more to say about nothing...

Although the clock says it's Tuesday, it's still Monday in my mind. It was a great weekend, I got to spend a day and a half relaxing on the lake doing a bit of jet-skiing, cliff jumping and sun burning. Needless to say the wave runners ran out of gas not once but thrice during the two days on the water. We only had to get a tow once, thank the lord for the reserve tank.

Anywho, there's not a whole lot to report on today. If you head over to Welcome to the M!dwest! you can find a partial Sufjan Stevens live show from 2003. It's posted out of order but all the songs have the talking and story telling and to even top all this off, Sufjan does an excellent cover of R.E.M.'s "One I Love". For all you with Real Player, Mr. M!dwest! also has a video of Sufjan's performance at KCRW.

OK...now I remember what I was going to talk about this evening. Fiona freakin' Apple. She's one of those artists I always knew I'd like but never really felt like pony-ing up the $15 to get one of her discs. After caving in and getting Tidal and When the Pawn... I was floored. This woman is a genius, her songs are so well written and recorded (I give a lot of credit to Jon Brion for this. Her songs about relationships, heartbreak, and just being pissed off are amazingly musical and well crafted. Even her big singles in "Criminal" and "Fast as You Can" are lightyears ahead of where the top 40 is now and was 9 years ago when "Criminal" first hit the air waves. So you might be like me and ask yourself where/what the heck is Ms. Apple up to these days, she hasn't had an album out in nearly 6 years. Despite no contact from her, she's been a somewhat busy girl. In 2003, she went back into the studio with Jon Brion to record her third album, Extraordinary Machine. According to several fansites like fionaapple.org and freefiona.com and other resources Sony shelved the project labeling it too non-commercial. There's that "man" for you. Fionaapple.org also claims another story about the shelved record, they claim that Fiona was unhappy with Brion's work and has since started working on her second third album with producer, Brian Kehew (Moog Cookbook).

I just want you to know that I'm going to take a risk for you loyal readers. After hearing about Fiona's unreleased third album I decided to go on a hunt with trusty Google. A little while later I found myself enjoying Fiona's latest work, Extraordinary Machine. I ran across several sites that had cease and desist like orders from the Sony copyright folks, but lucky for us music fans they can't really fine us because this album happens to be unreleased. So for your aural enjoyment:

Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine