From the Vault--PIL and Eric Bogosion

I'm finally getting back into my CD dump, which is a process I never saw myself engaging in--that is, taking all my CDs and digitizing them.  So much for "Kill Your iPOD."  The only thing that would make my iPOD more lovable was if I could get Walton Goggins' face on my iPOD case.

The process is actually helping me rediscover music I'd either ignored or completely forgotten about, which has been an absolute joy.  Right now I'm listening to PIL's "Disappointed," which was part of the musical tapestry that made up the last half of grad school and my now ex-stepdad leaving, an event so catastrophically devastating that I have yet to be able to write about it other than to tell people what a lying cockwad he is and leave it at that.  Because he pretty much ruined my life and it has only been in the last year or so that I've managed to hustle things back into some semblance of order.  But it wasn't fun

Oh you handsome devil

Eric Bogosian's Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead was the other big album at that time.  I was obsessed with Eric Bogosian, both on Law and Order: CI and as a writer; I'd seen him read from The Perforated Heart at AWP and fell in love.  His writing was so visceral that it made me physically uncomfortable, which I sort of liked because it was a nice distraction from crying all the time.  Matthew got me a signed copy of Nails and I read it while working costumes for Beauty and the Beast.  It also helped me get through that clusterfuck.  Eric Bogosian pretty much saved my soul.

I was especially fond of "Blow Me."  I loved the explosive, raw frustration of the piece because it was exactly how I was feeling.  The whole world, as far as I was concerned, could just fuck off.  At one point, my mother, with whom I was having a pretty rough time with post-ex-stepdad-leaving, suggested that I get a tattoo.  I whirled on her and snarled I'm going to get a tattoo, I'm going to tattoo my EYELIDS and they're going to say BLOW. ME. so that when I close my eyes the whole world knows how I feel about 'em.

She never brought up getting tattooed again.

There was a time where I could recite "Blow Me" from memory.  I was going to perform it at the Stonecoast Talent Show but Matthew talked me out of it because he is occasionally a buzzkill.

I still love Bogosian, but I'm at a point in my life where I need a little more smooth.  Where people yelling doesn't make me feel better, it makes me feel worse.  The man is a comic genius, an amazing performer and very handsome (also, a sweetheart, he replied to my email).  Things have gotten surprisingly better, for the most part.  I've mended.  I don't think I've listened to Nails or 9 since that time, but oddly enough, it brings with it a weird sort of nostalgia, not putting me back in that awful, dark time, but rather, reminding me that somehow, I got through all of it. 

I think I'm better at making break-up mixes than I am making actual, real, "Hey, you're rad" mixes.  It might by my affiliation to the Smiths, but I absolutely rock at making a mix to get dumped by.  I've absolutely perfected the art of saying "to hell with you" through song.

Exhibit A: I made this for the same guy who adored me with Matthew Sweet's "Winonia" dumped me via Billy Bragg's "A Lover Sings"--one good mix deserves another.

-"Human" The Pretenders
-"Change Your Mind" The Killers
-"Wrapped Around My Finger" The Police
-"King of Wishful Thinking" Go West
-"(Still) Terminally Ambivalent Over You" The Real Tuesday Weld
-"Bouncing Off Clouds" Tori Amos
-"No Reply At All" Genesis
-"Not About Love" Fiona Apple
-"Boys on The Radio" Hole
-"I'm Still Standing" Elton John
-"You've Got Everything Now" The Smiths
-"Here's Where the Story Ends" The Sundays
-"I Don't Love You Anymore" Magnetic Fields
-"Nothing Lasts" Matthew Sweet (see what I did there?)

I mean, how is that not awesome?  It must have worked, because I never heard from him again, which is fine, because he had turned into kind of an ass.

I don't know if I'm going to ever actually get around to giving this one out (or finishing it--it's a tad on the short side), but it's too perfect not to share:

-"Take a Bow" Madonna
-"House of Cards" Radiohead
-"Swallow Tattoo" The Long Blondes
-"I Don't Believe You" the Magnetic Fields
-"Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" The Smiths
-"Passion Kills" the Fontanelles
-"Off My Line" the Spin Doctors
-"Cabo Cad" JaR

Love, Summer Camp and Billy Joel

"How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies
perhaps we don't fulfill each other's fantasies"

Billy Joel, "Summer Highland Falls"

For as much as I rag on Billy Joel, "Summer Highland Falls" will always be one of my favorite songs ever.  It's still sad and tragic and beautiful (especially the live version on The Millennium Concert; I've always maintained that Billy Joel, like Tori Amos, is better in concert) untarnished by the realization that Billy Joel is a fat rich crybaby.

For me, this song is 17 and The New York State Writer's Institute Summer Writing Program, which was 25 of the top young writers in the state.  It still remains one of the highest honors I have ever received, and I've been in Pank.  But the night before I left, Aaron dumped me (because Aaron was, among many things, a first-class asshole) leaving me mourning among strangers.

But I acted out, as I am wont to do, and made some friends by being incessantly quirky.  And I met a boy, Andrew, who was cute and sweet and actually liked me, which was sort of a rare thing at the time. We went on a walk and found a cool tower.  And then he asked me to Billy Joel night at the commons.  I was at a crossroads--Billy Joel was kind of Aaron and I's thing (our song was, appropriately, "And So It Goes" because Aaron was, among many things, insane) but here was a boy who was asking me to go someplace with him.  Luckily, something inside my 17 year old mind, in between thinking about Pokemon and MST3K, said "fuck that guy, Andrew wants to hang out with you, and Andrew is rad."

Billy Joel night, by the way, was a guy with a Casio keyboard playing Billy Joel songs.   We sat at white picnic tables.  All our other fellow campers were there.  When he played "Summer Highland Falls," I looked over at Andrew and he looked at me and we smiled at each other.  It was then that I knew that I was going to be just fine.

What with "Summer Highland Falls" as our song, you're probably not surprised that things ended kind of badly with Andrew despite not having ever really begun.  It sucked, but it wasn't unexpected, because life isn't always fair and sometimes both choices have consequences that far outweigh any benefits.  I don't blame either of us, because that's just how things go.  He hurt me and he may not have known it, and I know I hurt him without meaning to, but, like Billy Joel suggested, we couldn't fulfill each other's fantasies.  Despite this, I still thought of him fondly--if not a little wistfully--and that smile on a night when I needed to reclaim part of myself, even if it was just a song or two.

I touched base with him a little while ago and was kind of annoyed that I hadn't looked him up sooner, because he lives in Austin and I was in Austin last summer.  We agreed that if either of us was ever in the other person's time zone, we'd get dinner and catch up on all the years between us.  And we left it at that.

Most grand romances are not meant to be.  But I've found that the most epic of romances exist only in the span of a few short moments, when you're raw and unaware that something wonderful is happening until it's all over.  We can't marry everyone we meet, but that doesn't mean we can't, even just for a few seconds or minutes or hours, be in love without picking out china patterns and combining our bank accounts.  Sometimes love just needs to be that flutter of the heart as the object of your desire turns the corner, never to be seen again.

All that being said, Billy Joel is still a fucking ponce.

If Justified knew what was good for them, they'd use Justin Towne Earle's "Mama Said" as an ending montage of Boyd Crowder doing stuff.  Anything, really.  Drinking bourbon, unbuttoning his shirt (seriously, he needs to stop buttoning that top button, it's driving me nuts), driving his truck, turning around, showering in slow motion . . . it's sort of all-purpose.  It's got a fitting melody, perfect lyrics and the exact right melody for a story that takes place in backwoods Kentucky. And the way he says, "I used to drink, boys, I used to cuss," sounds exactly like something Boyd Crowder would say and exactly how he'd say it.  He'd even do that little thing where he nods his head just slightly to the side, closes his eyes and smiles just a little.  God, I love it when he does that.



Of course, if Justified knew what was good for them, they would have reduced Raylan to almost nothing and put the focus on the crime families of Harlan, because the Bennett clan, Dickie Crow (such a great name that I wish I'd thought of it) and the Crowders are a hell of a lot more interesting than him and stupid boring Winonia could ever dream of being.

Today's Playlist

-"Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" Tom Waits ("He's a lawyer/he ain't the one for ya")
-"Cure Kit" JaR ("Her stuff in boxes/out in the hall/I'll cut the phone lines/in case she calls")
-"Jackass" ("If you knew me/like I know myself/you'd hate me like/I hate myself")
-"(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" R.E.M ("It's not as though I really need you/if you were here I'd only leave you")
-"Genius" Warren Zevon ("Your protege don't care about art/I'm the one who always told you you were smart")
-"Nobody's Baby Now" Nick Cave ("These are her many letters/torn to pieces by long fingered hands")
-"My Winding Wheel" Ryan Adams ("Wear it out tonight/for anyone you think could outdo me")
-"King of Wishful Thinking" Go West ("I don't want to let you see/that you have made a hole in my heart")
-"Rubber Ring" The Smiths ("And when you're dancing/and laughing and finally living/hear my voice in our head and think of me kindly")
-"Cut Here" The Cure ("I miss you/I miss you/I miss you/so much")

How To Know You're Totally Over A Breakup

I was listening to "Mr. Wrong" by Cracker, previously off the 2nd mix CD Dwight gave me, titled She Doesn't Think My Tractor's Sexy Anymore (poor Renee Zellwegger) and I realized that it no longer reminds me of Dwight.

Instead, I picture Dennis "Beeper King" Duffy from 30 Rock.

Dispatch from the Dollar Bin: The Long Blondes "Someone to Drive You Home"

In transferring my CD collection to my iPod, I've been coming across a lot of albums I'd forgotten about, many of them impulse dollar-bin purchases from Last Vestige Records.  I'm paring down a lot, so I'm giving a these albums a second listen to see if they stay in the collection or eventually put them in a box and offer to trade them with my friends, hopefully for something cooler.  This is one of them:

I bought The Long Blondes Someone to Drive You Home for $3 sometime shortly after Dwight and I split up.  I was in the dead center of my neo-noir phase, coming out of my music journalism phase, newly relocated to Oneonta and just about to enter grad school.  This album's purchase, more than it's actual music, reflect this perhaps more than any other acquired at the time.

Yeah, I'm Awesome

I should like this album.  It's got tons of noir and 60's babe references (Shout outs to Edie Sedgwick and Arlene Dahl, in "Lust in the Movies," as well as the opening line "Give me a good film noir and a bottle of gin" from "Swallow Tattoo) and "Giddy Stratospheres" might as well have been written about the situation that inspired me to buy the album in the first place.  It's got a certain old-skool ska feel to it, which is kind of cool, and the album cover is a painting of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.  As a girl who uses a photo of herself wearing a Tom Waits cabbie cap in a dive bar in Binghamton  as one of her writer headshots, this should be my absolute favorite album after The Heart of Saturday Night.

But that's just it.  It's too self aware.  Awesome, Long Blondes, you own records and watch black and white movies and drink gin.  Yes, I did all those things in the year I bought this album (Dwight and I used to drink gimlets like in The Long Goodbye, which makes us clearly cooler than The Long Blondes) but seriously, give it up.  Yes, you're cool and the girls you're writing songs about don't deserve the boys you're pining for because they don't get your kitchy 60's references that everyone gets because Edie Sedgewick isn't exactly Jean Moorhead.  But that doesn't mean you have to write a whole album about it.  The Long Blondes have the nostalgia, but they lack the clever wordplay that someone like, say, Warren Zevon or Morrissey has.  The words are all crammed in, like they just set a diary entry to a fairly generic (but catchy!) guitar riff.  Kate Johnson's voice is great, but it's also generic of every hipster girl who thinks she's amazingly artistic and deep.  I know, because I sing just like her, and I am writing in a blog partially named after a Duran Duran song while wearing a hoodie festooned with a vintage Morrissey tee-shirt a stalker gave me and a free patch I got at Forbidden Plant when he was promoting Ringleader of the Tormentors that, incidentally, is also the same hoodie I'm wearing in my uber-cool hipster photo up there.

Keep or Giveaway: Giveaway
Song to Save: "Swallow Tattoo." 

A confession

Those of you who've been following this blog since it's early incarnation (back when it was called the much-catchier "Kill Your iPod") know that I've been fairly resistant to digital music.  That's all changed now, and I feel I owe you that much of a confession.

I have an iPod, and I love it.

Please know that I didn't purchase it.  My friend Eeon gave it to me, either as a bribe or because he's a very nice person.  It's a mini in a white silicone case with my pink Monster High headphones.  What I really love is the "shuffle" feature.  I'm in the process of loading all my music onto it, and I love the randomness of hearing Steely Dan's "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" followed by Billy Idol's "Dancing with Myself" followed by Electronic's "Some Distant Memory."

Part of it is a desire to pair down what I own.  I'm in the process of going through my CD collection and trying to figure out what stays and what goes.  In the digital era, do I really need Reel Big Fish's Turn the Radio Off if, on the rare occasion when I do listen to it, I'm only going to play two songs before I remember how dumb it is.  If ten years from now, if my computer explodes and my ipod melts and I absolutely need to hear "Sellout," I trust that I will be able to find it somewhere in the vastness of the digital universe.
 
But the great thing about picking through 500+ CDs is discovering music I'd forgotten about--like the Crash Test Dummies' awesome cover of XTC's "Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" or The Long Blondes "Giddy Stratospheres" or Feeder's "Comfort in Sound."

In order to continue justifying my music smugness, however, I've decided that stuff I don't care a whole lot about is going to be purchased digitally and music I love is going to be purchased on vinyl.  No more CDs.  I managed to pick up Donald Fagan's The Nightfly, Tom Waits Nighthawks at the Diner and Huey Lewis and the News Sports for $15 bucks total, and I have to say, no digital transfer of Fagan's "IGY" comes close to how unbelievable smooth it sounds on vinyl (it's what they use to test the sound systems at The Beacon theater in NYC, where I saw Steely Dan back in Sept) .

Clearly, I'm not the only person who realizes this (even if I was into vinyl before it's resurgence, as Kill Your iPod readers will remember) because I was crossing through FYE the other day and THEY had a vinyl section.  And not just a bunch of old Eagles records--new stuff by Taylor Swift (blech) and reissues of classics like The Clash (yes!).

Smugness justified.  Carry on.

Discovery

I've discovered that it is impossible to have a bad day when you've started it with Huey Lewis and the News "The Power of Love"

Try it on a Monday morning!

Screw You, SOPA!

This blog has been blacked out for long enough--but make sure to tell your idiot moron governing body to keep their filthy paws off our internet!

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Justin Townes Earle at Foothills

For the last few weeks I've been obsessed with Justin Townes Earle's "Harlem River Blues," which is about as close to a come-to-Jesus moment as I've ever had with a song.  Not because of the lyrics, which are ultimately about suicide, but just in that it's so exubrant and whole and uplifting and spiritually fulfulling that I tremble whenever I hear it.  I want to put it on a mix tape and send it to Walton Goggins and tell him I think of Boyd Crowder whenever I hear it in hopes that he likes to too.  I have become a disciple of JTE.



. . . . despite the fact that he looks like an Irvine Welsh character



So he was performing at Foothills last night and for twenty bucks, I had to go. Thor went too, and we both sat in revered silence while he played.  I'm still new to his music, so I didn't know most of his songs, and although he played "Harlem River Blues" and my heart palpatated and I actually trembled, I was sad that he didn't play "Can't Hardly Wait," as he's been known to do.

But he officially won my heart when some drunk guy yelled "Play John Prine!" and he yelled back "Don't tell me what to do!"  I want to marry him. 

Also, I got Harlem River Blues on vinyl, and he signed it.  It's the only signed record in my collection.

Lyrics I Like: "Boys of Summer" by Don Henley

Who's with me that the famous Don Henley lyric "I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong/after the Boys of Summer have gone . . ." would be a hell of a lot better if it was:

"I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong/after the poison spiders have gone . . . "

 I think it's a much more evocative lyric, describing two lovers separated by a giant spider invasion, hoping to be reunited when and if they both survive . . . way better than some dumb summer romance.

That's what is sounds like he's saying, anyways.  Why Warren Zevon hired such a mushmouth as a backup singer, I'll never know.

This Week in Musical Obsessions

"The Moment" by Atomic Tom.  I don't sleep when I'm in NYC and find myself watching a lot of basic cable, usually culminating with me catching a few precious minutes of zzz's in front of Two and Half Men.

One night, while flipping channels, I came across the Fearless Music showcase, featuring Atomic Tom's "The Moment."  As you've probably noticed, I'm pretty damn cynical about modern music, but this just blew my mind--it reminded me of something I could remember, struck up an emotion I couldn't name. 




I like real love songs--songs like The Replacements "I Will Dare" that capture the awkward desparation of falling in deeply, madly, passionately infatuated in love. "The Moment" is exactly that.  It's about that one moment where you get that absolute rush of love, those great terrifying shivers that cause you to seize up and go silent (or worse, babble) in your beloved's presence.

I'm pretty much done falling in love.  I've met the man of my dreams and we've been together for awhile.  But sometimes I miss that tipping-backwards feeling of a new love.  That's where music comes in.  It's fantasy.  For 4 minutes and 35 seconds, I can remember that rush without having to go through all the trouble of falling in love again.

Record Party!

My friend/Odd Couples stage manager Thor came over last night for an oft-delayed record party.  Holding a record party is simple, you just get some records and play them and maybe have some food and talk about whatever comes to mind. We talked about our high school music teacher Mrs. Sobieski, apartment hunting, tattoos we'll never get but like to joke about, really, just random stuff.

One of the really cool things about record parties is that because the record sleeves are so BIG, you notice the names of the musicians who played on them and can draw neat parallels between the session musicians.  For instance, last night I noticed that Rick Marotta played drums on both Steely Dan's The Royal Scam and Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy.  Neat, huh?  And sure, you can look that up on the internet, but without it right in front of you, would you?

We got through Katy Lied, The Queen is Dead, Rockabilly Classics and the first disc of Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King.  We chatted.  We drank pink lemonade.

And then Thor put on Justin Towne Earle's Midnight at the Movies and the game changed.

When I was finishing the first season Justified, starting the currently in-between-titled novel I'm writing now (not for NaNoWriMo) and planning for my two-week trip to Oklahoma, I became very interested in Kentucky.  I rented Harlan County USA and watched it the instant it came in the mail.  What really struck me about it was all the singing.  They were out on the picketline, singing union songs from the early part of the century.  One woman wrote a song to teach everyone.  Not in a "I'm going to go to Nashville and record an album" kind of song, but a song to say what she was thinking.  Song, in this culture, was a means of communication.  It was raw and unacompanied and sung to get a message across.

And that's what I heard when I heard Justin Towne Earle.  It was music in it's pure, raw form, and it was heartbreaking and sad and lovely and wonderful.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted to put it on a mix CD and mail it to Walton Goggins.  I wanted to listen to that album all night long.  He covered "Can't Hardly Wait," which automatically endears him to me because I love The Replacements.



That's the magic of a record party.  Your friends bring some stuff you don't know, you play some stuff they don't know.  Thor got his first real taste of Warren Zevon.  I discovered Justin Townes Earle.  And at the end of the evening when we said goodnight, I realized how such a quiet little evening had reintroduced me to two friends--not just Thor, but the power and the core of music itself.

Halloween Playlist

Halloween is my favorite holiday, easy.  I love the costumes, the candy, the movies (Ed Wood, old-skool Tim Burton before he sold out and became dumb, Elvira, the Addams Family, the whole campy lot)  The halloween parties I threw in college are still talked about, and this year's party will mark a whole decade of my annual bash.  This year Ian and I are going as the Maitlands.  Not only is it an awesome couples costume, which I've been bugging him to do for years, but it fulfills my lifelong dream of being Geena Davis.



Not Pictured: Me Marrying Jeff Goldblum


I hate going to club Halloween parties and hearing them play whatever crap is on their ipod.  I can dance to "Bad Romance" any day of the year (not that I would).  We only get to hear "The Monster Mash" once time a year, and I want to hear it at least six times, followed by "Dead Man's Party" and then back to "the Monster Mash".

For those readers who are throwing their own parties, here's the official Record of the Month Club Halloween Playlist, compiled over ten successful party years. Spin these and your party is guarenteed to howl.

-"Bump in the Night" A-Teens (yes, it's from Scooby Doo 2--but it is consistantly the most requested song at my parties)
-"Dead Man's Party" Oingo Boingo
-"Monster Mash" Crypt Kicker Five
-"Hell" Squirrel Nut Zippers
-"Hayride to Hell" The Fontanelles (on the Hobgoblins soundtrack--hard to find, but if you're interested, shoot me an email and I can show you where to get a copy)
-"Monster Rap" Elvira
-"The Addams Tango" (because where else are you going to see Indiana Jones tangoing with The Joker?)
-"Zombie Stomp" Elvira
-"Weird Science" Oingo Boingo
-"Boogie Man" White Zombie
-"Haunted House" Ray Stevens (my dad's favorite)
-"Moondance" Michael Buble (more dancible than the original--for the couples)
-"The Time Warp" Rocky Horror Picture Show (even the people who don't dance will dance to this.  That being said, I hate the Rocky Horror Picture Show and always have.  Kevin Murphy agrees with me on this.)
-"Thriller" Michael Jackson (for years I had a "no Thriller" policy, but my friend Seema finally convinced me to include it, and it's stayed ever since.  Still not one of my favorites)
-"Remains of the Day" Danny Elfman (from The Corpse Bride.  Damn it, I love Danny Elfman)
-"Devil in My Car" B-52's
-"Feed My Frankenstein" Alice Cooper
-"Little Demon" Screamin' Jay Hawkins
-"The Ghost in You" Siouxsie and the Banshees (again, for the couples--there's something sincere and sweet about seeing couples in costume slow dance, and it gives everyone else a chance to get a drink and see if there are any fun-sized Snickers left)
-"Every Day is Halloween" Ministry (I like to play this at the end of a party--it's a nice reminder to come back next year)
-"Halloween" The Dead Kennedys
-"Living Dead Girl" White Zombie
-"Cemetary Polka" Tom Waits
-"Halloween" The Misfits (mosh pit!!!!)
-"Ghostbusters" Ray Parker Jr. (not Jack Black)



-"Bad Devil" Devon Townsend (This was played at the 2006 party only)
-"Pet Cemetary" The Ramones
-"Poor Skeleton Steps Out" XTC (not a dance song, but still fun)
-"The Ghosts that Haunt Me" Crash Test Dummies (very chill--good for when people are coming in)
-"Cretin Hop" the Ramones
-"Halloween" Siouxsie and the Banshees
-"Red Right Hand" Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
-"Whistlin' Past the Graveyard" Tom Waits
-"Don't Fear the Reaper" Blue Oyster Cult
-"Werewolves of London" Warren Zevon
-"Who's That Creepin'" Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
-"All My Friends are Zombies" The Pricillas
-"Party at the Leper Colony" Weird Al
-"When You're Evil" Voltaire
-"Black Magic Woman" Santana
-"Boris the Spider" The Who
-"Beetlejuice theme" Danny Elfman
-"Riding on the Wings of Steam (remix)" Chris Vrenna (from American McGee's Alice)
-"Gremlins theme" Jerry Goldsmith (I can't explain it, but every time this came, partygoers start hopping up and down.)
-"Phantom of the Opera" Nightwish
-"Bela Lugosi's Dead" Bauhaus
-"Nature Trail to Hell" Weird Al
-"The X-Files Theme"
-"Masqurade" Phantom of the Opera
-"This is Halloween" The Nightmare Before Christmas
-"Requiem" Mozart
-"I Put a Spell on You" Screamin' Jay Hawkins
-"Dead Man's Party" Hillbilly Hellcats
-"Mean Green Mother from Outer Space" Levi Stubbs (from Little Shop of Horrors)
-"Eye of the Zombie" John Fogerty
-"Zombie Zoo," Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
-"No One Lives Forever" Oingo Boingo
-"Surfin' Dead" The Cramps
 
(The following pair have to be ripped from the videos themselves--they're almost impossible to find otherwise, but well worth the effort)

-"Transylvania 6-500" The Creature with the Atomic Brain


-"Squeezit The Moocher" The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo
 (From Forbidden Zone)

Holy cats, I just got back from seeing Steely Dan, and it was awesome.  "Rarities" night at Beacon . . . demos, songs they wrote for other people, songs that didn't fit on albums, songs they only did in concert and one that go erased in the studio during Gaucho and had never been re-recorded . . . and, of course, "Peg" and "Reelin' in the Years."

It was too awesome for words .  . . but worry not, I'll have plenty of words on the Emmys tomorrow . . . well, really only one . . . either a "NO!" or a "WHOO-HOO!"

Food. Sir Mix-A-Lot and My Ass Complex

For some reason, at every wedding I've been too, the DJ plays "Baby Got Back."  Nothing ruins a hip-hop song more than seeing your mom/your dentist/your friend's aunt doing the humpty-hump.

I love this song, but it's giving me a complex about my own backside.  I've been told that I have, as Mickey Rourke put it in 9 1/2 Weeks, a "heart-shaped ass," but at 5'3" and 98 lbs (through no dieting or planning of my own) I'm sad because Sir Mix A-Lot wouldn't stop his Mercades to whistle at me.  I'm fine with being an A-cup, but I wouldn't mind having a bigger booty so I could effectively dance to this song because as it is, I feel like a dope out there.  I've only recently gotten over not being a Brick House, but I'm just not content to be lumped in with the "skinny girls."  Especially because when people say "skinny girls" it always comes with a sneer.

I love food.  And I know, people hate when "skinny girls" say that they love to eat, but ask any man I've ever gone out with and he'll comfirm, which has always made me a very popular date.  I love to cook (which also made me a popular date).  I love red meat and good cheese and crusty bread, dear God, I love bread.  And fruit desserts topped with lots of fresh whipped cream.  And bacon and eggs in the morning. Salt bagels with Nutella.  Life is too short not to eat delicious food . . . especially with beautiful boys.  So please, Sir Mix-A-Lot, show me some love.

That being said, if I am ever in a position to make a mix tape for Walton Goggins, you know this is going to be the first song on there. 

College Mix CD Time!

I came of age during that shameful period of music known as the late 90's.  This was when VH1 ruled the airwaves, handing us down the top ten videos of the day (who decided these things?) in a never-ending loop of Smash Mouth,  Shawn Colvin, Sugar Ray, Fastball, and Savage Garden.  The radio was alive with ska and neo-swing from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and the Cherry Poppin' Daddies.  Thanks to the Spice Girls, a short girl could easily purchase platform shoes tall enough so she could kiss Jeff Goldblum squarely on the mouth, should the chance ever present itself (my knee-high platform boots had dragons up the side and caused me to be late to math class enough times to warrent more than one detention).

My college years were earmarked by two things--Clerks (both the movie and the cartoon, which I still quote) and the 90's music I had come of age with.  Now that I didn't have to share the lone family computer and dial-up internet access with three sisters, a mother who was finishing college and online-poker obsessed stepdad, I was free to peruse Kazaa for songs I was too cheap to buy on CD and that had been lost to mix-tape technology years ago.  Better still, my friend Courtney was living in a dorm with fast internet (for the time) and a computer that could burn CDs.  I would send her lists and she would return with CDs when she came home on weekends.  Fiona Apple.  Barenaked Ladies.  Classics like "Call Me Al" and "Burnin' for You."  Theme songs from TV shows like The Advntures of Pete and Pete and Roundhouse   I played Love Amomg Freaks "Clerks" and wrote chapters for what was sure to be my breakout novel (it wasn't). 

Baby Boomers and hipsters like to mock people for liking late 90's/early 2000 music, always forgetting that it was what surrounded us.  Our parents could play all the Beatles records they wanted, our older siblings could give us Smiths CDs, but like it or hate it, this was the music that we came into our own with.  For a lot of us, these were the first CDs we'd purchase with our own money, making that transition from cassette to CD (my first was Savage Garden's eponymous debut--and for the record, "I Want You" still holds up--the rest don't, but that remains a solidly crafted song--also, the keyboard player was smokin' hot).  Embarassing as some of them are, there's a lot of joy there, a reminder of carefree days . . . and really, isn't the whole point of music to make a listener feel something? 

Next time you're in the car, bust out the Goo Goo Dolls.  Sing "She's So High" to your girlfriend at karaoke.  Play "Fly" at a party and see how many of your friend's faces light up.  Tell high school stories.  Remember old jokes and quote movies from your teenager years. You have nothing to be ashamed of.

From the Vault/Saddest Songs: The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs Vol. 1

My friend Bix understood exactly how I felt about the Magentic Fields 69 Love Songs vol 1.  I had put "The Book of Love" and "All My Little Words" on a mix I made for him, and he came up to me with this wonderous look on his face, as though he couldn't believe I knew the Magnetic Fields too.  Because with all the white noise of music out there, between Lady GaGa and Nickleback and Katy Perry and Justin Beiber and all the other billions of bands overtaking the airwaves, it's almost wonderous to find someone who knows the same little band you do

He, like me, played that album over and over and over, terrified to listen to anything else by them for fear it wouldn't be as good.  "Then I heard "Papa Was a Rodeo," he told me one night over champagne at an art gallery in Brunswick Maine.  "And I played that one over and over.  And I knew."  He had this dreamy, sincere look on his face, as though the two of us were speaking the secret language only Magnetic Fields listeners understand.  Because there's something so intimate about the music that you swear you must be the only person on earth who feels the lyrics, and when you find someone else who feels them that same way, it's almost magic.

My sister Shaun, giver of all things wonderful and musical (including The Smiths and Siouxsie and the Banshees) gave me 69 Love Songs for Hanukkah one year.  I took to it instantly, playing it through headphones on my discman, laying on the inflatable mattress I slept on during visits home, mouthing along in the dark as though the words on my breath might somehow reach their intended targets in the universe.

69 Love Songs was my album for boys who had no intentions being for me what I needed or wanted them to be.  "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side," "Absolutely Cuckoo" and "My Sentimental Melody," in that order, were all songs for Dwight, spelling out the ever-deepening emotional divide between us.  "Come Back from San Francisco" went on the first CD I made Michael, "I Don't Want to Get Over You" was for James, who I eventually got over and "Reno Dakota" was for Jay, who had a habit of vanishing for years on end, leaving me wondering if or when he might ever reappear. 

And like any good album, it grew on me.  I discovered songs that I'd skipped in early listenings now held a curious truth to them, like the cleverness of "Chicken With it's Head Cut Off" and I can't hear "All My Little Words" without picturing Jay Karns in the shower and Walton Goggins lifting weights.  

From the Vault: The Pretenders "Back on The Chain Gang" or, The Hardest Pop Song On Earth

I've been trying to get back into singing lately.  My friend and Odd Couple co-star Tio was a finalist for the local Idol competition, and I've been thinking about trying out.  I did a lot of singing in high school--musical theater, showchoir, chamber ensemble and all the terrible things that come with them.  That, and I never scored below a 5 out of 6 (usually getting a 6) at NYSSMA.

But a neck injury in college and a bout of infection that left me sounding like Tom Waits for six weeks when I was 22 more or less ruined my chances of ever being the screeching soprano in a metal band (or opera, whichever) and my descision to no longer persue musical theater left me with very few options for professional singing.  I don't play an instrument and there aren't a lot of karaoke options here, so I just sort of reduced myself to singing in the car and, occasionally, karaoke.

But I was listening to the Pretenders, and I was thinking about all my friends that do Idol every year, and thought that maybe I should get back into it.  I put "Back on the Chain Gang" on my record player, looked at my cat sitting politely on the couch, and, as I began to sing, I made a discovery.

"Back on the Chain Gang" is the hardest song in the world to sing.

My friend/writing partner Matthew makes fun of me for loving this song.  He calls out Chrissie Hynde as being a proto Natalie Merchant, a whispy little thing with a fairy voice.  Her voice is a little on the fey side, but what she does have is a master's control over it.  "Back on the Chain Gang" is riddled with grace notes, which less-talented singers usually gloss right over.  This explains why American Idol-type covers of The Pretenders always suck so monumentally.  Because they key isn't sliding up and down the scale, it's about hitting each one of those notes individually and moving to the next one.  It's a lot harder than it sounds.

This, by the way, coming from someone who routinely (and against her will) sang "Seasons of Love" from Rent, which a lot of musical theater types will agree is the hardest song in the genre to not screw up.  "Back on the Chain Gang" is a million times harder. Because not only are you trying to hit each of those notes, but you're trying to convey the same tough/tender/melancholy/hopeful tone of the song.  It's not about making it sound "pretty," it's about making it sound as real as Hynde makes it.

Maybe someday I'll get it . . . but for now, I'm having fun trying.