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Play All is Love – Curt Smith.mp3

(locally archived) (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License) (this track from Amazon.com, at no cost)

Update 3-7-10: It is now $0.89 on Amazon. I have “purchased” it anyway because, wow, this track keeps resonating in me! If you love this track, buy it.

I wrote on Curt Smith’s website (of Tears for Fears fame)

Curt, Thank you so very much for this song.

I found All is Love when browsing around for for Zoë Keating’s music. I’ve played it 50 times in the last week on your website. It hits me at a very deep level and I don’t know why. Every time the song ends, I get this slow lost feeling, as if I had been on my way to somewhere beautiful and then, despite trying to keep it in my memory, I slowly forget how to get there. So I find the page and hit play again. That’s all I can do. I don’t know what you’ve stirred in me but it’s worthwhile to explore.

Thank you for the message in this song. I look forward to the album release.

Curt writes about the song

Click here to listen to “All Is Love (featuring Zoë Keating),” Curt’s first new solo material in nearly two years. It will be released on January 24. 2010.

Smith is releasing “All is Love” via his KOOK Media label as a standalone single, which will be available in digital format from AmazonMP3, iTunes, CD Baby, thesixtyone and other online retailers.

Smith met guest artist Zoë Keating online. “I was looking for a cellist to play on the track and heard about Zoë through Twitter. I watched a few of her performances on YouTube and thought she was fantastic and innovative.” He sent her the in-progress tracks, and a month or so later she hand-delivered her cello parts to a Tears For Fears concert outside of San Francisco. The two will perform in concert, as a double bill, on March 23 at renowned L.A. venue Largo at The Coronet.

“All Is Love,” began life as a demo track for a television pilot theme song (the original version, called “Halfway Home,” streams on Smith’s website). While the pilot didn’t get picked up, Smith liked the musical idea he’d begun, and reworked it with longtime collaborator Charlton Pettus. In a departure from his usual lyrical themes of longing and loss, All Is Love’s anthemic chorus (“When every mother’s loving every son / When all is love, there’ll be love for everyone”) looks forward with hope to a time of peace and calm. “I was inspired by the 2008 U.S.presidential election” says Smith “The verses are about the negativity of all the advertising, whilst the chorus invokes the inspiration I felt about positive change.”

Like Smith’s previous solo effort “Halfway, pleased,” he’s releasing “All Is Love” under a Creative Commons license. The license Smith uses allows others to freely share, perform, and remix his work,so long as the uses are non-commercial, Smith is credited, and any derivative works carry the same license. “I’m a big fan of Creative Commons,” Smith says.”It’s a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. It affords you the opportunity to set the ground rules of how people can use your music upfront.”

Background vocalists on “All Is Love” include singer-songwriters Michael Wainwright (who opened for Tears for Fears on its 2009 U.S. tour) and Jason Joseph, as well as Pettus’ daughter Georgica. Charlton Pettus and Smith share writing and production credits.

Smith plans to play several Los Angeles-area solo gigs in 2010, working around a busy schedule of Tears for Fears concert tours taking place in Australia, New Zealand, southeast Asia and the U.S. EastCoast. He’ll continue to release new tracks as he completes them, with the possibility of compiling them into an album when he’s got enough material.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Lyrics to “all is love (featuring zoë keating)”

Written by Curt Smith and Charlton Pettus

Look what you’ve done
You’ve blown it all
On vanity and sympathy
See how you run
A pot of gold
And a bleeding heart to go with it

Chorus:
When all is love
And the hurt is gone
We’ll all reach out
To touch someone
When every mother’s
Loving every son
When all is love
There’ll be love for everyone

Look what you’ve lost
Innocence and faith
And save yourself at any cost
Here’s what you’ll find
When the bottom drops out

Chorus

Close your eyes and it’s gone
Don’t look down till it’s over
Hold on tight, everyone
We’re halfway home

Chorus (repeats)

When all is love
When all is love
There’ll be love for everyone
When all is love
When all is love
There’ll be love

Look what you’ve done

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Video game rivalries can be thrilling!

And wow, Billy Mitchell is really made out to be a jerk. Though I read some discussion notes on Wikipedia about how some parts of that stress was manufactured by the director with editing. 2 points being that we never see Billy playing even though he says how important it is to play in public, and that we never see Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe speaking to one another except for a single jab that Billy makes. It gives Billy this total jerk feel. Though I read that they do speak to one another at events.  Heh, you can even buy a “Billy Mitchell is a jerk” T-Shirt.

Tropic Thunder

Weeee!

The Hangover

Fun :-)

Superbad

When I first watched Superbad, I thought it was fun and cute. But I recognize now that it is an iconic film. I put it in the rarefied company of films like  Napoleon Dynamite, Revenge of the Nerds, Real Genius, and Breakfast Club.

I liked it a lot.

I was blindsided with the surprise ending. Don’t learn the spoiler before you see the movie. It’s kind of Fearless meets The Crying Game. No it’s not. I liked it anyway.

Last week I got to attend “From The ‘Hood to the House”. This year,  the Glide Church annual holiday festival was held at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on the 12th. It was quite an affair with Maya Angelou, a huge church ensemble singing, dancers, musicians and Cecil Williams celebrating his 45th anniversary running Glide Church.

I have to thank Cindy for inviting Charlotte and I to volunteer for the event. We got to help folks (I helped Cindy in the office much of the day), see most of the show and try a zillion tasty foods. :-)

I just saw The Departed. Good cop. Bad cop. Entertainment!

I’ve been listening to The Four Hour Work Week. I just made it to disc 3 and all of a sudden I’m getting disappointed. When the author says he checks email once a week for an hour and checks his voicemail once a week without any adverse effects, I begin to doubt. But I won’t stop listening. He is saying a lot of good stuff.

And I still love listening to Doctor Karl on Australian radio. Catch the RSS audio feed of his shows here

Some artists I’ve heard recently…

I saw Brad Paisley and Dierks Bentley in concert at Shoreline  Amphitheater  in Mountain View on September 25th. Charlotte, Rick and I went along with 40,000 screaming Daisy Dukes. It was a lot of fun! I enjoy his common-man lyrics.. (IE I’m Gonna Miss Her starts, “Well, I love her, but I love to fish…”) (photo credit)

On October 3rd, I got to sit 5 feet from and listen to Yacouba Diarra from west Africa play. Awesome!

I give a hearty “Thank You!” to the Mission Arts and Performance Project (MAPP)!  They get people excited about San Francisco art and local performance!

This movie is a lot of fun! I saw it with Charlotte at the Metreon.

I want the poster that is on Flint Lockwood’s wall proclaiming “Nikola Tesla Rockstar Scientist”! Tesla is standing in a classic rock and roll pose and it looks like he’s playing a lightning bolt like a guitar.

Nikola = Awesome

I grabbed this image from another Cloudy/Tesla fan :-)

I’m a good listener. In the last few months, I’ve listened to:

Art of War by Sun Tzu – a fantastic reading of a vital treatise. You should read this.

Cat’s Cradle byKurt Vonnegut, Jr – I’m slowly becoming a Bokononist.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond – I just finished yesterday. Once I got past the super-uptight voice of the reader, I rather enjoyed learning about the pleistocene and modern era.

Next up is the 22+ hours of the abridged Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

National Treasure 7-3-09  A fun chase scene

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 7-3-09.  Read the books instead, they are much better. Maybe it’s the British thing but it seemed that every line in the movie was delivered wrong. :-(

Sin City 7-5-09. 52:10 “Hi, I’m Shelly’s new boyfriend and I’m out of my mind.” Shivers down my spine. Lots of shivers. Very very cool.

Night of the Living Dead 7-10-09. Holy crap, that is a scary movie. It stands the test of time and then some. And the ending really really flipped me out. See Night of the Living Dead free on Archive.org.

Thumbs down on this book.

I got about 1/2 way through listening to the unabridged “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)”. I couldn’t finish it. Not enough science, too angry, too snarky, too jerk-like, too monochromatic, too… a lot of things. And the reader amplified those emotions.

Here is my simplified version of the book:

You’ve seen this a million times before: some jerk cuts you off on a highway on-ramp at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon, you speed up to see who this moron could be and he waves apologetically at you! What could this doo-doo head possibly he possibly be thinking? There was a study about this. It said that most people on the highway aren’t really jerks. But let’s get back to this idiot who cut you off.

I kept thinking it would get better, that the author would dive more into the ample quantity of interesting studies he’s read, that he’d bridge together ideas from across the story-arc. That he’d propose some ideas that didn’t sound like they came from some white-knuckled, road-raged jerk. But that didn’t happen.

1.5 out of 5 stars. (0.5 stars for choosing a good topic)