‘Cause Everyone Says They Know You Better Than You Know Who; Everyone Says They Own You And What You Do

Tuesday. I've had a decently busy day so far. I had my monthly regional meeting this morning in which all of the department managers, supervisors and financial reps (that's me) get together to discuss the state of business in the region and any issues/discrepancies/conflicts/etc. that we may be experiencing. Since I am in a remote, undisclosed location as opposed to being located at our corporate facilities, I get the pleasure of attending these meetings via teleconference. That's fine, except two hours and fifteen minutes later, when the meeting finally ended, I had found that the plastic in my phone receiver had melted and grafted to my ear. Other than that, my day has been somewhat uneventful. After having my morning pretty much blown due to said meeting, I have spent the rest of my day up until this point putting together my pre-website upload spreadsheet. Fun times.

This morning I listened to Speaking for Trees by Cat Power. Speaking for Trees was actually the title of a DVD put out by Ms. Power accompanied by a CD that contained one 18-minute song. I believe that this collection of songs is an "unofficial soundtrack" of sorts, that is, someone lifted the 30 or so tunes that appeared on the DVD and recorded them in mp3 audio format. I was pretty pumped to hear this album (if you want to call it that) since I rather enjoy Cat Power's other work. However, I am sad to say I was a bit disappointed. I don't think any of this disappointment can be attributed to Ms. Power directly, mostly to the individual who put this collection together. The sound was mixed poorly on this recording. Ms. Power's vocals were low and inaudible. Any attempt to increase the treble to clear things up was thwarted by the fact that there was a lot of background noise in the recording, most notably the presence of what sounded to me like a bunch of chirping crickets. As soon as I would try to increase the upper levels, the chirping noise would become painfully piercing to my ears. If I tried to turn down the upper levels and increase the bass, it would just wash out Ms. Power's wonderfully beautiful, but barely audible vocals. Oh, the despair, the injustice of it all!

I'm sure that if I heard these songs in an optimal setting I would have loved them. However, considering the actual situation, I was too annoyed to really get into them. To be fair, I have never viewed the DVD release of Speaking for Trees, so I cannot pass judgment on that either way. Also, this set list was like 1.6 hours long, so I didn't get to hear the back half of the collection. Perhaps in the later parts the sound mix dramatically improved, the background noise goes away, and Ms. Power's voice can be heard crystal clear. I'm going to take a big leap here and assume that it doesn't. While I definitely recommend picking up some of Cat Power's other releases, I advise passing this one over if you happen to come across it while randomly searching out music on the internet. I'm pretty disappointed.