Things that strike me

This one may be best for Kevin I think.

I was listening to Acoustic Cafe on Radio Io today, through my iPhone. I tend to do it through the phone more often than not because the iphone application currently doesnt’ have ads, and while the Radio IO ads are not particularly annoying, it’s nice not to have them at all. I went to Radio IO, by the way, when Last.fm got messy about radio outside the UK, US and Germany. Anyway, this afternoon at some stage, Radio IO fed me a couple of noteworthy things, one by Richard Thompson called Beeswing from the album Mirror Blue. It’s a lovely song which you can find on youtube although in the best tradition of Richard Thompson, hauntingly bitter sweet.

You don’t often hear Richard Thompson on the radio in Ireland and in fact, the last time I heard him it was probably 20 years ago on the Andy Kershaw show on BBC Radio 1 when he still had a Saturday evening show. I know it was that long ago because he played a song in the studio that night which I demoed as part of a college project when I was 19. That’s still on my iPod too because I still like what I did to it. Absolutely not sure what the legalities are about licensing it so it will not wind up anywhere on the web before anyone asks. Acoustic Café plays some interesting stuff though, stuff that I don’t hear very many places. Some Luka Bloom, some Crowded House. Like its sister channel, Radio IO Chill, it occasionally costs me money. Anyway, shortly after that, they played something I’d never heard before, by someone I’d never heard of before.

Cary Brothers. Apparently he has made a career out of getting his stuff out onto sound tracks. I loved this when it turned up in my headphones this afternoon, so I went to grooveshark and listened to some more. And I loved that too, so I went and downloaded two of his albums from emusic.com. I’d never heard of him before today.

It strikes me as winter evening music, a bit. It’s more middle of the road than the chill/electronica that I have been listening to a lot lately, more rocked up than the jazz piano. I don’t understand why I don’t get to hear so much of this on the radio, and then I remember that I turned on Irish radio for the first time yesterday hoping to hear Andrew Cotton interviewed and realised why I don’t ever listen to Irish radio. John Murray’s piece straight after the news yesterday about Olli Rehn and Finland was excruciatingly embarrassing. It is entirely possible that some specialist show has picked up on this guy.

When I was hunting around grooveshark this evening, I came across this song, called Honestly which has featured on some soundtrack or other. The arrival of the piano did funny things to my senses, as in, it made me go and get both albums.

Why isn’t this guy a superstar?