I have not done much in the way of writing reviews here. I seem to spend most of my time doing the posts for my plugin posts. I enjoy looking around in the plugin depository, but once I have spent a few hours doing that and writing the posts, I do not feel like writing much else. So I am going to write this before the plugin post, to see if that will work out better.

The choice of what to write about is easy this time. I mentioned back in this post on Twitter that I was introduced to Marian Call’s music by following Phil Plait on Twitter. Since then I have bought her 2 albums, and listened to them quite a bit.

Vanilla

Her first album is named Vanilla, named after a song on the CD, and both live up to the name, if you are talking about vanilla extract. It is very pleasant and it can be very powerful. The song starts off slowly, with Marian playing her typewriter and singing about how dull and plain her virtues are, then segues into some fast paced swing that shows her voice is anything but vanilla. This song is probably my favorite off of both albums, and the song I most want to see her perform in person.

Fret starts the album off with an uptempo beat, which hides the subject of the lyrics, someone fretting about not being worthy of the person they love. If they really love that person. But they must, since they wrote the  song about that person.

Dark Dark Eyes is very a slow, mellow song. Inspired by character River Tam from Firefly, it is a song of reassurance and love. Promising to to always be there for the listener, Marian puts a lot of emotion into the quiet words she sings.

Then there is The Volvo Song, which sounds suspiciously like taking some real life incidents and dealing with them in song. You really love them, but they do something that really ticks you off. The frustration of dealing with the incidents and the person who keeps doing them comes through very well.

That ability to get the emotions of the song to her listeners is Marian’s strongest point. From the laid back feeling of Sunday Afternoon to the love expressed in I’m Yours, it is very easy to believe that she is singing about what she knows and feels.  And she lets you feel right along with her.

While Windows Media Player labeled this CD as Rock when I ripped it to my hard drive, that is not really accurate. Alternative is a better description, alternative folk, swing, blues, whichever way you want to come at it. Independent is even better, staying away from one label and just picking whatever style, or styles, works best for the song she is singing.

got to fly

This album is a bit different. It was commissioned by Quantum Mechanix after they heard Marian sing her song, It was Good for You Too. It is full of songs for geeks, from the first track I’ll Still Be a Geek After Nobody Thinks it’s Chic, which is what it sounds like, through to the last, the earlier mentioned Good for You Too, about a certain Mrs. Reynolds from Firefly.

If you are a geek of any kind, Browncoat, BSG, Trek, you will find something on this album to relate to. But you don’t have to be a geek to enjoy it. The feelings expressed in the songs, whether the alienation in I’ll Still Be a Geek, the frantic stress in Got to Fly, or the loneliness of In the Black, are all things we all share to some extent.

This shares the strengths of her first album, the beautiful voice pulling the emotions out of you, lyrics that are smart and sharp, and has the added bonus of touching on parts of the geek subculture. And it shows that while the touchstones may differ, geeks are not that different from the mainstream. Despite what both sides may say about it.

Finding the music

For digital versions of Marian Call’s music, you can get it from Amazon here, or from iTunes, or go to Marian’s web site where she has a variety of options for supporting her and her music. If you do purchase the digital downloads from Amazon.com, do not purchase the Prologue or Postmortem clips. They are small (10 sec or less) studio outtakes and you can hear all of them from the clips.

You can find CDs of Vanilla at CD Baby and CDs of got to fly at Quantum Mechanix. The got to fly CDs are limited edition, so you really shouldn’t wait to get one if you are like me and have irrational attachments to CDs.

I like listening to music almost as much as I like reading books. I enjoy a variety of music, from all kinds of artists. People ask who is your favorite, and I find it impossible to answer. It depends entirely upon my mood at the moment. My playlist on my PDA includes Jimmy Buffett, Ray Charles, George Strait, the Nylons, and The Pipes & Drums, 1st Battalion Scots Guards.

Love on the Inside

This is the Deluxe Fan Edition of the Sugarland album, which was only supposed to be available for limited time before the standard edition of the album was released. This was a good marketing idea, since I at least do not normally not rush right out and get a new CD as soon as it is released. But I was enjoying Sugarland’s second CD, Enjoy the Ride, so I went out and got the Deluxe Edition when it came out.

I stuck the CD in my 6 disc changer in my car for my trip out west in August, planning on switching out all of the CDs as I went and the mood struck me. I have done this before on multiple day trips, getting a good mix of styles and artists as the mood struck and avoiding getting tired of one particular artist or CD. This time, things did not work out that way. 5 of the CDs I did not hear enough of to get tired of them. That is because I spent so much time listening to the sixth CD, Love on the Inside.

I didn’t love every song on the CD, the fourth track,” Joey”, I found somewhat annoying at times. That may just be because I am a cranky old man that has heard too many songs about teenage love ending in tragedy. Given that Sugarland’s aim for this album was to explore different aspects of love, it was probably inevitable that a song like this was on the CD, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it.

“Steve Earle” is another song that I am not in love with. It is a humorous song, and how much I enjoy hearing it depends very much on my mood. But it doesn’t ever annoy me, I just sometimes don’t enjoy it as much as others.

After those two songs as the weak points in the album, I found myself with 15 songs that at the very least I like to hear over and over. Depending on how they strike me at the moment, I can find myself hitting repeat on my CD player to listen to any of the 15 over again.

Instead of getting very tired of the repitition in the first single, “All I Want To Do”, I enjoy the upbeat rythym and the very idea of blowing off a day to be with someone I love, just because I feel like it.

“It Happens” also has an upbeat style, at odds with the events that happen in the lyrics. But the style helps sell the philosophy, as John Lennon put it, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” But Sugarland’s way of saying it is more fun.

My favorite song, most of the time anyway, is “What I’d Give,” the tenth track. The lyrics, especially the first 4 lines, make me think of someone I would like to sing them to, with appropriate changes to the genders, and the instrumental section makes me just want to hold them. Other songs invoke the pain that can result from a failed relationship (“Keep You”) or the desire to take care of someone you love that is hurting (“Fall Into Me”) or physical desire (“Come On Get Higher”). They are all very moving and powerful in their own ways. But none of them move me the way that “What I’d Give” do.

This is a very good album, with a lot of solid songs. It covers a wide range of styles but only has one real subject matter, love in all its forms. For an album of love songs, it is certainly very diverse. I don’t know if Jennifer and Kristian succeeded in their aim to make an album that will be a reference anytime someone wants to do a love song. But they certainly succeeded in creating one that covers the subject in depth and in style.