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Finally!  I’ve been a huge fan of Jars of Clay for over a decade and it took me until August 2008 to get a Jars of Clay T-shirt!  But it’s a beauty:

Plus, I got it during one of the best mini-vacations ever - a whirlwind weekend to Chicago to hang out with two of my sisters and see a bunch of my favorite bands!  In late August, my sister and I traveled to Chicago to meet my sister who goes to college in nearby South Bend, Indiana.  (We took the Megabus from Minneapolis, which is a very cost-effective way to get to Chicago from many places in the midwest.)  That evening, we caught a stop on the Music Builds Tour, which featured Jars of Clay, Robert Randolph & The Family Band, Switchfoot and Third Day, possibly one of the most amazing lineups in my rather short music history.  It was great to see the Jars guys rockin’ it onstage since the last time we’d seen them was in 2002.  Robert Randolph and hte Family Band rocked the place like only they can and brought a bit of Gospel flavor as well.  Switchfoot, of course, put on an amazing and inspiring show and all the bands came back for a synergistic encore.  Oh, and did I mention that it was outdoors on Lake Michigan on a beautiful August day?  That too!

The shirt, as you can probably tell, is gray and has the outline of the word “Jars of Clay” on it with some little bird figures.  It’s rock and roll and kinda pretty at the same time.  And now, I support one of my all-time favorite bands via my favorite art form: T-shirts.

Here’s a little story of something that’s happened recently.  In the end, it goes mostly to making sure that the webmaster of the sites did his homework, but maybe I’m supposed to remember things better, I don’t know.

So, as I mentioned in the blog post about the ILikeAndy.com T-shirt, I enjoy Andy Osenga and his music.  I’ve also loved reading his blog over the last couple years in addition to his music.  He’s one of my favorite bloggers.  But what I found while writing that story was that I’ve not been reading his blog for the last six months!

How does this happen?  Well, I’ve just been reading his blog via the RSS feed in my Google Reader, so I haven’t been visiting his site.  However, about six months ago, he got a new site, and the new site’s RSS feed was not the same.  Google Reader doesn’t notify me of this, so I probably at first assumed that Andy was too busy to blog and then forgot about his blog completely.

The great thing is that Google Reader keeps track of what’s new for me.  Google doesn’t usually screw up, but what happens when the webmaster forgets a little detail like that?  I miss six months of content and have to spend a couple hours on a Saturday catching up.  Should I be checking people’s actual sites more often?  I hope not - there’s way too many sites that I follow via RSS to do that.

I guess the moral of the story is to make sure that you’re not missing anything that’s important to you on the ‘net.  Unless you’re a webmaster, in which case, you should make sure you got your stuff together.  And speaking of which, I gotta go manage some sites.

Today’s shirt is one of my favorites - the ILikeAndy.com T-shirt.  Most say that my shirts are pretty unique, but this one is probably one of the most unique, mostly because it was a limited-run shirt from an independent artist.  It’s totally rock ‘n’ roll.

Andrew Osenga is an independent singer-songwriter and is the former leader of the band The Normals, everyone’s favorite band from Normal, Illinois.  He also currently plays as a member of Christian folk super-group Caedmon’s Call, who I like to think of as the Main Street Singers of Christian music.  (I won’t keep the A Might Wind analogies rolling, because I think it’s a bit too early to call Amy Grant and Gary Chapman the genre’s Mitch and Mickey.  Just to clarify, if you get all those references, you’re too much of a Christian music geek, just like me.)

The shirt has an interesting history.  Apparently, a couple years before the shirt was made, Andrew Osenga lost a toe while mowing the lawn.  That’s hardcore!  And he had enough spirit to make an awesome-looking, random, “vintage” T-shirt out of it.

Half the reason I purchased this shirt is because I love supporting independent artists and I’ve always liked Andy’s music.  But, the other half is because I love innovative Internet marketing, and buying a domain like ILikeAndy.com and pointing it to your site is fun marketing.  Whenever someone asks what the shirt is about, I always direct them to go to the site and check out his music - there’s tons of free Andrew Osenga on there, including the free Letters To The Editor EP.  So, seriously, check it out.

I’ve posted about the Apple iPhone before, and most of you probably knew it was only a matter of time. About 14 months ago I decided that the iPhone wasn’t good enough yet and so I purchased a Palm Treo. Well, I guess that was not the best idea, because the phone started giving me problems just after the year warranty. A number of the many buttons on the Treo, including letters such as “N”, “R” and “U” were not working well, such that I had to press them a couple times to even a dozen times to get them to register. Towards the end of my use of it, even the power on and off button was wearing out and I couldn’t turn on my phone for a minute or two the week before. While talking to Sprint representatives seeing what they could do to get the phone fixed, I found that it would be about $200 to get it fixed (because the 1-year warranty had expired) or $200 to leave my Sprint contract.

To be honest, I was kinda glad this happened. A number of my coworkers had purchased iPhones in the last couple months since the iPhone 3G was released, and I was envious of the abilities of their phone. Primarily, my phone really had only close to text-only web browsing, and the ability to view things in full layouts and full graphics was something I really wanted. Plus, the Palm OS is nice, had many applications written for it, and is pretty stable, but the applications being written for the iPhone are so much cooler and are written for today’s computing world, not the world of yesteryear. Let’s just say I was ready to upgrade, and this non-working phone was my push to get it.

So, last Friday, I walked into the Mall of America Apple Store and picked up an iPhone. And, well, I definitely like it. It’s going to be great to only have one electronic device in my pocket - no PDA phone and iPod as well. Plus, on the way home from work today, I watched a number of video podcasts on it’s beautiful 3.5-inch screen. It was totally fun. Here’s a couple things I’ve enjoyed since I got ot:

• The podcast area not only keeps track of whether you’ve viewed a podcast episode, but the podcast browsing page lists how long the episode is and how much time you have left. Also, it has an icon saying it’s half-viewed.
• When I plugged it into the Mac, it didn’t sync my e-mail content (at least I don’t think so), but it did transfer my e-mail account information from Mail to my iPhone so I didn’t have to even muck around in Mail settings for the iPhone.
• I haven’t used it much yet, but Visual Voicemail may actually be the killer app of the iPhone. (In case you don’t know, this makes your voicemail act more like an e-mail Inbox, where you can select a message from a list onscreen and then it just plays that one.)
• One of my favorite apps is the Remote app that Apple is giving away for free on the App Store. I have a desktop computer set up in the study, and if I’m across the room or even in the kitchen, I can control the music and even select new music to play right on the iPhone.
• So far, I’ve not been annoyed at all by AT&T’s phone service. Almost every time I’ve looked at the phone I’ve had the full bars and the 3G data service. Well, outside of the major metro areas may not be as fun, but I’m not out there very often.

I will keep playing with it and I’m sure that more blog posts about functionality and cool apps that I find will be forthcoming. If you see me in the next couple weeks, feel free to ask me and I’ll give you a demo.

Yesterday, Apple announced some updated music-related items. They announced updated versions of all the iPods, plus some purported improvements to their iTunes software. But, even after hearing about all the announcement from all the news sources, I’m still not sure it’s at all exciting. Here’s the rundown:

First, there’s the iPod nano. The nano is apparently thinner and more colorful than ever. The two-inch widescreen display is better than ever for viewing your music and video. The iPod nano also includes a sensor that tells if you’re holding it up straight or on its side and will react to that with its updated software. Plus, with nine different, bright color options, I think these may be a hit this fall. 8GB comes at $149 and 16GB at $199. The iPod shuffle was also updated to include half of the vibrant colors introduced on the nano as well.

The iPod classic was updated to a 120GB model for $249 and the 80GB and 160GB versions are discontinued. Unfortunately for those like me that like a lot of storage space for their library, this further signals that Apple may be considering the iPod classic to be even closer to dead. I still like to carry around all my music and the iPod classic is the only one I can do that on, so I hope they don’t discontinue it too soon. It’s also a bit odd, in my opinion, that they did not bring the features of the iPod nano software to the iPod classic, though.

The biggest deal they wanted to make, though, was the iPod touch. The touch is slightly thinner and a curved back like the iPhone 3G, plus it has a couple minor new features. There’s a speaker included inside the iPod touch’s innards, although early reports say it is not as good as the iPhone speaker. Still, it’s nice to have a speaker for casual gaming or sampling songs for your friends, although dedicated speakers would be much prefered for serious listening. Also, the Nike+iPod system, which allows you to track your workouts if you buy a sensor to put in your shoe, is included. Some persons have already taken the iPod touch apart and found what looks to be a Bluetooth chip in there, so besides a working Nike+iPod it’s possible that Apple will open usage of Bluetooth for more on this later.

The prices and storage capacities of the iPod touch have been updated, of course. There is an 8GB model for $229, a 16GB for $299 and a 32GB for $399. Apple, more than ever, touted the App Store with its hundreds and hundreds of applications for the iPod touch, and especially showed it off as a gaming device, which is a rather uncharacteristic move for Apple. It’s well-known that Steve Jobs does not play games, really, and in the past Apple has been very lackluster in promoting their products as a gaming platform, but this presentation showed a possible new effort to push the iPod touch and iPhone as a gaming platform. Only time will tell.

The only major software feature seems cool, but in my opinion it’s just snake oil. Apple’s new “Genius” feature is displayed with a little atom icon just like their in-store Genius Bars and offers recommendations of related songs. First, iTunes anonymously uploads your library’s data, and then you start getting Genius features. The Genius sidebar in the right side gives you songs, artists, or albums based on the songs or artists you currently have selected, and since it knows your library information, it does not list items already in your library. Also, select a song and press the Genius button on the bottom right of the screen and you get a playlist of songs from your library that are supposedly “similar” to that song. In my opinion, the Genius system doesn’t really seem to be that smart, but it may get smarter. This seems to be just the same as the iTunes Store’s “People who bought this also bought” database, which isn’t really anything groundbreaking, but I guess it’s cool to have that extended directly into your iTunes library. If you sync an iPod or iPhone with a library that has Genius enabled, the iPod or iPhone can also create Genius playlists on the fly as well.

These announcements were mostly what expected, and after finding out all there was to hear, I was a bit disappointed. The iPod nanos do look amazing mostly because of their bright colors. Nothing else was very exciting, and it makes me wonder why Apple was touting this as such a big thing. To be fair, Apple’s financial people were trying to tell investors that it was nothing to get excited about, but on the other hand, Apple’s PR team was saying it was going to be amazing. (I guess the investors are more the realists.)

After all these announcements, Mr. Slow and Boring himself, Jack Johnson, took the stage to lull us to sleep. After Steve Jobs woke us from our slumber to say, “Thanks for coming,” we all thought this was the coolest and most amazing new products ever. Yeah, right.

Today’s shirt is the Switchfoot tour shirt:

It’s a pretty nice shirt.  I don’t usually buy those shirts with all the tour dates on them, because it severely dates the shirt.  However, this one was a bit better because it just lists the cities and not the dates, plus it had the coolest front of any of their shirts.

I got this shirt at last fall’s St. Paul, MN stop of the Appetite for Construction tour.  I remember enjoying this show alot because Relient K played for a good hour or more and it was so good that I almost forgot that I still had Switchfoot left to go.  Of course, Switchfoot brought just as much excitement, variety, and rock ‘n’ roll as Relient K, if not more.  It was a great tour and a great pairing of some of my favorite bands.

Also, it became another meetup of one of my friends, Kim, who works a lot on the inReview.net website.  Kim started helping out at what was then cMusicWeb.com in 2001 by doing our first interview with Switchfoot, and she’s been doing interviews ever since.  She was in town to visit family last fall when the Appetite for Construction tour came through, so she joined me for the concert.  It was fun to hang out and enjoy some live music again, something we hadn’t done since we finally met in person in April 2006.  Without Kim’s constant help, there definitely wouldn’t be a website.

Kim also encouraged me to get a really cool book of photos taken by one of Switchfoot’s roadies, and she even introduced me to the photographer and we got it signed by them.  Then, after that, i decided to go through the signing line after I found this hilarious poster and absolutely needed to get it signed:

For those who have not seen Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, this photo is a parody of a photo of the characters from that movie.  Throughout the photo, each member of Switchfoot is represented one or more times.  It’s hilarious!

OK, so I’m already breaking one of my rules for the T-shirt blog posts.  I’m not currently wearing this shirt.  But, this is one of my more rarely worn shirts, the delirious? jersey:

Just in case it’s not immediately apparent, this is an actual soccer jersey made by a company in Brazil.  (This is one reason why I don’t wear it often, because that type of fabric feels weird to me.)  It has a UK logo and a red stripe on the front as well as the “delirious?” and “d:” logos, plus a “DELIRIOUS?” and “5″ on the back.  This is one of my most prized shirts, partially because I bought it directly from the UK webstore for a bit more money than I usually spend on a shirt, and partially because it’s my all-time favorite band.  (I also don’t wear it much because it’s a bit small for me, to which one of my roommates remarked, “Dan, most of your shirts are a bit too small for you.”)

I mostly wear this shirts to concerts, mostly because those are special events.  I wore it last week to the Music Builds tour in Chicago, where Switchfoot, Third Day, Jars of Clay and Robert Randolph & The Family Band rocked the ampitheater.  (Incidentally, I also got another shirt which looks like it’ll be rather tight on me, my first T-shirt ever from Jars of Clay, who are one of my favorite bands as well, but that’s another blog post.)  The show was great, and I got to spend the weekend with my two youngest sisters.

However, today, August 30th, is also an important day on the delirious? calendar.  Here’s a clip from their biography on h2g2:

The next major event, although horrific, shaped the history and gave us Delirious? as they are today. On August 30, 1995, Martin was driving his wife Anna, and Jon (Anna’s youngest brother) home from a late night gig. They’d almost reached Littlehampton when they had an accident - as a result of tiredness from the long journey, Martin fell asleep and drove the car straight into a wall just around the corner from his house. Jon and Anna escaped with minor injuries but it took the rescue workers a few hours to get Martin out of the car, and it took a couple of months for Martin to rehabilitate in hospital as he had suffered a broken leg. During this period he spent a lot of time on his own thinking things through. He also read Bill Flannagan’s U2 at the End of the World, and this inspired him into a decision, to which the others agreed. They found a bassist - Martin’s brother-in-law Jon (In fact, he’s Tim and Stew’s brother-in-law as well. Confused yet?) - and on April 1, 1996, Delirious?, and their own independent record label Furious? Records, was born.

A song based on this part of the delirious? history is the song “August 30th” and is on their King of Fools album.  It is a rather terrible event to remember, but it’s likely that without that experience the band would probably never have became a full-time band and would have just stayed a church worship band.

Check this out! According to this post from Engadget, Gibson Guitars has developed a version of their electrics that require no manual tuning at all. For an extra $899, it has a set of pickups that are solely for tuning the guitar. The guitar can be tuned in a few seconds by pulling out the Master Control knob. It looks like the pickups take the tone to a computer and it tightens the strings within a built-in motor system. More information is also available, and here’s my friend Mel’s thoughts:

Gibson will start selling a self-tuning guitar. At first I thought this was cool. No more lame guys who desperately try (and fail) to be witty while they wrangle their axe into harmonic shape! Hooray! Maybe we’ll be able to forever nix “so how y’all doin?” from stage repetoire.

On the other hand, what a bummer to take out this relational step between a musician and an instrument! I’ve tried to draw a proper comparison (robotic dog? online boyfriend?) and none of them quite fit. I know not everyone has a bond with their instrument. But I do. Willie does. BB King does. Clapton does. Tuning is the most common opportunity you have to feed the relationship. To care for it, pay it due attention, get it to it’s best form, and then work together to play the most frickin’ beautiful song you know. Work for it a little! Just a little!

As many of you know, for almost a decade now I’ve been running a music review website. It started out on GeoCities, but thanks to the writing and hard work of many people, it’s been at cMusicWeb.com for years, and it did pretty well as an independent, alternative source for honest reviews of Christian music. It was a good run, but in the last couple years the contributors have just gotten too busy with family and other commitments so the site has lacked a bit.

For the last year, we’ve been slowly building a new site, inReview.net. Over the years, we’ve found, like many Christians, that the small subcategory of “Christian” music does very little to define the listening habits or lives of most Christians. With inReview.net, we’re hoping to build a group of Christians who like writing about music and sharing some of their favorite music.

Speaking of which, this is where y’all come in. I know that many of you, as Christian brothers and sisters and (some of you) members of the People of Praise, enjoy music a lot. We enjoy all kinds of music - not just “Christian” music, but music by rappers, rockers, and folk artists (among others) who have something meaningful to say. (Let’s face it, I also listen to some who probably don’t have much to say too.)

I’m looking for people to write for the site. Our writing staff at the moment is very small, and we’d love to put out more reviews, but that takes people and time. Writing really isn’t that hard, especially when it’s about an artist or album that you’re really passionate about. Or, if you’re a music lover who wants practice in writing, this is a great place to start too. Not many of us, and certainly not me, are considered professional writers, but we strive to write honest, in-depth critiques of the music we hear and the music we love.

We’ve got a number of things lined up for this coming year, and if you’re interested in joining us, please contact us at inReview.net. We’d love to have a regular commitment of about one review per month, but just a good one-time feature or review is great. Also, persons to cover music news or maybe even avid music listeners who just want to blog free-form about it are welcome. There’s no pay at this point, but if we can start to sell advertising and cover costs in the future, there may be some. This isn’t just open to you as my friends, but if you know anyone who is interested please pass on the word.

In other news, to better keep the website going, I’m thinking of getting a new computer, more specifically a MacBook Pro. If anyone has any comments or thoughts on other computer options, I’d love to hear what you think.

Yesterday a press release issued from Amazon.com announced that they will be opening an online music download store. There are many players in this still-emerging market, but having another big player is definitely a good thing.

Not much was really stated in the press release except the music will be DRM-free MP3 files. Also, it was duly mentioned that EMI, often listed as the third or fourth-largest music company in the world, will be partnering with Amazon.com from the outset to put their music in the store. No word on pricing or dates of availability have been given at this time.

What does this mean for the music industry? Well, it will only accelerate the idea of selling DRM-free music, which any consumer is for. Plus, it could give a major competitor with Apple’s iTunes if Amazon’s Jeff Bezos can cut a good deal with the labels. And finally, it shows that EMI did not make an exclusive deal with Apple for non-DRM’d music, which is a good thing.

Amazon.com has the funds and the longevity to take on this challenge, but they definitely do not yet have the style points that Apple has. However, in a commodity market like this, we’ll have to wait to see how they can compete on the bottom line: features and price.