Category Archives: Music

Tweedy

Tweedy Album Sukierae I own a lot of Jeff Tweedy’s albums, but the only ones I really listen to are Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the first Mermaid Avenue album.

Today I downloaded his new album Sukierae and I’m really enjoying it. Notably, Tweedy made Sukierae with his 18 year old son Spencer and the album is named after his wife (who recently went through cancer treatment). The family influences are readily apparent as the songs are heartfelt and sincere. Summer Noon and Wait for Love are the first standout songs of the album.

If you’re not familiar with Jeff Tweedy, he was the lead singer of Uncle Tupelo and since 1995 he’s been the lead singer of Wilco. Along with the rest of Wilco, he worked with Billy Bragg to create the Mermaid Avenue series of albums that contain songs created from unused Woody Guthrie lyrics.

Also, video from the making of the album Yankee Foxtrot Hotel was turned into a really great documentary, I’m Trying to Break Your Heart.

Here’s the video for Summer Noon:

WordPress 3.6 – Native Support for Audio

While I was messing around with WordPress 3.6 and audio capabilities, I decided to the test the native support for audio.

Here are a couple things to watch out for:

1. Your host or settings may limit the size of on file uploads. To get around that limitation you can upload the file via FTP. But if you do that the file won’t show up in your Media Library. If this is the case, download the Add From Server plugin. This plugin adds a link in the Media Library which allows you to add file from your server to the Media Library. From there, it’s easy to embed in your post.

An alternative is to use FTP and then wrap the link to the file in audio shortcode. Here’s an example:

[audio mp3="https://www.kmarsden.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Trojans.mp3"]

2. Get rid of the spaces in your file names. The media player won’t work if the song/video has spaces in the name.

3. Not all browsers will support the mp3 embed. See the Codex for fallback methods.

4. The width of the audio player is set to 100%. You can change this by setting a smaller width in your child theme’s style.css. This is what I did:

.mejs-container {
max-width: 400px;
}

Just don’t go much lower than 200px;