Dogs & Donkeys

I love meeting people through the internet. I like it because it's like you meet peoples spirit first, their superficial details later. Our need to categorize and label people, politics and philosophy into black and white polarities still occurs online...but sometimes we get enough time to process tone, intent and humour by repeated online discussions. A phenomenon occurs that you can tell who is actually cool online, and who is not sometimes, oftentimes, without measuring and seeing their gestures and tone of voice. Many of us will never meet our blog friends or web board pals and yet an idea and bond occurs. I have met a lot of people from online in real life. I have never met Christian Keifer in real life, but I spent a fair bit of time several years ago discussing some novels with him and a group of others at a web board. I just found out he makes music and we got one of his cds yesterday. His album Dogs & Donkeys is a spooky haunting of beautiful folk ballads that feels like listening to a novel: maybe a gothic murder mystery. I hope you get a chance to check out his MP3s online.

I mentioned the other day that I had a meeting with Tim Westergren the founder of Pandora: The Music Genome Project. Tim said that the Genome Project is beginning to include a lot of independantly produced music. SPIN Magazine had an article about how to fix the music business. Incorporating independant music into Pandora programming is maybe one of the major paths to introducing independant music to new listeners. The way Pandora finds listener specific music is by analysing a listeners favourite somgs then finding more music that works mathematically and similarily to those choices. Christian Keifer's album Dogs & Donkeys is like Waylon Jennings meets Nico Case. I hope he sends his cds into Pandora.