Jim Willis

Category: Music

  • Nashville Notes

    In addition to catching Lucas Nelson + POTR at the Ryman, we saw a bunch of other great music, here’s a run down. This doesn’t include any details about the killer guitar shops we checked out, I’ll try to write some of those notes up. My nephew and I landed in Nashville, dropped our bags…

  • Lucas Nelson + POTR @ Ryman

    First off, the Ryman. Whoa. What a venue. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a comparable space for hearing live music. Not just how my history is there but the sound quality was astounding. We lucked into Nelson playing at the Ryman while we were in town. He had an opener, Meg McCree. She…

  • Music Update for October 2023

    Here are some of the Albums I’m currently checking out. Most of the New Releases have been added to my “New Releases to Check Out” playlist through the Music Harbor application as noted in my On Listening post. Blues From the Rainforest by Merl Saunders – found this CD when going through an old stack, so…

  • On Listening

    Let’s start by agreeing that there is so much great music out there—old and new—that it’s not possible to listen to all of it. Today, discovering new music now can feel like drinking from an algorithm-fueled firehose, but I can remember before the internet came around where all we had were music magazines, really good…

  • April, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    Really late on this. Here’s a playlist of my top tracks from April, 2022 on Last.FM and on Apple Music. Still really enjoying The Cactus Blossoms. Work has been busy and so meeting-filled that I’m barely listening to any music during the day. This has been true for April and May. So, listening habits are…

  • Music from the show High Maintenance

    I’ve watched every season of High Maintenance a few times. We’ve been watching them again lately when we need a short show to watch in the evenings and this time around I’m deeply focussed not the soundtrack for each episode. I’ve always been aware of the music in the show (it’s amazing, here’s some background from…

  • Find and replace local versions of Apple Music files in a playlist

    I have a bunch of playlists that I’ve crafted over the years and when I moved to Apple Music I was disappointed to see my local library copies of those files replaced with Apple Music’s versions. It seemed to be totally arbitrary and, importantly, the play count, rating, etc. was different on my local library…

  • March, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    My top tracks for March, 2022. You can listen to this playlist on Apple Music or on Last.fm. Last.fm’s is much more comprehensive for some reason. The service has seemed very flakey the past few weeks and I can’t find an alternative method for tracking so have to live with it just being janky I guess.…

  • February, 2022 Top Tracks

    Month 2 of my algorithm-free music discovery. I think my Top 5 songs definitely reflect that. You can listen to this playlist on Apple Music or Last.FM   The Alison is a real gem that I found digging through Bandcamp. I’m withholding judgment a bit on Epic’s takeover of Bandcamp. I hope it doesn’t destroy the product/community…

  • January, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    As promised, I’m trying to get better with tracking my listening and less-algorithmic with my music discovery process. Here’s what I listened to a lot of in January. Maybe next month I’ll figure out some fancy way to make this list streamable? We’ll see. Here’s the playlist on Apple Music. Wet Dream – Wet Leg…