Mostly Harmless

Sometime later tonight Kelly’s latest album will be available on the iTunes Music Store.

Scratch that! It’s here!!

I got the e-mail from Apple saying that my pre-order was ready at 10:24 p.m., CDT. I had it downloaded by 10:29. (I’ve got a CD in the mail from Amazon as well but the iTMS version has 4 extra tracks.)

A mere 938 days since the last album release and against the protestations of her label, album #3 is now a historical fact.

Much has been written on the web about how her label bosses don’t like the album. The only thing different about this release is that the struggle between the artist and the label became public, i.e. she had to fight the same battle for the previous two albums, Thankful and Breakaway.

What I find amazing is that the label only really liked one song on Breakaway (which was Since U Been Gone). The songs from that album spent 111 weeks (yes, one hundred and eleven weeks) on the Top 40 charts and won two Grammys. Because of You won the ASCAP Pop Music award for Best Song of the Year but she had to fight to even get it on the album.

Oh yeah, they thought Breakaway would only sell 500,000 copies. It sold about 6 million copies, domestically.

Shows what they know.

After the songs became hits the people at the label came around, apparently. Oh, now you like the album?

So when The Old Man doesn’t like the new album and wants Kelly to swap out 5 songs for more “$radio friendly$” tunes, going so far as to offer her millions of dollars to do so, and she says “no thanks,” I say: “Thank You, Kelly.”

To The Old Man I say: “Go stick your head in a goat.”

I just know that they would have picked the 5 best songs on the album and tossed ‘em.

I know that the best songs won’t be played on Pop radio and it is unlikely that My December will sell as many copies as Breakaway, but Kelly has more musical talent in her crooked pinky finger than The Old Man has in his whole body. That’s why they should just get the hell out of the way and let her record what she wants.

BTW, the next album will be some sort of mix of Country/Blues/Pop/Rocks/and/Soda. If you thought Kelly would pick one genre and stick with it you’ve obviously never been to one of her concerts or seen her perform on TV.

Speaking of TV performances, the episode of CMT Crossroads that she taped with Reba McEntire is awesome… check it out. And the video for their duet of “Because of You” is freakin’ phenomenal.

Meanwhile… I’ve listened to the whole album already. I’ve been listening to the leaked version for a couple of weeks now so only three of the tracks were completely new. One is a different remix of Never Again, which is still good despite being an 8 minute long club remix (because the song is still recognizable), the other two are “Dirty Little Secret” (saucy!) and “Not Today,” which would have made an awesome first single — too bad it’s not on the album and not even on the iTMS version, now that the pre-sale is over.

It boggles the mind to think that the label thought these were throw-away tracks. Morons.

(Some of the other tracks will be showing up as B-sides on upcoming singles, so there’s still hope to get more of the 26-27 tracks that have been recorded for My December.)

Kelly Clarkson is 25 today!

And she’s not the least bit bitter about it… but she was bitter a couple of years ago when she wrote her current single “Never Again” — which should be cracking the Top 10 in Pop any minute now at the iTunes Music Store.

I like the song reviews that refer to her as “an angry young woman.” Ahhh. So sweet.

Her new album, “My December,” has been completed but still doesn’t have an official release date. According to a behind the scenes video (at KellyAllAccess.com — after you buy some Vitamin Water to get a code) the album producer said they recorded 27 tracks for this album, “out of about 60.” That addresses my only concern: that I’d wait 2 1/2 years for a new album and only get 12 tracks.

Twenty-seven songs should do nicely, thankyouverymuch.

Update: Argh! So… after the final cut the album has only 14 tracks. So much for getting my hopes up. I wonder if the songs she sang on the last tour made the cut. That would affect the “new song quotient.”

Oh, and the release date of the moment is June 26th.

So the HDTV did eventually arrive, about 10 days after I ordered it. I’ve been too busy watching hi-def TV to update the blog (also I am lazy). (And yes there was a hole in the box but the TV was unscathed.)

Since the DVR only holds about 8 hours worth of HD I simply must watch each day’s recordings immediately so I can delete them and make space for the next day. Busy, busy.

Side note: How freakin’ awesome was Heroes this week? Woo!

BTW, now I’ve got three DVRs, so if I really put my mind to it I can record 5 shows simultaneously (TiVo, ReplayTV, Comcast HD x 2, & Formac DVR tuner/encoder). The Comcast DVR is the primary box now though, so primetime HD shows are recorded there, then the Replay will record various lo-def shows from the other digital cable box. I haven’t un-programmed a lot of shows on the Replay so there is some overlap, which is nice when the Comcast box decides to go mental.

Mini-rant
This just chaps my ass: I recorded the Daytona 500 so I could get Kelly’s 3-song performance just before the race. Once that was over I attempted to stop the recording so I wouldn’t have to waste space on disk with the actual race. Apparently, because I was using both tuners, when I hit ’stop’ on the remote the only options I got were “stop and delete recorded segment” and “cancel” (i.e. continue recording). Which was… not useful. The other tuner was recording the race on the standard definition channel, just in case they set the no-copy flag on the show, so I couldn’t stop either show for the full 5 1/2 hours, for fear of losing the only part of the recording that I cared about.

Happily they didn’t protect the show and later I pulled the HD video off of the box over Firewire. It was 720p instead of 1080p so that single 5 1/2 hour recording only took up 35% of the space on the DVR.

Anywho, the TV is nice but lacking in the sound department. I’ve got an old powered subwoofer from my last set of computer speakers attached and filling out the bass. Every once in a while it makes high-pitched squealing noises because something in the amp is dying, which reminds me why I replaced it…

So just minutes ago I placed an order, I think, for a refurbished Onkyo HT-S590 5.1 speaker system. After I hit submit the confirmation page said “* Error, order not processed.” without a clue as to why. Yet I did get an e-mail confirmation so I’ll check the order status later and see if it actually exists.

The HT-S590 is a basic 5.1 HTIB and my refurb price with 2-day shipping (including $10 Club Onkyo discount) is about $160. Can’t beat that with a stick. I was tempted to go for a higher model # but all I wanted was a small-ish, cheap-ish, decent sounding system. The S790 is a nice midrange 7.1 system but twice as big and twice the price for the refurb, or 3x the price, new. If I’m going to spend a few hundred for a speaker system I’ll do more shopping, and probably go for the “even more better” HT-S894 ($599) or HT-S990THX ($749). So since I don’t want to spend $600 now I went with the “buck sixty” model. When I get a really big HDTV set I’ll go for the really good speakers. My current system is like a HD starter set.

Oh yeah: www.shoponkyo.com

Blender Woman of the Year