My Desert Island 5 (the five records I would want if I were ever stranded on a desert Island) are: Unforgettable Fire (U2), Shake Your Money Maker (The Black Crowes), Flaming Red (Patty Griffin), Heartbreaker (Ryan Adams) and So Far (Crosby, Stills and Nash). However, truth be told, if those were the only five records I had on a desert island, I’m pretty sure I’d want to eventually suck my eardrums out with a plunger. 

Who in the world wants to listen to the same 5 albums over and over again? I don’t know a human being that could handle that. That kind of repetition is something you would have found at Abu Ghraib alongside waterboarding.

There is nothing more depressing than going through life unmoved. Static. Blasé. We all clutch to the inherent sense that we deserved to be wowed; to live in some sense of amazement or awe. But all the things we love…movies, music, cars, food…cannot escape the law of diminishing returns: no matter how great something is the first time, the more you listen to, experience, taste or encounter it, its impact becomes weaker.

It’s true. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t constantly be making and/or looking for new records. We’d be listening to the first thing that blew our skirts up. I’d still be clutching a Realistic tape recorder jamming REO Speedwagon’s High Infidelity.

But that’s a good thing…

It is because of music’s inability to ultimately satisfy our artistic/emotional itch that we push forward to find something new. We want to find something that builds off the brilliance of the old and connects with where we are and might be going.

I think that is what we are trying to do at Brite Revolution.

We are a new music destination. We built Brite to constantly bring people music from the artists they love and new artists they need to love. We cut through the background noise, find those things that promise to inspire, connect, move and resonate with people. We know the value of an artist’s back catalog, but we want to be about new experiences, new renderings of great ideas…new music.

I’m not going to lie. I still dig me some Speedwagon on occasion. Riding The Storm out is a wondrous guilty pleasure when speeding through the back streets on the way home at 2 AM. However, nothing will replace that moment when you hear a new song that’s the perfect storm of guitar parts, lyrics and performance. When we quit having those discoveries, we might as well be living on a desert island.

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Earth Worms & Eyelids

by Billy on April 22, 2009

When I was about five or so my family went cane-pole fishing off the bulkhead of the St. John’s River in Jacksonville. We weren’t really the cane-pole fishing kind of family, but for some reason we were all there standing along side North Florida’s finest residents as they dropped chicken coop laying mash in the water to attract schools of mullet (if you ever want to catch a mullet, laying mash is the key. They don’t bite hooks, but if you drop the mash in the water, they will swarm to the spot and you can snag them with your line. Pretty effective, actually.)

I was too young to be trusted with a hook and live bate and I remember standing back a few feet watching as everyone plunked their lines into the brackish water of the then-poisonous waters of the St. John’s.

My brother (who was 11 or 12 at the time) is a bit of a showman and I remember his silhouette on the rough concrete bulkhead and the swooshing sound of the cane pole as he whipped through the air trying to cast the uncastable length of fishing line. You see, you don’t cast cane poles. They have about 8 feet of line. The whole point is that you hang the pole over the water and let the filament dangle straight down. If you want your bait to go deeper, you have to stick your pole closer to the water. Watching him was like watching a scene in A River Runs Through it, minus the fly fishing rods and fundamental understanding of the fishing. [click to continue…]

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Nerf Broadswords and Texas

March 24, 2009

About a mile or so from my house is a huge park where once a month a group of dweeby-twenty-somethings take a break from their jobs at The Comic Book Exchange to don medieval costumes and beat the shit out of each other with foam rubber weaponry. I’ve pulled into that parking lot on more [...]

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Autobiographies, John Cusack & Buttless Chaps

March 12, 2009

One of my all-time-favorite movie scenes is from the John Cusack film, High Fidelity. Cusack plays Rob Gordon, a 30-something owner of a second-hand record store who is in the throws of a soul melting pre-midlife crisis. Rob has just been dumped by his latest long-time girlfriend and is sitting on the floor of his [...]

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