You might have noticed a cute little widget in the sidebar. Yes, oh yes, we’re starting an Album O’ The Week over here at Verbal Intent. Once a week, I’ll update and post about the album I’m currently listening to with a bit of a review for you. Let me know your thoughts on the musak, and as always send me your suggestions of music that I should be listening to.

This week, I’m listening to a ton of Tom Freund’s new album “Collapsible Plans” produced by our very own Ben Harper. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this album. On the one hand, I love it because it sounds like Ben Harper’s music just sung by a different guy. But when you hear it right next to older Tom Freund you almost feel like Ben Harper beat the heck out of Tom and forced him to become a soulful black dude instead. Not that it’s bad, it just doesn’t sound fully like Tom Freund.

At any rate, he’s a heck of a songwriter and can sing while playing upright bass which is a remarkable feat in and of itself. Ask Matty.

You can preview some of the songs from “Collapsible Plans” in the little Amazon widget in the sidebar. Enjoy!

A big warm and wet thanks to Chad for fixing the sidebar bug in IE. Way back in 2002, he sat me down in a computer lab and taught me HTML. He is also responsible for my affection towards the following bands:

• Hall and Oates
• Gorillaz
• Radiohead
• Chemical Brothers
• And Supreme Beings of Leisure.

Clearly, I owe him a lot. Tonight, we toast our ginger ale to you, Chad.

Our first quiet weekend in literally months, and it wound up being not so quiet. We had hoped to busk last night, but wound up in the living room playing late into the night because a 50 year old covering the Talking Heads cemented himself in Davis Square for nigh-on 5 hours. Discussing the Talking Heads in our home leads to marital strife, so you can only imagine our need to get as far away from him as possible.

Not sure whether the highlight of the night was when Matt and Peter convinced me to pull out the fiddle for “Wagon Wheel,” which was surprisingly enjoyable, or whether grilling ear corn at 12:30am was more fun. Or the sleeping in til 2.

Oh who am I kidding? The highlight of the night was cleaning up the two enormous piles of dog poop that I found upon returning home from work. Girl’s gonna have to work a bit harder to get me out to the dog park today.

So Matt’s flipping through the stations unable to find anything on network TV (no, we don’t have cable) that suits him. After lingering on “Big Brother” he moves on to PBS where a trumpet concert is taking place. He turns to me and says…

“Hey, it’s your friend.”

“Chris Botti?”

“Yeah.”

He quickly turns the station to ”House.”

I need to take this opportunity to defend myself. That one album of mine was an impulse buy because I couldn’t quite decide if I thought Chris Botti was hot or not, and I needed to look at some more photos located in the CD sleeve to ultimately decide. Yes, moderately hot. But also kinda creepy. And he is neither my friend, nor does his album get dignified by frequent spins on the stereo.

Thanks. I feel much better now.

Lately I’ve been finding myself missing the piano. I played piano for years and years, and I have to admit it’s the one instrument I worked the hardest at. So naturally, it’s the instrument I play the best. During my high school years, especially my senior year as my mom was battling breast cancer, heading off to piano lessons was therapeutic. For about an hour and a half of my life, my phenomenal teacher treated a bratty teenager like an adult inspiring me to work hard but also kick back and enjoy life a little.

For the past four years we’ve lived in second floor apartments with close neighbors, making owning a piano a challenge we did not care to address. After moving Matt’s Hammond organ a number of times, we decided to stick to highly portable instruments… like guitars, and lap steels, harmonicas and… upright basses (?). Matt even got rid of the drum kit which was a painful, but practical loss.

I keep seeing them advertised on Craigslist, these cheap $50 pianos that people want to get rid of. What I would give for one, I cannot quite express. But seeing as we buy a 6-pack of beers for the boys downstairs every time we have friends over to jam late into the night, I have a feeling our getting a piano would singlehandedly sustain the liquor store around the corner. And become an overwhelmingly expensive pastime.

Another thing I’ll just need to wait it out for… til we’re ya know… rockin’ the suburbs.

When Matt was an itty bitty high school student, he saved up his hard-earned lawn mowing cash to buy this Takamine. He has loved her immeasurably since. From time to time I will take his guitar out of it’s case and plop it in his lap as a well trained dog would do with it’s leash. He is usually in the middle of writing some programs for one of his cases, or reading a book by Shusaku Endo, but when I hand him the Takamine everything else falls by the wayside and for the next hour of my life I am giddy with delight while he plays through “461 Ocean Boulevard” and we annoy the neighbors.

I think when I shot this picture I caught him right in the middle of “Steady Rollin’ Man,” which he very much is.

From Daily Daguerreotype