vintage

I am kind of at a loss as to what to write about these days, since I haven’t seen any shows and I haven’t picked up any records. Heaven forbid, I know. However, one exciting thing remains: Neil Young has announced a North American tour in late fall, and I HAVE TICKETS. I am a pretty happy camper. Here’s a list of his Canadian dates:

• Oct 16 MTS Centre - Winnipeg, MB

• Oct 18 Brandt Center - Regina, SK
• Oct 19 Pengrowth Saddledome - Calgary, AB
• Oct 22 GM Place - Vancouver, BC
• Nov 29 Metro Centre - Halifax, NS
• Dec 1 Bell Centre - Montreal, PQ
• Dec 2 Scotiabank Place - Ottawa, ON
• Dec 4 Air Canada Centre - Toronto, ON

See his full tour schedule here.

I also actually had a post in the works about a mixtape I made … but unfortunately, the RIAA got in the way. Some of you may have already been part of Muxtape, a terrific website geared towards those interested in discovering new tunes. It was a very, very simple and streamlined site; no nonsense, no annoying images, just music. Users had a unique ID (username.muxtape.com) and were allowed to upload a maximum of 12 songs to the site; they could then arrange them in any order or rename them, as well name their tape and pick a colour for it.

After that … the listening. Features like “next” and “random” provided gold mines of new music and old favourites; one that I stumbled upon only had songs that were 2 minutes and 42 seconds long, and another person had just uploaded the entirety of Highway 61 Revisited (okay, I can see why the RIAA would not be too happy with that one). You could also add tapes you liked to your favourites, so you could come back and listen to them again later. Recently, Muxtape added a fabulous feature which allowed users to sync with Last.fm, enabling any tracks they listened to on Mux to scrobble onto their charts. Ingenius! Let me tell you, I was listening to Muxtape quite a bit the last few weeks.

Of course, anything good eventually gets shut down by the RIAA, and this one was no exception. Since there were so many tracks being provided in streaming format to the internet, it was only a matter of time before the problem of royalties surfaced; Muxtape has grown quite a bit in the last little while, and this puts them on par with a lot of other websites that have to pay hefty fees in order to stream that much music to listeners. The future is still up in the air for Muxtape, and if you’re like me, you’re crossing your fingers, toes and anything else that will stand still long enough in the hopes that it will come back.

Disney-meets-Kodak-styled sister site Mixwit just isn’t the same (and probably will get shut down eventually too); where Muxtape was smooth, streamlined and no-nonsense, Mixwit looks like an eight-year-old girl’s room was strewn all over the place. Oh well.

In other news, I’m seeing Squeeze in a week.