A Bloy and his Blog

Last night Ryan Adams & the Cardinals were in town, playing at Madison’s Overture Hall in support of their upcoming release Cardinology. Because of the venue, I expected good acoustic sound and I wasn’t disappointed. This could have been one of the best sounding shows I ever attended. Musically the band seemed to give it their all, playing for almost three hours (with a 15 minute break between sets).

The concert started off with two new songs, which went over fairly well with the audience. Next was a pained and somber cover of Oasis’ “Wonderwall”, followed by another new song. By this point Ryan and the band seemed to be functioning like a well-oiled machine, and came to the first big highlight when they played “Goodnight Rose.” It included a wonderful instrumental jam featuring harmonizing guitars, an almost whispering chant of “goodnight, goodnight” toward the end, which segued into the signature musical riff of the song at full volume to finish.

read the rest of: Ryan Adams & the Cardinals’ marathon jam

Taken at a small family gathering yesterday. From left to right, Wil Bloy, myself, Chris Davis (née Bloy), Barbra Bloy, Steve Bloy.

I recently discovered a wonderful website for anyone interested in astronomy and space: NASA Images.

In addition to the huge collection of images and multimedia of the universe, our solar system, the Earth, aeronautics and astronauts, it’s also got a nice time line from the late 1950’s until the present day.

High resolution versions of the images are available for download.

via: Librarians’ Internet Index

Get a free MP3 of Wilco & Fleet Foxes covering “I Shall Be Released” by Bob Dylan. All you have to do is pledge to vote this November. You were going to vote anyway, right?

Here’s a sample of the song, which was recorded from a live show this summer. Very reminiscent of Dylan and The Band.

Found via Rolling Stone Rock & Roll Daily.

read the rest of: Crab apples

I recently stumbled upon this little gem: a bootleg of Sting’s Unplugged performance at MTV studios, in March of 1991 — back when MTV actually had music on the channel.

Sting was touring to support his latest release at the time, The Soul Cages. He plays four songs from that underrated CD, but the highlights of the session are outstanding versions of “Message in a Bottle,” “Fragile,” an excellent cover of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and “Tea in The Sahara” which segues into “Walking On The Moon.”

Although a cover image is included in the archive, I didn’t think the publicity image of a Synchronicity era Sting made sense, so I came up with my own cover based on images from The Soul Cages CD.

Share and enjoy.