Welcome to my first music podcast.

Yes, this is pretty rough. I was seriously tempted to redo the entire thing, but then I decided to leave it pretty much as is, because it would serve as a benchmark for me later as to how much I had improved, assuming, of course, that I improve at all.

About the name

In the second X-Men movie, there’s a scene where Mystique, disguised as Yuriko Oyama, breaks into Stryker’s computer. If you look closely at the monitor, you can see a folder labeled “Project Wideawake.” For some reason, that caught my attention, and I backed up, paused the dvd, and zoomed in on it. I knew I would have a use for it later.

Then, when I realized that I would be doing a music blog, it didn’t take me too long to realize this would be the perfect title, because good music can keep me wide awake for a long time.

I did try just coming up with some names on my own, and then I googled “cool name generator” and found the Online Name Generator, which gave me a ton of names. I especially liked:

• harsh skunk
• ninth temple
• eternal crayon
• small lucky waffle

Seriously, small lucky waffle? How awesome is that? I very nearly used that one, but decided against it when I remembered Project Wideawake. But now I’m thinking that I’ve got to come up with some new project just so I can use the name.

Ninth temple? That sounds like something out of Avatar—the cool airbending one, not that postcolonial going-native epic piece of crap that James Cameron came up with.

Covers

Even if you’re not familiar with the News of the World album, its cover is so iconic that you probably recognize it:

What you may not know is that it was based on a cover for a 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The band actually went back to the original artist, Frank Kelly Freas, and asked him to redo it using members of the band (in this case, Brian May and John Deacon), which he was happy to do. (Click on either picture to see it full size.)

More information

• You can buy Queen’s News of the Worldfrom Amazon.
• I finished this podcast at about two in the morning, which may explain all of the mistakes.
• If you really need it, you can buy the Warrant version as well.
• Every time I start recording again, I have a strange compulsion to adjust my microphone, even though it’s in exactly the same place it was five seconds ago. It shows up as a weird scratchy sound.
• This podcast is 18 minutes and 34 seconds long, including the mistakes. I’m also told that it’s 22,283,607 bytes. That’s a lot of bytes. Please chew carefully and thoroughly.
• This podcast was released at exactly 9:00 pm on Saturday, June 11th.
• At the beginning of the fourth paragraph, for some reason I originally started it with “Thus,” but didn’t catch it until the six or seventh draft.
• Queen’s official website is Queen Online.
• Paul Rodger’s official website is just here.
• Yes, I know Queen + Paul Rodgers came to an end two years ago, but there’s always a possibility that they will tour again.
• I almost forgot, but you can also buy Queen’s Live Killers album from Amazon.
• Check out my friend Shane Koehler’s artwork.

You are welcome to comment, but be nice. That guy in Poland is listening and we don’t want him to learn any bad words.

As always, enjoy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.