Music Monday | Barrett Strong & Eliza Neals – bringin’ Motown back!

Once upon a time in 1960, a tiny little record label in Detroit named “Motown” released a song called “Money (That’s What I Want)” (you may have heard of it) that became its first hit and the beginning of a musical movement. The artist and songwriter was a man named Barrett Strong, who became a pivotal figure in Motown’s formative years and one of the most influential songwriters of the last century. Teaming up with legendary producer Norman Whitfield, Strong is credited for giving the world such classics as “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Ball of Confusion,” “War,” and “Take Me in Your Arms and Love Me.”

Yeah, he’s kind of a big deal.

A handful of years ago, Strong started collaborating with some new Detroit musical talent and decided to take them under his legendary-Motown-figure wings. His first protogé is an incredibly talented woman whom I am lucky enough to call a good friend, Eliza Neals. Together, they co-wrote her albums “No Frogs for Snakes” and “Liquorfoot,” both available for download on iTunes.

This summer, they’re bringin’ Motown back. REAL Motown.

Written fifty years ago when he was only 16, Barrett Strong released a single called “Misery” that didn’t get the marketing that it deserved. Now, he’s re-releasing it, sung by Eliza, and she’s putting her awesome Detroit diva soul spin on this authentic Motown tune.

Below is the video, just released, and Strong makes a cameo alongside super producer Tino Gross, also of renowned funk band Howling Diablos.

This is the sound of Detroit, folks — the sound that gave it the nickname “Motown,” the sound that started it all. And we all have Barrett Strong to thank.

The single will be available for download on iTunes soon (official date pending), but if you want it now, the only way you can get it is through email via private release. $3 will get you a limited edition copy of “Misery” with the video & outtakes with Barrett Strong and Tino Gross.

Eliza Neals lives in New York now but makes it home to The D once every couple months, and you can see her perform “Misery” and hear some more of her real Motown sound this Friday, July 2nd at Memphis Smoke in Royal Oak, and the following Monday, July 5th at Black Lotus in Clawson.

Find/hear more of Eliza Neals on iTunes, ReverbNation, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and Barrett Strong on MySpace and CD Baby.

(Note: None of the links in this post are affiliate links, and I am making no money off this post whatsoever. My only disclosure is that Eliza is my friend, and years ago I did a little bit of work with Tino Gross.)

The secret to my (alleged) Twitter “success” revealed

There’s nothing like tweeting about blogging and blogging about tweeting to beat a dead horse into the ground, eh?

Guess what?

I’m doing it anyway.

Last week a friend messaged me on BlackBerry messenger about something, I don’t remember the exact context, but somewhere along the line I decided to send him a link in a direct message (DM) via Twitter, and realized he wasn’t following me. So I asked him why, and he said he was “trying a different approach to his Twitter strategy” and he unfollowed a lot of people in order to reduce the noise in his stream. His logic was that if he wanted to talk to me, see what was up with me lately, etc., we’re connected on Facebook and of course, BlackBerry messenger.

I can respect that.

However, it spurned an interesting conversation about “Twitter strategies.” People put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to best use this tiny tool of epic proportions. Ari Herzog has been experimenting with it and documenting his findings, which, from an analytical perspective, is very interesting.

People ask me what my Twitter strategy is quite a bit. To my knowledge, I’ve never really divulged the details of what it is in writing, until now.

Are you ready? After the jump, you’ll find out my own personal Twitter strategy. (If you came here on a direct link, you won’t see the “Read more” thing.)

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This is why fireworks outside of Orlando do nothing for me.

When you live and work at Walt Disney World for nearly a year, you get used to seeing these every night, and then nothing else ever compares. I know video isn’t the same as being there, but it’s the closest thing I’ll come for a while. Use your imagination — that’s what Disney’s all about.

Wishes – Magic Kingdom

These are what I saw every night while I worked at the Magic Kingdom:

. . . when I wasn’t at the Magic Kingdom, I was at Epcot, watching my favorites:

Illuminations: Reflections of Earth

For good measure, I’ll include Fantasmic, at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Many people like these the best, but my heart will always be at Epcot.

(Yes, I know I’m acting like a total spoiled Disney princess. Kiss my tiara.)

I can quit Twitter, but Twitter can’t quit me.

Between friends getting married, friends passing away, getting used to a new schedule, and just overall life things, you could say I’ve had a lot going on lately. Sometimes, one can only take so much before wanting/needing to pull the plug on some things that cause more noise than signal in life.

The other day, after attending the funeral of a friend, I decided to quit Twitter for a while.

Many didn’t think I could do it. I’ve tried to “take a Twitter hiatus” before, and have only lasted a few days, at most. This time, however, I was pretty sure that I was done spewing <140 character blurts into the ether for a while. I just needed my “Stacy time,” my time to be lost in my own thoughts without the internet bugging me or me bugging it.

I really thought I could do it.

Fat chance.

It didn’t occur to me until after I had posted the above that even when I have no intention of tweeting, I tweet anyway. I’ve integrated so many webby things with my Twitter account that it’s nearly impossible.

Hitting the “Tweet this” button at the top of an interesting blog post or article after reading it has become second nature to me. BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I subscribe to a YouTube channel? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I just “like” a video on YouTube? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I check in somewhere on FourSquare? You got it — BOOM! There’s a tweet.

You get the idea.

Not to mention, that if somebody chooses to retweet (RT) or reply to one of my auto-tweeted tweets, it’s usually appropriate to say something back to them.

Oh sure, I could manually go and remove all of my Twitter connections/integrations on each app, but really, that’s a lot to go though if I’m only planning on a temporary hiatus. Plus, I’d have to re-hook it all back up when I came back.

So I guess I’m stuck tweeting, whether I intend to or not.

I guess I just find it funny — these days, there are still hoards of people trying to figure out HOW to use Twitter and why; meanwhile, I’m so enmeshed in it that I can’t easily quit using Twitter, even if I wanted to.

Has anybody else had this problem?!

The only rule of online privacy you need to know.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo about Facebook’s privacy settings lately.  Facebook, which started as a network where people could share their information privately, has loosened their privacy options/settings/system/whatever over the past few years to be everything but private.

Yada, yada, yada . . . I’ve done enough research about this to make my head spin.

However, when it all comes down to it, I’m not sure if the public is freaking out about privacy settings as much as the media says it is.

Regardless, whether we agree with Facebook’s ethics (or lack thereof) in this situation, there’s only one rule you need to know when it comes to online privacy, and this is the rule that I live by:

Don’t put anything online you wouldn’t want your mom to see.

Period.

It’s common sense, people. The internet is a very public place. Clamp down on privacy settings all you want, but if you have stuff online that you would rather your mom not see, you probably shouldn’t have put it there in the first place.

Now, I know there are situations where people will upload not-so-flattering pictures of you and tag you on Facebook. Guess what? You have the option to not let people see tagged photos and videos of you. Look in the privacy settings. Guess what else? You can also remove tags. These were always options, even way before the recent Facebook privacy debacle.

No, this doesn’t mean that incriminating stuff of you won’t be seen by others, there are always the friends of the people that uploaded it in the first place, but still — you’ve got a better chance of covering your own hide this way than fussing over what Facebook is deciding to do with your information this week.

Are there some embarrassing pics on Facebook of me that I didn’t upload? You betcha. But my mom is my friend on Facebook, and she can’t see them. Nor can my dentist, my former college professor, or Jerrod Niemann. There’s nothing my mom can’t see that anybody else can.

Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t comment things like “Please don’t get any more tattoos…” when I post pictures of my friends’ new tattoos, but hey . . . shes my mom! She’s supposed to be worried about that kind of stuff! (And since a good friend of mine owns a tattoo parlor, she’s got every reason to.)

So I’m wondering, are you freaking out about Facebook’s privacy flip-flopping lately? Why or why not? Or is this being overblown by the media?