I Can be Anything I Put My Mind to Man, All I Gotta Do is Give Myself Half a Chance

Friday. Yeah! Well, I finally finished that manual summary billing. It only took me three days. Next month it better generate correctly, that was a complete pain to have to do. The irony is that this new way was supposed to make it easier. At least I can personally guarantee that it's accurate. That would be a first in about a year and a half.

On sassinak’s recommendation yesterday, I listened to the John Butler Trio on the drive into work this morning. The JBT is an Australian jam band that sounds similar to The Dave Mathews Band but more funky and bass-driven. It's like a cross between the DMB and, say, the Infectious Grooves. After having a couple of platinum albums in Australia, they came stateside and released Sunrise Over Sea, which went gold in its first week. Not bad for a band who releases albums on their own label. The big single that has been getting radio play around here is a tune called Zebra. It is pretty cool, but my personal favorite that I've heard from JBT is a song titled Betterman. This track starts out normally enough, but then changes over into a funk riff, then into a drum solo, and then into several other exploratory themes until returning back to its opening bookend nine minutes later. I've never seen the JBT in concert, but I'm guessing that they could probably stretch this one out into a pretty rockin' jam live. I'm not the biggest DMB fan, but I do like jam bands and I love the bass. It's like they took what was good about DMB, funkified it, and then gave it an Aussie twist. I recommend the John Butler Trio if you are into the jam band genre of music. It was definite a fun, funky way to start my Friday off right.