New music

I’d just been thinking recently that I hadn’t stumbled upon or bought any new music recently, and how that was a shame. It’s partly due to failing to set up any more than podcast downloads on a new laptop; it’s also partly due to no longer living near the friend who used to gift me with CDs on a fairly regular basis, which had the effect of making me lazy about seeking new stuff out on my own.

This morning on the way to work I heard a pretty acoustic tune on one of the local college radio stations and stopped my scan to listen to it. It was a dude with a guitar, and he was singing about dreams and manifestations, and ended with a chorus of “goodness gracious, good night.” (I promise I didn’t just like the song because I say “goodness gracious” a lot.)

I sat at a traffic light as the song ended, scribbling what lyrics I could remember on a gas station receipt so that I could look it up when I got to work. I wondered if it was some Josh Ritter or Ryan Adams I’d never heard, though I wasn’t convinced it was either of them.

After some searching, and a failed attempt at calling the college radio station, I discovered the song I’d heard was called “Goodness Gracious,” was off an album of the same name, and was by an outfit I’d never heard of called The Heligoats. That’s right: THE HELIGOATS. I had the requisite old-lady response of “What the hell kind of a name is that?”, then sought out some other samples of their music.

Dear fellow listeners, what I found I liked a lot. It’s lovely, alt-country-folky-poppy stuff, with kind of weird and great lyrics. I only listened insofar as the Amazon sampler allowed me, but I intend to investigate further.

What a nice treat for a Friday morning.

When the words are touched with sorrow

I had the oddest experience this morning: upon hearing “Your Wildest Dreams,” my brain went haywire. Specifically, it went, “Oh this reminds me of aerobics. No, college! No, the hallways of junior high. Or was it high school … grade school?”

Figuring it was a lost cause, I hit scan to find another song, but immediately changed my mind and went back. I thought by exposing myself to the entire song I might get some clarity around my associations with it. And I have to say … that didn’t work at all.

The best I can latch on to is some vague feeling of being alone and either hearing or singing this, and being filled with the sort of weird yearning/hope that certain love songs inspire, and it turns out I also seem to know most of the lyrics. My cortex is crumbling.

On a more concrete and delightful note, you will not want to miss the oh-so-’80s video saga:

Real wild child

My colleague MK has written about the aerobics craze with some affection in these pages, and I share her warm fuzziness for the oh-so-eighties, Jacki Sorenson/Spandex/Reebok-obsessed madness.

My own brief fling with aerobics, though, I remember rather less fondly. I was a first-term freshman in college in the early nineties, and — thinking I was oh-so-smart — I decided to get one of the four required P.E. credits out of the way first thing. Seriously: I signed up for an 8 a.m. section of aerobics, so my first college class was a gym class.

And I hated it. I have never been a person excessively fond of exercise, and I quickly learned that while I was hauling my ass out of bed three times a week for aerobics, the rest of the campus, save the other twenty or so ladies (they were all ladies) in my class, was slumbering happily. Lesson #1 in College Time for TGOTS. The class itself was just your usual, peppy aerobics class, taught by a succession of peppy young women from town who would bop in wearing their cute little outfits, boom box in hand. The class wasn’t even excessively challenging — I just did not like having to be there one bit.

In the years since, I seem to have both blocked the memory of aerobics class and fixed it permanently in a dark corner of my brain. On the one hand, I can’t remember much more about the class than the little I’ve written above. This is unusual for a gal who could tell you which of the people who became her friends, or whose lives intersected with hers in some way, were in pretty much every single class she took in college, all the way back to fall term freshman year. I’m the gal who memorized the facebook (back when they were facebooks, not Facebook) before even setting foot on campus and who studied it religiously once there. So, to not remember another soul from aerobics class is odd for me.

However, hearing Iggy Pop singing “Real Wild Child (Wild One)” I immediately get a shiver of distress, remembering my early mornings in that little dance studio, half awake and bouncing and lunging, reminding myself that I was going to be glad, both later in the day and later in my college career, to have this P.E. credit checked off on my list of distribution requirements.

Man, though. I did not enjoy those classes.

(I have to add here, having discovered, just this morning, that it was Iggy Pop who sang the song that most reminds me of aerobics, that I am haunted by his “Lust for Life” as well. I once worked for a company that did brand management for this one major cruise line, and I helped write endless copy for their marketing materials. They then fired my firm, yet must have had rights to all we wrote because a year or so later, that cruise line’s ads with “Lust for Life” in the background were all over the television — while a narrator read copy that my colleagues and I had written for other purposes. It was bizarre. Not as bizarre as a punk rocker selling out to a cruise line commercial, but bizarre. And at least old Iggy got a fat paycheck out of the experience.)

Do the jerk now

So here was my experience in the car today, during the daily scan:

1. Hear appealing sax-heavy Motown strains.

2. Slam scan button to stop radio on appealing sax-heavy Motown strains.

3. Think almost immediately of Murphy Brown and how the show would start with various Motown tunes.

4. Wonder if this particular song was ever actually used on Murphy Brown, or if I was just so affected by that show that I associate Motown with it.

5. Cringe slightly at that thought.

6. Recover, and remember how great a show Murphy Brown was — and how much it reminds me of one MamaKitt, who loved it.

7. Wonder if we’ve ever talked about MB in the blog before.

8. Realize that while I recognize the tune, I have no idea what it’s called, who sings it, or what the lyrics are.

9. Focus hard to suss out and memorize a couple lines so I can Google it.

10. Get home, Google, and discover the song is “Shotgun” by Jr. Walker and the All Stars.

11. Ask self, Who knew?

12. Wonder how it’s possible to have a strong “oh yeah, it’s THAT song” reaction to a tune without having the slightest piece of mental information about it beyond recognition of the music.

13. Wonder how many other songs are in my head like that.

14. Wonder if this happens to other people.

15. Blog lamely about it.

Seriously, though, it’s an interesting question, isn’t it? How a song can feel so familiar, but when parsed be revealed as really only half known?

I’m a little ashamed to admit how many aspects of “Shotgun” had escaped me until today, because it’s a genuinely fantastic song. You could do worse, if you’re having a slog of a day, than to treat yourself to this:

A lesson learned in time

Last week, Jr and I spent the afternoon with my sister and two of her three boys. It was a Friday, but the Sunday comics were still on the kitchen table, and at one point my almost-nine-year-old nephew began perusing them.

After a minute, he looked up at me. “Is there a Green Day song that goes something like ‘I hope you had the time of your life’?”

Why yes there is, I said. Why? He proceeded to read aloud from the teen-angst strip Zits, which had amended the lyrics to read something like, ‘I hope you had the (sober, sane, smart) time of your life’ and given the attribution ‘Green Day-ish.’

Needless to say, I busted out with the song, further cementing myself as the weirdest-but-almost-coolest aunt ever. As I sang, I reflected on a question that occasionally surfaces in my brain: How come comics are so totally not meant for kids, despite their colorful candy coating?

This thought gained even more prominence a moment later, when my nephew looked up and said, “Why would someone build a statue of Obama that looked like Stalin?”

Why indeed.

The comics are weird, are they not? I remember when we were growing up there were two separate and very public squabbles in our local newspaper, one about where Mark Trail should live (the sports page, apparently, because the editors moved it) and one about where Doonesbury should live (the op-ed page became its new home). People were pass-ion-ate about this topic, and letters to the editor ran for weeks. Those were the days.

Anyhow, it does continue to strike me as odd that the comics so often contain adult themes. Not in the vein of my new obsession, Sesame Street, which manages to speak to adults and kids at once with clever layering. The comics just flat-out speak to adults in picture form.

Another sister and I have a longstanding joke about the way she reads the comics, which is with deep, intense concentration, furrowed brow, and nary a laugh. Maybe that’s how they’re meant to be read after all. That’s certainly how my nephew looked as he puzzled over sobriety and socialism at the kitchen table.

Tuesday night addendum

Roller rinks + Springsteen? All in the first five minutes of Glee?

Tell ME Ryan Murphy doesn’t read this blog!

Give me things that don’t get lost

This morning, Neil Young made me think of an old friend, she of the sheet-ironing teen mother. I heard her insistent voice, unbidden, echoing through time from a high school car or classroom: “You know, the one that goes, ‘Old man take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you were.’”

As was so often the case, I hadn’t known the song before her tutorial, but would soon realize it was inescapable on our local radio station.

That was all I had this morning, until I realized Neil was making me think about someone else entirely: the graphic designer who worked on the magazine where I used to be an editor.

He was a freelancer, so our relationship existed almost entirely over the phone. I’ve had lots of these over the years, and they end up being both weirdly intimate and very misguided, because you develop an image of the person long before you ever meet that always — at least, if you’re me — turns out to be off-base. I still remember being sure that a male photographer I’d talked to for years had a thick mane of long blond hair, and staring, befuddled, when I met him and he turned out to have short, dark hair. Right voice, wrong head.

It wasn’t quite the same with this designer, because I’d met him once or twice, so I knew what he looked like. Although his build was always smaller than I remembered. Anyhow, the point is that we spent hours on the phone together, especially during my last year on the job, when I was a little less concerned about how I spent my time. One of us would call to discuss some design detail — a messed-up font, a missing photo, the whereabouts of a set of proofs — and after we’d cleared that up in five minutes or so, we’d spend the next 45 minutes talking about … wait for it … music.

This guy was passionate about Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, and he would regale me with tales of seeing them in concert in the ’70s, his flat upstate-New York accent rising to an excited pitch. He was into newer music too, and would wax on about people like Lucinda Williams. And he had even started watching American Idol, and couldn’t get over the fact that Ryan Seacrest, a veritable nobody at the time, was trying to coin his own personal sign-off. He would often leave me voicemails that ended, “OK, Seacrest out.”

We had a hell of a good time. And then I left the job, and a year or two later I heard that he was replaced with a new designer. And a year or so after that, his wife died of cancer, and I was too cowardly to reach out. And a year or two after that — my math is bad, but now we’re only a year or so earlier than today — he dropped me an email, out of the blue. We had a happy, high-energy exchange that lasted about  two days, and then he was gone again.

He’s raising two daughters and trying to make a living and … I don’t know anything else about his current life. I should give him a call.  If nothing else, we could still have a good laugh at Ryan Seacrest’s expense.

I can live and breathe and see the sun

“In a Big Country” is one of those songs that I never think about, that I go years without hearing, that is nonetheless filed somewhere in the overflowing slush pile of my brain. I hear the opening notes and I know the song instantly, and reflexively reach to turn the radio volume up.

This is one of those songs from my earliest days of listening to pop radio (which is probably part of the reason it still resonates all these years later). Like Madness’s “Our House,” which Wikipedia tells me came out around the same time, “In a Big Country” makes me think of the little saltbox house where my family lived in the early 1980s, and of the little rectangular black radio that I kept tuned to WJBQ in my little white bedroom.

I don’t have much more of a story about it than that, really, but I have (as evidenced by this and other blog entries) been thinking quite a bit lately about how I came to discover pop music, fixating on songs from that era when I happen upon them. I know my experience was different from yours, MK, seeing as you had all those older cool folks around and I was an oldest child, but I’m interested in people’s memories of when they first started listening to the radio. Do you remember, music lovers, how it all began? The hows and whys and wherefores of your earliest listening?

I looked up Big Country, singers of “In a Big Country,” on Wikipedia today, not having had the slightest idea about the band beyond its name. Turns out they had only the one real hit in the U.S., but played together for quite a long time. The story ends tragically in 2001 with the suicide of the lead singer, I’m sorry to say. But I was interested to read about how they experimented with technology to make their generic rock band instruments produce traditional Scottish and symphonic sounds. Fascinating. And a reminder that, like Craig Ferguson and the Fratellis, lots of good things come from Scotland.

It’s getting very hard to stay

My only real association with “Allentown” is a memory of my sisters enjoying/picking on the way that I, as a seven-year-old, sang the line, “Ask them to dance/Dance with them slo-ow.” (That’s how I have sung it for the last 28 years, although I see now that the verbs are,  logically enough, in the past tense.)

Even then I recognized that the world Billy Joel was depicting — of fathers at war and on the shore and mothers in the USO, whatever that might be — was a significant one, to be revered and mourned and yearned for in some not-altogether-clear-to-me way.

I was less clear on the fact that the song was really mourning the much more recent past, the still-unfolding present, really, the closure of steel mills and lengthening unemployment lines and growing despair.

When I did finally put it together, I thought Billy had created a fairly moving, if slightly too perky, tribute to the situation.

That was until I saw the video this morning. We have naked steelworkers showering! Half-naked steelworkers … working! Cheerleaders! Fireworks! Billy as wandering minstrel!

I don’t know quite what this is, but a somber tribute it is not. Since I was cable-deprived during the rise of MTV, this is literally the first time I’ve seen this. In fact, I think it’s only the second Billy Joel video I’ve ever seen, the other being “Uptown Girl.” Somehow early-Billy videos are a concept that’s never even crossed my mind, and I might now have to go in search of some others.

After I watched this one once, I went in search of the pop-up video version, which is predictably ridiculous. I’m having trouble getting it to appear here, but should you have 3:46 to spare, behold.

Marooned

Remember a few years back when Maroon 5 was all over the radio?

I recall hearing “This Love” for the first time and  trying to puzzle out if it was Justin Timberlake or some new wannabe. Twas, of course, the latter, but I’ll be damned if those boys weren’t everywhere for a few months/years.

One of the places they were was in the movie Love, Actually, which I think, actually, I’ve already noted here is one of my all-time favorites. I’ll eat up pretty much anything Richard Curtis does, from L,A to Four Weddings and a Funeral to Bridget Jones’s Diary. Give me a wry British film filled with lovable gangs of friends and a little romance, and I’m yours forever.

This weekend I watched Pirate Radio — or, as it was known in the U.K., The Boat that Rocked. (Which is the better title? I’m leaning toward the UK version. Talk amongst yourselves.) It was a very good, if imperfect, movie about the uneasy birth of rock ‘n’ roll radio in the United Kingdom. But the most pertinent aspect of it, for these pages, was the way in which Curtis — an obvious lover and strategic user in films of music — deployed now-classic tunes in his depiction of the moment they were born.

We have all heard “All Day and All of the Night,” “Dancing in the Street,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” ten trillion times. But Curtis and crew manage, in Pirate Radio, to create a sense of excitement around the broadcast of these songs that made even this viewer — inured to their power by endless repeats on classic rock radio (not to mention manglings by Muzak and high school marching bands and the like) — shiver with delight.

I highly recommend watching the movie yourself to see just how they did this; it’s a combination of the joy with which the deejays spin their illicit records and the even greater joy their broadcasts elicit from listeners across the country.

And this speaks to the most fundamental reason I like Richard Curtis movies: they are about JOY and MUSIC and the JOY OF MUSIC. What more could you want?

What’s that? You’re dying to see Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in the same movie again? DONE.