Travis "Flowers In The Window"

There was an awkward pause.  No one knew what to say.  Someone had to break the ice.


You think that meeting a rock star is awkward for you.  But really, it's awkward for them too.

We were backstage at Fleet Boston Pavillion in 2007, about to meet the band Travis.

I had not been a fan of Travis initially, turned off by what I had perceived as yet another whiny Brit band.

But when I'd met my wife, she immediately set about turning me around on the subject.

She was a huge Travis fan, had seen them multiple times, and in the time we'd been together had played me plenty of fun, light songs that brightened my view of the band.

For instance, "Flowers In The Window" is a sweet song by singer Fran Healy, who writes about being surprised at how much he loved his sibling's new baby.

As soon as I heard that Travis had a new album, and was coming to Boston, I made sure to pull a few favors and get a chance to take my wife to the show, AND meet the band beforehand.

We spent the whole ride up to Boston listening to the new album "The Boy With No Name."  And we were especially focused on the song "My Eyes" which was about the birth of Healy's new baby boy.  Our own baby was due in just 3 months, so we were very wrapped up in the joy and wonder of it all.

At the gate to the backstage area, we loitered with some super-fans, some contest winners and some record store owners, until the local record label rep to arrived to take us backstage.

We were led into a small, unoccupied dressing room, where we milled about quietly waiting for the band, and wondering if we were allowed to eat anything off the vegetable tray.

After a wait that was probably shorter than it felt (due to the excitement and anticipation), the label rep ushered the band into the room.

"Please welcome Fran, Dougie, Neil and Andy.  Travis!"

There was an awkward pause.

The band didn't really seem to know what to say.  And the fans didn't really know what to say.  We just kind of stood there.

Someone had to break the ice.

Fran Healy decided to do it.

"What's going on here?!" he said to my wife, pointing at her round belly.

There was an awkward pause.

She was a little too nervous to immediately response.

And you could see a flash of fear in his eyes that said, "Oh my God, I hope this woman is pregnant, and not just fat."

"We're due in November," I said, and all three of us smiled broadly.

We congratulated him on his new baby, and he immediately whipped out his new iPhone (in 2007, he was the first person I'd ever met who had an iPhone), and showed us pictures of his boy.

And when I asked him to sign our CD, he just handed to the phone over to my wife so she could continue to look at baby pictures while he used two hands to sign.

With the ice broken, the full crowd had now engaged the band, and they were signing CDs and snapping photos all around.

"I have Fran Healy's iPhone!" my wife whispered to me.

We briefly considered adding our own phone number into his contact list, but, being new to iPhones, we weren't sure how to do it.

Instead, we settled for this photo of the band, me, my wife and yes, a little bun in her oven.

So, if it's not clear in relation to yesterday's post . . . I should have known that it had been 5 years since Travis' last album, as my daughter was born just a few months before the last record "Ode To J Smith" which had come out just one year after "The Boy With No Name."  And I remember that "The Boy With No Name" came out while my wife was pregnant.  So I know how long it has been, because I know how old my daughter is.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Travis "Moving"

I hadn't heard that Travis was putting out a new album this summer until about two weeks ago, when Sean Coakley, an independent promoter, mentioned that we'd be getting the new single "Moving," shortly.

"It's their first album in five years," he noted.

"Five years?  Really?  Yeah, I guess it has . . ."

But of course it's been 5 years.

Because their record "Ode To J Smith" came out in 2008, right on the heels of the album "The Boy With No Name," which had arrived only a year before.

And how do I know that album came out in 2008?  I'll tell you tomorrow.

For today, enjoy the new track . . .


Hear the song on Youtube.

Travis "Selfish Jean"

Here is a (partial) list of things that I enjoy, that my dear wife doesn't have any particular interest in, but still indulges my desire to discuss, listen to, search online for, obsess over, follow and otherwise geek out on:

Arrested Development
This American Life
Big Star
The Onion/AV Club
Battlestar Galactica
Tina Fey
pulled Pork Barbeque sandwiches
Flight Of The Conchords
Wait Wait Don't Tell Me
Dr. Demento
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
The Wire
Cadbury Eggs
Parks & Recreation
Louie
Emmylou Harris
Watching American movies on Telemundo even though I don't speak Spanish

My wife is not immune to nerding-out, herself. But about things that interest her---for instance, graphic design elements. Like fonts (yes, I'm talking about a particular typeface). She's crazy about fonts. In fact, she once went gaga for one particular font.

And not just any font, but a font based on a video by the band Travis, featuring one of her favorite comedians, Demetri Martin, who designed the font on the t-shirts in the video below.

This is so graphic-geeky. But she is generally accepting of my foibles, so it would have been wrong of me to tease her about font-passion.

Well, I did tease her, of course, but that just makes me an annoying geek.


See the video on Youtube.

Travis "My Eyes"

We had a pretty good idea of what our kid was going to look like. There wasn't much room for guessing.

My wife and I look basically the same.

We're both Italian/Irish, favoring the Italian side, darker skin, brown hair, dark eyes. It has never been out of the ordinary for someone to think we are siblings. Or for people to think that my wife, is my mother's daughter. Young pictures of my father-in-law, look a lot like me, now.

It was a lock. We were going to have a little brown baby, with brown eyes.

And while my wife was pregnant, that's when we fell in love with this song from Travis.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Fran Healy had just had a child, too, and sang about the day he was born:

"You've got my eyes."

The only thing up for debate was, would our daughter have my brown eyes, or my wife's brown eyes?

Then she was born.

It's not uncommon for a newborn to arrive with blue eyes. And these eyes were blue. But yeah, they'd probably change to brown.

Right?

No. Months later, blue eyes. Years later, blue eyes.

It's not genetically impossible. My mother-in-law has blue eyes. And my Dad has blue eyes. Recessive genes do happen.

Today's her 4th birthday, and her eyes are still blue. My brother-in-law calls my daughter, "Blueberry eyes."

It was a good, early, lesson in parenting.

Even though you know better, when you have kids, there is a part of you that wants them to be a Mini-You. You hope they look like you and act like you and love the same things you love and become you, only better.

But it doesn't matter how much of your DNA they have. It doesn't matter how much you try to nurture them to be a certain way. It doesn't matter.

They are not a little you. And if you try to force that upon them, they'll spend the rest of your life, proving just the opposite.

There are so many things I want my daughter to see and do and be and love. And I'll guide her toward those things, hoping that she'll find some resonance in them.

But I learned on the day she was born, this day four years ago, that decidedly, she would see the world through her own eyes.

Happy birthday, little one!

Travis "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?"

If you discover a band after their fourth or fifth record, do you go back and buy their old records?

As a music consumer, I usually do, figuring that if I like the new stuff, there is probably some older stuff I might like too.

But as a music programmer, it's a little harder to do that.

Meaning, if we start playing a band on mvyradio, five albums into their career, do we go back to their old albums and start to play their old songs too?

It certainly works that way, going forward. Meaning, that once we've brought a band into the mvyradio World, we are more likely to play songs from subsequent albums. If we like a band enough to add them, then we like them enough to follow them forward.

But backwards is harder, and here's why . . .

When a new song goes into rotation, we play it a lot. If it really resonates with the audience, we'll play it a couple of times a day, every day, for several months on end.

As a programmer, you do this to build familiarity. If a song is strong enough to withstand months of spins before people start to get sick of it, then it is probably sturdy enough to become a permanent member of our rotation. Songs that make it to this point might get played once a week.

So let's take Travis for an example.

They put out several very good albums, but for some reason, they never quite seemed to be a band that we wanted to put into full rotation.

By 2007, when they put out the song "Closer," they had evolved enough, and mvyradio had evolved enough, that it seemed to make sense.

And it sounded great on the air, as we played it very frequently for a few months, and now play it every 7 days or so. It's familiar enough at this point, that you don't have to play it often. People recognize it and remember it.

Listening to "Closer" and the album "The Boy With No Name" sent me back to older Travis songs. And I kind of think that they have several songs that are really good, and could potentially be a good fit for the station.

But we can't suddenly start playing "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" which is a 10+ year old song, twice a day for months on end. That would be weird.

And if we only played it once a week, well, for most of the mvyradio audience, it's a completely unfamiliar tune, and would come up so infrequently that the average listener would never become familiar with it.

Then again, it's a pretty great song.

So all this week, old songs by bands that we now play. I'm asking you, are they good enough to overcome that hurdle of lack-of-familiarity?

What do you think of "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" and "Flowers In The Window"?


See the video on Youtube.


See the video on Youtube.


See the video on Youtube.