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I listened to Dave Matthews’ ‘Some Devil’ this week for the first time in ages – entirely by accident, mind you. I was blindly reaching for a CD in my car and that was what I grabbed.

What a fantastic CD this is. I had almost forgotten just how great it is. It’s easily the best thing that has come from Dave since Before These Crowded Streets (the last truly great CD DMB has released to date.)

The thing that is really interesting about it is that you can listen to the songs on it and hear direct influences or sounds from other artists, yet at the same time those influences have the recognizable Dave Matthews sound.

‘Baby’ is the James Taylor signature lullabye song
‘Save Me’ would fit right in on Bridges to Babylon
‘Gravedigger’ has a little of the Led Zeppelin sound
‘Trouble’ has some U2 in it
‘Grey Blue Eyes’ has a little Clapton in the riff
‘Too High’ has the Radiohead psychosis

At the same time, ‘Oh,’ ‘Some Devil,’ ‘Stay or Leave,’ and ‘So Damn Lucky’ are 100% Dave Matthews. I think ‘Some Devil’ (the song) is especially wonderful. It’s one of my favorite sad bastard songs, as is ‘Stay or Leave.’ It’s safe to say I’d be much more excited for a Dave Matthews followup album than a new DMB album (although, things are shaping up to be pretty good for the DMB album too.)

Speaking of all things Dave Matthews – Tour dates were published last week and there’s no Saint Louis date. There’s a Kansas City date, but no Saint Louis date? What is that about? I want them to start doing two night runs at riverport again, and they cut the only date we get.

Indy it is, then. That works out OK too, that’s the weekend of Laura’s birthday, and it’s probably the last year for concerts at Deer Creek, so I’d like to make it there one last time anyway. My boss’s sister works for LiveNation and has a ticket connection, so she’s going to take care of us this year and I won’t be taking my chances in the Warehouse lottery for the first time in seven years.

That’s kind of scary, at least for me. Hopefully we can find someone who will sell us the artsy Warehouse ticket stubs after the fact.

So I think I’ve finally found content software that I can work with, instead of working around. Movable type was nice enough, I guess, but it just seemed like I was constantly trying to patch CSS to make things work – not just the MT generated pages, but the HTML pages that I created as well.

Wordpress seems to solve all that. Not only does it seem easy enough to apply dozens of different formats to this system on the fly, but Wordpress can easily manage my HTML pages for other content as well – now I can make one change one time and have it automatically change my story pages, my photo pages, et cetera – no pain in the ass involved.

The other really great thing about it is the Falbum plugin, which I have to thank Lauren for turning me on to, which lets me take all of my albums from Flickr and integrate them (almost) seamlessly into my layout. Setup of Falbum was kind of a bitch – the falbum website has basic installation instructions, but doesn’t really give any information about how to use it or make it work once it’s installed – but I’ve managed to get it working well enough for now.

I’m going to stick with a theme from the theme directory for now, but as I figure out how this all fits together, I’ll probably design my own.

So anyhow, this is what things look like for now, but that can all change in a moment’s notice if I find another theme that I like. If I had you linked before and now I don’t, I just forgot when I was updating the blogroll. Let me know and I’ll fix it.

And perhaps the best part of this whole thing is that after 8 or so years of bullshitting around and trying to ghetto rig something together, I can finally share photo collections on my site. Those nancies photos from 2001 might just make it up yet.