Music
-
Strange Fruit
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs[/youtube] Strange Fruit Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh! Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop. I had never heard this song before, nor did I know the story behind it. I was listening…
-
XTC ~ Dear God
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk41Gbjljfo[/youtube] One of my favorite songs ever, and one that sums up a lot for me. A lot about atheism. A lot about not being able to make the leap of faith to understand how the tragedies that affect so many people: earth quakes, tsunamis, sick asshats who kidnap kids and keep them in the basement, etc.. How can these things be explained in a world with a loving God, who at the same time, is involved in our lives and answers our prayers. I can’t make that leap. I know that many people can, and that a big part of it is being able to say, faith. Faith. …
-
The Wallflowers ~ One Headlight
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEeqDk7203U[/youtube] I remember being really impressed by Bringing Down the Horse, by The Wallflowers. Loved all of it. My favorite three songs were probably this one, One Headlight, along with Three Marlinas, and 6th Avenue Heartache. The pop hook is great in all of them, but I particularly think that Jakob Dylan got some pretty decent lyric writing chops from his old man. Here are the lyrics to 6th Avenue Heartache, which I think I like even more than One Headlight, but I couldn’t find a copy that would embed on YouTube. Click the link above, to listen to 6th Avenue Heartache. Written for a homeless man in New York…
-
Violent Femmes
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocQeP1UOwss[/youtube] Here we are at V already, coming mighty close to the end of this mostly ignored experiment called, The ABC’s of Music, which I copied and morphed from Gina, and was then copied (yay!) from me by Simon. I thought of Veruca Salt, who I do enjoy from time to time, but I’ve mentioned them before already. Thought of the Verve, but then I remembered The Violent Femmes! Oh my, does this take me back to a particular time and place, that being my sophomore year of college, in Stockton, CA. We didn’t get much ‘good’ music in Stockton, or at least it didn’t feel like it at the…
-
Boomtown Rats ~ I Don’t Like Mondays
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA-2oXzk10[/youtube] For those of us old enough (or young enough) to remember Live Aid, it was indeed an amazing phenomenon. We missed a lot of it in California, being 8 hours behind England, and 3 hours behind Philadelphia, and it being announced not too long before the concerts were held. But wow, the work that went into that…without email, without cell phones, all of that. And a lot of it didn’t make it to MTV at the time. Originally, Geldof didn’t want the concert to be re-broadcast, saying that it would have more power in our memories than in being replayed over and over again. Not like today, where it…
-
Jewel ~ You Were Meant For Me
I have a soft spot for this song. I had kind of forgotten it, but a few weeks ago it came on while I was driving around, and it brought back memories of when Maya was a toddler, and a HUGE Jewel fan. She especially loved this song, though Foolish Games came in as a close second. Look closely at the picture above, and you’ll see that she’s holding a printout of the cover to Jewel’s Pieces of You album. She would carry it around with her, sleep with it, everything with it. One copy would get torn or wet or lost, and Ted would print out another one. We…
-
Great American Food & Music Debacle
One advantage of Ted’s job is that we sometimes get free tickets to local events. One such event was yesterday’s Great American Food & Music Festival, held in Mountain View. This was the first (perhaps last) year for this event. The idea was to take iconic dishes from around the country and bring them all to one venue, bring in some big names from the Food Network, and pair it up with some good music and make a day of it. Sounds good on paper, right? Unfortunately, something fell apart in the execution. I’d be interested to read a newspaper account of what all actually went wrong, but one major…
-
ABC Music Monday ~ David Bowie and David Gilmour
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0Pl80Zf00[/youtube] I was having a hard time with picking a ‘D’ here…I mean, David Bowie was my first husband, so of course, loyalties should go there. But I also love Depeche Mode, and Dire Straits have always been a huge favorite. What’s a girl to do? So I was toying with the idea of blowing them all off, and putting up David and David’s Welcome to the Boomtown. Went searching for “David and David” on YouTube, and came across this live duet of David Bowie and David Gilmour performing Comfortably Numb at the Royal Albert Hall, and I couldn’t pass it up. The Wall was such an amazing, amazing album,…
-
Cowboy Junkies ~ Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6k4ZYjW-cA[/youtube] Some music hits you with its beat, or the melody, or the way the guitar and the bass work together…and sometimes a song hits you because of the absolute poetry of the lyrics. I’m not talking “Jump” here. But there are a handful, at least, of artists who can truly paint a picture, a beautiful picture of real life and honesty and pain and loss and love, something that touches your heart. A few examples, for me, are Simon and Garfunkel, Aimee Mann, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and Texas. Another is The Cowboy Junkies. This song, especially, evokes a certain feeling. The bittersweet feeling of loss at the end…
-
ABCs of Music
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tgFVltYVfM[/youtube] New feature here at Thinking About. I did an ABC Meme last week, which got me somehow to thinking about Gina’s Music Monday feature, and then somebody put peanut butter in my chocolate, and the next thing you know, I decided that for the next 26 weeks, I’ll post videos. I’m going to go through the alphabet, and I think I’ll stick with the name of the band/artist, but I can’t promise to be consistent on that. So, Happy ABC Music Monday! Our first group, of course, is ABC, with their fabulous song, “All of my Heart”. I love this song. It’s about eleventy billion times better than their…
-
Happy Birthday, Mozart!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltNkfRFpeHc[/youtube] Mozart, Clarinet Concerto, 2nd movement, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Women’s Orchestra. Today is the 253rd anniversary of Mozart’s birth, so I thought I would share this beautiful, beautiful piece of music with you. From the first time I heard this piece, I was enraptured. It was used in the film, “Out of Africa”, and I think the music from that movie made me love it as much as the beautiful cinematography, the costumes, and of course the compelling story. If you haven’t seen it, it does hold up very well. Of course, the all time wonderful Mozart film is “Amadeus”. I don’t know how much of that one…
-
Some goodish news amongst the painful crap…
There’s been so much pain lately. Mostly the pain of missing my mom and realizing, yet again, that she’ll never give me a big ol’ hug. That hurts a lot. Then there’s the job search for Ted, where he finds some really promising leads, jobs that sound like a really good match, but they.just.don’t. call. Asshats. Then there’s the homeowners crap, which is almost enough to make me wish we lived in a little cabin out in Nebraska somewhere, rather than a condo/townhouse in the Bay Area, because the finances SUCK right now. Did I mention that Ted’s on the board, so he has to hear about it from everyone? …
-
Torture…
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=PtS45bh_INY[/youtube] I wrote last year about waterboarding, and how it’s clearly torture, no matter what the dickwads in Washington think. Well, I was walking Genevieve the other day, and listening to Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me on my beloved iPod, and what should I discover? (I swear, you get better news from this show and Comedy Central than 99.9% of what else is out there.) The U.S. government is being sued for copyright infringement, because they tortured inmates at Guantanamo by playing crappy music over and over again, and they never paid the artists any sort of royalties. Kind of an ingenious way to stop torture, I guess, but I…
-
Soundtrack to a Vacation
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=K8AH7yYQpro[/youtube] Great DJ, by the Ting Tings. I like to think of them as being from Guyana, since ‘ting’ is another way of saying ‘thing’ in Guyanese, but they’re not, they’re British. Anyway, this song is in heavy rotation on Ted’s iPhone, and it’s infectious…meaning, it gets in our heads and sticks there. Luckily, it’s a fun fun song, so we’re enjoying it. Hope you enjoy it too! If it comes up with a stupid message saying that the video is not longer available, go straight to YouTube, here.
-
We Are In Love
I know you so well I can tell by the sound of your voice If you’re really in love with me And you are And you are You know I can’t lie If I say to you ‘baby, I love you’ Then baby, I love you Oh, and I do Yes, I do I do… could it be that’s the Phrase you thought never would phase you Well baby, you better hold on tight ‘Cause I’m the one who’s supposed to Kneel down and propose, well alright Ooo, well I might, I might So, when I kiss you good-night Just sleep tight with the thought that you’ll Always be caught…