Yesterday I spent too much time getting my music organized in iTunes on the Mac so that the new iTunes ‘Genius’ would not suggest to me music I already own. Probably won’t bother trying iTunes for Windows, “bloated” or with unintentional or intentional problems as some folks are suggesting, as I’ve been happily using Zune on Windows for almost 2 years now, but what other compelling choice for music management is there on the Mac (suggestions, please)? It’s sort of a shotgun gadget wedding on the Mac.
Genius creates playlists based on a song you listen to from what you already own and I’ll get to that fun in a minute, but finding/exploring music I don’t own is something I enjoy. A true musical genius would be able to mine the world’s database of music and return me exactly the type of music I enjoy but don’t already own. AmazonMP3 does a decent job recommending me DRM-free MP3 albums I might want to buy based on what I’ve already purchased from them, can the iTunes Genius do better?
First, you have to activate Genius, which burped for me the first time:
But worked fine the second try:
This process took several minutes mining our family’s ever growing music collection of 272 artists and 50.35 GB of music. After running, I noticed iTunes 8 changed my default view to Cover Flow.
Cover Flow looks pretty when you have album art for every artist and ugly when you don’t.
A couple years back I hunted missing album art for every album but through time and circumstance I’m missing a lot these days, since iTunes on the Mac isn’t my regular music player any more. Good thing you are just a view click away from going back to the boring text view and can have iTunes automatically fetch missing album art.
Recommending to buy songs you already own = not Genius
Even after a couple hours making sure the music library was updated — and Genius was updated too — the Genius was still recommending songs I already owned on best of albums instead of the studio albums. Bummer. I would think a song with the same name by the same band that’s not marked ‘live, unplugged, acoustic, demo’ etc., would not be returned as a result.
Not all the results were bad, I noticed a couple songs of possible future interest. This part of Genius shows promise, but sorry, it’s a long way from being genius.
Play a song and press the Genius button to generate a similar playlist of songs you already own = almost Genius
My first Genius playlist test started with the song "Born Again" by Black Sabbath, here’s the playlist Genius generated:
Cool results! I like many of these songs. They aren’t just popular tracks I’ve listened to with songs like "I’m Insane" by Ratt live and "The Eyes" from Dio’s Master of the Moon. And I totally dig "Keep It Warm" off the same Born Again album, "Heaven and Hell" Live by the renamed Sabbath. This Genius generated list of 25 similar songs is excellent.
I tried playing other less popular songs that I five star rated in iTunes to see what Genius returned. Next: "All Mixed Up" by The Cars:
Doh! Even after an update, no luck with this song. Next song: "Time and Time Again" by Counting Crows:
Another good list with some songs I recognize and like along with some lesser known titles. Thumbs up. Next song: "Comin’ Under Fire" by Def Leppard:
Another solid playlist, saved. I found while testing more songs with Genius, I wished there was some sort of way to quickly output the results of these Genius playlists as text files to share with others online. Wait, this could be where a service like Nutsie comes in. Remember me writing about Nutsie a year ago? Bet the Nutsie folks are ecstatic over Genius. I see where you can make an iMix out of these playlists but Nutsie seems like a better idea if it works with Genius playlists.
Overall, I like what Genius does. I don’t think the name quite fits because as you can see from a small sampling above that there are some holes. I suppose even Einstein wasn’t perfect, so maybe I’m being too harsh, but the Genius algorithm appears very, very good. This feature will encourage me to start using iTunes again. Mission accomplished, Apple.
New iPod announcements
Before exiting this post, I see Matt is curious what I think about the new iPod announcements. From an Apple shareholder standpoint (I’ve owned AAPL stock for a couple years now), I love these Apple events. Steve Jobs out on stage evangelizing like only he can. And what’s not to like about taking $100 off the iPod Touch?
Being excited about touch screen enabled devices like tablet PC, I really like the idea behind the iPhone and iPod Touch but here’s my problem: not enough practical storage space for the price.
Realistically I’m only going to carry one music device. I’ve already got my Pocket PC which the iPod Touch could someday replace, but I don’t see it having enough space for me at the right price now. We have over 50GB worth of music and my current 30GB Zune isn’t enough. Why would I spend $299 for the iPod Touch 16GB and have 14GB less for music not counting cool iPod Touch applications? Even though the Nano’s price is right the storage is the issue there too. Always have liked the Nike+ tie-in.
Right now the 32GB iPod Touch is selling for $399. The money conscious side of me says: wait it out until the price comes down and storage amount increases. Inevitably it will. The cool gadget side of me is saying to stop thinking about it and drop down the bones now.
The iPhone remains out for me as long as it has anything to do with AT&T. If Sprint had the iPhone, the current cell phone carrier my wife and sons are using (I haven’t had a cell phone of my own for awhile), I might pull the trigger. Been checking out that Samsung Instinct and thought maybe, just maybe that would look good in my hands but then I think about having a phone contract for two more years and that keeps me at bay.
So it looks like I’ll be getting either a Zune 120GB or iPod 120GB classic. In the iPod corner is knowledge that my wife’s 80GB iPod has worked very well and I like the interaction with iTunes on the Mac. Also, I’m hoping this holiday season to upgrade my Mac. Last and my first ever Mac purchase was in October 2004. It’s time for me to get one of those shiny Intel-based iMacs. Santa, are you listening? Having the 120GB iPod would fit this scenario well.
In the Zune corner, bonus points for how the Zune has treated me as a customer by continuing to give me firmware updates on my Zune 30GB with features that are in their next generation devices. I’m intrigued by comparing the channels function to the ‘Genius’ and must admit not being one of the 50% using the FM tuner to date, so that FM to tune capability won’t play much of a factor. I spend 75% of my time in the Windows world and prefer Zune software to iTunes on Windows. Seems like jumping into the 120GB is going to fit my growing music needs well whether it be Zune or iPod.
If I let desire rule my wallet, I’d buy a new iMac, the Zune 120GB and the iPod Touch 32GB tomorrow. Oh temptation, you cruel beast!
Repeating the tradition started last year by showing randomly rotated victims from 9/11 on pages at Hmm. This year instead of flying in the header section, the victims are being randomly displayed on every directory page, including the home page above the first post.
Will be leaving these up there for at least the next week. I noticed the victim details links that are supposed to lead to september11victims.com (didn’t link intentionally because don’t want to compound the problem) appear to be broken. I’ll see if I can link to a Google cache or something else as this site might be getting pounded if this continues.
Update 8:37pm PST: CNN has a complete list of victims by name sorted that you can learn more about each of the victims.
Remember me writing last week about my negative customer experience with CD Baby? This morning Don Dokken made it so I could only buy his second solo album Solitary ($9.99, been available online since Feb 2008) through the service Snocap via dokkenstore.com.
Didn’t go through as many screenshot motions as I did with CD Baby, but Snocap wouldn’t let me add my credit card in Firefox so I could finish the order. I kept hitting the ’submit’ button and nothing happened. Grrrr.
When I fired up Internet Explorer things seemed to work correctly, but minor gripe, why as a first time customer do I have to do the following:
1. check box next to the song to order 2. confirm order 3. be taken to another browser window — hey I’m already in one — to visit Snocap to register for the site and add payment information on file. Why not open in a tab? And why not wait for the other browser window until we actually add payment information and can verify we are on a secure page? 4. In IE I saw an option to use PayPal. After authorizing, did the system take me back to finish the order? Of course not. So back to the other browser tab to try the order again. 5. This time it went through and asked me if I wanted to download the Snocap download manager or download the songs direct. By all means to anybody reading, choose to download the songs direct.
From experience I should have done that, but didn’t. Next, the order screen turned into a message saying there was an error returned from the software. Meanwhile, the Snocap download manager was still installing. Huh? When it fully installed and ran it didn’t show any music for me to download.
[sigh] Here we go again. Didn’t we just do this a week ago with CD Baby?
6. I went directly to the Snocap site and checked this out:
The ultimate website NON-confidence builder: big, broken image. The screenshot might be a bit small but there is only a ‘profile’ link and ’sign out’ — nothing about account or transaction history. They lose points for not making this more clear. When you click on ‘profile’ you can then navigate to your transaction history.
7. And there, finally, I can download the songs one at a time without having to use the download manager. I didn’t see any way to add the songs to the snocap download manager. Fortunately all the songs from Solitary downloaded.
Why is buying music from some of these online music sites a hassle? I’ve had very good experiences with AmazonMP3, iTunes and Zune but my last two experiences with services I haven’t used before has not been good. I was pleased to see the artist, Heavy Jack, reply this morning to my experience last week and say they are looking into it.
I’m starting to understand, but still don’t think it’s cool, people who go the bittorent route to get the hard to find music. Enough of this, what about the Don Dokken solo acoustic album, Solitary. Is it any good?
It’s mellow, I’ll say that. Have to listen to it more to judge but I’ve always liked Don Dokken’s mellow stuff. On his first solo album the song "1,000 miles Away" is one of my favorites. With Dokken who doesn’t like "Alone Again?" And pretty much the entire Under Lock and Key album (ok, not every song is mellow on there, but that one seemed like one of the most mellow Dokken albums) with tracks like "It’s Not Love" and "Jaded Heart." Then there are some more rare and less commercially appreciated albums like Dysfunctional with excellent songs like "The Maze" and "From The Beginning."
In the official Dokken podcast #2 and elsewhere Don Dokken keeps saying that this year’s good selling Lightning Strikes Again (my favorite track off that one is "Oasis") is probably the last Dokken studio album. He wants to do something outside what he feels are the musical confines of Dokken. Something "harder." Rhino, the company who published Lightning would like another Dokken album but it doesn’t sound like Don Dokken is interested at the present time.
One request, whatever you do, Don: please make it easy and hassle-free to buy whatever album you make going forward. This is something for musicians to keep in mind with how they choose to distribute their music. If you make it too much of a pain in the ass, some (many?) fans will take the path of least resistance. A quick search engine query reveals tons of illegal avenues to acquire Solitary.
Solitary Track List
1. "In The Meadow" 2. "I’ll Never Forget" - the ID tags in this MP3 were not set correctly and I had to manually fix. Good thing it’s easy to do these days in a wide variety of software. 3. "Where The Grass Is Green" 4. "Ship Of Fools" 5. "You Are Everything" 6. "Venice" 7. "Sarah" - Don Dokken says this song is about a "first love" he had in the 80s. One of the better tracks. 8. "The Tragedy" 9. Someday
If you like the harder Dokken songs like "Breaking The Chains" then Lightning Strikes Again will be more satisfying. If, like me, you enjoy the mellow side of Dokken, roll the dice with Snocap or attend one of the Don Dokken solo shows when he starts doing them again (he’s out touring with Dokken in support of Lightning now). He is selling Solitary at his shows. I wish he’d consider using a service like Tunecore.com which will get his music out on iTunes, AmazonMP3, Rhapsody, Napster, EMusic and more.
Apple is flexing their quality control muscle by rejecting applications based on "limited utility." This, no doubt, a knee jerk response to pulling the expensive iPhone application I Am Rich and spawns a rejection of another app called Pull My Finger. I’m sure there are plenty more what many might call stupid, pointless, worthless applications that Apple is subjectively deciding not to publish and promote.
While I agree that the application in question has little use, this is a dangerous precedent that could easily have been used to ban Wikipedia, Twitter or CouchSurfing.
I wouldn’t go that far. Look, the web has always been a fairly level playing field for whatever crazy idea someone can come up with and promote. If some dude with an application that does nothing more than be too expensive and it gets popular, hey, more power to them. Same thing with a sophomoric humor application like Pull My Finger.
Wikipedia solved an itch: the ability for regular people to be able to contribute to an encyclopedia collectively. To a much lesser and more niche following, the same applies to Twitter where the cliche ’short and sweet’ and the popularity of text messaging converge. Can’t speak for CouchSurfing because I don’t know much about them but again if they can find success with something you and I might think is silly but others enjoy then more power to them.
Apple has the business right to exercise whatever quality control they want around their App store. If their requirements are too restrictive or too vague this opens the playing field for somebody else to come along and compete. I realize it’s their playing field, but you could always make apps that run on competing phones, yes? Don’t get mad, go out and promote your app on an iPhone competitor that doesn’t reject applications that they deem as having limited utility.
What do you think? Is using "limited utility" a good idea for quality control? Or should Apple let iPhone have the quality control gauge? I believe the web is already a working example of quality control so that you don’t need to impose additional quality control standards on an application breeding ground if you, well, want it to breed.
Perhaps unrelated and of little concern to those who aren’t AAPL shareholders (disclaimer: I am a current AAPL shareholder) but as one I’d like to see Apple not use subjective rules like this for quality control for iPhone applications. They should ferret out anything that’s a security risk or spammy and if they don’t want porn, fine, that too, but beyond that, let the users be your QA team.
Mr. Donavon is right in one respect: having undefined quality control standards on one project will open a company to these questions about other services that accept submissions from third parties. For that reason alone I think if you are planning on releasing something where other developers submit programs to you, it would be wise not to impose subjective quality control rules.
2008 is a great year to be a rocker. A new Metallica album available next week and the next — and possibly last (hope not) — AC/DC studio album Black Ice will be available October 20. Oh yeah.
You can grab the AC DC what happened in history widget for your blog or favorite social service here or using the ‘get & share’ link in the embed above (RSS Readers: visit the page to see widget embed).
Black Ice Track Listing
1. Rock ’n Roll Train - you can listen to this track on the widget page
2. Skies On Fire
3. Big Jack
4. Anything Goes
5. War Machine
6. Smash N Grab
7. Spoilin’ For A Fight
8. Wheels
9. Decibel
10. Stormy May Day
11. She Likes Rock N Roll
12. Money Made
13. Rock N Roll Dream
14. Rocking All The Way
15. Black Ice
When I buy digital music downloads from places like iTunes and AmazonMP3 the music is available, as expected, for download right away. This morning I bought an album in MP3 format from an indie rock artist, Heavy Jack, from CD Baby. Believe that this was my first ever CD Baby purchase.
One of the things I like about CD Baby is they take a very small percentage of the money from the sale. Via their artist signup site:
For digital sales, we keep only a 9% cut, paying 91% of all income directly to the artist. For physical CDs, we keep $4 per CD sold.
Good deal for artists/bands, I’m there. So yesterday I checked out this music discovery service and came across Heavy Jack. Loved their song Fly Away (Black Crow), particularly the Hendrix-like vibe, embed is below for readers from the blog (won’t show in RSS feed):
Good stuff, I wanted to show them some material ($) fan love and thus went to their website this morning and saw I could purchase their album in CD or MP3 format. I went for the MP3 format which cost $9.99. I used PayPal and received confirmation that CD Baby was paid right away at 7:02am PST.
What I didn’t receive as expected was a download link from CD Baby or explanation of when the download link would be coming. I waited. And waited. Waited. Started to wonder around 10 minutes if the order didn’t go through on CD Baby’s end. Hey, sometimes things happen.
30 minutes later I decided to write an email to CD Baby with a copy of the transaction number and ask them how long it took to get the download link? I didn’t expect to receive a response to this email right away. If I got a response by the end of the business day, I’d be happy. Through experience have learned to set expectations lower when emailing customer service of any site online. It’s a pleasant surprise when somebody responds right away, but a business day is reasonable.
49 minutes after the sale, I received an email with the subject line: "CD Baby loves Tdavid" and order # confirmation:
Nevermind being anal about their script failing to capitalize the ‘D’ in my name, that’s just nitpicky, what does matter is that the download link they provided in their email didn’t work. The page just errored out. Waited a few more minutes, figuring maybe there was another delay before the download link was activated. As silly as that seems, have seen that situation before. Nope, didn’t matter, still didn’t work.
In their ‘love me’ email they added the message:
If you’re not able to use that link from this email or just not ready to download yet, you can always log in to your account at http://cdbaby.com/account and find all of your MP3s in the "Your Downloads" section.
Hello, I was able and ready 55 minutes ago. If you love me, just give me a download link that works already. Where is the music I paid for? WTF is up with this place? I don’t walk into a music store and pay them for a CD and then come back and hour later and still can’t get the CD to take home. This isn’t ordering a pizza on a Friday night when the parlor is getting slammed and they are understaffed, it’s an automated web order system for a digital download.
1 hour 25 minutes (8:27am PST) after the sale and all I see when I click the download link in CD Baby is this:
At this point I thought maybe, maybe the download link would work on another computer. Tried it on my laptop. No work in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
1 hour 42 minutes here I sit still unable to download music from the link. If I was into BDSM I’d try buying another MP3 download from CD Baby for a different artist just to see if this negative customer experience was an isolated case. Instead, I’m making this blog post for others to tell me their CD Baby MP3 purchase customer experiences. Did you get your MP3 download right away? Did it take more than a couple hours? Did the download link not work at first and work later?
1 hour 53 minutes. Still no working download. I’m getting ready to hit publish on this post. Some say you should never blog mad, I say when your wallet is impacted: screw that! This is a bad experience.
2 hours. Wow. The download link finally worked! I’m going to publish this as written anyway to see if this is the norm for CD Baby MP3 purchases. If this is the normal customer experience, CD Baby is one torturing lover. If you run a music delivery service, don’t make your customers wait two hours for digital downloads. Two minutes, fine. Two hours and it’s time to hire new programmers.
Update 10:02am PST: Received an email response from “pony” at CD Baby apologizing for their servers being down this morning while they did some work.
Music and gaming are enjoying a strong synergy in 2008 that could be witnessed nearly everywhere at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle 2008 this past weekend. We spent three days there collecting video, pictures, playing games and rocking out to video game music, most of which I’ll be sharing at VTOReality.com. Here I’ll try to give a brief overview of what we experienced.
I’ve attended dozens of concerts but experienced a first at PAX 2008 being able to see a couple bands perform video game songs live. The OneUps opened the Friday Night concert at PAX and were impressive. No singing but plenty of six-string bass, violin, drums and guitars.
The OneUps were so impressive that we went to see the bassist, Mustin, the next day and bought both their CDs (Volume 1 and Volume 2).
Also signed up for their MySpace page (warning: sound onload). The only other videogame-related music I remember buying has been Buckner & Garcia’s Pac Man Fever.
Our sons entered the Guitar Hero tournament on Saturday and the youngest was eliminated in the first round. Our 17 year old son made it to the final 8 in the tournament. They also did the Soul Calibur IV tournament earlier in the day and were both eliminated in the first round.
We performed as a Rock Band both on the show floor and in the after hours Rock Band event Friday Night. Didn’t wait in line to play Guitar Hero World, but that booth was very active throughout PAX.
Also got to check out the Wii Music drums where you play with the balance board and drumming into thin air with the Wiimote and nunchuk. On the way to lunch away from PAX we stopped by Gameworks (conveniently located a block away) which had the first guitar game by Konami called GuitarFreaks and DrumFreaks (although this one was out of service).
Back to the show floor and one of the 10 spotlighted PAX games for the Xbox 360 live arcade was called AudioSurf. This games looked a little bit like the old Atari puzzler Klax and sounded like a full-on music game.
AudioSurf’s description from the PAX guide:
"Ride your music. Audiosurf is a music-adapting puzzle racer where you use your own music to create your own experience. The shape, the speed, and the mood of each ride is determined by the song you choose."
It seemed like at almost every turn at PAX there was some kind of music videogame being demoed or played. Did I mention the Sony booth where Singstar contests were happening? Or how about the Intel Booth where you could play against a ringer to win a PC version of Guitar Hero?
Music games are everywhere and I love it. Forget the RIAA missteps and DRM issues, there continues to be a huge opportunity for bands to have their music heard and purchased in the videogames area.
If you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve already seen me write that with Chrome, Google’s (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) shiny new browser, so far I like what I’m seeing. Chrome is a lean, mean beast and feels snappier, but haven’t run it long enough to benchmark if that’s the reality (Adrian Kingsley-Hughes offers a SunSpider JavaScript benchmark which shows Chrome on top). And yes it lacks features like plugins/extensions, but I’m sure that is on the drawing board. This is going to turn off those who want to get in and customize. Also it’s Windows only with Linux and Mac OS X versions coming "soon."
What I like most about Chrome is that they stripped it back and will add what’s needed. Reminded me of how Firefox started out. If they don’t weight it down with too many BS features, Chrome could be a contender someday. In their Chrome intro video they emphasize wanting to move the browser space forward. Since talk is cheap, let’s look at interesting Chrome features:
- tabs that are independent processes. This is huge. Every browser should have this feature. Why have one website crash every other tab you have? Major kudos to Chrome for this feature alone, which they borrowed from the Internet Explorer 8 team but as a user, I don’t care. Hurry up everybody else and get this in your browsers now.
- locate the memory hogs. You can track memory usage by each tab by typing:
about:memory
Is your favorite website a memory hog? Now you’ll be one about:memory check away from finding out.
We’ve seen some creative uses of the location bar but Chrome is on the right track by recognizing that having more than one input form is just eating precious pixel space. Chrome helps utilyze pixel space.
- a useful local homepage. When you first load Chrome it will show your most visited pages. Maybe not the most innovative page on the planet, but different from trying to sell us something or advertise to us.
You can check your browsing history at any time by typing CTRL+H
- Incognito mode. Don’t want to have websites you visit show up in the history? Just open an incognito window. No sites you visit here will show up in the history a la Firefox’s Awesome bar or IE8 InPrivate Browsing.
Walt Mossberg spent the last week with Chrome: "My verdict: Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version — which is just a beta, or test, release — is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later."
Sweetcron is billed as a host it yourself, very moddable lifestreaming service, think FriendFeed only on your own server with mods galore. It is early, frequently updated code by Yongfook based on the open source CodeIgniter Framework. One noticeably missing Sweetcron feature as of this writing is some kind of bookmarklet.
Before heading out to PAX I whipped up a Sweetcron bookmarklet controller but it wasn’t far enough along to show anybody else. With version 0.4 of my Sweetcron Bookmarklet code, I’m ready to share with other Sweetcron users. Consider this post the official place for updates for future versions, so might want to bookmark this page.
Update 9/9/08 8:20am PST: version 0.5 released. This fixes issues with sweetcron default configuration disallowed characters in the web page tittles being bookmarked. For people upgrading to the new version, you’ll find instructions in the README.txt.
Installation and usage is straightforward, just do the following:
STEP 3. Then login to your sweetcron admin area and visit:
yourdomain.com/admin/bookmarklet
You’ll see a page with the bookmarklet code that looks something like this:
STEP 4. Right click over the "SCBM v0.4" link and drag to your browser bookmarks toolbar.
STEP 5. Now visit a web page, select some text and click the SCBM bookmarklet. A window will popup and allow you to edit the selected content or add new notes, images (image extraction is not automatic) or other HTML. If you are at a page with the meta tags set, these will be automatically extracted and added to the "Tags" section of the Sweetcron Bookmarklet form. Otherwise, you can enter in tags separated by commas. When satisfied with what you want to publish, then click the "Publish Post to Sweetcron Now" button.
Whatever you added should show up on your Sweetcron page immediately like this:
If you manage to break something or have suggestions/feedback for making this bookmarklet controller better, feel free to let me know in the comments below.
Browser compatibility
The following browsers have been tested and work with Sweetcron Bookmarklet (unofficial) v0.4:
Among the list of bands I’d like to see get completely back together, Dennis DeYoung with Styx is near the top. He might be 61 but there is no reason — other than personality conflicts — I can tell anyway that he couldn’t and shouldn’t still be singing with Styx. I saw DeYoung perform for the first time at the Rockin’ The Rivers concert in Montana earlier this month and they rocked the place. His voice is in great shape.
Rockin’ The Rivers is billed as the biggest rock concert event in Montana of the year and this was the 10th time they’ve had the concert. It’s three days of bands that play from noon until 2am. People camp overnight, drink (lots) of beer and have a great time. At $120 for three days or $50 for one day this is among the best value concerts out there. Here’s what the official concert guide looks like:
The Van Halen cover band Hot For Teacher was impressive as well as Fran Cosmo singing Boston Songs. Wasn’t as impressed with Manny Charlton with Nazareth. We didn’t attend day 1 or day 3. That’s the only bummer I can think of regarding this concert: it’s like 650 miles from here. We’re planning on going again next year and maybe doing the camp out thing. Lots of fun.
Dennis DeYoung Rockin’ The Rivers 8/9/2008 Setlist The Grand Illusion Lady Loralei Don’t Let It End Castle Walls Light Up Mr Roboto Desert Moon 100 Years From Now Rocking The Paradise Sweet Madam Blue Babe Best Of Times (encore) Come Sail Away
When I saw Matt Wardlaw post the House of Blues 8/24/2008 setlist from the band Styx including members Tommy Shaw, James “J.Y.” Young and Chuck Panozzo I was reminded to get this post out of the draft bin. Check out the same songs played by both bands, marked with asterisk, as well as the order:
House of Blues 8/24/2008 Setlist Blue Collar Man * The Grand Illusion * Loralei One With Everything * Lady Too Much Time On My Hands Snowblind I Am The Walrus Boat On The River Man In The Wilderness (Shaw acoustic) Crystal Ball (beginning acoustic w/ Shaw only) * Suite Madame Blue Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man) (Chuck Panozzo on bass) Miss America * Come Sail Away (Panozzo on bass)
Interesting to note that both bands closed with Come Sail Away and The Grand Illusion was Dennis DeYoung’s opener and the second song Styx played. Must admit I missed Tommy Shaw singing "Snowblind" and "Crystal Ball" and would have liked hearing Blue Collar Man in the Dennis DeYoung line-up. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the extended guitar solo version of Desert Moon and wouldn’t have wanted that axed in favor of Styx doing a Beatles cover.
I realize Styx sans DeYoung had a bit of success with their covers album but I don’t go to a concert with a band the calibur of Styx and want to hear songs they covered by The Beatles when that is in place of other, better songs like "Castle Walls" which DeYoung said Styx never played when he was with them.
What a haunting, beautiful song from the same album as "Come Sail Away."
The YouTube video of Desert Moon shown above (taken from the Arlington Heights show on July 6, 2008) and the one of Castle Walls (Chicago Ridge, Illinois on July 25, 2008) don’t do the live performances justice but are included here to give you a sampling of what it was like.
DeYoung played the title song from his new album 100 Years From Now that’s out in Canada and available via his website. He said it will be coming out in the states in January 2008. My wife didn’t care for the song, but I liked it. I’ll be buying this one when it comes out in the states, if not sooner.
A sweet moment in the DeYoung concert was when he dedicated "Babe" to his wife of 38 years Suzanne and she came out on stage and danced with him. Come on Dennis and Styx, mend those ties and get back together already!
