Flannel Shirt

It was so exciting, I can't describe my feelings!!!

The new ABBA museum.

You can thank ABBA for the music. And so much more.

A museum devoted to the pop superstars opening in Stockholm on Tuesday will celebrate the band's long list of hits. But it will also show off paraphernalia, including the helicopter featured on the cover of its "Arrival" album, a star-shaped guitar and dozens of glitzy costumes the Swedish band wore at the height of its 1970s fame.

Some gear is definitely not on show. With a smirk on his face, band member Bjorn Ulvaeus says certain items are "mysteriously ... forever lost," conceding only that among them are "embarrassing" tight costumes he wore when he was "slightly overweight." He declined to say more on the matter.

Some 40 sets of the trademark shiny flares, platform boots and knitted hats are on display in the museum. But visitors can also see digital images of what they would look like in costumes, record music videos and sing such hits as "Dancing Queen" and "Mamma Mia" on a stage next to hologram images of the band members. A telephone also has been placed in a corner and ABBA members have promised to "Ring, Ring" and speak to visitors occasionally.

But the museum also shows a less glamorous, more everyday side of the history of a band that has sold 400 million records and consistently topped the charts in the decade after winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo." The band — made up of Ulvaeus, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Benny Andersson and Agnetha Faltskog — started out as two married couples, and continued performing after their divorces, before eventually drifting apart in the early 1980s.

The collection includes models of the band's kitchen, a cottage where they used to compose their songs and the small, rustic park venues Bjorn and Benny played when they first met in the 1960s. Visitors can listen to the band members' recollections and one section is dedicated to the breakup and the story of the divorces.

"It (touches) on those things as well because we think they are important in telling the story," Ulveaus said.

The museum also includes a Swedish Music Hall of Fame, detailing other Swedish artists.

It was a long time coming, eagerly anticipated by fans and visitors to the Swedish capital. Ulvaeus said they needed the time to reflect on their careers. "You need some distance, you need perspective to be able to tell a story like that and I guess you can say that we have perspective now, 30 years on," he told reporters.

Outside the newly built wooden museum scores of international ABBA fans gathered Monday, singing the band's songs and hoping to get a glimpse of their idols arriving for a gala dinner. All were expected except Faltskog, who is currently promoting her comeback album "A'' in Britain.

Nikita Stolyarov, a 21-year-old student from Russia said he got a glimpse of Lyngstad on Sunday when she came by for an early view of the museum.

"It was so exciting, I can't describe my feelings," he said.

Riddle me this

That's the kind of stimulation I get when I'm working on music.

Whether you’re rocking out to Britney Spears or soaking up Beethoven’s classics, you may be enjoying music because it stimulates a guessing game in your brain.

This mental puzzling explains why humans like music, a new study suggests. By looking at activity in just one part of the brain, researchers could predict roughly how much volunteers dug a new song.

When people hear a new tune they like, a clump of neurons deep within their brains bursts into excited activity, researchers report April 12 in Science. The blueberry-sized cluster of cells, called the nucleus accumbens, helps make predictions and sits smack-dab in the “reward center” of the brain — the part that floods with feel-good chemicals when people eat chocolate or have sex.

The berry-sized bit acts with three other regions in the brain to judge new jams, MRI scans showed. One region looks for patterns, another compares new songs to sounds heard before, and the third checks for emotional ties.

As our ears pick up the first strains of a new song, our brains hustle to make sense of the music and figure out what’s coming next, explains coauthor Valorie Salimpoor, who is now at the Baycrest Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. And when the brain’s predictions are right (or pleasantly surprising), people get a little jolt of pleasure.

All four brain regions work overtime when people listen to new songs they like, report the researchers, including Robert Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University

The links between the brain’s reward center and the three other areas explain how simple sounds strung together in complex patterns can give humans so much joy, Salimpoor says. Music theorists have speculated that new music might tickle people’s pleasure centers by engaging their minds in play. But until now, no one had matched up the theory to the neurobiology.

In the study, the researchers examined the brain activity of 19 people as they listened to short clips of new music in an MRI machine. At the end of each clip, volunteers could choose to buy songs they liked, using their own money. The researchers asked them how much they would be willing to pay, $0.99, $1.29 or $2, in a system similar to iTunes. If volunteers did not like a song, they could choose not to buy it.

Then researchers compared brain scans of participants who bid different amounts on songs. Amid the bustle of activity in the brain, the nucleus accumbens leapt to life when people heard songs they wanted to purchase. The more money people chose to spend, the livelier their nucleus accumbens was while listening.

Teaming neuroimaging with the iTunes-like system for buying music was “a very clever idea,” says cognitive neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel of Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “It’s a nice application of new technology to address an old theory in music cognition,” he says. And in fact, the new findings seem to fit well with the old theory, he says.

The results tap into the fundamental ways our brains deal with sound, says auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “The implications are rather enormous,” she says. The work could help scientists better understand how humans decipher other complex sounds, such as speech.

From The Prison, by Richie Havens

 

Richie Havens, RIP

Strange, wonderful voice. 

 

It's 4-20

Not quite sure how it started, but 420 means marijuana.

So here is a little musical celebration of it, from the Lawrence Welk Show.

 

My Favorite TV theme song

 

Sorrow Tears and Blood by Fela Kuti

 

Shades of Blue: Oh How Happy

Before Edwin Starr was explaining to the world what war was good for (absolutely nothing) he wrote this great song, performed by the group Shades of Blue.

 

Music Monday: It's Your Thing by Dyke and the Blazers

 

This song has always troubled me

From back in the days of disco a British band named Hot Chocolate came out with a song called "You Sexy Thing". The song opens up with the singer announcing, "I believe in miracles. Where ya from, you sexy thing?" The singer has the weirdest delivery. You expect the woman he's hitting on to say something like, "Well, you'll need a miracle for me to go out with you." Really, the singer sounds totally goofy. I always wondered what happened to this guy, although I think he and the sexy thing actually hook up in the last verse.

I came across this You Tube cartoon which shows the goofiness of the song.

 

Here's the whole song, live: