Charlie Recksieck

The Gipsy Kings: A Living Dynasty

Before global fame, the Gipsy Kings played weddings, street gatherings, and family celebrations, absorbing flamenco traditions passed down orally rather than academically. Given their career in retrospect, it might be tough to remember that at this point they were still carrying guitars without cases and playing on the street for years.

How Money Actually Flows Through the Music Industry in 2026

It’s easy to dismiss the streamers completely as “tech bros,” but the people making the real money at the top are not in the music business. They’re in the money business, and to them music is “content.”

Too Mellow? Five 2025 Songs That Excite Me Anyway

We’re all supposed to think the most exciting music should be loud, energetic or at least algorithm-breaking. That’s what’s cool. That’s where music evolves from its influences into the next big thing. So why is all of the 2025 music I listen to seem to be in soft-focus and, God forbid, 'tasteful?' Tasteful translates to boring or NPR music, where restraint gets almost fetishized. As card-carrying music aficionados listening to this stuff, we are supposed to be ashamed of ourselves. But I’m not.

Is Technology Making Us Stupid? Maybe, But What Is ‘Smart’ Anyway?

Modern technology has undeniably increased efficiency, speed, and access to information. It has also quietly changed what we mean by being “smart.” Tools that once required memory, precision, and effort now outsource those traits entirely. The question stops being whether technology makes us smarter or stupider, and becomes whether the brain was ever designed to process this much acceleration.

Defining Yacht Rock

The "Yacht" Test — Would you tolerate doing a couple of lines of cocaine with a douchebag on a great boat party with that song blasting? Yacht rock needs to be smooth and polished — less crunchy than folk rock or soft rock. It’s about sophistication: jazzy chords, tight production, and often those legendary LA session musicians like Jeff Porcaro and Steve Lukather.

Score One for Our Side

My role was to do something different with the score. Scoring a film isn’t just dropping songs in scenes—it’s composing music that supports and shapes the emotion without calling attention to itself. For this project, that meant creating about 65 minutes of music, often on a tight deadline, and sometimes using fragments of unfinished songs or unexpected sounds like electro versions of classical pieces and even coroner reports.

Woody Guthrie and Songwriting

Just like an NFL football “coaching tree” refers to a network of coaches connected through mentorship, typically tracing which head coaches “trained” or influenced other coaches ... if you sketched out a “Woody Guthrie tree” it would feature Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, and countless folk and rock musicians who credit Guthrie as a major inspiration.

In Defense of the Accordion

Historically, the accordion is a kind of musical punch line—symbolizing everything cheesy and corny for nearly a century. From your great grandmother’s music through Weird Al Yankovic’s ironic takes, it’s often dismissed. But the accordion is only as good or bad as the people playing it. From French musette to Zydeco, Tejano, Klezmer, and Gypsy Punk, the accordion shapes rich musical traditions.

Lawrence Welk: Revisiting the Counter-Counter Culture

Welk was the ultimate counter-counter-culture, offering a comforting oasis of old-fashioned, wholesome music through decades of social upheaval. While Hendrix and Elton John transformed music at a neighboring theater just yards from his TV studio, Welk entertained Nixon’s “silent majority” with cheerful accordion tunes and tap dancing.

If You Don't Like Performing For 20 People ...

I used to live next door to another musician who was young and had ambitions. One time I asked him to join me at an open mic night, figuring it's easier for us both to hang with a friend than doing that by yourself all night. My neighbor demurred, saying he didn't think it would be good for his image. Just then I first thought: he's never going to make it.

Music: Life After 40

I’m over 40. Playing music — the singing and piano part — actually gets better with age. You learn licks, tricks, and how to read a crowd. Load-in and load-out are brutal—carrying heavy gear up stairs feels like a war zone. My favorite gigs now? Early evening sets, good beer, and burgers — rock ‘n’ roll, just with a bit more wisdom and less hangover.

Disruptors: A Stupid Term In Stupid Situations

The majority of people who claim they are a disruptor do so before they’ve actually disrupted anything. “Innovating” is not the same thing as “disrupting.” If you call yourself a disruptor, four out of five people in the room are rolling their eyes.

Is ChatGPT A Search Engine?

Is ChatGPT a search engine? Not really. But ChatGPT, voice assistants, and other search methods are reducing Google’s importance for finding answers and changing what websites need to do for SEO. People increasingly want answers, not links. Local, specific, experience-based content wins.

Upcoming article in Plannedscape Postings

AWS Outage of October 2025: Lessons For Them And You

The takeaway is simple: a single regional fault can ripple globally when dependencies are centralized. Companies should test how outages affect their systems, plan for multi-region resilience, and accept that cloud infrastructure reduces effort — but does not eliminate risk.

The George Michael Sports Machine

The George Michael Sports Machine was peak 1980s/early-90s sports television, where highlights met giant blinking buttons and industrial sound effects. George would stare intensely into the camera, announce a sport, then slam a button with the enthusiasm of a kid setting off a bottle rocket, "LET'S FIRE UP ... THE SPORTS MACHINE!"

So All Great Podcasts Just Turn Into Bad TV Shows Now?

Let's face it; podcasting is basically just a couple of people talking to each other - which turned out to be hugely popular as the importance of podcasts continues to rise. Going to video, there's a subtle structural change that happens when cameras are introduced; a podcast shifts from a conversation towards more of a performance.

25 Fake Bands I’d Actually Pay to See Live

"The Clash at Demonhead – Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
I like them so much better than Scott Pilgrim’s band Sex Bob-Omb, it’s not even funny, and I resent him for breaking up The Clash at Demonhead. In reality, their music was written by real-life band Metric, so this band almost does exist.

Is Michael Scott From The Office Good At His Job? Great Salesman, But As a Boss?

Michael Scott is an easy target because he’s loud, needy, and frequently inappropriate. But the show is surprisingly consistent about one thing: he was promoted because he was excellent at sales. Judged against standard management traits—clarity, empowerment, trust, and psychological safety — Michael performs better than his reputation suggests.

Satire Is Not a Dirty Word: Interview with Spud Davenport

“I got to have martinis with David Lee Roth in the front of the Troubadour, the front bar. The Ringmaster. He came in because I was hanging with a buddy of mine who did engineering on all those early Van Halen records and Terry and I asked him to come in and Terry says hi. So, he came over and he said ‘martinis all around.’ You know, I don’t even like martinis, but hey, you do what Dave says.”

Music Writer Jim Trageser

Charlie: A lot of critics really lick their chops on a bad one, behaving like a bitchy Rex Reed and "having fun with it." But what’s the point of trashing some independent album?
Jim: It’s just as painful to create bad art as it is to create great art.