MIKE HALE
Lives Like Mine
(Suburban Home)
Available on CD, LP, iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic

This gentleman’s recent back story begs to ask the question: How devoted are you to your art? Weeks before former Gumball member Mike Hale was to release this, his second solo album, he had made the decision to quit his day job, put his belongings in storage, and travel the globe with no fixed address, concentrating solely on his music (both as a solo artist and with his trio In The Red). (Going even further in the determination department, Hale’s label Suburban Home also offered the album as a free download, which only help raise awareness of Hale’s work – and made for a nice tideover as the initial vinyl edition was delayed in manufacture). Hale’s solo records are very stripped down affairs, consisting mainly of Mike and his guitar; On this release, he also plays electric piano on a couple of cuts. Lives Like Mine (and its highly recommended predecessor, 2008’s Broken with No Hope) is emo music gone both pure and mature.

I’ve had a Last.fm account since around the late summer of 2004, around which time I had a nice Apple PowerBook, no iPod to speak of then (although I did have iTunes and was burning mix CD’s like a motherfucker), and come to think of it, last.fm was known under another name back then. Anyway, thanks to last.fm’s scrobbling technology I’ve found it quite interesting to see how it charts my listening habits day to day and week to week as far as my iPod and laptop go. Obviously, it does nothing when I’m slapping a record onto the turntable or slipping a CD into the player of my car, but since the iPod still seems to be the primary device I derive much of my melodic and rhythmic intake from, we’ll go with that.

Using my last.fm page’s static weekly charts as a guide, I’m going to self-analyze my listening habits and try to put a paragraph to them. Because goodness knows, I’m the only one who can explain why Mission of Burma comes up on my iPod one moment and John Coltrane comes up the next. (I’m sure the guy who has been running Gallery of Sound in West Hazleton since it first opened in 1987 sometimes tells the guys who work under him about the one time in 1992 when I walked up to the counter with a New Kids on the Block remix CD in one hand and the Bitches With Problems CD in )the other…

Just as a general foundation, here’s what my overall last.fm Top10 chart looks like:

1) Morning Musume
2) The Stooges
3) Nine Inch Nails
4) Minutemen
5) Black Flag
6) W
7) Puffy AmiYumi
8) Sayuri Ishikawa
9) Frank Sinatra
10) Hank Williams III

Now, here’s what my listening habits looked like, from #10 on down, as they looked for the week ending Sunday, August 30, with my somewhat pithy/pitiful explanations following each one: (Last.fm usually finalizes these charts at Midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Sundays) Read the rest of this entry »