I’ve been fooling around for the past week with a website called Let Them Sing It For You. It’s a Swedish website (part of a radio channel) that lets you feed a phrase, a sentence or just arbitrary words and then spews them out as a song. Only, to create the final song for you, the software seeks out each of the words that you fed from a database of popular songs. So, if you write the clichéd blues opening line: “I woke up this morning”, it’ll pull out “I” from, say, a Chris Isaak song, “woke” from maybe a Nickelback song and so on. The end product, depending on the words you’ve fed in, can either be a nice mashed up melody or utter rubbish.
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Jazz legend Duke Ellington, who’s credited with many interesting quotes on jazz, blues and music critics is believed to have once said: “There are two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind.” But what’s good and what’s the other kind is entirely a matter of individual taste. Mentioning Ellington’s quote, a recent article in Uncut magazine said perhaps The Beatles are one those rare bands on whom there is a consensus. Everybody thinks The Beatles made great music.
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Ever since last week when I first heard Pearl Jam’s Backspacer, their newest album, I’ve been obsessively listening to it over and over again. It’s a mighty fine album and if you read the review in last Saturday’s Rock ’n’ Roll Circus in Hindustan Times by my colleague Indrajit Hazra you’ll know what I mean. Backspacer is a whopper; a cracker of an album from the band. Pearl Jam has been around for nearly 20 years, much longer than what many bands take to burn out or become their own stupid caricatures—I’m sure you know the ones I’m talking about.
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Last week, on a self-indulgent nostalgia trip I had recreated one of my playlists dating back to 1976 and put the ‘Crosby, Stills & Nash’ track Wooden Ships on it. My colleague and Brunch columnist, Vir Sanghvi, was quick to observe that probably the Jefferson Airplane version of the song, featured on the band’s
Volunteers album, was a better one.  Read more

The best thing about scouring for music on the Internet is that you discover new bands and musicians constantly. Sometimes these are brand new outfits, lurking under the radar, like hidden treasure that’s waiting to be discovered. Read more