The year is quickly winding down. Somehow Halloween is over and today is Thanksgiving. Both of these holidays just make me think of Roseanne. Most things I can somehow relate to some TV program! Roseanne is known for some fantastic Halloween episodes but they also have their share of great Thanksgiving episodes. I got to watch two of them last night before I dozed off to sleep on Thanksgiving eve. They showed the episode with the brilliant Shelley Winters as Roseanne's Grandmother. Her character pretends to be senile but everyone is on the joke except for her daughter, played by Estelle Parsons. Darlene gets out of coming home by pretending to have to go visit her boyfriend David, even though she is secretly already living with him. Jackie is about to have her baby and her mom is playing tricks on her by pretending to dislike the father of her baby so she might decide to date him. Dan is mad at Becky's boyfriend Mark for marrying his daughter when she was so young. We also find out a secret in this episode -- that Roseanne's mom got pregnant before she was married. Roseanne was one of those shows with an amazing supporting cast. I can't get through the holidays without my Roseanne. I really thought they would give us a Roseanne DVD box set by now but looks like I have to wait another year. We did get the Golden Girls box set this year, so I shouldn't complain. I still haven't decided if I need a replica of Sophia's purse in my DVD collection...but it might be too hard to resist! Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Hopefully your families are as hilarious and welcoming as the cast of Roseanne and The Golden Girls. But if not, you always have TV to escape into.

I know very little about car models and brands. It is just something that I was never interested in. I never really enjoyed playing with model car kits or with hot wheels. Like most boys of the 80's though, I owned my share of toy cars. I didn't really choose my toys and I sort of just used my imagination. I much preferred the spaceships to cars, actually, and I really thought we would all be driving some sort of spaceship by now anyway. It is 2010! Remember when that seemed so far away? I guess it just seemed like the year you would turn 20 if you were born in 1990!...which is a bit crazy to me still. The children of the 90's are growing up too. Movies obviously played a big part of the way I thought about the future. They influenced us all, and often more than what we learned in the textbooks, although I do remember learning about the future in school a bit. I remember having to write an essay in elementary school about what I thought the future would be like. I had to "invent" something that would be commonplace in the future. I would kill somebody to get a hold of that essay! I still have most of my high school and college papers but I think in high school I decided I wasn't ever gonna need to read my papers on Harriet Tubman or the Challenger shuttle disaster that were from middle and elementary school. I think they have been recycled back into other paper products at this point. My essay on the future might have been influenced by the movie Back to the Future more than anything I had been taught in the classroom, but I do remember having a good imagination -- or maybe I just combined the movies Tron and Back To the Future in my mind. Back To The Future came out in 1985. Tron came out in 1982. I would like to think I wrote this paper in 1981, but it may have been a couple of years after that. Maybe my teacher actually took my paper and sold it to Hollywood and made off with a million bucks! I really need to find that paper. I was talking to one of my friends the other day about my first movie memory. Both Tron and Back To The Future are early movie memories. I can still remember the theater I saw E.T. in and where I was sitting. I can also remeber Empire Strikes Back, which I think is my first movie theater memory. Back to the paper... I wrote about these highways that were all tracks. You would just get in your car and tell it where you wanted to go and it would drive there for you. My invention was great because I remember that I claimed, "No more car accidents!" I think I drew pictures and everything. The cars looked more like miniature limos and they came with their own cassette tape boom box, of course. I guess I was not smart enough to invent the mp3 or the Ipod. Or maybe I did and I just don't remember. It was a long time ago.

You are probably wondering how I got to be talking about all this if you are still reading along with my journey through my memories. I will relate it all to a new album I love very soon, don't you worry. I loved the Delorean in Back To The Future. And the car doors in my future highway that I designed opened up much like the Delorean in Back To The Future. So of course I was excited about a band named Delorean! It could have been some lame metal emo band that got to the name first, but I'm glad it was this Delorean, a band with a new album out on True Panther. The album is called Subiza. And yes, it does sound like the future...or maybe some version of the future that I imagined in the 80's. It sounds a bit like a fun beachy Miami Vice soundtrack at times. Or what the hip grandchildren of the Golden Girls would have been listening to. It is also spacey and dreamy. Beachgaze dream pop! I love the new music coming out from bands like Washed Out, Best Coast, Surfer Blood, and The Drums. It's getting me excited for a new generation of musicians. I love the shoegaze so I am of course excited about all the nugaze coming out this last decade, but this band is not nugaze. They are more influenced or at least sound like 90's house and pop dance. They sound more like Pictureplane than Beach House. It's Marky Mark meets the Beach Boys. It's the KLF meets OMD. It's just good. They don't really need a category.  This is my first time hearing Delorean but this is actually this Spanish band's third album. It's a fun dancey album! You should love it. I am already in love!

127 Bands, 5 Stages, 3 Days and 1 Mean Sunburn.

"Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival - April 17-19th, 2009 or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Find 30 Reasons To Love a Weekend in the Desert."

- By Scott Butterworth


Day #12 - Artist #12 - Noah and the Whale:

Noah and the Whale formed in 2006 in Twickenham, London, England, playing a brand of folk influenced indie-pop rock and released their debut album Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down in August 2008. At first I wanted to just write these guys off as just another indie-pop band singing love songs. But the more I listened to it, the more curious I was. I promised I wasn't going to use the cheesy "metaphor" method of describing a band after I used it in The Hold Steady profile, but again, this band's music seemed unique, yet there was something oddly familiar about it. It was as if they were channeling someone or something in order to create their music. After two or three listens, I couldn't hear the band anymore. It wasn't that the music was inaudible, it was that I couldn't hear Noah and the Whale on the surface. I could only hear a particular voice that was coming from within it.