largehearted boy: a music and literature blog

Kamby Bolongo Mean River is a novel that resonates long after its end, the story of a young man alone in a room with only his memories. In understated prose Robert Lopez crafts the man's history in one of the year's most original and psychologically haunting novels.

In his own words, here is Robert Lopez's Book Notes music playlist for his novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River:

The bulk of Kamby Bolongo Mean River came together during the summer of 2007. The novel concerns a young man who finds himself confined to a room and the subject of seemingly pointless tests. His only connection to the world is a telephone that will not dial out. The story moves from there. I had a nice office in the house my then-wife and I were renting just outside of Portland, OR, having just moved from just outside of New York City. The office overlooked a beautifully landscaped backyard kept up by the landlord. There were trees and flowers and what have you. Every so often I'd spot a hummingbird floating fast and feeding on what was out there. There are no hummingbirds in New York City or just outside of New York City. At least I've never seen a hummingbird. After work each day I'd listen to Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, which pertained to my life in more ways than one during that summer. Turns out there are lines that relate to the narrator's predicament in Kamby Bolongo Mean River all over the record, though I was unaware of this at the time.

"Either Way" – "Maybe the sun will shine today"

"You Are My Face" – "Trying to be thankful/Our stories fit into phones"

"Impossible Germany" – "This is important but I know you're not listening"

"Sky Blue Sky" – "Windows open and raining in/Maroon, yellow, blue, gold and gray"

"Side with the Seeds" – "Embracing the situation is our only chance to be free"

"Shake It Off" – "I take to sleep again/Where I dare pretend I'm more than I seem"

"Please Be Patient with Me" – "It means I'm partially there"

"Hate It Here" – "I try to keep myself occupied"

"Leave Me (Like You Found Me)" – "Tell me what to do"

"Walken" – "I was talking to myself"

"What Light" - "If you're trying to paint a picture but you're not sure which colors belong"

"On and On and On" – "This world of words and meanings make you feel outside"

Robert Lopez and Kamby Bolongo Mean River links:

excerpt from the book

Bookslut review
The Quarterly Conversation review
Trestle review

Elimae interview with the author
Emerging Writers Network guest post by the author
Word Riot interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)

online "best of 2009" book lists
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks

tags: books music literature fiction

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Shorties (Colin Meloy's Children's Books, Paste's Books of the Decade, and more)

Colin Meloy discusses his children's book projects (illustrated by Carson Ellis) on his Tumblr.

Paste lists its 20 best books of the decade (2000-2009), and includes two books from the Largehearted Boy Book Notes series, Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live and Carl Wilson's Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste.

Pitchfork interviews Brian Eno.

NHPR's Word of Mouth examines the "indie blog curse" of hype on musicians.

The Raleigh News & Observer profiles John Booker and Rachel Hirsh of the pop ensemble I Was Totally Destroying It.

Immensely catchy and likable, "Horror Vacui" ranges from new-wave power pop to acoustic jingle-jangle, with Hirsh's keyboards in a starring role. The hooks and harmonies are dead-on throughout, rendered with assurance and polish. "Horror Vacui" would brighten the atmosphere at any commercial radio station with the sense to give it a spin.

The Guardian's books blog ponders American fiction after Philip Roth.

The National Post profiles a cookbook author who excels at pairing food with music.

The New Yorker features new short fiction by Stephen King, "Premium Harmony."

Newsarama interviews David Small, author of one of the year's most impressive graphic novels, Stitches.

Grovel reviews the book.

MTV offers a preview of the new Dr. Horrible comic.

On sale at Amazon MP3: Phoenix's 11-track 2006 album, It's Never Been Like That for $1.99

Drowned Sound recaps October's music releases.

The Top 13 is a new website featuring pop culture "top 13" lists.

Newsweek reviews the remastered and expanded edition of Nirvana's Bleach album.

Win Peter & Max: A Fables Novel and Fables: The Deluxe Edition, Book One in this week's Largehearted Boy contest.

Follow me on Twitter for links that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

online "best of 2009" book lists
best of the decade (2000-2009) online music lists

daily mp3 downloads
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

tags: music books popculture indie

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Daily Downloads (Sunset, Bloodsugars, and more)

Today's free and legal mp3 downloads:

Bloodsugars: "The Light at the End of the Tunnel" [mp3] from I Can't Go On, I'll Go On (out November 17th on CD)
other Bloodsugars posts at Largehearted Boy

Brilliant Colors: "Absolutely Anything" [mp3] from Introducing
other Brilliant Colors posts at Largehearted Boy

Canterbury: free and legal Thank You album [mp3]
other Canterbury posts at Largehearted Boy

Globes on Remote: "Space Camp" [mp3] from The Woo Hoo Hoo (out November 17th)
other Globes on Remote posts at Largehearted Boy

Mark Matos & Os Beaches: "High Priest of the Mission" [mp3] from Words of the Knife (out November 17th)
Mark Matos & Os Beaches: "Hired Hand" [mp3] from Words of the Knife (out November 17th)
other Mark Matos posts at Largehearted Boy

Sunset: "Pocketful of Debt" [mp3] from Gold Dissolves To Gray (out November 24th)
Sunset: "Green Truck" [mp3] from Gold Dissolves To Gray (out November 24th)
other Sunset posts at Largehearted Boy

Tristeza: "Manitas" [mp3] from Fate Unfolds (out December 1st)
other Tristeza posts at Largehearted Boy

Various Artists: 15-track Hardly Art Label Sampler v1.0 album [mp3]

Free and legal mp3s of live performances at other websites:

Elizabeth and the Catapult: Daytrotter session [mp3]
other Elizabeth and the Catapult posts at Largehearted Boy

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous free and legal mp3 daily downloads
2009 Bonnaroo downloads
other music festival downloads

Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and album streams from weekly CD releases)
weekly CD release lists

tags: music download indie mp3

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November 5, 2009

2009 Year-End Online Music Lists

As "best of 2009" year-end music lists appear online I will aggregate them in this post as I have in past years (see the lists for 2006, 2007, and 2008).

If you post or see a 2009 music list on a blog, newspaper, magazine, or other media site that isn't listed, please feel free to e-mail me the link or leave a comment.

Read the daily updates to this list.

Adam Sherwood's Writings (favorite albums)
Amazon.com (bestselling CDs)
Amazon.com (bestselling mp3 albums)
Amazon.com editors (bestselling songs)
Amazon.com editors (best albums)
Amazon.com editors (best albums you might have missed)
Amazon.com editors (best alternative & indie rock albums)
Amazon.com editors (best alternative & indie rock songs)
Amazon.com editors (best Christian albums)
Amazon.com editors (best Christian songs)
Amazon.com editors (best classical albums)
Amazon.com editors (best comedy albums)
Amazon.com editors (best country albums)
Amazon.com editors (best country songs)
Amazon.com editors (best dance & electronic albums)
Amazon.com editors (best dance & electronic songs)
Amazon.com editors (best Latin albums)
Amazon.com editors (best Latin songs)
Amazon.com editors (best pop albums)
Amazon.com editors (best pop songs)
Amazon.com editors (best R&B albums)
Amazon.com editors (best R&B songs)
Amazon.com editors (best rap & hip-hop albums)
Amazon.com editors (best rap & hip-hop songs)
Amazon.com editors (best songs)
Amazon.com editors (best soundtrack albums)
AWmusic.ca (hottest Canadian bands)

The Best Albums of 2009 (best albums)
Bridging the Atlantic (hottest bands in Canada)
Broken Mic (best albums)

Cancer Bats (top albums)
Confessions of a Software Developer (best albums)

DevilDriver (top albums)

eMusic (overlooked albums)

Flavorwire (most surprising musical collaborations)
For the 'Records' (hottest Canadian bands)

i(heart)music (hottest bands in Canada)
The Independent (best music websites)
It's Not The Band I Hate, It's Their Fans (hottest Canadian bands)

KJNB's Music Blog (best & worst albums)

The Late Greats (favorite albums)

Macleans.ca (top songs or albums)
Mechanical Forest Sound (hottest bands in Canada)
Michael Patrick Brady (favorite albums)
The Modern Music (best albums)
MW Music Review Blog (hottest bands in Canada)

No Rock And Roll Fun (lists of music lists)

Official Blog of CMR's Cara Fisher (top albums)

Repeater (top albums)

Running the Voodoo Down (jazz albums)

Textura (favourite labels)
Thick Specs (top Zunior albums)
Total Darkness vs. Blinding Light (top songs)

Uncle E's Musical Nightmares (best albums)

Who Needs a Blog? (top albums)

also at Largehearted Boy:

daily updates to this list

Best of the Decade (2000-2009) Music Lists
Online "Best Books of 2009" Lists

2008 Online "Best Of" Music Lists
2007 Online "Best Of" Music Lists
2006 Online "Best Of" Music Lists
Online "Best Books of 2008" Lists

other lists at Largehearted Boy
Daily Downloads (free & legal mp3 downloads)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
musician/author interviews

tags: music cd list lists indie 2009 albums

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November 5th Updates to the Online "Best Books of 2009" Lists

Just like last year, I will be updating the online "best of 2009" book lists daily. As the lists appear online, I will add them to the master list. Please feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me with a blog, magazine, newspaper, or other online media book list I have missed.

the complete list of online "best of 2009" book lists
daily updates to the list

Booklist (top arts books for youth)
Gourmet (favorite food books)
USA Book News (best books)
World Fantasy Awards (fantasy literature)

also at Largehearted Boy:

Online "Best Books of 2008" Lists
Online Best of the Decade (2000-2009) music lists
2008 Online Year-end Music Lists
2007 Online Year-end Music Lists
2006 Online Year-end Music Lists
other lists at Largehearted Boy
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Anitiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks

tags: books literature list lists indie 2009 fiction nonfiction

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November 5th Updates to the Best of the Decade (2000-2009) Online Music Lists

Today's additions to the list of the online best of the decade (2000-2009) music lists:

Alphaville (best albums)
Blurred Clarity (best albums)
David Katznelson (top albums)
Filles Sourires - Pierre Faa (best French albums)
GISGISGIS (favorite albums)
Guuzborg (best French albums)
The Hardest Button to Button (best albums)
The Hardest Button to Button (best songs)
J. Mensah's Billboard Files (singles)
Marisol Segal (top albums)
Paste - Andy Whitman (favorite albums)
Quizas Perhaps (best albums)
Rock de Luxe (best albums)
The Scope of the Scene (best albums)
Spinning Platters (top albums)
Stars in Coma (best albums)
Steve Jang (top albums)
Sweeping the Nation (songs)
The Top 13 (albums of the decade)
Zoo Animal (favorite albums)

also at Largehearted Boy:

list of the online best of the decade (2000-2009) music lists
daily updates to the list

tags: music cd list lists indie 2000s albums

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Book Notes - Ben Winters ("Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters")

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

With Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Ben Winters adds literary-inspired nautical mayhem to Jane Austen's classic novel. A well-written combination of monsters and classic literature, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is a clever and entertaining literary mashup.

In his own words, here is Ben Winters' Book Notes music playlist for his novel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters:

Alas, there are not a lot of famous songs about sea monsters. There is only one really famous one, which is the theme from the hallucinatory Sid & Marty Krofft show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters; unfortunately, it’s a terrible song. Even allowing for the fact that it’s the theme song for a children’s show about a playful sea monster, it’s a pretty darn bad song.

There are, however, a lot of great songs about just the sea, and also lot of great songs about just monsters. Both themes offer a lot of bang for your buck, metaphor-wise—as Homer knew when he wrote (chanted?) The Odyssey, the ocean and all the menacing things therein can stand in really well for the sea of troubles that we mere mortals navigate, in life and love.

So the playlist for my Regency-romance-meets-B-movie-action/adventure novel consists of fun and/or cool and/or interesting songs that deal with either monsters, or the sea. I’ve left off a lot of bad songs about monsters (including "Monster Mash") and plenty of bad songs about the sea; for example, the two entrants in the sub-genre I call Cutesy-Wutesy Beatles Songs Set Beneath the Ocean ("Yellow Submarine" and "Octopus’s Garden").

For each song, I’ll include a brief lyric quote or some other explanation of what it’s doing on the list; songs that somehow touch on the sea and monsters are marked by an asterisks.

"Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon

For once, an artist’s most famous number which is actually one of his best, encapsulating so much of what made Zevon a class act. "Werewolves" is catchy, dark, and sublimely funny. Like the singer himself, the titular werewolf is debonair and dangerous: "Better stay away from him / He'll rip your lungs out, Jim / I'd like to meet his tailor."

"Boat Train" by The Pogues

The Pogues have a lot of terrific songs set on the water, tales of immigration, drinking heavily on a boat, and/or shipwrecks. This one has whiskey, gin, tequila, brandy, racial slurs, and vomiting.

"Plenty More" by Squirrel Nut Zippers

"Al the boys are monsters / all the girls are whores / so if you lose the one you love, there’s always plenty more."

* "Half Shark Alligator Half Man" by Dr. Octagon

You have to love that math. The half shark/alligator half man sounds like a sea monster to me, although in the lyrics he tangles not with sailors, but with the LAPD.

"The Man in the Iron Mask" by Billy Bragg

The real l'Homme au Masque de Fer was a top-secret prisoner, but the guy in this Bragg weeper is the classic lovelorn-person-as-hideous-monster. "You must have your reasons [i.e. for breaking my heart] / I will not ask / For you I will be the man in the iron mask."

"Crawling to the USA" by Elvis Costello

"I thought I would go to the sea and shrink down very tiny / to slide inside the telephone wire that runs under the briny." I use the word "briny" a bunch in the book, and every time I fondly recalled this EC classic.

* "Everything You Can Think of is True" by Tom Waits

Like so much of Waits, this number from Alice presents a weird and gorgeous vision of descent into madness, or at least some altered state. Earns its asterisks for rhyming the title line with both "before the ocean was blue" and "Nigerian skeleton crew." Also, for that matter, "the fishes make wishes on you" and (my favorite) "the baby’s asleep in the shoe."

"Enter Sandman" by Metallica

I like songs that confirm the fears of children. Yes, there is something under the bed, and yes, it is trying to kill you.

* "Rock Lobster" by the B-52s

Chapter 28 of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters features a malevolent band of death lobsters, which is why the folks at Idlewild Books played this song as a warm-up before my reading at the book launch— happily reclaiming it forever from my previous association, which was with awkward junior high school dances.

"Two Headed Boy" by Neutral Milk Hotel

"Two headed boy / all floating in glass … I can hear as you tap on the jar." So unsettling, and so, so very beautiful.

"Sloop John B" by the Beach Boys

Obviously I had a lot of Beach Boys numbers to choose from, since so much of their oeuvre is, you know, beachy. But there is something really simple and sad about this number from Pet Sounds, which has origins in an old folk song. "I feel so broke up / I wanna go home."

"Thriller" by Michael Jackson

No brainer.

"Table-Top Joe" by Tom Waits

Waits has a lot of monsters scampering around his catalog. I also might have selected "The Eyeball Kid," but I happen to like ole Table-Top a little better: born without a body, he’s rich and famous, playing Stravinsky on a baby grand.

"If I Had a Boat" by Lyle Lovett

The mixing up of perfect worlds in this song always makes me laugh: "If I had a boat I’d go out on the ocean / and if I had a pony, I’d ride it on my boat."

"Tokyo Storm Warning" by Elvis Costello

An epic disaster movie of a pop song, featuring "cheap Korean monster-movie scenery" , "Japanese Jesus robots," and Martians.

"Hat and Feet" by Fountains of Wayne

Maybe I’m stretching, but surely "I’m just a hat and feet" is some kind of declaration of monstrousness. With Fountains, its hit or miss in any given number whether the quirkiness will outweigh the sincerity. In this song, which takes as its heartbroke metaphor the image of a video game or cartoon character crushed by a heavy object, sincerity wins.

"Ventura" by Lucinda Williams

Of all the songs that use the ocean to talk about the boundlessness and the boundless terror of love, this is my favorite. "I wanna watch the ocean bend / the edges of the sun, then / I wanna get swallowed up / in an ocean of love."

Ben Winters and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters links:

the author's website
the book's video trailer

5-Squared review
Books 'n Border Collies review
Diary of a Book Addict review
Fandomania review
fashion_piranha review
The Harvard Crimson review
Jane Austen's World review
Living Read Girl review

The Lovecraft News Network interview with the author
Shelf Life interview with the author
Slate essay by the author about writing the book

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes submissions (authors create playlists for their book)

online "best of 2009" book lists
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
guest book reviews
musician/author interviews
52 Books, 52 Weeks

tags: books music literature fiction janeausten austen

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