The Firebare Blog

Have you ever had a friend who just seems to have some kind of built in radar for the latest and greatest music? I think I just found their secret. Pandora Internet Radio, a free web based radio player created by the Music Genome Project that lets you customize your own stations to the kinds of music you like.

This Flash based player allows you to begin customizing your station by asking you for the name of a band or song that you want to hear. If it’s in their database (odds are it is), they’ll either load the song you wanted, or one of the songs from the band you entered. Then, you can tell Pandora if you like that song or not. If you don’t like it, they adjust their search, and send you song after song that they think you’ll like from thousands of different bands. You can also bookmark favorite songs and bands so you can go back, see what you liked about them, read band biographies, and then if you want to buy their music, you can link to the Amazon.com and iTunes stores right from your profile page. For a small fee, you can get the service without adds, but if you don’t mind having an add or two on the page, you can have it for free! (Needless to say, until they make it a lot more worth my money to pay for something I can have for free, I’ll suffer through a few adds.) And, if you don’t have a great sterio system hooked up to your computer, a company called Slim Devices have developed a player for the price of an iPod that hooks up to your sterio system, and uses Wi-Fi to stream music collections over the Internet through a software player such as Winamp or iTunes on your computer.

From their site:

“Ever since we started the Music Genome Project, our friends would ask:

Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.

We created Pandora so that we can have that same kind of conversation with you.”

In September of 2003, I was visiting my parents when they lived in Connecticut, and they told me about a place just around the corner from their home called “The Space”. They’re a music venue with an open mic once a week, and concerts on the weekends. Well, I was immediately sucked in to the environment of the place, and it was there that I discovered one of my now all time favorite musicians, Andrew Bird.

Here’s a snippet of his bio on Myspace:

“Andrew Bird is a man of constant surprise. The instant some hapless journalist on a deadline attempts to pigeonhole him in any kind of tidy, one-dimensional category, he changes direction and creates new music that defies the description. He’s been tagged at various points in his career as a neo-traditionalist, a maverick experimenter, a Beatlesque pop/psychedelic revivalist, and a creator of ambient soundscapes, among other things. But none of those catchphrases does justice to the full span of his musical vocabulary. The simple truth is this: Andrew Bird creates sounds on his own terms, and as far-ranging as his various incarnations may appear, they are remarkably consistent when it comes to clarity of purpose, craftsmanship, wit, and sheer audience appeal…”

Watch this video, and go check out Andrew Bird either on his MySpace Bio or at andrewbird.net.

Enjoy this video of Bird live at The Mercy Lounge in Nashville, TN:

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

If you love podcasts, and music, the Dallas Does Indie Podcast is for you. The weekly podcast is pretty much an hour long radio show hosted by my old friend Jasien Swords. Jasien has been influencing my music listening habbits since the early ’90s, and he somehow seems to keep doing it.

You can either download the latest podcast as an mp3 right off their site, or subscribe to it through iTunes.

LOST is back, and I’m proud to say, better than ever. Creator J.J. Abrams and his crew have been able to keep the story moving forward with great momentum. Ever since I finally got caught up in the LOST craze, I haven’t missed an episode! But, just in case you missed the Premier of Season 3, you can watch it for free online at ABC.com. Even better, download it for keeps at near DVD quality at the iTunes Store.

And if you’re always looking deeper into the making of LOST, or just want to know more about your favorite show, you’ll probably interested in this interview with writer J.J. Abrams at TV.com: “Given the sheer quantity of episodes that need to be created, there is just no way you can foresee where the story will go,” he said. “The rhythm of the piece kind of defines itself…and is also the result of actors, directors, and editors. The audience might see something important that we don’t, as well.”

Ever since Apple started selling TV shows through it’s iTunes Store, and networks started realizing that viewers were downloading episodes of their shows using P2P software, I have seen network after network start airing free episodes of their shows online (which is a nice feature for those of us who don’t always have the chance to see our favorite shows when they air on TV), and aren’t quite sure if we want to download an episode onto our iPod. I’ve tested out the players on ABC, NBC and CBS (my favorite of which is ABC’s player).

This morning, I learned of new updates to Fox’s Full Throttle page on MySpace.com, allowing viewers to watch their favorite new shows from Fox. Among the lineup: “Bones,” “Prison Break,” “Standoff,” “Vanished,” “Talk Show With Spike Feresten,” “’Til Death,” “The Loop” and “Justice,” among others. The site seems to work quite well, with two minor downsets: First, you have to download a video player to watch the shows. Secondly, if you use a Mac you’re going to get one of those grand old messages saying the video player doesn’t support your platform yet.

Full Throttle, not quite ABC’s media player, but great none the less!