Tag: random song

I found a list on my computer and its origin and purpose has been lost with the passing of time. I think it was a list of songs from Pandora that I liked. Let’s have a listen, shall we? Then I will add them to my Song of Month Playlist on YouTube.

“It’s Time” Imagine Dragons. I’m not going to add this to the playlist, because it gets played on the radio a lot. Still. But I always enjoy listening to it, despite the number of times I encounter it. (Also: “miles of clotted hell” is one of my favorite things about this song)

“You’ve got me” Colbet Callie. This is a nicely pleasant song.

Every Morning Sugar Ray. I would describe Sugar Ray’s guitar sound as “bright.” This is why I tend to like the Sugar Ray songs I encounter. And holy cow, is this video all about the 90s. Even all the 70s stuff in there is totally 90s.

“The Underdog” Spoon. This song reminds me of Neil Diamond in all the best ways. The horns! The various percussion things! The tonal quality of the lead singer’s voice! The way it seems to be a very serious song, but with such a cha-cha-cha kind of musical arrangement!

“Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in my Hand”–Primitive Radio Gods. Speaking of the 90s… I’ve always loved the “I’ve been downhearted baby” sample in this song. Since I spent large portions of the 90s depressed/sad, this hits those zones, but in a good way. Also, someone good at singing pointed out that this is a fun song to harmonize to because there are lots of entry points.

For fun, here’s the song the sample came from. B.B. King “How Blue Can You Get”

“Cough Syrup”–Young the Giant. Oh yes! It’s that song. I had no idea it was called this. And! Synchronized swimmers!

“Last Night”–The Strokes. Such good basic rock. Standard guitar, driving rhythm. Singer’s voice.

“Age of Consent”–New Order. Yeesh. This is just a solidly good song.

That brings us to the end of the list.

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I have the day off, and I’m working on getting the gumption to go work on the side yard project.  To distract myself from that unfinished project, I’m working on the another (endlessly) unfinished project: the Great 2017 Blog Catch Up.  Having written Song of the Ponth posts for October, I was letting the Mountain Goats autoplay while I wrote and edited.  At some point I clicked back and the computer algorithm that YouTube uses suggested a bunch of Tiny Desk Concerts.  And here were Bleachers.  Given how often they’ve been on my song of the month list (either as Bleachers or as one-third of the now-defunct fun.) I clicked.

And what a great Tiny Desk Concert.  I loved the first song a lot. It manages to use saxophone without inducing terrible 80s-pop-song flashbacks.  There’s a funny bit where Jack Antonoff asks, “how often do you do this?” and disappointment or uncertainty flashes over his face when someone answers.

It’s also interesting to see this version of “Don’t Take the Money,” (In contrast to the Tonight Show Version I referenced previously) and to see how he fights to keep up with the drum machine that is coming out of the boombox.  It doesn’t quite work, which, in an era of overproducing music, I quite enjoy.  Stick with it thorough the end of the song and you will get to see a different charming mistake.

For contrast, here’s the album version of the first song, Everybody Lost Somebody.

September 2000.  The new millennium hasn’t gone so well. I spent the first half of the year working for Census 2000 in Boston and then there was a period with no job and rapidly dwindling savings.  I’d just started a position as an accounting assistant, but money was still tight.  It was the first time I learned that when your money gets to a very low level, it takes time to pull yourself back into financial stability, even if there are paychecks coming in.

Cameron Crowe’s new movie was coming out soon.  There was a time when a new Cameron Crowe movie was a big deal, and this movie, Almost Famous, promised to be a really great movie.

Its release date coincided with a trip home for a friend-of-family wedding.  I didn’t really have the money for a weekend trip home, but had already bought my ticket, so I skipped paying for some other things and headed off to Boise.

I would have been better off staying home.  The wedding was nice, but my divorced parents freezing each other out at the reception was not enjoyable.  There was drama around meeting up with an ex-boyfriend, I completely dissed another friend, and then suffered through a night of not-dancing at a dance club with yet another friend who, I realized around hour two of watching her have fun with other people, had grown very distant.

Almost Famous was my vacation reward.  I was going to see that movie on opening weekend, because I suspected I was going to love it.  It was about the life I thought I wanted when I was in high school.  I was going to be a roadie, touring with the band, music surrounding me.

Almost Famous wasn’t playing in Boise that weekend.  It opened three weeks later.

I returned to Boston, beat up from the changing friendships, and with no extra money for movies.  I headed off to work as usual, girding myself for the day.  This job didn’t have enough for me to do and pretending to be busy for hours on end gave me a lot of time to mull over the sorry state of my life.

I can’t remember exactly when I finally watched Almost Famous, but I know it was a “screw it, I’m gonna see this damn film” moment. I’m pretty sure it was after work on a weeknight. I worked in Harvard Square in Cambridge and one night, instead of going home, I went to the theater after work.

I did love that movie.  I loved it from the first frame to the last one.  I watched the story of a time when music was changing at the same time my life had shifted so abruptly and that film imprinted itself on me. I hoped for a transformative cinema experience and I got one.  And I didn’t anticipate how funny it was going to be.

There are quotes from that movie that run through my head.*  Aside from being transformative, and having a really great soundtrack, this movie also rehabilitated my opinion of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” with one scene.

After a fight between band members, William Miller has just spent the night at a party in Topeka, Kansas with Russell Hammond.  The bus comes to collect them, and everyone’s mad.  Russell sits alone in the front seat and as they leave Topeka, “Tiny Dancer” plays.  Tension dissipates as people start to sing along, until the whole bus joins in for the chorus.

It’s shoddy storytelling, fixing an argument through a sing-along.  But it totally works.  Before this movie I thought Elton John’s song was kind of silly, seeing members of a touring band love the song so much made me love it too.

*The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when your uncool.

Every summer I associate songs with the season.  This doesn’t happen in spring, fall or winter, for whatever reason.  Sometimes the songs I hear all summer are songs I hate, sometimes they are songs I love. Sometimes they are songs I grow tired of because they are played too much.  Back when things changed all the time–say when summer was a passing point between two different grades, or I had a different job every summer–it was easy to link specific songs with specific summers.  But now that one summer isn’t much different than any other they blur.  The summer of “We are Young” by fun (loved it!)  and “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye (hated it!)?  Who knew when that was?  (Yes, the internet could easily tell me.)

So here is my scrapbook of songs from the summer of 2015.

Note that I interacted with all of these songs through the radio when I was driving around.  I’ve never watched any of the videos and until I was writing this post I had no idea who sang any of these songs, because radio stations rarely tell me, perhaps because the Shazam app can do that for them.  And perhaps because even though there are still local (sometimes “local”) radio stations, most of them have cut back significantly on their on-air talent.

Walk the Moon’s “Shut up and Dance”

This song was all over the pop stations this summer.  I find it vaguely rude and the slightest bit overly manufactured and obvious, but rarely changed the station when it was playing.

Elle King’s Ex’s & Oh’s

This was also all over pop stations and also 94.7, the alternative radio station.  Plus KINK liked it.  So basically every music station I listen to.

Vance Joy’s Mess is Mine

I think it was mostly KINK that loved this song.  Maybe the alternative music station now and then.

The very wordy named Andrew McMahon In the Wilderness’s “Cecilia and the Satellite”

Another across-the-preset favorite.  I liked singing along with this, while also finding it slightly cheesy.

It occurs to me I’m not really crazy about any of these, so I’ll add in one more that I adore, even though I started hearing it in the spring.

Vampire Weekend’s “Unbelievers”

I love the music, I love the words, I have watched this video and I like it also.  I would like it to be longer, but songs seem to be very short right now.  I think all of these are under four minutes.

This song is one that I also looked up the chords and figured out how to play on the piano.  It involved figuring out some chord inversions, but I was successful in my inversions and I felt very smart.

At one time I was very into music and it was a big part of my life. With that came the worst archetype of the music world: the asshole who knows everything about music and thinks your taste sucks.

Not surprisingly, this archetype was always a man.

Which is why I greatly enjoy this song, as it seems to skewer a particular brand of music asshole.  I was all about music, but, given the constraints of the time, I could only listen to the music that played on the radio, MTV and stuff that I could buy myself or tape off of stuff that my friends bought.  My music tastes were as broad as it could be, but there were huge gaps, which asshole blowhard music guy was always happy to remind me about.

A good detail from Heavier Than Heaven, Charles Cross’s extensive biography of Kurt Cobain, was the large music gaps Cobain had.  Which, of course he did, he was a poor kid with a Walmart for a music store.  I remember a scene in the book where a now-famous Cobain was blissing out to something like Peter Frampton’s “Baby I Love Your Way” and the other musicians in the room–for which this was a completely cheesy song–were unsure if he was serious or not.

I afforded my rock & roll lifestyle as much as I could, but there were many people who could outspend me.

I also greatly love Cake, whose music is sort of a 90s-era cool oasis for me. Plus they have horns.  I’m a sucker for a good horn part.  When we saw them several years ago, the horn player was a hard working man, covering not just the horn parts, but also backup vocals and extraneous rhythm things.

As a side note, I was interested to note that the guitar riff in this  song reminds me of one in one of my favorite Cake ditties, “Stick Shifts and Safety Belts”

Also, the above video is weird.

This song (Frank only) came on in my tap class tonight and I was reminded of this version, which came out when I was in high school and got me listening to Sinatra.  

In general, I’m not a huge fan of Mr. Sinatra.  I adore a couple of songs (this, “That’s Life”, “Something Stupid”) but overall I find I’m usually snapping my fingers and yelling at him to, “Speed it up, Frank!”  But this is pretty speedy and I love the way their voices work together.