I live in Mayberry/Mount Airy NC with my lovely wife and two awesome boys. It's the American dream, I tell ya. I have a great job and enjoy teaching and playing music on the side. I stay busy and have to remind myself to slow down a bit and soak up this big wonderful sponge called life. I want to make the most of every day I've got.
I don't usually try to write a song in a week. Heck, I'm lucky if I can pen a decent tune in a month. But sometimes the creative muse flows freely, as it did this past week, and I don't ask why when it does.
The chorus came first; I started humming it in the car on Tuesday. The rest came later that afternoon. It's not done yet - more tweaking to come, I'm sure. I know for certain I'll transpose it to piano, not only for a better overall feel but mainly because the open tuning on the guitar sounds too much like this silliness, and I just can't have that.
I sang this today in worship at the end of my sermon. It's not the greatest quality, but not too shabby for a lapel mic and standalone (props to Mark Brown for his A/V acumen). I hope to use it when I lead music for the 2012 Montreat Collegiate Conference too, on piano. I think it'll work nicely as a singalong.
So - a song in progress. Let me know your thoughts. Lyrics below...
I may speak with the tongues of the angels I may give my all away I may move the mountains with my belief But if I don't have love - If I don't have love... I can use my power for selfish gain Living like I wanna live I can die a martyr and a saint But if I don't have love - If I don't have love... I once couldn't see Now I believe, I believe
In faith, hope And the greatest of these is love Faith, hope And the greatest of these is love, greatest is love
When the world defines you by what you do Love will show you whose you are All a part of God's great family This is why we love, this is why we love Battles rage and lines are drawn in the sand Cause we learn to live in fear Love comes down with the promise of something new It’s greater than the fear, love is greater than the fear Sometimes we can't see Lord help us believe, believe
In faith, hope And the greatest of these is love Faith, hope And the greatest of these is love Greatest is love
I'm thankful for good friends who, with a little resistance on my part, nevertheless talked me into taking a day off from work and joining them on the Dan River for a day. It's been a while since I've done some semi-serious canoeing and kayaking, so I was ready for it. And given that temps in northwestern North Carolina were soaring into the high 90's, there really wasn't a better place to be.
Many thanks to Jeff E., Jeff P. and Delane for a great time this past Wednesday, as you'll see in the video below (click HERE if you don't see it).
(P.S. Not only is Delane the king kayaker, but also a pretty decent videographer!)
You know me - always into the "latest" thing. Truth is that Spotify, the awesome streaming music service, isn't really all that new. It's been in Europe for years now, much to the chagrin of those in the West who long ago saw the writing on the wall: that not only were the days of the compact disc long gone, but the days of the downloaded mp3 weren't far behind. We'd always heard that it was only a matter of time before Spotify came stateside; just a few kinks to work out with record distributors who've reluctantly realized that times are surely a'changin'.
I actually got to check Spotify out before I really should have. I remember a year or so ago reading a blog post about how you could create a Spotify account by using a random UK address. The deal was, though, that Spotify would be able to tell from your computer's URL where you were, so I had three weeks in "travel mode." During that time, I was sold. Here's why:
Easy Interface - I've been using Rhapsody for almost a year, and while the iPhone app is decent, the desktop experience is very clumsy. That, and for some reason they never created a Mac program. Spotify's computer program looks and feels like iTunes - full content on the left, current tracks playing in the large middle. It's amazing how much our eyes are trained to engaging music in an iTunes context. By modeling their format after them, Spotify makes the transition all the more seamless.
Syncing and Streaming - This is the "promised land" of the future of streaming music. I add an album (and yes, I still think in terms of albums and not individual songs) to the playlist on my computer Spotify and in seconds it pops up on my iPhone. Works the same the other way. Steve Jobs and Apple realized the importance of this when they announced the arrival of iCloud this fall, including not only music but documents too (thanks to Google Docs for leading the way on that, incidentally...) Now our music can literally be wherever we are. Even when...
Offline mode - The crux of streaming anything, of course, is having an internet signal. Businesses like Spotify are banking on the fact (accurately so, I believe) that one day wireless internet will be pretty much wherever we are. Until that happens, Spotify offers an "offline mode" where you can "download" the song files to your computer or mobile device to listen independent of the internet (sorry, they're encrypted, non/mp3 files, so no snagging ability). Rhapsody and other similar services offer the same functionality, incidentally. It's good that Spotify chose to do the same as we make the eventual transition one day to all-streaming.
Preserving the album - Pandora's all the rage, of course, but the downside of internet radio is that there's really no good way to listen to the songs you want to listen to, in the way they were meant to be listened to. Things like Spotify help preserve the album concept for us purists. Besides, if you click that little "thumbs-up" thing on Pandora, you can resign yourself to hearing that song played every fifth or sixth song. Ugh.
Facebook Integration - This is honestly not a huge deal to me, but I think it's smart for Spotify to include this. And it's less about all things Facebook (in fact, as we're seeing, alternatives such as Google+ are showing that Zuckerberg-land is not invincible) and more about the fact that music and social media go hand-in-hand. iTunes kinda blew it with that whole "Ping" thing. Spotify is avoiding making the same mistake, going with an already-existing social media platform instead of trying to create their own.
Song selection - Granted, this is Spotify's growing edge right now; as their music catalog, while still pretty expansive, doesn't quite equate that of Rhapsody or Amazon. Still, it's only a matter of time before more agreements are reached with the music industry and more artists show up (on a side note, they may not have Incubus' latest album yet, but they do current have THIS ;-)
So - does this mean I'm ditching Rhapsody? Most definitely - in fact, I canceled my account this morning. ITunes? That's a different story. Unless I plan on searching Spotify and indexing every one of the 8500+ songs in my iTunes catalog by hand, I'll still have a need for iTunes. I've noticed that the Spotify desktop program has some kind of iTunes integration called "Local Files" that allows me to play iTunes songs in Spotify. Not sure what that's about but I'll learn more as I get into it. So I'm not sure exactly how I'll integrate Spotify and iTunes right now - maybe Spotify for albums that I'd like to listen to but not enough to buy them? Who knows.
The thing is, Spotify is the future of music, plain and simple. It's only a matter of time before everyone is using some kind of streaming service to listen to their music. Just look at what's happened so far in the past six months - three major players in the online music biz have rolled out some kind streaming service. Amazon Cloud and Google Music rolled out this spring, and the iCloud for iTunes this fall was announced last month. And today, Spotify comes to the US. You can bet your Dad's awesome turntable that none of that was coincidence. They all saw what Spotify was getting ready to do and didn't want to be late to the party.
It's weird to think that our kids will laugh at us and shake their heads when we tell them about the good ol' days of downloading mp3s, but I'm pretty sure that's in our future. Like 2012. As it is with so many things in the tech world, it's only a matter of time.
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