Fresh Fridays...on Saturday Morning, lol

I'll get the timing right yet, folks!

A few days ago, I was coming home from a babysitting gig when one of my friends called me proposing a late night ice cream excursion to Maggie Moos. For the record, I LOVE Maggie Moos, more than a lot of things that are probably essential to my life, lol. Alas, I was sure they were closed. Still fiendin' for ice cream, we decided to look for a place that was still open,drive, and listen to music. Being musicians ourselves [undercover on my part, but very much so on his], whenever we find ourselves together, we must spit about music. We were deep into analyzing the production of a track off Britney Spears' new album when we stepped completely across the genre lines into Jazz and Esperanza Spalding, whose name I had only heard. What can I say? We are NOT linear talkers. Anyhow, clearly I have been sleeping, as world-renowned is an understatement and not fully-representable of Ms. Spalding's musicianship.


I Itunes[ed] Spalding when I got home [I buy all my music], and with the first song that fully downloaded, "Fall in," I was hooked. Out of habit, I began looking for names of the album's songwriters. There aren't many, as she wrote nine of the twelve that appear on her self-titled album "Esperanza." I do not know what rock I have been living under [as this album was released almost a year ago], but I clearly must step my musical game up.


I think what excited me the most about the album is its versatility! With many albums, you can, it seems, match at least two songs on the album that have a similar background, or feel, or trademark riffs. It's often a subtle self-advertsing mechanism [I'll talk more about that later] It isn't to say that all artists don't have something like it, but each each song on Spalding's album has such a different feel, it seems pointless to categorize it more than for the purposes of production. She strikes me as an artist who doesn't hesitate to experiment. An artist like that has the ability to do what many can't; market a passion with the strength to survive the industry.

More later- I'm listening to "Esperanza."