginning of 1983, I was listening to a steady diet of artists like this:

Hall and Oates
Human League
John Cougar
Chicago
Toto
Foreigner
The Cars
Men at Work
Journey
REO Speedwagon

Not that these bands are terrible or anything, but they have one thing in common: I haven’t intentionally listened to any of them since then. Except maybe for a walk down memory lane. Or in the case of some of them, a laugh.

During 1983

So, what happened in 1983? I started listening to this wonderful radio station in Chicago called WXRT. It was similar to KFOG in San Francisco where they were allowed some freedom to play what they wanted even unproven hits.…

2019-09-04

For those that follow men’s tennis, you know it’s been dominated by 3 players for more than 15 years. Out of 60 grand slam tournaments that have been player, 85% of them have been won by these three players.

If tennis is not your sport, imagine that a single team or player won 85% of every major event for 15 years. It would get a little boring after awhile.

First off, it’s worth mentioning that these three players (Djokovic, Federer, Nadal) are exceptional players and all work very hard. Perhaps they are the best three tennis players of all time.

But tennis has a lot of interesting and subtle rules that assist top players in retaining their dominance. For each of these rules, there’s a good case to be made that it’s positive for fans and definitely positive for the bottom line of the sport of tennis. But taken together, they take some of the drama out of the sport.…

2019-06-27

When someone asks me this, I can always rattle off a few I’ve always loved, but then everything else is this giant soup and I can’t really rank them. So, I like to take a scientific approach.

I looked at songs I’ve liked in Spotify and found the artists with the most likes and this is the list I came up with for my Top 10:

VAST
Ludovico Einaudi
Enya
David Byrne
Brett Dennen
R.E.M.
Sia
Iron & Wine
Beatles
Two Lone Swordsmen

It’s interesting how many of these were not really on the tip of my tongue but clearly I like them! I did the exact same exercise in 2013 and here’s what changed.

Changes since 2013

Added Ludovico Einaudi, Brett Dennen, and Sia, three artists completely new to me that I now adore.

Added Enya, who I’ve always liked, but as I listen to more music as background with people around, I’ve shifted towards more mellow music.…

It’s the plucky ones that surprise you most