The Power of a Song
Add comment March 11th, 2008
Hello. It is amazing to see what a simple collection of words can do. For the following examples I will use my experiences with songs I’ve written but I would like to hear stories of your own. A single song can mean nothing to one person and everything to another. I have a song called, “Better Without You”, and there have been times when people have come to me tearing up yet other times people yawn through it. I have a song called, “My Interpretation of the Kind of Song Lifehouse Would Sing if They Were Frustrated After Playing Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii”, and trust me - some people really, really get a kick out of it yet some others could’ve cared less what they just heard after listening to it. The point here is that despite the fact that singer/songwriters write songs based on relevant experiences it still feels good knowing that someone else has made a connection to it. Playing as a solo musician in the area and being relatively unknown it is sometimes difficult to find the right ears to hear my voice, so to speak. If Bright Eyes was coming to town, for example, every single person in the audience would be there because they’ve bonded somehow to either Conor Oberst or his music. For me and many others in this town that is the challenge : To play for a crowd of few to find that one who gets it. The one who likes it. The one who wants more of what you have. It can sometimes be defeating to be a solo musician performing for others but knowing that just one person has been affected by what you’ve created makes it worthwhile. So I’m going to keep doing it. I hope to see you next time I play.
The Farrelly Brothers have a box office reputation for matching the bizarre and usually gross with the warm and sometimes heart-felt, as seen in hits like “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary.” Unfortunately, in executive producing the new comedy sitcom Unhitched, the half-hour compression squeezes out most of what made the Farrelly Brothers’ movies so fun to begin with, and leaves behind only gross and grosser material. The show follows divorced Gator (Craig Bierko), who befriends several other ex-spouses and abruptly returns to the bachelor’s life. It’s a great premise, and one that might work – if the emphasis was on finding love instead of gross-out humor. But often the most original elements of the show – such as a bouncer finding work at a doctor’s office – winds up as just an end note. Bierko (Scary Movie 4, Boston Legal) is perfect for this style of quirky comedy, but right now seems like another lead wasted. Unhitched airs on Fox Sunday at 8:30 P.M. 
The tagline of New Amsterdam is “Uncover the mystery”, and the mystery of a detective as old as New York City is an intriguing one. Unfortunately, New Amsterdam goes the polar opposite direction of Lost – giving far too many answers. By the first fifteen minutes, the entirety of the mystery is laid bare – John Amsterdam (Nikolaj Coster-Waldu) is an explorer bestowed with eternal life by Native American shamans until he finds his true love. When all is said and done, New Amsterdam just isn’t all that new. We’ve seen the period-piece TV show in “Highlander”, the immortal cop in “Forever Knight”, the love-related spell in “Angel” and the lone wolf cop who doesn’t want a spunky new partner in a dozen other TV shows. Coster-Waldu does a good job as Amsterdam, but the plot is just so poorly rendered his talents are likely to go to waste. New Amsterdam airs on Fox at 8:00 PM on Mondays.
A couple months ago, it would have been hard to imagined NBC’s much-hyped Lipstick Jungle triumphing when ABC’s painfully-similar series Cashmere Mafia already had a head-start. Fortunately, Lipstick is a superior series is almost every way. Focusing on three of New York’s most powerful women (Brooke Shields, Kim Raver and Lindsay Price), Lipstick Jungle matches its heart with humor found in fast-paced and refreshing dialogue as well as dynamic and unpredictable characters. Lipstick Jungle also carries a supporting cast every bit as accomplished as the leads, including Paul Blackthorne (The Dresden Files), Julian Sands (Rose Red) and Andrew McCarthy (Pretty in Pink), lending a sense of balance ABC’s Cashmere Mafia otherwise lacked. Lipstick is one of the few shows of television that lives up to its hype. Catch Lipstick Jungle on NBC Thursdays at 9:00 P.M. 
