Well, my plan to blog more often hasn't really happened so far this year. Too much of my time was spent watching and reading about American Idol in the spring and now this summer I've been reading a ton of Twitter posts on several subjects. Maybe if I actually got some comments from people who read my blog, I might be inspired to write more. But then again, maybe I'm just too boring? Whatever the case may be, I'm here today to write about my favorite subject: music.
Over these last 4 months or so, it seems that Ryan Star's music has been on my mind the most. I haven't even been reading books as much as I normally would because I've been on Twitter every day reading what other fans are saying and sometimes having conversations with them. My Twitter obsession began in June, after I drove to Pittsburgh to see Ryan perform at a mall. (I'm so glad I finally got a chance to see him perform again and to talk to him afterwards without being nervous. Unlike when I met Chris Daughtry 3 weeks before that and I totally froze up and only said Hello.) I had already been on Twitter for almost a year but somehow I began following more and more people after that day. I guess I just needed to talk to people who understood my passion for Ryan's music. I have also been voting for his song Breathe on a Pittsburgh radio station's weekday Top 8, plus voting for Breathe on VH1's weekly Top 20 music videos on TV. Last week, Breathe was removed from both of those lists but a few days later I found out that the song Start A Fire is listed as being his next single, and will be released to radio in mid-September.
I have started working on getting some of my friends and family interested in listening to Ryan's new album, 11:59. I started by playing the Breathe and We Might Fall videos plus a snippet of Start A Fire when my nieces were here visiting one weekend in July. The 4 year-old had fun making her Barbie dolls dance to Start A Fire and the 9 year-old kept wanting to hear Breathe and We Might Fall over and over again. When the album was released on August 3rd, I bought some extra copies to give away as gifts. So far I have given out one to my cousin who is going through some tough times right now. I have plans to give copies to at least 5 more people eventually. There's just something about Ryan Star that makes me want everyone to have the opportunity to hear and love his songs. And if they would be so fortunate as to see him perform live and meet him, that would be the icing on the cake.
It has been so much fun watching the progress of Breathe, and now 11:59, on various charts. Breathe's highest ranking as a current song was #15 in the Hot Adult Contemporary genre before Mediabase moved it to the recurrent category. The 11:59 album had a good debut on the Billboard charts last week by coming in at #31 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and at #10 on Billboard's Top Rock Albums chart. One of the reviews I read about the 11:59 album said that 11,599 units were sold in the first week. I wonder if that number is accurate or if the reviewer just added another 9 to the title of the album to see if anyone would notice? Either way, it's interesting to think that 11,599 could have been sold already. I don't know what the average is for a relatively unknown artist but that sounds like a good amount of albums to sell in the first week of a debut album.
Now to talk about some other musicians. In April, Jason Castro's debut album was finally released and I was pleasantly surprised at how good it is. When he was an Idol contestant in 2008, I thought he should have gotten more experience performing before auditioning. His album, though, shows that he has been hard at work since then and deserves the exposure he got by being on the show. The deluxe version of the Jason Castro album is well worth the money. Some very good bonus songs are on there. A few weeks after Jason's album was released, Anoop Desai independently released his own debut. I had high expectations for Anoop's album because he had been one of my favorites in the 2009 season of Idol. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as good as what I was hoping for. I had wanted to see him record "classic R&B" style songs with some Indian influences in them. Instead, it turned out to be crappy "modern R&B" with very little orignality in the songs. It didn't help much that Chris Richardson (from the 2007 season of Idol) was one of Anoop's collaborators. I didn't care for Chris Richardson at all when he was a contestant and I still don't like him or his music. Matt Giraud (from 2009 Idol) is still working on getting a record deal. So far, he has dueted on 2 songs with well established artists and is hoping to release an EP of his own soon. The first duet was earlier this year with singer Anna Wilson on a jazz version of the classic country song You Don't Know Me and it did very well on the jazz charts. Currently, Matt has a new duet with Jim Brickman called Thank You. I'm not sure if it's considered to be jazz, christian, or adult contemporary. Personally, I hope that Matt continues with the jazz route and stays far away from R&B.
Wow, this blog post has become very long and I haven't even gotten to everyone yet that I wanted to write about. The rest will have to wait for another post, I guess.
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