All my favorite bands combined probably don’t have the place in my musical heart that The Cure do. As a highly influenced 5th grader around 1988, I was lucky to have a sister 10 years older than me, as well as some older neighbors who were into everything the UK had to throw at the music world. My sister made a mix cassette for me that I still have to this day that included most of The Cure’s album Standing On A Beach / Staring At The Sea, and from the very first guitar riff in Killing An Arab, I was hooked. The intro to Jumping Someone Else’s Train to this day is still probably my favorite guitar part ever.

The Cure are releasing an incredible deluxe version of Disintegration on June 8th, and fans who consider this their finest album will no doubt be pleased with it. A web site dedicated to the album is up and features a ton of instrumental demos and live songs from the album. Disintegration might actually be the first tape I bought - it may have been a Christmas gift, and it was also the Christmas I got my first stereo. I remember hours and hours of going to bed with headphones on playing that tape over and over. I don’t know why I find it strange these days to look back and think of a 6th grade kid obsessing over music at all, but I just didn’t know that many kids who were into anything like I was listening to at the time, like The Smiths, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, etc. In a pre-Internet world, I have to say it’s awesome to think any of that stuff was even accessible to me. Again, thanks to my sister and neighbors!

The Cure have had far more influence on my songwriting and guitar playing than anyone else as well. When I got my first guitar in 1992, after slowly getting the hang of it, the only thing that came natural to my ears were minor notes and depressing chord structures. Anyone who I’ve played or written music with over the years will tell you what a struggle it often is for me to write anything upbeat or cheerful. Thankfully, I’ve come around here and there, but I gladly go back to the late 80’s and the influence The Cure had on me as the reason why my guitar style is what it is.

If you are a huge Cure fan, I highly suggest heading over to the Disintegration web site and checking it out. The music section is a must and the Prayers For Rain Instrumental Home Demo is absolutely chilling. The full three-disc set will be released on June 8 in the US for $40, or $20 for digital download. There’s also a double-disc vinyl of the original album for $25. Full track listing after the jump.

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DSC_0291, originally uploaded by mg33_chicago.

I took this photo of the Aqua condo building in downtown Chicago on a particularly foggy Saturday morning in April.

I was recently looking for some good photo blogs and came up short on anything I could really see myself following on a daily basis, until these two. I think one was listed on smashingmagazine.com and another on wanken.com and they’re definitely the kind of thing I was looking for:

http://deartroy.com/blog/

TheLandBetweenHereAndMountains.Blogspot.com

As I’ve been learning more about photography since buying a Nikon D90 last October, I’ve found that I gravitate more towards the saturated, older film camera images both in terms of what I like looking at and how I like to edit my own photos after taking them. Of course I laugh at the fact that I’m using a pretty sophisticated, modern digital camera to take great vivid photos and then manipulate them to look old, but there’s something much more alive about these kinds of photos. They just have more of a personality to them than sharp, vivid photos.