5 Live Performances That Were Surprisingly Awesome

I spend a lot of time watching live concert footage, videos of talk show performances and the like on Youtube. Often, videos go in this article's hypothetical sister-article, "5 Live Performances That Depressed Me By Being Surprisingly Bad (Starring Tegan and Sara)." Sometimes I see a completely new side of an artist I thought I hated - or at least was ambivalent about - or gain a new appreciation for them. They end up in THIS article.

5) Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne, Dhani Harrison and Prince - While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Sorry for the formatting. Wouldn't want to leave anyone out. Look at that murderer's row of guys who were awesome in 1978 (and whoever Dhani Harrison is. George's son?). This has everything I want to hate about a performance:

• Washed-up rock stars that are going to make me feel sad watching them try to sing
• A famous guy's son getting some shine for no other reason than his parents. 
• It's at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
• Randomly grouping artists that don't play together to play a song none of them sing/sang or wrote.
• Shoe-horning one of my favourite artists (Prince) into what will surely be a runaway trainwreck. 

But none of that happened. This performance had the benefit of Lynne and Petty, who had been bandmates ones (in The Traveling Wilburys) and had worked together for years. And I guess Steve Winwood doesn't suck, so he can follow along and riff a bit. He even gets a short solo and does ok.

And Dhani Harrison is there. 

The performance becomes great when everyone just takes a step back and allows Prince to have the stage. For the second half of the song.

I knew Prince was a virtuoso on several levels and instruments, but I'd never really seen it before this so I guess, in a way, I didn't truly believe it. It's impossible not to now.

4) Gnarls Barkley - Live at the Astoria/Roskilde/Everything

Gnarls Barkley is one of my favourite acts of the last 10 years. Period. I was all about Cee Lo when he was in Goodie Mob and DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" opened my eyes to a new way to make music. More than each individual though, I love the sum of the two: Gnarls Barkley. I'll start you off with my favourite moment from the Astoria. Keep in mind this is a band lead by a hip-hop DJ/producer (Dangermouse) and fronted by a former gangster rapper (Cee Lo). I give you: Gnarls Barkley does Radiohead.

The idea that this rap-pop experimental duo's live show could feel more like a rock concert than anything else blew my mind. They repeated the trick (or didn't. Not sure which show came first) at Roskilde in 2008. Here's them doing one of their own songs, but like...arena-rock style.

Also the idea of playing a Gnarls Barkley song live is just daunting to me. On the records, this duo is glitchy, weird and contains a ton of samples. How do Cee Lo and the Mouse do it live? Just hire a huge band and have them play the samples live. Love it. 

Beyond these two shows though, if you just type "Gnarls Barkley live" into Youtube with an hour two kill, you'll have a fun time. 

3) Miley Cyrus - On SNL and MTV Unplugged

Maybe the small stage at SNL's studio forced Miley to trim back her normal live show until it was just a band and her on stage, but whatever it was, it worked. Especially for "Wrecking Ball." 

 I'm not gonna bother defending this one. Haters gonna hate. But check out the last chorus, specifically. Hannah Montana can straight up sing. That's a tough song to sing too. Try it out. Requires some solid range. Then she played "We Can't Stop" in a weird, virginal shroud with a midget on (tiny) rhythm guitar. That was fun I guess. 

I think you can guess the surprise element: Miley Cyrus can actually sing pretty well. When she burst into my consciousness, it was as a Disney star and I didn't know much beyond that. Then she turned pop star and it was all twerking and controversy. I didn't know much about the music at all. Her antics I can take or leave (but if you're gonna get mad at famous musicians for doing drugs, you should reconsider your priorities), but at least she can sing. I'll leave you with her cover of "Jolene," originally by "Aunt Dolly."

2) Janelle Monae - This Performance in Rio 

And really, every time I've ever seen her do "I Want You Back" and "Cold War." So here it is. The first 11 minutes of whatever this giant show in Rio de Janeiro is.

Let's talk about the cover of "I Want You Back" first. Not many people in the world can cover a pre-puberty Michael Jackson song without transposing the entire song down a few steps. Grown Michael Jackson probably couldn't even do that. But Monae's high-end range carries it. It's just impressive that she pulled that off.

But the real gem of this is the performance of "Cold War." The ArchOrchestra (her band) brings the fury big time and Janelle works the shit out of the suit-and-tie (eat it, Timberlake) look.

The surprise came from my misconception of Janelle Monae. I knew her from features on Big Boi tracks and other rap songs. I figured she was like a Ciara or Ashanti-type: A pretty black girl who could sing well enough to do the hook for a big rapper but had little star-power beyond that.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Now I'm just a huge Janelle Monae fan. I even follow her on Twitter.

1) Bruno Mars - Everything

No, there's no song called "Everything." I mean all of the live performances of his I've ever seen. There was once a Max who thought "That Bruno Mars is a hack. He's so sappy. Totally not a real musician." Then I stumbled on to this video of him performing in Sao Paolo (what is it about Brazil?), which I thoroughly recommend you watch in its entirety. 

Yeah it's an hour long. It's an entire concert. If you want to follow along though, skip ahead to 54:30, for "Grenade," which is the first part of this video I saw (I was linked to it from some site that had it go straight to "Grenade"). It's not even my favourite Bruno song, but you can't watch that and maintain the "Bruno Mars isn't a real musician and he doesn't care about making good music" stance. That performance (and seriously, this show and every other one of his I've seen) is balls-to-the-wall enthusiastic entertainment. 

He's not the best looking pop star, he's not the best dancer (he's damn good though) out there, but he and his crazy-ass dancing band work as hard on stage as anyone in the pop game. Which brings me to why he's my favourite pop star: He doesn't have a backing band. He's in a band. He just happens to be waaay more famous than his band. Apparently they've been playing together for years while he wrote and produced hits for others. Now they're his touring band. He's not backed by them. He's part of the band. He's the front man. Which is why his live show is so cohesive and relatively gimmick free: The musicians on stage are just straight up good. 

The Best Best Picture Nominees

Every year, the craftsmen and artists and monied executives of Hollywood get together in a nice theater to pat one another on the back. It's all "great job playing servants and athletes, black actors" and "Way to work all those product tie-ins in." Well I do not believe that's how film history works. We honor these films yearly against competition from the same year, but that's not how we think about film.

We beat The Help! We beat The Help!

I don't walk out of Moneyball comparing it and its merits to those of Hugo. I compare it to other movies based on plotless and character-free works of journalism, like The Social Network. By the same token, I didn't walk out of True Grit comparing to The Social Network, I was comparing it to other Westerns from throughout history.

It is in that spirit that I present to you my ten nominees for best picture drawn from a competition pool of past winners

Note: This list is in no particular order, because when you have ten of the greatest movies ever, trying to decide which one is the best is a retarded thing to undertake. So I put them chronologically.

Note 2: If you don't want any of the movies spoiled for you, stop reading. I'm not going to leave out details from movies that are all more than 5 years old. The statute of limitations on complaining about spoilers has passed. Vader is Luke's father.

Play-by-play Tips

Bryce Duffield is my friend and the play-by-play announcer for the North Delta Devils of the Pacific Junior Hockey League (PJHL). He recently wrote a post with 10 tips for being good at play-by-play, one of the most mentally taxing and difficult things I've ever done. And I've done a lot of it. Nearly 200 hours in the last 2 years. So I thought I'd make my own list of tips. Here it is and you can read Bryce's list here.

1) Prepare, prepare, prepare
It seems basic, but you'd be surprised how many broadcasters I've run across that don't go into their games with prep sheets. Here was my pregame study method when working in the PJHL, a league whose website doesn't track team stats: Three hours of stat crunching (team powerplay, penalty kill, shot numbers, player and team scoring streaks, etc), an hour of watching the visiting team's previous game to get a sense of which players I would need to know best and an hour of putting it all together into a list of talking points for myself and my colour commentator.

2) Prepare some more
Look, if you're doing any kind of sports play-by-play, the event you're broadcasting is going to be no shorter than 90 minutes long (in the case of the quickest basketball games). That's a long time to be live on-air with no script. You need to treat each broadcast like the biggest test of your life: study your head off. Then those inevitable down moments in a game where nothing worth describing is going on, you've pertinent information to bring to the table.

3) It's ok to pre-write jokes
Yeah it seems like its cheating, but if you're NOT READING THEM off script, they still sound natural. My partner and I spent an after noon coming up with jokes using the name Quon (Spencer and Dylan Quon were two of the best players on the team we worked for) like "the beat goes Quon" and "the show must go Quon" because we knew they'd score a ton an saying "Quon scores!" every time gets boring.

4) Water and gum
Water to wet the whistle as need be, gum during breaks to keep your saliva glands going. That's my recipe. Others have their own. Christopher Walken claims to drink Tabasco during plays and long, dialogue-heavy movie scenes to keep his mouth moist. To each his own, but that sounds gross to me. Hence water and gum.

5) Eat before the game
It's not as tough as actually playing, but broadcasting takes a lot out of you. Or at least it does to me. I think of it as "live writing." Normally, you intake experience and process it for a bit then write about it later. Here, you see it and a description of it has to be coming out of your mouth within a second. Beyond that mental taxation, you have to be able to channel the energy on the court/ice/field for the viewers and listeners at home. Whether it's tense, whether it's sad, whether its loose because one team is getting obliterated, that tone needs to come through in your voice. And you need to be able to hit all those notes at any given time. If you don't have the energy to channel the high-energy moments of a game, you're going to fail. So make sure you're fuelled up and good to go. You don't have to eat anything in particular, just don't be hungry.

6) Don't be afraid to ask for pronunciations
In fact, ALWAYS BE ASKING FOR PRONUNCIATIONS. I called a bunch of high school basketball games a few weeks ago, and there was a kid on one team named Nick Xylinas. Usually, the PA announcer would know the kids' names, so I asked him. He said "Ex-alinas." I thought there's no way that's right. I asked the technical director, who said "Za-leen-as." That sounded closer, but there was too much doubt. It was too late though, the game was starting. After the first quarter, I asked an assistant coach on his team and was told "Za-line-as." So I went back on air and corrected myself and got on with my life. I did the sae when I'd spent two games pronouncing "Bogajev" was 'Bogayev' before being corrected by broadcast director. Live and learn.

7) Anticipate the play
You simply cannot do this job if you don't know the sport you're calling. I never played hockey, but I watch a ton of it and I tend to pick up sports quickly. But I played basketball, the only other sport I have broadcast. When I say know the sport, I don't mean casually. I mean know it like an oncologist knows cancer, like a therapist knows therapy. You must study your sport and the team you work with most often. Then you can see what's coming before it happens, so you can describe it as it happens. If you're wrong, switch it up and describe what actually happens.

8) Use shorthand
Baseball has "going, going, gone!" Football has "15, 10, 5, touchdown!" Basketball has "three-ball! Good!" and hockey has things like "glove-side" and "blueline" describing a pair of defencemen. Every sport has some and they're useful time and word savers.

9 Don't talk so damn much 
This one only works if you are paired with a video feed. Nothing conveys what is going on better than video. You are there to augment that, say who has the ball/puck for those who can't tell for themselves, add that emotional flair. But you don't need to describe EVERY LITTLE THING. I fall into this all the time myself, but it's something I'm working on. You should too.

10) Have fun! 
This was also Bryce's 10th point, but it's just true. If you have fun, that'll flow through to your listeners/viewers.

Get out there and try it for yourselves (only if you like sports though. If you don't, this just won't work). It's one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done.

Intensity vs. Volume

It's time to reboot Painting The Corners. It's been a few years, but now I need a blog for a class, so it's time to open this long inactive blog, which I originally started to kill time after getting kicked out of Canada. The following post was taken from a Tumblr that I started for class before I realized I hated Tumblr. 

I took a vocal performance class last semester and it was mostly yoga and shouting. But if nothing else, our teacher left me with one concept, one thought that has shaped my approach to voice work (specifically play-by-play announcing): The idea of seeing volume and intensity as two separate, detached concepts.

You can be speaking with high intensity and low volume, and high volume with low intensity or you can crank up both metaphorical dials. This thought has become important to me for one key reason: I do play-by-play from time to time, mostly unwatched webcasts of junior hockey and high school basketball. The volume vs. intensity battle is at play every second of every game for a couple of reasons.

1. When I do play-by-play, I wear a headset, so the microphone is fixed relatively close to to my mouth. If I yell too much, I blow out my mic. 
2. Viewers watching the game rely on the tone of my voice convey the atmosphere in the arena and on the ice. If I’m just yelling the entire time, or if I’m super-intense the whole time, it will feel monotonous. I have to build to a climax at the end of the game.
3. There are intense moments in sports. Sometimes your natural reaction is to shout. But because of point 1, you can’t. So you have to convey the feeling of jumping out of your seat and shouting some other way. So you dial up the intensity and you leave the volume behind. 

As I continue to wrestle with this concept and try to incorporate it into my broadcaster’s toolkit, I am beginning to see/hear it in professionals. Canuck’s broadcaster John Shorthouse comes immediately to mind, with his signature “scores!” (sounds like “skewers!”) rarely jumping in volume but always turning up the excitement/intensity to 11. Marv Albert (NBA on TNT) does a very similar thing with his signature “YES!” as well as “And it was…a GORGEOUS move!”

CBC’s top hockey voice, Jim Hughson, does a great job in this regard, but in a different way. I feel he cranks up the intensity in tiny, almost unnoticeable increments over the course of a thought or a word, then dials it back, creating the constant feeling of anticipation that watching hockey elicits.

Those are a few of my favourites. Who is your favourite play-by-play voice?