I feel no thoughts to move my head

Apparently it’s quiet folk day in my brother’s kitchen. Lyle Lovett, The Kingston Trio, other lovely but slightly soporific things have been wafting into the air this morning. Until now, when a peppy, poppy song came on. I peeked at the iTouch to see who was singing, and it’s the Psychedelic Furs.

How excited am I! Pretty excited. Because I feel like I’m filling a gap in my education just by sitting here. That band name is one I’ve heard forever, I feel like, without actually knowing any of the accompanying music.

Except I guess that’s a big lie, since they sang “Pretty in Pink.” Huh.

As ever, I feel woefully ignorant on the English punk/new-wave front. In fact, the other day I was happily singing and bouncing along to a song I know perfectly well, but confessed to my brother that I wasn’t sure who sang it. “The Cure,” he replied flatly. Then, to rub it in, “He has a fairly distinctive voice.”

That he does. This all makes me feel like I need to lock myself away for several days with nothing but The Cure, Depeche Mode, the Psychedelic Furs, and other groups of their ilk for a thorough course of study — from which I will emerge clearheaded and cool.

I hope my meaning won’t be lost or misconstrued

I bet I’m not the only child of hippie baby boomers who knew “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” before any other Paul Simon or Simon & Garfunkel song. Or before many other songs at all, really.

My father can’t have been the only one inclined to bust out with a “hop on the bus, Gus” when herding his children into the car, or a “make a new plan, Stan” when trying to divert our attention. All I know is that he’d often rely on this song either for gentle parental teasing or for our entertainment — because sometimes there were little singing/dancing performances that went along with it. And I suspect others of his generation probably did the same, leading to a Generation X soaked in jazzy solo Simon.

It seems to me at least one of my siblings was super taken with this tune as well. Maybe the baby brother? The one so young he’s not even Gen X? I can’t pin it down, but I have this vague sense that one of them cracked themselves up by singing the chorus with a hard emphasis on the names.

It was probably the baby brother. This is, after all, the boy who laughed himself into tears at age 3 over “Mum mum bo BUM” (banana-fana, etc.), and who inexplicably added “pepper” and “hulla” to everybody’s names (Kitty-pepper, Emmy-hulla, etc.). Dude never met a song, rhyme, or nickname he didn’t love.

Good rhymin’ Simon times with the On the Swing family.

The finest years I (n)ever knew

This morning, my nephew (12 going on 9 going on 19) and I were treated to a short discourse on the music of the 1970s by my brother. It was 6:45 or so, and I’d dragged myself out of bed to see my nephew put the finishing touches on a school project he’d stayed up late working on last night. Convoluted and complex, it involved cardboard and spray paint and a chairlift made of wire and tiny pictures meticulously connected with clear packing tape. It was classic junior-high stuff, and it was fun to watch him work feverishly on it.

As it happens, it was a mountain. And since, as previously mentioned, my brother is wont to pepper every conversation with song lyrics, he began singing “he lived on the morning side of the mountain, and she lived on the twilight side of the hill.”

Neither nephew nor I knew the reference. Warbled by the Osmonds before it was warbled by my brother, the song was released in 1975, the year I was born. My brother proceeded to find a YouTube version of it, which he blared through the early-morning air, holding his laptop aloft and grinning alongside toothy Donny and Marie.

My nephew, torn between laughter and eye-rolling, summed up the situation: “There sure was a lot of bad music back then.”

My brother, agreeing, proceeded to look up Jimmy Osmond and play (and sing along with) a delightful ditty called “Little Arrows.”

I like to think I know a fair amount about the music of the 1970s, despite not having been around for half the decade. But this just reminded me that there is a trove of treasures with which I am unfamiliar. Just now, sitting in the kitchen with the radio streaming on my own laptop, I heard Bread’s “Everything I Own,” another unfamiliar tune, this one from 1972, the year my parents married.

My primary association with Bread is snarky references made to them by a writer, I think Dave Barry. I don’t believe I could name a single other song by them, although it’s possible that, like Dean Martin, they’ve been secretly providing the soundtrack to my life.

However, I just asked my brother if he could sing a Bread song, and after a suspicious “why” over his bifocals, he busted out with his best falsetto — “Baby I’m A-Want You,” “Everything I Own,” and “Diary,” in quick succession.

He provided a footnote only for “Everything I Own” (having no idea that I’m sitting here writing about it), saying it was a huge hit when he was in the fifth grade. Then explained to me that it is about the singer’s mother, not a love interest. Dropped in some factoids about Telly Savalas and Eddie Albert covering Bread songs, then circled back to the fact that “1974 to 1976 was just an abysmal time for music.”

It is useful, and highly entertaining, to have older siblings. Is all I’m saying.

Never was a cornflake girl

I have never been a particular fan of Tori Amos, but I have to admit that my aversion may be due not so much to her music itself as to my annoying younger cousin’s youthful renditions of it.

This cousin was one of those kids deemed GIFTED! and ADORABLE! by her parents, and was regularly trotted out at family gatherings to play the piano. As it happened, she was just another kid taking piano lessons, without any particular GIFT!, and her plinkings-out of Tori Amos and Richard Marx tunes were rather less ADORABLE! than like nails on a chalkboard.

I suppose every family has a cousin like this, and I suppose I’d be lying to deny that, as a child, I envied mine the limelight. I’ve always had more than a little a-star-is-born in me, angling for center stage (even without any discernible talents), and as a youngster felt cursed with parents who resolutely put the smackdown on any diva tendencies. Now, of course, I’m thankful that they raised me that way, and that I didn’t turn into the self-centered horror that my younger cousin became has always been.

BUT perhaps that’s unfair. If I’m going to credit/blame my parents with turning me into the adult I am now, I have to do the same for the cousin. Maybe it’s all her parents’ fault. I wonder what Tori would say … after she smacked me for lumping her in with Richard Marx.

Is the landlord still a loser

Traveling this week, so my blogging is suffering a bit. Last time I visited HQ, I scored a private office, for the first and only time. While that cut down on my social interactions, it allowed for all manner of inappropriate web activity, including lavishing love on Auto Tunes (although I seem to recall a dearth of source material). This time, I’m sitting out in the bullpen, with at least four people looking over my shoulder and the opportunity for anyone else to walk up at any time. Of the many reasons I’m glad I work at home, this set-up ranks high.

At the moment, however, I’m sitting at my brother’s kitchen counter, both of us on our laptops, his iPod sitting happily in a dock and blasting all sorts of random music. Well, it’s random to me — it represents his most beloved music, which is helping him write the second book of an historical fiction trilogy he’s working on. Part One remains unpublished, but he’s soldiering on, god bless him.

I have to say, he has fun taste in music. I knew this already, after many car trips with him and via the fact that he peppers his conversations with lyrics. But it’s fun to hear it all spiraling out into his kitchen: The Cure, Tom Petty, Luna, They Might Be Giants, Cowboy Junkies, Queen, Gordon Lightfoot …

It’s this last that has got me doing my own little spiral this morning. Lightfoot was a staple of my childhood. My mother and brothers and sisters played the records so often they practically wore them out, and I (as always) spent long minutes at our piano bench studying the album covers, which more often than not featured haunting photos of the gaunt, mustachioed Canadian. Who got gaunter as time went on.

My mother had a particular soft spot for him, not only loving his music but also feeling deep empathy for his hardships. Which, as far as I could glean, involved bad relationships and alcohol. I still don’t really know.

These days, I never listen to Lightfoot intentionally. He just isn’t in my collection. But when I hear him, on the radio or on my brother’s playlists (where he is in frequent rotation), I wonder why that is. Because his songs, sad as most of them are, make me happy. I don’t have much sense of how they are regarded by the world at large — probably as cheesy and unpalatable — but for me they are foundational, nearly woven into my DNA. Probably time to bring old Gordon back into my life.

Sigh no more, ladies

Okay, since even my local classic rock station is now apparently playing Mumford & Sons, do I need to go check out their album?

I’ve heard plenty of “Little Lion Man,” and like it very much, but haven’t heard much of anything else. And haven’t heard or read so very much about them either. So, thumbs up or down, faithful reader(s)? Yea or nay to the Mumford & Sons?

“Little Lion Man” aside, I’m inclined to like these fellas on principle for their chosen album title. This is apparently the title of the album’s opening song, in which they incorporate lines from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. And Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing — that is, Kenneth Branagh’s spectacular film version of the play — is another item on the list of My Favorite Things. This clip is long, but I guarantee it will brighten your day (some bare bums included, though, so potentially vaguely NSFW):

Now, I realize that I have, from my very first post in this blog, compromised its musical focus by talking so much about television and film. I feel kind of bad about that. But for me, they’re all tied up in one great big ball of joy, these works of art that make my heart sing through story and sound. And I suspect that’s true for many of the singers and bands that we write about here — the Mumfords are surely not the only pop artists who’ve taken inspiration from a Shakespeare play (or any number of less canonical pieces of writing).

So I maybe need to let go of my bloggerly guilt. Sighing no more, this lady.

But still wondering about the Mumford & Sons.

TGOTS’s lament

Okay, so it doesn’t really matter what I heard on the radio this morning, because nothing will push THIS out of my head:

I caught part of Forgetting Sarah Marshall on TV over the weekend, and I haven’t been able to rid myself of this song for the last two days.*

The song, like the movie, is silly but also kind of hilarious. We have a well-documented affection for the Jason Segel here at Auto Tunes (though a scan of the archives suggests that I and I alone am the one who has written a half dozen posts about him), and his clear love of music and musicals constitutes a goodly portion of that.

“Inside of You” is so gross it’s funny, and its success depends on its generic melody (and Russell Brand’s perfect performance as Aldous Snow), but DANG if that melody isn’t driving me bonkers.

I would much rather have THIS stuck in my head (original AND performance from a Craig Ferguson show appearance, which I also find adorable):

OH I love the goofy boys with their deconstruction/reconstruction of the pop and musical lexicon. But I better get a new song in my head soon.

*YES that is code for “came upon it and stopped to watch the entire thing.” DANG.

Waiting for the storm to pass me by

Yesterday the news broke that a key person at my company had “resigned effective immediately,” which was a polite way of saying she was basically fired. It wasn’t altogether surprising, in retrospect, but it sure was shocking.

I’ve written before about the strange disconnect between my company’s small nonprofit-for-social-good status and its odd habit of cutting people off at the knees. And I can’t make any better sense of it today than I could then. When I heard the news yesterday, I mostly felt numb. Today I am more fed up, and definitely demotivated.

Listening to Michael Franti this morning both helped and didn’t. On the not-helping front, he always makes me think about a former co-worker who met him through her job, and about all the work she did, and about the ways her youth and idealism were slowly crushed by the company. On the other hand, how can you hear “Say Hey (I Love You)” or “Sound of Sunshine” without being happy?*

Anyhow. I’m in that special place today, a place I don’t particularly want to be. I can’t decide whether the fact that I’m going out to HQ next week is a good thing or a bad thing. I think it’s good — it feels like a sort of come-to-Jesus moment, a necessary time for reflection and confrontation with my peers — but ugh. Mostly I just want to run far, far away.

* Even if they are essentially the same song. (No! I won’t believe it!)

Nothing more than high hopes

I’ve been terribly crabby about (and at) my job lately, and am very much in need of an attitude adjustment. I allowed my last job to compromise my senses of self-worth and well-being; I can’t allow that to happen again. It’s a job, annoyances must roll off my back, I must be pleasant and agreeable to my colleagues, even when they are stupid. Or so I tell myself each morning.

Today as I drove to the office, my pep talks weren’t having the desired effect, and as I pulled up to the last light of my commute I looked desperately to the radio to send me on my way with something perky.

I didn’t get perky — but I did get Dolly.

It’d take less than one hand to enumerate the Dolly Parton songs I can name, but of course her voice is instantly recognizable. This morning she was singing either “Smokey Mountain Memories” or “Appalachian Memories,” depending on which part of the internet you want to believe. (I’m too lazy to verify it. Yes, that’s right: pissy AND lazy. How you like me now?)

I found the song, whatever it’s called, by googling some memorable lyrics; can’t recall ever having heard it before. It’s a plaintive, nostalgic, spiritual-esque tune, with Dolly stuck in some cold northern clime while her southern heart yearns for the old folks back home. But! She has “creative hands,” and she’s glad of that.

Oh, Dolly. “9 to 5″ might have been a better soundtrack for the day I fear I’m going to have, but when you swooned for Appalachia this morning I swooned with you.

Maybe I should download some Dolly to help me through these (really not awful it’s just that I’m perpetually dissatisfied with my employment and employers and need to get over myself and just punch the clock) dreary working days.

Happy Bruce Springsteen’s birthday, everybody.

Never quite as good

I don’t remember when I first heard “Love Child” — I would guess it was some time in high school or college — but I remember my instant fondness for it, in all its singable, cheesy glory. Since then, I’ve found that referencing it to others inspires either zero recognition or an instant sing-along. If you know it, it is irresistibly bad-good. It is, in a word, Supreme.

For a long time, part of my joy around the song came from my perception of it as a relic of another era, one when having a child out of wedlock was so taboo as to be unspoken, except in shocking #1 pop hits. Oh the Sixties, I would think. Things were so different back in the day.

Years later, I got pregnant, and got quite a wakeup call. As soon as my long-term-partner-but-not-legal-husband (aka the fella) and I announced our news to our loved ones, the question came from all corners: Are you going to get married? Are you going to make an honest woman of her? When’s the wedding?

Certain of them took things a step further, referring to our unborn child as “illegitimate” and even “a bastard.” These are liberal, progressive people, and they delivered these terms with a sheepish smile. Sort of an  “I know it’s 2008 and I don’t really think this, but secretly I really do, I just can’t shake my deep religious roots and you’re going to hell, but I don’t mean it, but maybe a little” expression.

To be honest, I was shocked by the reactions. The fella and I had been in a fully committed relationship for seven years at that point, and owned a house together.  We weren’t exactly in the midst of a fling. But to many of our family members, we had done something unimaginable.

We shrugged most of the comments off, and eventually they died down. But they still give me pause. When, in a few years, I send my son off to grade school, will his peers know or care that he was the product of unmarried parents? Will the parents in this small town whisper about us? I find it very hard to believe. Then again, I could not have predicted that our own family members would gently lob pejoratives our way. Here we are in the 21st century, and so very little has changed.

Funnily enough, “Love Child” — released in 1968, when the world was publicly sexing up — is a plea for abstinence, which I never fully realized until reading the lyrics this morning. It’s clever, the way Diana’s songwriters embraced the taboo while simultaneously condemning it. Feels sort of familiar.