Listen now 
Saturday, July 5 July! July!
Given the placement of this year's July 4th holiday, chances are you may have already had your fill of music, parties, food, drink and sun, or some combination thereof-- even though it's only Saturday night. You're forgiven, then, if you're keeping at home-- Sunday night style-- tonight, but that doesn't mean you won't be missing out on plenty. Take the folks over at the Waterfront Blues Fest, for example. They're soldiering on with the good times (because somebody has to) by taking it to the wee hours for the third consective night tonight, with still plenty more to come on Sunday. Charlie Musselwhite, Back Door Slam, Eric Lindell and still more all play Saturday night performances for the festival, where ten bucks and a couple of cans of food gets you in and serves a good cause.
If you like your music indoors, look no further than the Aladdin Theater, tonight hosting the legendary anti-folkster and avowed enemy of the internet (just try to find something "official" for him on the web, it won't happen) Jonathan Richman. Once upon a time the leader of The Modern Lovers, Richman has built a career and a persona around his brilliant albeit quirky style, including more than a few odes to his artistic heroes, Picasso and the Velvet Underground among them. His 20th studio album, recently out, is Because Her Beauty is Raw & Wild, a collection that shows once again that even when we get more or less what we expect from Richman ("No One Was Like Vermeer" is the artist ode this time around), he still surprises with the kinds of curveballs he's always thrown us.
Elsewhere tonight, Maria Taylor and Jonathan Rice head up a decidedly Oberst-y line-up at the Doug Fir Lounge, along with Nik Freitas and Son, Ambulance. In case you don't keep track of such things, Taylor and Son, Ambulance are Saddle Creek labelmates with Conor Oberst's Bright Eyes, while Nik Freitas' latest is new out on Oberst's own Team Love label (Rice has a connection in all of this, too, but it's a long story about how his girlfriend's band originally made their name on the aforementioned Saddle Creek).
MP3: Maria Taylor, from Lynn Teeter Flower- "A Good Start"
The thread is open for your comments, including a call for your take on the newly-announced MusicFest Northwest line-up. Read on below...
Comments:
On Saturday, July 5 at 10:42pm, glorenzow said:
i got 'comicopera' from the library (please allow me to give thanks to the mult. co. library. so many new music discoveries i owe to their extensive CD collection.) and haven't stopped listening to it. absolutely stunning album from start to ... almost finish. I like the first 2/3 far better than the last 1/3, but yeah. it's beautiful. thanks for playing.
oh, and any comments on the mfnw lineup? it's gonna be BIG. like, maybe too big for me to wanna fight the lines big.
On Saturday, July 5 at 11:11pm, jpetersen said:
Indeed, glorenzow, MFNW is beginning to look like SXSW, and I suppose we take the good from that with the bad, as you pointed out. The question is: how long a line is too long a line? How far back in the crowd is too far back? Probably different for everyone based on a whole set of criteria and particulars (personally, anything short of Tom Waits or a Smiths reunion merits no more than, say, an hour of standing around, but that's probably just because I'm getting old).
So then, would you wait it out for? Let's see some lists.....
Aside from that, who's standing out on that MusicFest Northwest list?