Weekly Update: The Power of Music

Music: Disclosure
I have always wanted to see Disclosure play live. I've been finding myself hankering to go to more dance shows of late, probably because I am between favourite dance halls in Toronto. A girl's gotta dance!

Disclosure is a gruesome pair of brothers out of England, Howard and Guy Lawrence. They make music that is hypnotic and super fun, most notably elevating themselves to fame by collaborating with Sam Smith on a little song called Latch. You probably heard it once or one hundred times on the radio last year.

Our darling Sam announced the reveal of their second collaborative song when I saw him at Wayhome, which was a tip-off that they'd be touring soon. And yes they are! Here's the new song:

Accomplishment:

I have officially let up my Google Analytics account. Since its launch on Tuesday, I have had two visits, each at 3:00AM for zero seconds. So, some work needs to be done. 

I have also been riding my bike. I've mastered coasting down a hill without pedalling and completing sharp-ish turns. I'd like to be able to stand up while biking, but maybe I should master balancing with one hand and while looking backwards first. I'm thinking of making some kind of guide to help people learn how to ride a bike. It's one thing to master balance, but there are so many steps beyond that that I have devised and found helpful.

Goal:

I'd like to get analytics up on all the pages of my website (it's currently only on the homepage) and figure out what these zero-second users are all about. It might be nice to look into setting it up on my blog too. And on that note, think about ways of getting some more followers. All that is happening on Wednesday.

As for that dang jumbotron article, I'll be editing and emailing it on Sunday. Might be nice to finish off Sam Smith and post it to draft.im too. I'd still like that pesky dribbble invite sometime! 

Random Thought:

I have always believed that music has the power to bring people together. A great many hobbies and interests of the world are highly subjective, but I think that music is a truly universal thing. Everyone has a favourite musician, and music affects us all (whether we want it to or not). Even cross-generationally, when it can be hard to find interests in common, there are musicians of such renown and popularity that have lasted the test of time. The obvious example is The Beatles. Pretty much everyone I know, of every age, likes at least a handful of Beatles songs. This got me thinking about how music can stand the test of time, and what makes it memorable to each person. As I hear the new tween pop songs, I can't help but feel that pop music from the 90s, my tween years, was more artfully crafted and had more soul. But that can't really be true, because those songs aren't beloved cross-generationally. I think that we can imprint on songs, applying happy memories of childhood to them that make them seem more special than they really are.

My dream is that one day in my lifetime, there will merge a new Beatles or Michael Jackson, whom I can discover and love from the start. I don't think any musicians of my lifetime have come close to that status. And perhaps, with the exponential amount of genres that have been invented since the days of John, Paul, Ringo, and George, it may never happen. It may well be that people's tastes have become too eclectic for us to have room in our hearts for a universal music idol. We'll just have to wait and see.

Inspiration: Michael Kagan
Being a designer, I have a certain passion for all creative endeavours. I have always loved how versatile oil paints can be, and how the artist can use the medium to create hyper-realism or abstraction or anything in between. Being so picky about the visual, when I find a truly wonderful painting that I would gladly hang on the wall, there's something special there.

Michael Kagan is a fine artist out of Brooklyn, and he somehow manages to make visions of space travel and highly digital, futuristic scenes into something more soft and organic. Check these out.

I love the way he manages to blur sharp lines and find warmth in such cold subject matter. It almost makes me feel like these astronauts know something about the world beyond that the rest of us Earth-walkers are not yet privy to. Only time will tell.