John Anealio writes songs about Science Fiction, Fantasy & Other Nerdy Things. His music sounds like John Mayer, Weezer & James Taylor playing Dungeons & Dragons together on their iPhones. Download his music for free at johnanealio.com
Artists of all kinds are often inspired by other mediums. Songwriters are routinely influenced by novelists, and novelists commonly listen to music when they write. While there have been numerous novelizations of feature films, there haven’t been many book length interpretations of individual songs. So here’s a question for you:
Which Author Should Novelize “The Trees” by Rush?
Shoot your answers to us in the comments below. Meanwhile, watch the video f the song and enjoy a bonus question! Read the rest of this entry
This coming weekend (July 22nd-July 24th) I will be a guest at Confluence, The Literary Sci-Fi Convention in Pittsburgh, PA.
I will be performing a set of my original music on Friday evening:
Friday, July 22nd 9:00pm: John Anealio (Solo Concert) in The Redwood Room
This is a great con with lots of cool guests like Robert J. Sawyer, Jon Sprunk & S. Andrew Swann. If you are attending, please stop by at my concert and say hi. Be sure to follow my Twitter and Google+ streams for con updates.
Balticon, The Maryland Regional Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention is this coming weekend (May 27th-May 30th). If you are in the area, I highly recommend checking it out. This is a great con with lots of cool guests, which this year includes Ben Bova, Scott Sigler, Paolo Bacigalupi, Mur Lafferty, Jon Sprunk and tons more.
John Joseph Adams-called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com-is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a 2011 Hugo Award-nominee for Best Editor (Short Form), and his books have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor of Fantasy Magazine and Lightspeed Magazine. John is also the co-host of io9′s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
John Anealio: What was the first album that you bought with your own money? Do you still listen to it now?
John Joseph Adams: I think it was Nirvana’s Nevermind. I generally listen to a playlist of around 200+ recently-acquired songs. I rotate stuff out, rotate new stuff in. So while I haven’t listened to Nevermind in a while, I do still really like the album. Nirvana’s my favorite thing to sing in Rock Band, so I do listen to them fairly often in that context, and actually not too long ago I did have Nevermind and other Nirvana albums in my playlist, as I sort of had a renewed appreciation for them after playing their songs in Rock Band so often.
The first album I can actually remember owning (though I was like 7 or 8, so surely I didn’t buy it with my own money) was Metal Health by Quiet Riot. Can’t say I listen to that anymore, though I suppose it makes sense that my first album would be metal (albeit of a type I would hardly consider metal now).
John Anealio: What was the first album that you bought with your own money? Do you still listen to it now?
Peter V. Brett: 1984 by Van Halen. I’m not positive I actually BOUGHT it in 1984, but it was still popular at the time. Might have been 1985. I was 11 or 12 at the time, and had just gotten a Walkman, the cassette tape player that was the absolute height of portable entertainment at the time. It was about the size of a paperback book, but not some wimpy 80,000 word media tie-in novel. I’m talking a The-Name-of-the-Wind-sized paperback. And heavier. It would play one ENTIRE cassette tape… if you flipped the tape halfway through. That was like ten songs! Truly I grew up in a golden age.
Here is a very silly song that lists all of the Sci-Fi & Fantasy authors with new books out this month. If you like it, you can download it for absolutely free by clicking the Download button on the player below.
Last week’s discussion of The Dave Matthews Band got me thinking about other groups that feature non-standard instruments in their lineup. The musicians that make up Bela Fleck & The Flecktones are about as non-standard as you can get.
Bear McCreary’s excellent arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” for Battlestar Galactica led to an interesting discussion of which artist has recorded the best interpretation of the song. Jimi Hendrix? Michael Hedges?
In the comments section of last week’s post, quite a few people nominated the Dave Matthews Band’s version of the folk staple. While I love DMB’s reading of the song, I decided to feature a more Science Fiction appropriate track for this week’s Tuesday Tune….
As a follow-up to last week’s post, I thought that I would address my somewhat disparaging statement that Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” was covered by every coffee shop strummer and sloppy bar band. While the song is built on a relatively simple chord progression that even the most pedestrian musician can stumble through, there have been many truly inspired versions of “All Along The Watchtower”.
While most people will point to Hendrix’s seminal recording of the song (and who could argue with Hendrix) as the standard bearer, it is my opinion that the acoustic version performed by the late Michael Hedges might be even better.
Movie soundtracks are probably the most frequent rendezvous point for music and science fiction. Who could forget John Williams’ iconic Star Wars theme or Jerry Goldsmith’s brutal, avant-garde score to The Planet of the Apes? For my money, no one is writing better music for Science Fiction these days than Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary.
Jonathan Coulton is arguably the most successful singer/songwriter of the internet age. Much has been written of his “Thing a Week” project, where he wrote, recorded, and released a new song every week during a 12 month span in 2005 and 2006. Many other artists have tried similar tricks, but Coulton’s success is due more to the undeniable quality of his songwriting rather than any gimmick.
Coulton’s songs combine a Beatle-esque level of songcraft with a They Might Be Giants’ sense of fun and humor. The sheer number of flat-out great songs that he produced during this period is truly remarkable. This week’s Tuesday Tune was written during this time.
Whenever a band gets really popular, there is always that bozo within everyone’s peer group that is quick to shout: “I was into this band way before they got popular!”
Unfortunately, when it comes to Fountains of Wayne, I am that bozo.
Tis’ the season to be inundated with a stocking full of crappy Christmas music. In the interest of sanity preservation, I’d like to spend the next few weeks here on SF Signal recommending some less-cliched Christmas music that may be appealing to the Sci-Fi Fan.
I’ve been on a bit of a Van Halen kick this week. I’m a David Lee Roth fan, but I think that the actual songs from the Sammy Hagar era are better. Case in point, this week’s Tuesday Tune: “Love Walks In”.
Now you may ask: “What does this song have to do with Science Fiction?”
Up until a few days ago, I would have asked the same thing.
This past Saturday, I was fortunate enough to attend Philcon in Cherry Hill, NJ. You may ask: “Shouldn’t Philcon take place in Philadelphia?” My best answer to that question is that hotel rates are cheaper across the river in Cherry Hill and that renaming the event “Cherrycon” would mistakenly draw unsuspecting bakers and Warrant fans.
Anyway, I was in the audience for an excellent panel entitled “Why Aren’t We Writing About The Future Anymore?” There was lots of great commentary by Sci-Fi Authors Cory Doctorow, David Louis Edelman, and Gregory Frost.
This got me thinking about songs with “Future” in the title.
Sometimes, I feel like I’ve missed my true calling in life. While I love writing and recording songs about Science Fiction and Fantasy, I think that I would be an awesome Music Supervisor for movies and TV shows. No offense to music supervisor extraordinaire Alexandra Patsavas, but she totally dropped the ball by not including this week’s Tuesday Tune in the upcoming “New Moon” soundtrack. I’ve yet to see “New Moon” or “Twilight” for that matter, but come on! The title of the song is “Vampires in Love”. It’s a no-brainer!
This week we are blessed with the arrival “2012″, the latest cinematic masterpiece from Roland “I like to blow things up” Emmerich. When I first read the title of this film, I briefly thought that someone had made a movie out of Rush’s magnum opus “2112″. Sadly this appears to be another by the numbers world catastrophe movie.
Tonight, ABC premiers the reboot of V, the 80′s Sci-Fi mini-series that featured carnivorous reptilian aliens and Marc Singer’s perfectly feathered hair.
In recognition of this historic event, it seems only natural to feature a song about Aliens.
