Thousandapologies

Nice song, played a lot by 102.1 the Edge, my favourite Canadian radio station. Will help against the Friday afternoon weariness at work

Some of you might know I’ve been playing the guitar for quite some time now. Some time ago, I found a great resource for learning to play the guitar, called justinguitar.com. Justin, a great online guitar teacher, of which I spoke before, recommends listening to songs and try to find out how to play them; this to train your ears. Quite recently, I therefore started tabbing out some songs of my favourite artists, all of which I will start to share on the new page above called “Tabs”. Right now, I’ve added “Love Vigilantes” and “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron & Wine, hope you will enjoy them! Please let me know what you think (especially if you have improvements), and if you have any suggestions for songs, don’t hesitate to let me know. If they are not to extremely difficult I will try to figure them out for you. I will try to add some more tabs soon (Bob Marley & Foo Fighters coming up).

Seems another band has been added to the list of bands at Pinkpop 2010, this time it is the Australian band Wolfmother. Sounds great!

Beautiful cover from the Across the Well Album (original is by New Order), Update: TAB can be found here.

Saw him last month in a local venue called “De Nieuwe Nor”, didn’t post about it but it was, like Barney from HIMYM would say “legend…wait for it…dary”. Words can hardly describe how awesome it was; a very good atmosphere that made you feel at home. Plus: I got a signed CD Hope to see him soon again, for now a video someone posted on youtube that catches this homely atmosphere this great artist can create, the warmth of it especially fit for this dark winter season.

Since I purposely missed the Pinkpop festival at the beginning of the year, I still needed my yearly portion of festivals. Luckily, every year there’s the free Booch? festival and because last year’s edition turned out to be quite a lot of fun, I planned to go this year again. I heard that one of the bands was playing already on Friday in our favourite pub, so for Stephan, Olivia and me already the festival started this day . The band, which was called the Buck Brothers, turned out to be awesome entertainers and the atmosphere on Friday was awesome. Next day, Olivia had bar duty, so Stephan and I were joined by Danish and Nick and decided to go and watch Buck Brothers again. The atmosphere of this year’s Booch? was really good, something which I felt wasn’t always true for earlier editions. It might have been the good weather, or the beautiful girls suddenly appearing all over Heerlen, or maybe it even was the nice cool beer cooling you down, it could have been the nice music, but most probably it was the combination of all. Certainly, it was also the good company . Next to Buck Brothers, who again gave a good performance, I think also K.E.E.P. was really a lot of fun. Hearing those good old Seta Surf songs in the sunny weather brought up good memories and made it a beautiful last day…

Saw this band on RockPalast on German TV yesterday, and wow! they rock. If you like the Dixie Chicks, you will certainly like this band too. I must say these gals had me confused, while they sound really American, they are actually from Sweden; country-chicks from the EU

Last Tuesday, was the one and only day a special documentary about one of the best (in my opinion) metal bands ever, Iron Maiden, was shown in our local movie theatre in Heerlen. Olivia had found out quite early that it was playing so Stephan, her, and I, all having Iron Maiden in our all-time most favourite band top five, decided to go and see this special documentary. I’m lucky we did! The documentary showed the life of the band members on the last “Somewhere back in Time” tour, that took place in 2008. Iron Maiden apparently was the first band ever to be crazy enough to tour the globe in a customised airplane: Ed Force One. Not only did they travel around 50.000 kilometres, but also the plane was most of the time flown by their lead singer Bruce Dickinson, who is a commercial airliner pilot as well. The documentary was the first in its kind because normally the band members of Iron Maiden do not like to have a camera team with them, and they tend to keep away from press. Even without actively seeking out commerce, they still manage to sell a lot of albums, and I think they must belong to the most successful metal acts around. The documentary itself gave a nice personal view of the band members, who unlike other famous bands, seem quite modest and laid back; going golfing and sight seeing whenever the opportunity arises. The thing though that surprised me most was their enormous popularity in Southern America, ok I knew metal was popular there, but I couldn’t have imagined it was so popular. Apparently, the music means a lot to the people there. Luckily, there was also a lot of Iron Maiden music in the documentary, and I can say this, after watching it, I really am looking forward to seeing them live! I hope they will have a gig somewhere near soon. But for now, I think I have to do with playing their albums over and over and the videos like the one below; Up the Irons!

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Yesterday was one of those special days. The day started already beautifully with a nice walk and splendid company of a special someone. And while I felt the four hours spent together went by too fast, the evening was also one to remember. I decided to go and visit the little theatre in Landgraaf for a folk group, called Quramitry, I hadn’t heard of before, but sometimes these unknown groups can give you a surprise, and so they did. Their music was a good mix of feel-good pop music, some folk, and some american influences, most of the songs written by themselves, and some unexpected covers in the same style. Most of all the great enthousiasm of the band members was exciting to see, but I was also surprised by the quality of the music; lots of different songs, excellent vocal arrangements, and the different instruments fitting together as puzzlepieces…only question I can come up with is: why the heck don’t they have a banjo player ? especially seeing the young age of the musicians, their enthousiasm, and a sound that could also be commercially successful, I think we will hear more of them soon. More specifically because they released a cd too, and the gig yesterday was the release party. Of course, I also got me one, so I will be enjoying their music some more. Suffice it to say, it was an evening well-spent, although it would have been even better to have that special someone with me, but alas… I included a video below for your enjoyment…

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…and how I sometimes miss the days we went to see this brilliant band The Old Firm… So to see they’re still playing some gigs, hope someone can get them to come to Heerlen. Enjoy!