David Cook = 42

Welcome.

Presumably you and your family will want to eat while you are in town. Here are a few suggestions.

Pre-Race Pasta Loading

• Al Tiramasu. Lots of seafood, but the pasta is reputably good too.
• Sette Osteria. Marine Corps Marathon runner approved.
• Sette Bello. The executive chef’s Cafe Milano is supposedly better known for taking care of celebrities, but the service and energy at the Clarendon location works for me.

Post-Race Brunch

• Tonic. Casual for race goers, Washington Post approved.
• Luna Grill and Diner. Probably not suitable for large groups, but tasty egg dishes and low-key atmosphere.
• Tunnicliffs. Some service issues, but a good brunch in a casual atmosphere. Also Washington Post approved.

Burgers

• Palena. Legendary DC burger. Still getting food press after being on the menu for years.
• Ray’s Hell Burger. The best burger I have eaten in my life under $10. It was good enough for Pres. Obama, it should be good enough for all of us. (Possible crowd issues and zero ambience or privacy, though.
• Central DC. Lobster Burger. Ah-may-zing. Heard some menu items are not up to this caliber, but if you can get this and the kit kat bar, it doesn’t matter.
• Five Guys. Not even linking, because they are everywhere.

Bars and Clubs.

Bourbon. PX. Churchkey. Little Miss Whiskey’s Golden Dollar. Gibson. 18th Street Lounge. Something for every mood. But I admittedly don’t know from bottle service, and have more often attended divey happy hours. I can wholeheartedly endorse Spider Kellys, though: good and not divey.

Enjoy. Race well. It’s a good town; hope you have fun here.

Part I Here.

Things are in ever sharper focus. Now he’s convinced that they’ll be back in the studio by February, still anticipating a summer release.

And again, this strikes me as not that unusual. Because he’s preparing for it.

Here’s a twitvid from Andrew Cook, the content of which I will ignore for this analysis. (Although if you watch it for that, it’s quite adorable and genuine.)

The point here? He’s living at his brother’s house. He doesn’t play instruments. One can therefore assume that any and all performance-related equipment is Dave’s. And it looks like this room (which I won’t call a studio because that would mean more acoustic sealing and rugs) has quite a bit of it.

He has a small amp, a keyboard, and a fairly expensive piece of drum production software. The guitars will probably come home when he does. (And I’m sure there’s some nice piece of audio interface equipment to get all of that onto the computer.)

Assume that the band keeps writing, then gets off the road sometime in December, and everyone returns home. Cook mucks around through December and early January, and probably brings back five (or even more) “rough demo” songs before the band goes into the studio. They continue to write and record over the next few months, and then go for mastering and post production in early-mid summer.

Again, I just don’t think it requires superhuman skills to go from where they are to an album in the next 10 months or so.

So after many months of insisting that he would not Twitter, no way, no how, he gave in. I’m sure it was a necessary step just to root out the fakes.

But I remain amused at the way his attitude turned from active disdain to grudging acceptance as a potential promotional tool to embracing it like a…person who embraces things enthusiastically. (I finally knew it was him when he started following Katy Perry. [sigh] At least he’s following Orianthi, too.)

(For the record, I do not Twitter. I could go into very long, detailed explanations as to why, but they largely boil down to: 1) I want to know what I’m clicking, not play guessing games with bit.ly, 2) unthreaded replies can suck it, and 3) the credulity threshold on Twitter seems to be lower than on the internet at large, if that’s even possible. [Also, no matter how many text messages I receive, seeing "u" for "you" still makes my soul shrivel.])

Now, there’s been some popcorn-worthiness already, including a sibling twitwar that probably annoyed their mother to no end.

Of course, having 27K people peering over one’s shoulder, 2000 of whom are actively egging things on, makes the whole thing a tad bit strange.

But I’ll be curious to see what happens next. Just please, for the love of all that’s holy, never actually respond to an unfollowed fan tweet. It will cause a ruckus.

And in conclusion, I think this sums things up nicely:

@thedavidcook Yay! I’m so excited to see you here, sir! (And I, um… apologize in advance for the internet.)

For whatever reason, the multiple pull quotes regarding Cook’s potential timeframe for a new album (back to the studio by the beginning of the year, with an album possibly out next summer) seem to be causing people to clutch their pearls. How can this be?

I don’t think it’s overambitious at all.

In 2008, Cook came into making an album with two albums of pre-Idol material, but no guarantee (or, probably, intention) that all would be used. In the course of the next few weeks, he and his cowriters knocked out between 20 and 30 songs (I’m extrapolating from the “60 songs” figure bandied about in a few interviews). Half of the next few were spent on tour rehearsals. He then spent 53 days on tour, squeezing in additional cowrites, demo recording, studio tracking, and band selection, until a solid five weeks arose at the end to finalize the album. By my count, that gave him 81 days to develop an album from start to finish. Yes, it was rushed, and oddly sequenced, and the production was lacking in places, but it managed to be a solid effort.

Compare that to what he has now: 4/5 (or maybe even 5/5) of a band with a strong musical chemistry, a very good working/social relationship with some of his cowriters and his producer [even if I wonder if he might look elsewhere], 60/70 song ideas AND the remainder from the first recording session. And, not exactly immaterially, the opportunity to be in one place to supervise the melding of all those elements.

I just don’t see two or three months of solid writing and demoing, followed by two more of culling, tracking, and mastering, as that insurmountable for someone who has already had a trial by fire.

Of course things could change. Of course he’ll want to let ideas marinate. But the band is starting from a place orders of magnitude better than where he was last summer, so I have no concerns about their ability to produce something they’ll be able to put their names behind.

Every once in awhile I realize that the flood of interviews and soundbites is a double-edged sword.

Sure, it’s great to hear him talk about his songwriting process (5:33) and how he wants to reach people and how he credits so many others for helping him learn and grow.

And even the constant “I either a) have my very own special dictionary that none of you mere mortals have ever seen or b) am just fucking with you because it amuses me” word choices can be endearing in small doses.

But sometimes…

Sometimes I am confronted with the fact that he would say with a straight face that Journey makes better music than Depeche Mode or the Cure.

I am off to go clutch my copy of Disintegration and sigh loudly.

Anything I could have possibly said over the last several weeks would have been inadequate, so I didn’t say anything.

But now I can do something.

It’s 99 cents. It is stunning. It supports translational research into brain tumors. You should buy it.

The plans surrounding this show decidedly went agley; I’d initially thought we’d drive out early, see some of Williamsburg, catch the show, and then hang out with some folks for drinks afterwards. But it was probably all for the best.

Read the rest of this entry »

but every time something strikes me as honestly amusing and not completely “old meme,” something else comes along that is decidedly not funny.

And there’s been a whole lot of not funny lately.

I really hope that stops. Now.

Pawnotes?  Never mind.

1)First, we have to talk about the hat.

I will preface this by saying a) I lived in Michigan for a while.   So while I am not personally a big fan of hats, and am bemused by the cultural prostration in front of Aretha Franklin’s, I accept their utility in the winter months. And b) I get that there were probably not too many opportunities for washing hair while jaunting around from base to base.  The most important thing, clearly, is the fact that he went to entertain the soldiers, so I was not expecting GQ ensembles.

None of this explains why we can no longer see Cook’s eyebrows.

To sum up:  Tuque.  Ur wearin it wrong.

2) Many of us were pleasantly surprised by the massive amounts of promotion that occurred during the first week of American Idol, and even more pleasantly surprised by the surge in sales for both the album and the single.  But even the video for Light On got a nice boost in iTunes sales, and has passed 2.3 million views on Youtube.  One could certainly attribute that to the rest of the promotion, and his continued VH1 spins.

But I not-so-secretly think that the big push came from many students returning to school, who really responded to the hidden message of the video: Mah brainz, let me show you them. You don’t have to put out for assholes.*

3) In a remarkably clever move, Cook’s management has decided to distract us from his inability to alter the space-time continuum by answering another question.^

We can haz platinum certification?

Yes, we can haz.

* Or nice guys, either. But still. Resonance!
^ I am aware that there were other factors involved than just physics. And my hope is that there will be some shifting later in the year so everyone has their brief history, and time.

Cook managed a relatively quiet period of rest, but after hustling to Vegas, where he may have played a song (it was hard to tell among all the diagrams of Robbie Kinevel’s Patented Ways to Die[tm]), he’s clearly back to the grindstone, providing new radio interviews.  And of course, said interviews provided a few crumbs of information (official confirmation of a new! puppy!, nostalgic references to queuing! ducklings!), but included some information we’d either already heard or really didn’t need to.

With that in mind, I humbly suggest, Mr. Cook, that you get your manager to seed more questions.  Some of your fans have already come up with some thoughtful, insightful ones about your songwriting process, your stage performances, and your past educational/career decisions and their influence on you now.  You could certainly answer those.

Or, you could answer mine, which will be of no value to anyone, except me, since I will likely laugh.

1. Do you get some sort of Ambassador discount for your QuikTrip boosterism?  Have you asked for one?
2. If you were feeling ambivalent about cursing during your Orlando performance of Man in the Box, why didn’t you sing “pit?”  (For the record, I want to hear you sing “shit” every.single.time.  [Maybe even in songs for which that isn't an original lyric.]  But you do have options.)
3. If David Fincher finally lost his mind and mounted Fight Club as a Broadway musical, would you audition?
4. How often, in high school and college, did friends/acquaintances/fraternity brothers suggest that you “cowboy up, Cook?”  How often did you punch them in the arm for doing so?
5. Would you ever consider getting this for Dublin for use while on tour?

Welcome back to the grind, kid.   Getting tour dates at some point would be swell.