Swell Marketa and the June Fool

I ordered the CD that the two people from the "Once" movie had made (Marketa Irglova, pictured above, and Glen Hansard), it's called "The Swell Season". I was not hugely taken with it the first time I heard it, but that was in the car heading up to San Francisco. Now I've had a chance to hear it again tonight on the proper CD it is really rather good. Musically it is really beautiful, really pretty, relaxing music. Shame Marketa only gets to sing one song on her own, she has a great voice. There are loads of lovely harmonies she does with Glen Hansard. Marketa sang about three songs in the "Once" movie that are featured on the CD, I wonder why not.


The next CD that I almost grabbed at random made me smile after I put it on. Considering we are only now three hours away from next month (and it's next month already back in Europe) how strange that it's the late great "Madder Rose"'s "Hello June Fool" CD I just put on. I wonder who the June fool I am subconciously thinking about is?

When I left the UK I transfered all my CD's, and some vinyl, to Apple's equivalent of MP3, AAC. I then sold all the CD's on eBay, as I was not sure I wanted to cart mountains of CDs here to the USA. What I've discovered since is how much quality you use when you compress the audio files to make them fit onto iPods. Hearing the original Madder Rose CD again, it sounds great. I hope all the exponents of downloading from iTunes are realising that they are not really downloading music that is really CD quality, but a rather flat sounding compressed file. The audio compression technology is really clever to compress all that data into a 3meg file for a three minute song, but there is no such thing as a free lunch and I've found that you lose a lot of sound quality in the process. Maybe the compressed files are OK on an iPod, but if you play them back on a computer connected to a decent hifi system, the difference between the compressed file and the original is obvious.

Having realised this, I went on a second hand CD shopping spree back in December of last year, and re-bought Madder Rose's finer moments as well as a lot of other old friends. So I feel a bit stupid now, having gotten rid of so many CDs, just to buy them back again 18 months later. So maybe I am the June fool? Problem is that I think I sold the CDs in March.....