rodney says

This post was made from my iphone.

It’s basically just a test because I can :)

I like a wiiiide range of music.

I know people say that a lot, but I genuinely appreciate music from the jazz, hip hop, country, rock, punk, ska, r & b, folk, pop, top 40 genres.

From the oh-so-cool garage band you’ve never heard of to the american idol finalist.

But there’s one genre of music that I like that transcends all those genres, and that’s what I like to call “the funny talker”.

It includes Billie Holiday, Josiah Lemming, Amy Winehouse, Raul Midon, Edelle, Sharon Jones the lead singer of Sugarland, Duffy, Amos Lee, Eddie Vedder, Corinne Bailey Rae, David Gray, Ryan Bingham,  Al Green, Jason Mraz, Lil Wayne…hopefully you get the idea :)

Recently, I came across two new funny talkers, but only one of them stood out enough to make me click the infamous “buy album” link in iTunes.

Jazmine Sullivan and Madeleine Peyroux

I first came across Madeleine Peyroux while riding in a friend’s car. She had the CoffeeHouse XM Radio station playing, and I thought they were playing Billie Holiday. She pressed the “info” button and it said “Madeline” something. So I typed it into the Notes app on my iphone and looked it up when I got home.

I found the correct name on iTunes (and YouTube) right away, and she is an amazing singer.   As many people probably have written about her,  it’s uncanny how much she sounds like Billie Holiday.  The problem for me was that while I love me some Billie Holiday, I couldn’t get over someone new sounding *so much* like her.  I listened to a few snippets, but I couldn’t click that “buy album” button.

Then today I came across Jazmine Sullivan after someone on Twitter posted a reply mentioning Heavy D was on Twitter.  So I checked out Heavy D’s Twitter page and from there I saw that The Fat Boys were on Twitter (old school hip hop).  I clickety clicked the Fat Boys homepage and heard one of those annoying music players auto-playing.  But since I had my headphones on, and I was nostalgic for some Fat Boys, I let it play.  One of the tracks was a remix of “bust your windows” by Jazmine Sullivan.

Right away, I could hear the funny talking in her voice.  This particular track had an Amy Winehouse flavor, but it was still unique. I headed over to YouTube to listen to a few more tracks and what stood out was that her voice was like a unique mix of so many artists: Amy Winehouse/Lauryn  Hill/Mary J Blige/Alicia Keys/Sharon Jones with a sprinkle of something else that made it uniquely Jazmine Sullivan.

I listened to a few snippets of tracks on iTunes, walked away, and finally came back and clicked that “buy album” button.  I figured I’d give her a shot and hope that the full album would be worth it.  It was.  To be honest, I’m not a big fan of just pure R&B singers…after listening to a few, they all start to sound alike. But on this album, there’s so many different styles, and she uses her voice in so many different ways, it kept up the flow through all 13 tracks.

I’m not gonna lie, I’ll probably end up buying the Madeleine Peyroux album sometime down the line.  But Jazmine Sullivan won out today.

This is the backstory that inspired my post on twitter here. Although it was a material thing in this case, it seems to apply in other situations as well :)

There was this house one street over I used to pass every day when taking the girls to and from school. The house was pretty much like our house except that it had one thing that I loved about it: it had a cool balcony. I’ve always thought it would be neat to have a house with a balcony. Somehow, sitting on the balcony (or a nice covered front porch) seems like the most relaxing thing I could imagine. I actually went so far as to go to their house and ask them who built their balcony right after they had it put up.

We could see part of their backyard from our house and they had an above ground pool, a basketball hoop, and shiny lights around their balcony. I always thought it was just the coolest thing.

Well, a couple of weeks ago we saw that the house had gone into foreclosure and there was a (sad looking) real estate agent inside doing an open house. We walked through the place and it was tore up from the floor up. Doorknobs missing, stair railings missing, doors from closets missing.

The biggest kicker was the balcony that I coveted. I went upstairs to check it out and it was all crooked and not built securely. It actually slanted down, so it wasn’t even level.

It was just an interesting wake up call that I think about now whenever I pass the house to pick up my daughter from school and see the for sale sign out front.

It was sad to see but also good in a way.

Objects in the envy mirror are not as shiny as they appear :)

This is the first post in my blog. That makes it more special than the others.