Lisa Loeb & Elizabeth Mitchell Catch The Moon

Last week there was a full lunar eclipse so I took that as my jumping off point when choosing music for the Lyrical Venus Radio Hour this week and chose a bunch of moon songs. (Tuesday 9AM CST. Tune in to 100.1 FM in Fairfield, or kruufm.com online from anywhere.)

While I was searching for a few more songs to fill out the hour, I happened on this delightful little project by Lisa Loeb & Elizabeth Mitchell. Catch the Moon is a song, a book and a CD title. Sweet and simple, the album is one of those kid's entertainment concepts that is hip enough that parents and other grown-ups can enjoy it too.


Feed and email readers may need to come to the blog to see the video

Roommates in college at Brown, they had a duo called "Liz and Lisa". Lisa's big break came with the song Stay got a placement in the movie Reality Bites, and Elizabeth went on to make several children's albums. The two got back together in 2003 to collaborate on Catch the Moon.

If you go to Elizabeth's site and click on the link that says "moon" you'll be able to see a complete virtual version of the book, with illustrations by Elizabeth's mother.

The whole children's book/album thing must have worked out well for Lisa - she's planning a May release of another one!

Anyway, Catch the Moon is just one song that will be on the show, have a listen and let me know what you think of the rest of it too!

Worldwide Radio Through the Wonders of Technology!

I try to just stick to the music on this blog, so probably some of you don't know that I've escaped the Iowa winter to have two months of Spanish immersion in tropical Barranquilla, Colombia! I've been here for a week already, and my official Spanish classes started on today, although of course I've been learning new words and phrases every day. I'm staying with my husband's family and they are taking very good care of me.



One of the things my husband said motivated him to learn English was the number of books wanted to read about physics and science that were only available in English. Following that logic, I've started looking for things I like - music and poetry - in Spanish so that I'll be motivated to learn the meanings. Yes, we're the Artist and the Scientist, but we do have plenty of common interests, for example the internet and technology.

The cool thing about technology is I can talk or chat with my husband, family and friends every day online, and I can also record my radio shows here and send them all the way to the station in the States via FTP! And the cool thing about researching Latin music is it opens up a whole new world of songs for the Lyrical Venus Radio Hour!

While there's a whole world of fun stuff to share, this week I decided to focus solely on female singer-songwriters from Colombia. I've found six amazing Colombian women who write and sing their own songs. The one you probably know already is Shakira, who is actually from the very city I'm in - Barranquilla! I've even driven past the place where she went to high school. That was actually one of my self imposed homework exercises - there was a recent article in the paper about her that I read with the help of my trusty pocket dictionary.

In any case, I'm super proud of my radio show I sent in for this week! You can listen at 100.1 FM in Fairfield, www.kruufm.com online worldwide. Tuesday morning at 9 AM CST.

If you hear it let me know what you think!

New Year Off to a Good Start!

Hello lovely readers! You will never guess what I did this morning to kick off the New Year! (Well, unless I told you about it already in person...)

I DID A RADIO SHOW ON KRUU FM!!! One whole hour!



In case all the exclamation points and capital letters didn't clue you in already, I am very, very excited about this. :-)

KRUU is an awesome little local, low power, non-profit radio station here in town. This is the mission statement from their website:

"The mission of KRUU is to give Fairfield a voice and strengthen the community by encouraging creativity, dialogue and community involvement. KRUU is an open, inclusive, diverse forum for music, creative expression, information, and entertainment. It is a non-commercial, non-profit, community-supported low-power radio station with a strong emphasis on locally created and produced programming."

Yeah, it pretty much kicks butt big time. It's run on Open Source software, grassroots community support, enthusiasm, hard work and love. I think they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 DJ's? With that many different people, you can imagine the diversity of the shows, somewhere in that mix there's a little something for everyone. It's low power, so the range is only 10-20 miles out from the center of town, but you can listen to the stream online from anywhere in the world.

And now I'll tell you a little secret... When I came up with the name Lyrical Venus maybe a year ago, it was actually in anticipation of having a show on KRUU. But between them being super busy trying to learn how to build and run a 24 hour radio station from the ground up, and me being both busy and rather shy (especially when it comes to sharing music - bad run-ins with music snobs in the past), it's taken this long to get started. I think it's actually pretty good timing, because I've had this much time to discover more artists, build my music library and grow my confidence in my music tastes through this blog. So when James the station manager said to me at 6:30 last night, "You want to come in tomorrow morning at 9 AM? Do you have an hour's worth of music you can play?" I was able to say "um, YES!", tweak up a playlist, and still have a good time out at a friend's house for New Years Eve. My co-host was out of town, but she'll come back and it looks like we'll have the 9:00 AM Tuesday slot going forward, so you can tune in to 100.1 FM in Fairfield, or online to listen to the Lyrical Venus Radio Hour every week!

Never fear readers, I shan't abandon this blog now that have achieved my goal of a radio show. I quite like writing about my all-time favorite singers and new musical discoveries. I have so many artist posts sitting in little draft folders waiting for me to have time to flesh them out and put up for you.

Sometime soon I also want to do a "Lyrical Venus Best of 2007" post, as well as set some goals for 2008. But I was so excited about this I had to share it before going to bed!

Oh, one last thing! Big thanks to any and all of you who read this blog on any sort of regular basis. It really blows my mind that people from around the world are reading the words I sit here typing on my little laptop! Please don't be shy to comment or send me an email if you have any ideas or feedback, I really do love to hear from you.

Until next time, this is Heather, signing out!