Category Archives: Music

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Seven Christmas Songs I Love (part 1)

Like so many people this time of year, I’ve gone and dredged up a playlist on my iPhone that normally gathers dust for 11 months out of the year: my Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe playlist.

No no, just kidding, it’s my Christmas playlist.

Anyway, it’s a great time of year for music, so I thought it might be fun to share some of my favorites… so, seven days of Christmas songs! Let’s see if I can really pull this off.

First up, Aimee Mann’s “Calling on Mary.” It’s an original song from her One More Drifter in the Snow album, and I just love her deep, soulful voice on this song. So many original Christmas songs stink (let’s be honest, they really do) but this is one of the few exceptions to the rule. It’s hard to keep from humming this song after you listen to it.

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Thirty Years of Music

There’s something pretty cool about (most of) the response to R.E.M. breaking up. I’m not referring to the people who are saying, “Who’s that?” or “About time,” of course, but rather the number of responses talking about why the band meant so much to them, and their favorite songs. (My friend Chris Butcher has a nice write-up of why he loved R.E.M., for example.)

But here’s the thing that I find the coolest, at least for me. Every time someone has said, “And here’s my favorite song,” I’ve started nodding along… and then realized that once again, no one among my friends appears to be picking a duplicate. I guess when you’ve got 15 full length albums (plus EPs, soundtrack contributions, and bonus tracks for compilations) it’s easy to hit that.

I won’t pretend I’ve got anything deep to write about the band—I first started paying attention to them in the mid-80s thanks to a co-worker at Giant Food, plus my friend Kira in high school—but I too have loved a lot of their music and thought I’d pick three favorite songs; one from the ’80s, one from the ’90s, and one from the ’00s. (I’ll be nice and include 2011’s Collapse into Now into that final grouping.) I tried to pick non-singles as well, if only because they’re great songs that you may not have heard.

Continue reading Thirty Years of Music→

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If I Could Sing, I Would Want To Sound Like This

Last weekend’s This American Life played a new single by Cee Lo Green over the closing credits, “Georgia.” (The entire episode, incidentally, was fantastic: a series of stories about different interesting people they encounted in small towns within Georgia.) And there was something about Cee Lo’s voice that… well… yeah, I think I must have listened to the snippit about 20 times.

Today I sat down and finally figured out who it was, then bought the digital single from Amazon. It’s going to be on his upcoming album Lady Killer, and if the entire album is in this style? I’m buying it, absolutely. Just listen to his voice and bask in its greatness.

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On the Cutting Edge

Continuing my attempt not be a zillion years behind the times (and failing), I finally heard that Ke$ha song “Tik Tok” thanks to The Simpsons remaking their opening sequence to the first minute or so of the song.

(If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth doing so. Surprisingly clever, and a search for Simpsons Tik Tok should do it. People are uploading faster than Fox can take them down.)

Anyway, curious, I listened to the rest of the song and three thoughts won’t leave my head now.

  1. Thanks to auto-tune, anyone it seems can be a hit singer. Seriously, could it be any more blatant?
  2. I could go the rest of my life, happily, without ever hear the word “crunk” again.
  3. Damn, that song sure is catchy. It’s been stuck in my head all day long.

Tune in during July 2015 when I finally hear a song by Justin Bieber.

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Epileptic Disco

I just heard the most awesome thing ever, and it was on my local NPR station, WAMU. One of the classical music CDs they were playing as part of their program “The Big Broadcast” started skipping. And not just a little bit. It sounded like an old 33rpm album cranked up to 45rpms, during an earthquake so the needle jumped every half second.

I normally reserve my hysterical laughing at NPR programs for “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” and “This American Life” but it turns out there is something out there even funnier.

After about five minutes, I gave them a call and let them know what was happening. Much to what I’m sure was great disappointment to the other listeners, they did then fix it about 90 seconds later. (Or rather, the station went silent, and then turned on a BBC radio news feed.)

Craaaaaaaaaaaazy radio!

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Wishing I Was There

My friend Graeme introduced me to the phrase of Jungian Radio, where for a lack of a better description, is when you have that song that is forever attached to some sort of moment or memory in your life. While trying to find YouTube videos to drive Charlie insane (it’s my job), I saw a link for a Natalie Imbruglia video, and suddenly I was back in Rome at the end of 2006.

I wish I could remember the name of the club/bar, but it’s lost to me now. I do remember that Tod, Doug, and I went there on a whim; we wanted something simple and easy, and it looked good. The place was going to turn into a dance club in an hour or so, but until then they were still serving food. While we were sitting down and waiting for our food, the music playing sounded awfully familiar. It wasn’t until I’d mouthed half of the words to “Wishing I Was There” and “Don’t You Think?” that I finally figured out it Natalie Imbruglia’s Left of the Middle CD playing on random.  I don’t think I’d listened to any of that CD in about six years or so by that point, and all of the sudden it made me desperately want to hear it again.

Sunset on Rome

All of this, more than anything else, makes me want to go back to Italy. Or really, somewhere new in Europe, there are so many other countries waiting to be explored. When I’m on holiday, you’re given the excuse to walk around in a city or town for hours and just stop at a random cafe and eat something. When I’m home, there’s always something else that needs to be done, or a favorite place that I end up eating at instead of just taking a random stab and seeing what I end up with. (Or most likely, not eating out and just making lunch or dinner.)

Charlie and I spent part of Saturday looking at some different neighborhoods, ones to just try and get a better grasp of what’s out there and what our future options are. One of the most exciting things about doing that? The idea of having the slate cleared on all of those patterns and habits that we fall into. Start over, reset and reboot, ctrl-alt-del. Get forced to find something new. I like that.

Funny what a single YouTube link will dredge up.

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The Way It Used To Be

2009 = Music explosion!

Generally speaking, 2008 was kind of a dud year for new music. Not many new albums I was really excited about, per se, and even artists that I like who did release albums had some real middling end results. But this year? Well, we’ve got Bruce Springsteen, U2, Kelly Clarkson, Indigo Girls, Tori Amos, Pet Shop Boys… lots of new music for me to be listening to for the rest of the year, quite frankly.

As it is I’ve been listening to the Pet Shop Boys album preview (thanks Trevor!) today and there are a couple songs (“The Way It Used To Be,” “Pandemonium,” “Love etc.”) which have just instantly clicked—that great sort of feeling of, “Yes, yes, more like that” coupled with having a deja vu flashback to earlier albums and thinking how much you loved them as well.

I’m not saying that artists need to be like what they’ve already done (that gets old quite frankly) but there’s something great about a song that puts you in mind of an earlier project. Almost like you see how they’re connecting the dots from one to the next. Anyway, good stuff! Can’t wait for the actual release so I don’t have to keep clicking on a song title on the web site to listen to specific tracks over and over again.

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My Fall Listens and Reads

With everything else going on I forgot to mention it, but I became even more of an Arlington resident stereotype last week; I donated money to WAMU, our local NPR station. I started listening to WAMU around the start of the year on my drive to and from work, and I have to admit that I’ve grown to really love Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And from there, well, I’ve started adding podcasts to be automatically downloaded, like StoryCorps, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, or NPR roundups of the week’s news relating to specific subjects (my two favorites are Food and Pop Culture), and most Monday mornings at the gym I spend my hour on the rowing machine and the elliptical listening to the weekend’s episode of This American Life.

So yeah, they’ve given me a lot of entertainment, so with the latest pledge drive I finally crumbled. (It does help that I can make it split over 12 months. That’s not so bad.) But it did make me realize that I really have not picked up much in the way of new music this year. There are still a few albums I’m hoping to get for Christmas (new ones from Aimee Mann and Pink leap to mind), but I didn’t feel the need to rush out and get them. The newest album I can think of acquiring was Tod loaning me Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Trip the Light Fantastic, which was pretty darn good.

Is this a bad year for music? Or merely a bad year for me finding music that I’m interested in?

On the other hand, I’ve definitely done a lot more reading this year; getting those two hours on the bus at least once a week has certainly helped, of course. I’m almost done with Pride and Prejudice and all of you were absolutely right, it’s very enjoyable. At some point I’ll finally tackle Wuthering Heights, but that will have to wait for a little bit. I took advantage of Small Beer Press’s fall sale and ordered the “everything we published in 2008” set (which may sound like some huge crate of books but it’s actually just five).

It helped that three of the books were already ones I wanted; a new Geoff Ryman book is reason to celebrate (Cambodia? Really? I’m in!), I’ve been wanting to read Joan Aiken’s works for a while now, and I’d heard very good things about Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories. So that made the decision easy; doubly so because Benjamin Parzybok’s Couch sounds entertaining, and I’ve always heard very good things about John Kessel too. (And hey, one of the stories in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories involves the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice meeting Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster. It’s like it was meant to be.)

Also on my radar (but for 2009) is NESFA Press’s planned six-volume set of anthologies collecting every single Roger Zelazny short story. I cut my teeth on Zelazny’s Amber novels, and from there went to his anthologies (I still vividly remember telling a friend about Unicorn Variations in the sixth grade and wishing that I could write a short story like Zelazny did) and many of his novels. With half of his anthologies out of print and the other half all scattershot and over the place, a complete, definitive edition of everything? Oh yes. Yes yes yes. It’s just as well that it’s a minimum of four months away.

(Oh, and World of Goo for the Wii is one of the coolest games out there, and for $15 at that! A steal and a half. I actually have to stop myself playing it at times because I don’t want it to come to an end. It’s that good. I would talk about wanting an Xbox 360 Pro, here, but I fear that you lot will just egg me on to buy one. And, um, no. I cannot justify one. Maybe next year.)