Gin Blossoms can still rock it out, and Follow You Down was one of the first songs I recorded from the radio to make a mix tape.

Gin Blossoms - Follow You Down (Live)

Look up here, I’m in heaven I’ve got scars that can’t be seen I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen Everybody knows me now

– David Bowie, Lazarus

David Bowie died surrounded by family at his New York home Sunday, January 10, 2016 eighteen months after being diagnosed with cancer. He released his final album, Blackstar, on Friday, January 8, 2016, his birthday. I’m listening to it as I write this article about how he inspired me.

Many have expressed their sorrow at our loss of Mr. Bowie on social media and it is hard to find a news story or obituary about him that is not composed at least partially of Twitter embeds. I’m writing this because while I never met the man, his music and personality played a major role in why I started playing music and how I approach songwriting, and just plain writing, to this day. In other words, I’m making this tragedy about me.

Then again, so are most other folks, I’m just admitting it at the outset.

I was in high school. I had only first picked up a guitar in the last year or so and quickly befriended a couple of other guitar-toting music nerds (Hey Jonny, hey Chris). We were already big fans of the Beatles and the more recent Brit-rock band Oasis. And we delved into Pink Floyd and David Bowie together, finding something like our own voice in that decidedly British amalgam of rock and roll.

But it was Bowie who, more than all of the other musicians who inspired me in the early days of my musical development, illustrated how far the synthesis of personality and art can be taken. There’s no need for me to explain his chameleonic permutations, they’re as iconic as his music.

Throughout high school and through college – even to this day – I remained a pedestrian-looking musician, just another white guy whose long hair got shorter and dyed-black as he entered his twenties and thought he, and he alone, was the saddest, most tortured soul at the party.

Womp womp.

Put simply, “chameleonic” is just not a word anyone would use for my appearance. But Bowie’s music was as dynamic as his makeup tray and he seemed to foresee rather than follow fashion and sonic trends. That’s the part of him that stuck with me, consciously, as in I’m not just writing about it today because he has died, but as in I think about it, about him, a lot.

I don’t talk about writing songs very often because it’s become sort of like a diary, a journal. Like most of what I write, songwriting for me is a would-be novelist’s first notebook of character sketches, equal parts selfish unflattering funhouse-mirror style portrayals of myself and people I know and cringe-inducing artistic growing pains.

But I’ve been writing songs since the seventh or eighth grade. They stopped sucking sometime at the beginning of college and I owe a lot of that to David Bowie. When I wrote a particularly shitty song in one style, I’d just switch to another style. Acoustic dream-pop, rollicking early rock, simple quiet ballads, weird jazzy oddities.

This sort of stylistic rotation prevented me from concluding that I absolutely should never, ever write another song in a given style. And as a result, I eventually became pretty good at writing songs in two or three of those styles.¹ I also developed my own original voice, both in music and in writing, by emulating the greats and selectively shedding bits and pieces of their approach in favor of my own.

So now that I’ve made it about myself, let’s bring it back to what’s important: there will never be another David Bowie and his loss is a cultural tragedy of a global scale, but he made one hell of a dent.² Nothing, not even death, can silence a force like David Bowie. So go listen and smile.

Adele’s ‘25’ on Pandora

Pandora confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that every track from Adele'e new album is available through its radio service. That's not going to be a particularly great way of listening to 25 — because Pandora is a radio service, it means you can't choose what to listen to and will have to wait for a station to play the new songs — but it does mean that Adele's album is streaming in some form. You just have to be really, really patient to hear it all.

Pandora’s strange licensing niche usually works against it but here, despite the inability to listen through the songs in order, Pandora has something like an exclusive.

I wonder if Adele’s lawyers told her that keeping it off the on-demand streaming services means the track order she chose will not be the one many people hear the first time they hear the songs.

I don’t know how much that matters to modern musicians, or to someone like Adele, who doesn’t really have a customer acquisition problem.

For the, er, record, I prefer to listen to an album in order if possible.

“Happy birthday” lawsuit takes a(n unexpectedly interesting) turn

Did you know copyright lawyers have waged a legal battle over ‘Happy Birthday’ for a long time? They have, and, somehow, it recently got interesting.

If this proposition is accepted by the judge, Warner/Chappell may lose out on a cash cow that is reported to reap $2 million a year in revenue. Filmmakers like the named plaintiffs — and others who have forked over as much as six figures to license — would no longer have to pay a penny to feature "Happy Birthday" in motion pictures and television shows.

If the copyright the company has been using for years to charge people licensing fees is invalidated, we may see a whole lot of lawsuits aimed at the would-be copyright holders to recoup those licensing fees.

"Birthday candles," Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

OutBeat, America’s First Queer Jazz Festival

My goal was simple: I wanted to export all of the tracks I’ve listened and stored in my Last.fm account. I don’t have any real experience working with APIs, but thanks to Jeroen Baert’s post, which I found via this StackExchange thread, I found a handy Python script that even a newb can run.

The script was originally written for use in moving your Last.fm data to Libre.fm, but it works just as well as a standalone backup.

I saved lastexport.py to my home folder (the one with your Mac username) and opened up a Terminal window. Then, I just pasted the following command into the Terminal prompt and pressed Enter:

python lastexport.py -u last.fm_user_name

Make sure you replace last.fm_user_name with your own Last.fm user name. The script will store the results in a text file called exported_tracks.txt, located in your Home folder or whatever other folder you saved the script in. The data in the text file is a little messy, but it’s all there.

If you know how to make the data prettier, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Streaming music: good for fans, bad for musicians

At least one Ars Technica reader agrees: Rdio > Spotify

Google Music gains scan and match feature in the US

Streaming music to listeners, but not money to artists

Pandora suing ASCAP for lower licensing fees