The part of this song that everyone likes best is the “What can you do/What can you DOOOOOOO,” which is pure vocal catnip. We’re supposed to like it. It’s in there as enjoyable punctuation in a number which is not shy about throwing chest voice belting in with rapid enunciation. In the Raul Esparza interpretation… Read More “30/90,” from tick…tick…BOOM!
Tim: Happy Super Bowl Sunday, buddy. May the Pats be struck down. Matt: Now and forever, amen. Tim: (This is going to look worse when this goes up and the Patriots win by thirty two hours later.) Speaking of championships, ha ha, today we chat a smidge about this championship belt project that both of… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #12: Belts
Original image links back here Tim: It’s been like, four months since our last music conversation. And we return today to talk about Coheed and Cambria, who you probably know best as the guys who roasted Antonin Scalia. (The Decemberists one really feels like it happened like, last week.) Matt: That Scalia roast is… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #10: Coheed and Cambria
“Let’s talk it over – it’s not like the podcast is dead. Was it something I did? Was it something that broke the sound in our computers?” Anyway! We return! We have sound! We have a reason to talk! In honor of Matt’s recently completed series on the top rock albums of 2000-2009, we review… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 38: Full Metal Genre Pedantry; or, Jangly!
Another week, another conversation. The latest conversation in our series considers what it means for a band or a director, specifically, to age. How do we reevaluate them? What do we look for? Do they fade away entirely? What is their (gulp) legacy? What follows is a lightly edited conversation in lieu of a podcast.… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations, #5: How Media Changes As It Ages
Matt and Tim get to talkin’ again, and this time they settle on a band both of them hold dear. The Decemberists, fresh off of a new album, I’ll Be Your Girl, are the subject of this particular debate…and there’s certainly more debate than usual. What follows is a lightly edited conversation in lieu of… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #4: The Decemberists
About a year and a half ago, I was working on a short project where I wrote about fifty different showtunes from different musicals which I enjoyed a lot. I haven’t touched the genre very much since then on this site, mostly because I’m kind of tapped out on the subject. But while I was… Read More “I Don’t Care Much,” from Cabaret
Even in the midst of one of the more eclectic musicals of the recent past, “Letters” stands out as an especially weird song. The first third of the song, which belongs solely to Pierre, careens from topic to topic in his letter to Andrey who, if you remember the “Prologue,” isn’t here. What is at first a typically… Read More “Letters,” from Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812
Matt and I return, adding another unnecessary element to the title of the podcast (it’s possibly the B&B B&B Suite now, which is punny and dumb and relates back to the punny, dumb stuff we do), but more importantly biting off more than we can chew. Both of us burrowed back into our little musical… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 32: The Kirk, Spock, and McCoy of 2000s Alt-Rock
I came across the Kerry Ellis Anthems version first. It hums and pulses and lands on forte sections every now and then thanks to an active string section and Ellis’ smooth voice for three minutes before Kerry really gets to whale on the song, and by the end she and Brian are in full shred mode, the way that… Read More “You Have to Be There,” from Kristina from Duvemala
Seeing Things Secondhand 