Ted Hardy

Alma Hater -or- Why My College Irks Me So Bad

If you know me personally, you probably already know that I don’t have a lot of good things to say about my alma mater, its former president or its policies. Even calling it ‘not a lot’ is probably charitable. My time there in the mid-90s left me a large

31 Days of Music - Dave Matthews Band - Under The Table And Dreaming #tinychallenges

Funny the way it is, when you think about it… Ok, that’s not a lyric from this album, its from Big Whiskey, but its unsurprisingly a commentary if you’ve read this far into these posts. This is the fourth post out of 31 that focus on my life

31 Days of Music - Moby - Play #tinychallenges

In the early 2000s, a couple good friends of mine got married and I was asked to be in the ceremony. Well, ceremonies. Actually, it was a day long wedding, starting in the morning with a Vietnamese ceremony, followed by pictures in the early afternoon, a Christian wedding in the

31 Days of Music - Cee Lo Green - The Lady Killer #tinychallenges

My first encounter with the music of Cee Lo Green was in his collaboration with Danger Mouse, Gnarls Barkley. Yes, that was a crazy as I hadn’t heard vocals like Cee Lo’s before. The duo took much of what I knew to be great in music and took

31 Days of Music - Smashing Pumpkins - Today #tinychallenges

Anthem. That’s the word which springs to mind when this song appears on my car radio. The song had been out for some time but its link to me had only ever been tenuous. For some reason, as influential as this band is, I’ve never been a huge

31 Days of Music - Fantastic Negrito #tinychallenges

I really didn’t know what to expect when I heard about the NPR Tiny Desk Contest but I did know that the winner would likely be someone I had never heard of and something that I likely wouldn’t like. For some reason, adult contemporary, which is what NPR

31 Days of Music - The Blues Brothers - Discography #tinychallenges

Some bands just end too early. Its not that they are amazing musically (well, at least the singers are not), but they have something just a little special when you hear them. When you first hear them, they seem like a gimmick, till you do the research and find out

31 Days of Music - Mark Ronson - Discography #tinychallenges

Occasionally, an artist comes along that surprises you. When Mark Ronson teamed up with Bruno Mars for Uptown Funk, I was at first unimpressed. It wasn’t that I thought it bad, I just didn’t think of it much at all. Then I heard Valerie with Amy Winehouse and

31 Days of Music - Tower of Power - What is Hip? #tinychallenges

That year I played baritone sax in college jazz band saw me introduced to Tower of Power. As our conductor was also a jazz saxophonist, he knew all the music that was likely to inspire the front row of the ensemble on to greater and greater musical heights. He nailed

31 Days of Music - Spin Doctors - Pocket Full of Kryptonite #tinychallenges

A former coworker of mine once referred to this as the album with one song and 10 pauses. To him, the album was repetitive and uninteresting. Obviously, I disagree. Is this great music? No, but as we’ve previously discussed, this is all about music that means something to me,

31 Days of Music - Dave Matthews Band - Lillywhite Sessions #tinychallenges

As Dave does so well, he pens the lyrics to a love song… but one gone very, very wrong. Its not that he’s unique in this ability, yet for some reason he nails the sentiment even when I have little frame of reference for the actions contained within the

31 Days of Music - Esperanza Spalding - Esperanza #tinychallenges

Wait, who? I’ve stuck pretty close to main-stream musicians so far, but I’m pretty sure this one will lose most of you and that makes me sad. I still remember hearing her for the first time, sitting in the parking lot of an office building prior to heading

31 Days of Music - Queen - Greatest Hits #tinychallenges

There are some bands where you just can’t pick a song or an album, and Queen heads that list. Maybe its weak-sauce picking all three greatest hits albums, but hey, its my blog and if you don’t like it, you probably should find some other part of the

31 Days of Music - Blues Traveler - Four #tinychallenges

I don’t remember where I was when I first heard Blues Traveler, but I do remember where I was when I first saw the album on sale. It was the tiny, awful Wal-mart in my small college town. Man, what a hole in the ground that place was. It

31 Days of Music - Megadeth - Countdown to Extinction

Junior english class, a fellow student showed up with this album and soon after, I heard the first single on the local hard rock station. One listen is all it took and I was hooked. Previously, all I really thought about metal was the 80s hair bands, and while there

31 Days of Music - Dave Matthews Band - Before These Crowded Streets #tinychallenges

Curtis: “Look what the music store in Corbin had!” Me: “Turn around, get back in your car; we’re going back.” This was the conversation we had in our last semester in college as we found that our favorite band’s album was on the shelves several days prior to

31 Days of Music - Pomplamoose - 30 Rock #tinychallenges

Every once in a while, a band comes along that is so catchy you can’t help immediately falling for them. Pomplamoose wasn’t that band. It took a while for them to grow on me, but as their sound and professionalism grew, so to did my fondness for their

31 Days of Music - The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out #tinychallenges

Looking back on my nearly 40 years of life, its strange to think that for only 5.5 years of it did I regularly play in a jazz ensemble. To put that in perspective, I sang in choirs for probably ~18 years. I played in concert band for 6 years.

31 Days of Music - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - Same Love #tinychallenges

Last year, I started (that’s about all I did) a series of posts on this blog that would chronicle how music has influenced my life and why I now hate music. Its funny that I would start a series of blog posts with this focused and interrupt it with

31 Days of Music - White Zombie - Astro Creep #tinychallenges

If you’ve read this far, you realize that we have now taken a hard turn to the right. White Zombie, Ted? For real? Yes, this album holds a special place in my heart even though I haven’t heard any of the songs on it in at least 15

31 Days of Music - Jack Johnson - In Between Dreams #tinychallenges

Is it a great album? Probably not. Sometimes, one comes along at just the right time in your life that really fills a void in your music library. This most assuredly was how Jack Johnson first crossed my radar. The first single from this album I heard was Sitting, Waiting,

31 Days of Music - Barenaked Ladies - Stunt #tinychallenges

What exactly is it that defines a generation? For many years, I’ve been annoyed by an older generation discussing the faults of the generation which comes behind it. When you go back to writings from the early 1900s, you’ll see generations complaining about the “kids these days” in

31 Days of Music - Jamiroquai - High Times #tinychallenges

The more of these posts that I write, the more I realize that MTV played a bigger part of my formative years than I realized. I believe it was my junior year in college when I first saw the video for Virtual Insanity and just couldn’t believe how amazing

31 Days of Music - Harry Connick Jr. - She #tinychallenges

Freshman year of college, spring semester, my jazz band classmates asked me if I wanted to head down to Knoxville one evening to see the Harry Connick Jr. concert. I’m thinking, the big band jazz guy? I love playing the music, but why would I ever want to go

31 Days of Music - The Wallflowers - Bringing Down the Horse #tinychallenges

Summer of 1997 and I was traveling with a revival team around the state of Florida. For those who have known me less than a decade, this probably seems to be an odd thing to find out about me, but those who have known me for much longer realize this