Imperial

I know it's already on My Flickr, but it was a nice introduction to this post, I thought.
Yesterday was a very long day. Very long. Tiring. Stressful. I sat in traffic for nearly two hours to go about 16 miles. Chinese group meeting at 6, and I got there about twenty minutes early, so did I work on a presentation? Did I clean out my car or go get something to eat (since I hadn't had anything but a smoothie in the past 6 hours)? NO! I went to the piano dealer I called earlier in traffic to go play the Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand piano. Check out the notes on my Flickr pix about it. It's nothing shy of the best in the world, and it was 15 seconds off the tuning fork when I came in to play, and had been pitched and all. Yay.
I had very little time to do what I needed to do there, and sat down to play a few things, and tinker w/ chords and whatever, and it just feels so good. I wish I could actually play a few things and be expressive with them, but it's amazing.
I also listened to great music. I had tons of new tracks queued up on my fauxPod (the photo of which makes it look far cheaper and less sturdy than it really is), and I set it to shuffle. Boy, did she pick out some great tunes, and it came out being a great playlist, so I've got a smattering of about twenty tracks I'm going to put together that work for yesterday's happenings. It soundtracked my day.

Chick rock

So apparently I listen to way too many female artists (Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Rachael Yamagata, Sarah McLachlan, Emily Haines, Joanna Newsom, Regina Spektor, Charlotte Martin [jibblies], and somebody told me to listen to Kate Bush yesterday, [some of these are new forays for me, too]). That's what I'm told anyway. The music library (aside from Amos) probably isn't overwhelmingly female, but whatever. I've really been getting into more PJ Harvey lately, and got two or three more of her albums and they're excellent. I've also been influenced into listening to Bjork, and she's growing on me, although she's less straightforward musically than what I'm used to. Anyway, I found this interesting [read: incredible] and thought I'd share.


PJ plays guitar in her typical grunge/bluesy style, but I've never heard Bjork sing like this before, and it's awesome.