Is it just me or are there really so many “aware” songs out there in the past few years… And so many good ones at that too.

From self-aware songs:

• Meant To Live by Switchfoot
• One Thing by Finger Eleven
• Welcome To My Life by Simple Plan
• Harder To Breathe by Maroon 5
• Float On by Modest Mouse

To world-aware songs:

• This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race by Fall Out Boy
• We Believe by Good Charlotte
• Heard The World by O.A.R.
• Waiting On The World To Change by John Mayer
• If Everyone Cared by Nickelback
• High School Never Ends by Bowling For Soup

And saving my newest favorite for last:

• In Mumbai, Waiting For A Miracle by Raghu Dixit

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. — T.S. Eliot

My latest “power song” is the flagship song of the Colourblind band. Who are these guys? I have no idea. From what I read on their website, they were/are a couple of rockers who got their album recorded with Sony Music India in 1999. Not sure how many copies they actually sold. They had got great reviews by newspapers but apparently still didn’t get support from their recording company:

We sold 10,000 copies in 2 weeks. Regardless of that Sony didn’t put out more copies in the market and published only 500 CDs.

Nine years later, we have the ubiquitous www giving opportunities for everyone to spread their music. For example Kal-Jug by Azad Zeeshan to some awesome fusion flute by Bapu Padmanabha on Muziboo and many more bands featured in the RadioVerve channels.

Unfortunately, you get to hear these songs only online inside a browser. Why is this a problem? Because I listen to most of my music on my iPod during commute, runs or walks.

This is why I really wish Muziboo/RadioVerve/etc. would consider producing an Indian “amateur” music album. A while back, Niara and myself were discussing that the potential is really big considering the online virality (do a couple of youtube videos or at least put some of the mp3s online) all the way to marketing at the national level in cahoots with a big production house. Imagine how many college bands would want to be featured.

Oh heck, you could even do a reality show on TV to select the bands whose songs get to be in the album! (well, okay, maybe this one is a stretch)

On the other hand, I sorely wish there was an indie iTunes store in India where I could purchase these songs. Or perhaps even a Sell-a-Band for an Indian audience.

For now, I’m waiting for MusicYogi.com to deliver my copy of The Raghu Dixit Project’s new album. Can’t wait to listen to ‘Mysore Se Aayi Re’ on my iPod.

Shreyas, Gaurav and the gang have relaunched RadioVeRVe and it now rocks even more than before!

Things they haven’t changed:

• They play music by independent bands from India. That’s right, these are all Indian bands.

Things I liked:

• The new look feels good and is intuitive. How’d he do that? Hats off to Ganesh Rao.
• Amazing list of channels - from Rock, Metal, Easy to Classical (carnatic!) and Konkani
• We can now play the radio from within the browser.
• Each song is accompanied with info about the band on the right side, the importance of this cannot be understated. We get to know more about the band like who’s on the vocals, the drums, the bass, as well as the history of the band.

Things that I would like to see or improve:

• Some of the RadioVeRVe audio ads are not very comfortable to listen to… sorry guys, but the harsh voices in the metal-style ads are a little jarring in the midst of listening to songs.
• A ‘Buy this song’ option so that I can purchase and download the song and play it on my iPod eventually - for example, I want to listen to “Shadow of the Sun” by Leminsk8 again, but can’t .

So, go ahead and listen to the best of Indi Indie music.

Although it started with sports, it turned out to be a musical weekend.

Saturday afternoon : Parikrma Senior Sports Day

Parikrma had a sports meet of the senior children among all its various schools - from Jayanagar to Sahakarnagar, and it was amazing to see all the boisterous children compete against each other, including gritting their teeth in the running races.

I may or may not have a hand in making the pom-poms for the children to use in one of the exercise-dances

Saturday evening : Bengalooru Habba Music Show

A call from a friend got me rushing to Palace Grounds for the Bengalooru Habba. I got to see many good bands play - I particularly liked the Amit Heri band (especially “Mahaganapatim” from the Morning Raga movie) and the Ministry of Blues.

Then, came the maestro - Sivamani. It was going to be a percussion evening, and he got traditional “Kutti” drummers to join him in creating fusion music, and it was something that has to be simply experienced to explain. For a person who tried to learn drums, Sivamani is God. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for long, because I had promised to meet a few friends for dinner.

Sitting in a sofa in the 2nd row in the VVIP section rocks! Thanks to my friend Karthik for that

(more…)

I chanced upon this wonderful song by Eliane Elias:

I’m not afraid
All is forgiven
Coz after all
What’s done is done
Move on with grace
Slippin’ to space
And when I’m ready, I’ll sing my song
Follow the silence far from the sadness
Leave all the madness behind
I’ll keep on living
I’ll keep on running
Passing through heart who I’ve become
I’ll keep on driving eternal darkness
I’m scared of falling
Turn my lights on
Coz when I’m frightened, we carry on
And keep on living
And keep on running
Running towards what I’ve been running for
I will not hide
Fatal submission
You are so wrong
Because I’m still here
Drive through the night into the light of the horizon

It reminds me of yesterday. We ran 27 km. Just for fun. I was exhausted much more than usual, and I came home and crashed (and I mean crashed) on the bed. I had the most peaceful sleep for four hours and then woke up and realized that it was 1 pm, that I still had my shoes on, and that my stomach was grumbling because I hadn’t had breakfast.

I’m getting addicted to RadioVerve. Keep up the good work guys!

I voted for Swarathma and Phenom today evening, and these two were the most-voted bands today

I totally digged the Kannada song that Swarathma played.

After reading some good reviews about Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor album, I bought the CD at Planet M today.

I had installed Kubuntu 5.10 (breezy) recently and have been hooked to it. I especially like the way it has good support for restricted formats, and the Ubuntu wiki helped me fix the jerky DVD playback as well.

Coming back to Madonna, I followed the normal routine… I popped in the CD, KsCD opened up, and started playing ‘Hung Up’, the first song in the CD. Konqueror also opened up and showed me the CD contents, and surprisingly, I see a folder called Ogg Vorbis and there are .ogg files inside! Just to make sure I’m not seeing things, I copied over the ogg files and played it in Amarok.

It seems KDE shows an Ogg folder and a FLAC folder view for any Audio CD, from where you can copy the “songs” and KDE will automatically convert it into Ogg/FLAC respectively on-the-fly when you copy it to your hard disk. How’s that for ease of use?

Now, back to my deadlines …

I was pleasantly surprised to find a Bollywood Music channel ranked 60th in the Shoutcast charts. There were 384 listeners when I last saw the page.

Watch the Linux Can! video (I took yesterday night) now!

I just can’t get that tune out of my head …

Update : The video is now available on Google Video.