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June Playlist

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My themes for June are dance songs, telling people what to do (because that’s what a lot of dance songs end up being), observations about the universe (because telling people what to do is basically advice and advice usually involves making observations about things) and the moon (because it rhymes with June). June is a month about attempting to explain the world through dance. So bees. Bees fit into June as well. And the wind. Because the wind teaches things to dance.

M79- Vampire Weekend

This is a nice bright happy sounding song. And I like a good use of strings. It’s a new addition to my June playlist, so I haven’t spent much time analyzing it. 

Here are the lyrics:

“No excuse to be so callous
Dress yourself in bleeding madras
Charm your way across the Khyber Pass
Stay awake to break the habit
Sing in praise of Jackson Crowter
Watch your step along the arch of glass”

The lyrics aren’t entirely positive, but overall, the song seems to be about embracing multiculturalism, which is something I agree with. It reminds me a little of Cake’s Mr. Mastodon Farm which advises to “take swatches out of all material.”

 Dancing in the Moonlight – King Harvest

(recording of song with picture)

Interview with the song writer Sherm Kelley where he explains how he came up with the song. He and his girlfriend basically had a terrible experience getting attacked on a beach and he wanted to imagine a world where that sort of thing didn’t happen. Interesting interview, but it might mess up the song for some people. 

This fits two aspects of the monthly theme: the moon, and dancing. It’s also just a wonderful happy song, even with its tragic back story.

We like our fun and we never fight
You can’t dance and stay uptight
It’s a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancin’ in the moonlight

Video for Toploader cover of the song. This has more of a November feel to it.

Lizard #3 – Go! Go! 7188

This is a live version of the song. I prefer the singing in the recorded version, but the live version is great for the guitar solo and and for the feeling of general awesomeness. The name of the song is Tokage Sango, which literally translates to lizard number 3. And on the surface, the song appears to be about a lizard.  But In a bizarre, very Japanese fashion, the song also seems to be about coming to terms with one’s limitations and one’s place in the universe.

Tokage sangou tokage sangou
Shippo no kireta HAchuurui
Tokage sangou tokage sangou<
Onaka aohikari HAchuurui

KIRAKIRA to hikaru ano buttai wa nanda ? 
Kinou arukidashita kono jimen ni wa shiranai nomo ga
Takusan aru sa

Ore to kage kuro to kage tsuite kuruna ore tokage 

My translation:

Lizard #3 Lizard # 3 
With the bright blue belly
Lizard #3 Lizard #3
With the cut off tail

What is this sparkling and shining thing?
Yesterday I didn’t know what it was that I saw<
It’s a lot isn’t it?

Me and my black shadow and my lizard self that I cannot control.

The Wind – PJ Harvey

She dreamt of children’s voices
And torture on the wheel
Patron Saint of nothing
A woman of the hills
She once was a lady
Of pleasure and high born 
A lady of the city
But now she sits and moans
And listens to the wind blow
Listen to the wind blow

This is a great song. Spooky and innovative and yet with a groovy beat. The lyrics are also intriguing. Before I saw the video the imagery I got was of a craggy hill in Scotland or maybe New Zealand where some lonely church stands weathered by time and neglect while some hermit woman sit contemplating dark things. The video is neat its own right, placing Catherine the protagonist of the song in the cityscape of New York and emphasizing the contrast between the bustle on the surface and the serenity of the high places. 

This is the kind of song you want to hear again right after you hear it the first time. It’s a novel compressed into the poetry of song and you can’t figure out exactly what it’s about, only that there is something that pulls you in. 

It’s also kind of an anthem for introverts.

Other June Songs

I Bet That You Would Look Good on the Dance Floor – Arctic Monkeys Live video

The Weight (Take a load off, Fanny) – The Band This is a version of the song done with the Staple Sisters.

The Boys of Summer – Don Henley 1984 music video

Hey Ya – Outkast Official music video.

The Dark of the Matinee – Franz Ferdinand Official music video. Great direction on this one IMHO

(Give Me Back My) Bunty Bunty – The Bombay Royale Live

Bee Girl – Pearl Jam Music only

How about You? (I like New York in June) – Frank Sinatra music with moving pictures

Little Acorns (Be like the squirrel girl)- White Stripes Music with Spanish subtitles and timed visuals.

Clarissa – Mindless Self Indulgence Music with lyrics. Some offensive content.

Discoball World- David Garza Live version. The recorded version is better I think, but this has video.

Spiderwebs – No Doubt Official music video. Ska Gwen!

Tom the Model (Do What You’re Gonna Do) – Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man Music video. Beth Gibbons is the lead singer of Portishead. Excellent stuff.

Handbags and Gladrags – Rod Stewart Live

Derelict – Beck Live video. Nice and weird. The vocals are a bit rough though.

In this City – Enon Music video

May Playlist

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The themes for May are Dreams, wishes, and graduation as well as Hispanic songs (for cinco de mayo reasons)

Andar Conmigo

Artist: Julieta Venegas

Why it’s a May Song: Cinco de Mayo, dreams and memories

This is a fairly simple song really, but that’s part of its beauty. “Andar conmigo” literally means “go with me,” and more colloquially it means “date me.” But this song uses both senses of the phrase. It seems to be not only an invitation to start a relationship, but an expression of a deeper philosophy. The singer is inviting the listener to experience all that life has to offer with her, rather than merely offering herself. It seems very Daoist to me. Aside from the Spanish language aspect (IE Cinco de Mayo), I think it also fits the theme of dreams and memories. She speaks of telling the story that’s inside her, a story that still continues. 

Here are the lyrics with translation:

Hay tanto que quiero contarte

Hay tanto que quiero saber de ti 

Ya podemos empezar poco a poco 

Cuéntame, qué te trae por aquí

There is so much that I want to tell you

There’s so much I want to know about you too

We can start right now little by little

Tell me what brings you here

No te asustes de decirme la verdad

Eso nunca puede estar así tan mal

Yo también tengo secretos para darte

Y que sepas que ya no me sirven más

Don’t be afraid of telling me the truth

That never can be as bad as you think

I also have secrets to give you

And you should know they don’t serve me any more

Hay tantos caminos por andar

Dime si tu quisieras andar conmigo

There are so many ways to go.

Tell me if you would like to go with me x4

Estoy ansiosa por soltarlo todo

Desde el principio hasta llegar al día de hoy

Una historia tengo en mi para entregarte

Una historia todavía sin final

I’m anxious to release everything

From the beginning to today

A story I have inside me to give you

A story that still has no end

Podríamos decirnos cualquier cosa

Incluso darnos para siempre un siempre no

Pero ahora frente a frente, aquí sentados

Festejemos que la vida nos cruzó

We could tell each other anything

Including to give ourselves for forever a forever no

But now, face to face, here are feelings

We can enjoy what Life has put before us

Martha -Tom Waits

“Those were days of roses,

Poetry and prose and Martha

All I had was you and all you had was me”

One of the themes of May for me is graduation,which goes beyond pomp and circumstance to any song about momentous life changing events and looking back to how things were back when you were a different sort of person. Along those lines, there is no greater song in my opinion than Martha. This song is the story of an old man catching up with a woman that was a girlfriend of his from 40 years ago. This song really covers all the wistful, beautiful sadness that the passage of time creates.

Oddly, this is a song that Tom Waits wrote as a young man in the early seventies. Tom Waits worked as door man and piano player at a bar and you can hear a little of the Billy Joel piano man in his style here. Later on Tom Waits became a move character actor and moved into a different style of music where he sounds like some demented carnival barker, which is fun, but I always prefer his more melodic tunes like this one.

Almost all of Waits’ songs have an arresting narrative quality. This one in particular has this intriguing character of an old man regretting letting the love of his life go some forty years ago. You think of all the time and experience that have occurred and yet…And yet…

Where did Tom Waits get this story? It seems too vivid to not be in some way real. In his youth, Waits worked many odd jobs, and he would write down “phrases and snippets of dialogue he overheard”

He might have generated the story of Tom Frost and Martha from one of those conversations. I have an alternate theory though. Think of it as a lie that might accidentally be true. Perhaps Tom’s mother Alma was the Martha of the song. Perhaps Alma named Tom after her Tom Frost. Alma raised her children after separating from Waits’ father when Waits was 10 years old. Did Alma tell her children stories of an old flame she had when she was younger? Did Tom Waits simply put to words and music a fantasy of his mother’s of her old lover catching up with her?

Probably not, but I like it as a conspiracy theory.

While Strolling through the Park one Day (the Fountain in the Park- Hit Co. Masters)

I was strolling through the park one day

In the merry merry month of May

This video is from a guy who sings all the parts of a barbershop quartet by himself. It’s a nice version but it’s not the one I listen to on playlists. The version done by the Hit Co. Masters is a little longer and has some instrumentation. 

This is, of course, that song sung by various characters in Looney Tunes cartoons. “I was strolling through the park one day, in the very merry month of May.” One cannot create a thorough list of May songs without including it. 

Almost Like Praying 

Artist: Lin-Manual Miranda and MANY others

Why it’s  a May song: (Puerto Rico so it’s vaguely related to Cinco de Mayo, but it’s also about a prayer for the people of Puerto Rico so it’s like a wish or a dream)

I first heard about this song on an episode of the podcast Song Exploder . Miranda talked about wanting to do something for the place he grew up after it was devastated by hurricane Maria. Wired magazine had a good article on this and how badly it was handled and what people did to solve the problems that arose because of it. Miranda, being a song writer, did what he could do, which was write a song and get everyone he knew to help with it, and then give all the money he made from it to the relief effort.

Miranda is best known for his work on the musical Hamilton, which is extremely popular, but doesn’t really seem like something I’d be into. I’m not a fan of rap music generally, although there are exceptions. More specifically any attempt to combine education with rap has always struck me as being particularly dumb. But I haven’t seen Hamilton; so I might find I like it after all. Almost like Praying has a section or two of rap, but it is mostly a melodic work consisting almost entirely of the names of the cities of Puerto Rico. As an amateur poet I find the skill with which Miranda managed to group all the cities into rhyming patterns  impressive. He also uses several styles of music from musical, to rock, to rap, to reggaeton. Even without the humanitarian aspect, the song is simply interesting and fun to listen to. I only know one or two of the many artists involved, but that too is intriguing. Finally I’m a fan of Steven Sondheim, mostly from Sunday in the Park with George, but West Side Story is a neat one too and the repeated use of the line from the song Maria was an elegant and well-implemented device.  

Full Playlist

Here’s the full Youtube playlist followed by links to individual songs:

April Playlist

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Shelter from the Storm – Bob Dylan 

I’ve heard newborn babies wailin’ like a mournin’ dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
Come in, she said I’ll give ya shelter from the storm

A marvelous song that’s been in a lot of things and has had many things said about it. I first heard this on the soundtrack to Jerry Maguire, but It was originally on Bob Dylan’s album Blood on the Tracks which came out in 1975.

This is an epic song full of symbolism told with delightfully surprising rhymes and references. 

But what is it about? 

To me this song is about love, and in particular how it sustains us through hardship even when all we have is the memory of it.

There’s a good chance the woman in the song might be Sara Dylan, to whom Bob Dylan was married when he wrote the song. The marriage was falling apart, and he could have been mourning the loss of how things used to be. Sara Dylan was born Shirley Marlin Noznisky to Jewish immigrants from Poland, but according to Bob Dylan biographer Robert Shelton (sourced originally in wikipedia) she “had a Romany spirit, seeming to be wise beyond her years, knowledgeable about magic, folklore and traditional wisdom.”

It’s reasonable to suppose that Sara might be the woman born at the same time God was, but it also could be about Dylan’s mother. The song seems to describe a birth into a nurturing environment after living several harsh lives. Sara was a mother already when Dylan met her so it could be that both things are true. To put it crassly, Dylan may have had mommy issues. Or it could be the song isn’t autobiographical at all and it’s about a fictional man recalling a fictional woman. For the sake of discussion I’ll call the lady referred to in the song as “the Goddess.”

The verses are not sung in chronological order, but the singer seems to be telling the story of his life after being asked by someone “Is it helpless and forlorn?”

He talks about other lifetimes, times when he suffered in numerous ways before he found this Goddess who might have been a lover, but who was also something of a mother figure.

Then there was a time of blissful childhood or something like it where he was always safe and warm.

Then people tried to tell him who to be ( they gambled for his clothes) and he didn’t like that so he decided to leave, and the Goddess let him (he bargained for salvation and she gave him a lethal dose).

Growing into adulthood, life was hard and he encountered adversity ( he offered up his innocence and got repaid with scorn).

He currently lives in ” a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm.” Where, regardless of whether one hopes to learn philosophy (becoming a preacher riding a mountain) or learn street smarts (become like a deputized horse walking on hard nails) in the end all that matters is that time is short and you’re going to die eventually (it’s doom alone that counts). But even in this dire situation, to answer the man’s question, the singer repeats “Come in, she said, I’ll give ya, shelter from the storm” There was one time he found love and acceptance, and that alone is enough to make up for whatever hardship he has to endure.

The one-eyed undertaker hasn’t gotten the singer yet. He still walks in this country that seems foreign to him, but someday he will cross the line and succumb to the razor’s edge that beauty walks along. And if he lives in this world again he vows to always do his best for his goddess.

I’m almost entirely sure I got that wrong, but that’s what I’ve come up with for what the song is about. What do you think?

Fire, Water, Earth, and Air – Julie Felix

“And as I grow the earth below explains where the rains comes from.
From clouds that borrow joy and sorrow, that’s where the rains come from.”

This song is vast in scope, encompassing the elements of Earth, and weather, and states of human existence. I would like it for that alone, but then you factor in the surprising internal rhymes of the lyrics, the thrumming native american sound of the music, and Julie Felix’s clear, confident vocals, and it’s just a marvelous, wonderful song.

There is, of course, a hippy undercurrent to the song. One expects there will soon be some one along to say that we should protect the squirrels or eat nothing but rutabagas grown in reclaimed sewage. But I prefer to take the song at face value, as a celebration and appreciation of nature and life. I don’t disagree with people who say we should preserve the environment, but I think where such people can go astray is when they see themselves as separate from it. We are part of the environment, part of nature. It is foolish to destroy nature to preserve ourselves, but it is equally foolish to destroy ourselves to preserve nature. A body needs both a brain and a stomach to function.

I’m a Dog – Crash Test Dummies

“But it seems the thinkers you call greatest are
The sort who often fall ill young, or pine away
How can they help but drag the species down?

Like many Crash Test Dummies songs, this one offers a unique perspective on a seldom explored aspect of life. In this case the song is from the perspective of a dog wondering why humans venerate people who don’t seem to live good lives. 
The dog, being a dog, is essentially a hedonist, appreciating the physical pleasures of life like brushing up against a cow’s leg and having breakfast with the master in the morning. He marvels at humans who try to control their instincts and be civilized, when all it seems to do for people is make them miserable

There is an added layer of irony here in that Brad Roberts, the lead singer and lyric writer, is, himself, an example of the poets the dog is criticizing. 

Other April Songs

I’ve made a YouTube playlist, which you can see here:

It has the songs I described above plus the following:

One song that’s missing though is this one:

Mr. S – Letter People

Everyone should know about the Letter People. Words are made of Letter People

February Playlist

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Foux de Fafa – Flight of the Conchords

If you don’t know about Flight of the Conchords…you really should. They’re a comedy duo from New Zealand comprised of Jemaine Clement and Bret Mckenzie. More than that though, they’re are kind of at the nexus of half of everything that’s good in the entertainment industry right now. It’s been more than a decade since they had their show on HBO, but many of the people involved in that and in other things they’ve done have gone on to do amazing things. Jemaine Clement in particular has been in a lot of good things from the “shiny” crab in Moana to the trippy astral traveller in the FX series Legion. He and Bret worked together on What We do in the Shadows a funny movie about vampires that got turned into a series of the same name on FX. They worked with Taika Waititi on that and that guy just made a movie (JoJo Rabbit) that got nominated for a Golden Globe. Waititi also directed the last episode of the first season of The Mandalorian. Not to mention Thor:Ragnorak. The credits are already getting tedious at this point, but suffice to say that many of the people involved in Conchords show up in other good things.

This particular song is great because it combines the normal awkwardness of trying to impress a girl with the somewhat more specific awkwardness of speaking a foreign language. I’ve taken a lot of classes in Spanish and Japanese. I can almost speak Spanish. And I can understand a bit of Japanese, but always, inevitably, without fail there is a moment where my knowledge of the language just runs out. That situation is captured beautifully in this song. I also like how the Spanish I know means I can kind of understand a lot of the French. All the terms are your basic first year French terms and so it makes you feel like you’ve maybe learned something after all.

The video I’ve linked to is the segment as it appeared on the HBO series with added subtitles (I didn’t post it, I’m just describing it) They did a great job with the video too. All the colorful Frenchisms and the music video tropes. The style they’re parodying, the internet informs me, is “scopitone,” and even while I recognize it as silly, I kind of enjoy the bright cheerfulness of the style on an un-ironic level too. 

Love Song 311

I first heard this cover of The Cure’s Lovesong in the movie 50 First Dates. This is a movie starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore where Barrymore’s character has a peculiar form of amnesia that causes her to forget whatever happened the previous day. It’s an Adam Sandler movie, which means that for any particular scene there’s an even chance someone is going to get hit in the balls… or someone is going to be going through some dramatic realization that makes them a better person. Depending on the particular movie, I sometimes wish for more of the other thing, but Sandler has a success rate for me of about 70%, which is better than a lot of actor comedians. 

50 First Dates is mostly silly, but it still addresses a little of the horror that the condition of Barrymore’s character has. There are actual people with anterograde amnesia, and although their situations are usually more like the character in Memento than like the 50 First Dates scenario, the problems do get some play in the movie. Another thing the movie has going for it is that it doesn’t rely completely on the amnesia part of the story. Sandler’s character has an interesting job and lifestyle and they could have just had a simple love story with his character and it would have been fun to watch. Having such an interesting premise just pushes it over the top. The final thing 50 First Dates has is the soundtrack, which is excellent. You really get a nice beach vibe from the whole thing, which helps set the scene, but more than that, the music is all high quality. 

311 does a great job with this cover. You do get the beach life feel that goes with the soundtrack, and that goes against the February feel a bit, but it is, of course, a love song and it’s done well. 311 manages to do their take without removing the Cure’s melancholy tone from their version. 

The subtle sadness conveyed in the music matches the movie’s theme as well. Sandler’s character has to lose his love every night, but he meets her again every morning. It’s terrible, but beautiful.

Koop Island Blues Koop

“The truth is

We were much too young

Now I’m looking for you

Or anyone like you”

I first heard this song in a brothel in Paris. It was the 1940s.  I was a race car driver and demolitions expert working with revolutionaries to fight the German occupation. Times were tough then, and listening to this song was a welcome respite from a day spent killing Nazis and blowing up military installations…

The videogame called “The Sabateur.” that I’m referencing  has its problems, but it’s still a fun game. It plays similarly to Assassin’s Creed with a lot of climbing and finding things and clearing out areas. It also borrows a bit from Grand Theft Auto, with a lot of driving and a minimap that lets you know where enemies are and how alert they are. And it takes place in Nazi occupied France so the buildings you have to climb are famous and the people you are killing are evil. The brothel singer’s songs aren’t the only ones. There are other playing on the radio and on record players throughout the game.  Really it’s strange that the game wasn’t more popular than it was. It has its fans, but when it came out in 09 it wasn’t really on anyone’s radar. The critics gave it middling reviews and it seemed to be largely ignored afterward. And back when I was playing it, I would have probably agreed with the sentiment. But while I’ve mostly forgotten other, arguably better games, The Sabateur has stuck in my mind. I keep thinking of it at odd moments. 

One thing that comes up for me often when I think of WWII or the name Jules or even failing at something in a particularly bathetic way is how the main character Sean would say “Sorry, Jules” sometimes when he died, which was usually either by falling off a building or getting riddled with bullets. His brother is named Jules in the game and Sean spends most of the game trying to get revenge on the Nazi that tortured and killed him. But the back story for that happens early on in the game and I played it off and on for the span of a few years so I forgot about Jules. It seemed like Sean was saying “Sorry, Jews,” which seemed delightfully irreverent without quite .

Aside from that, though the game had some striking visuals that just worked really well even with the lower resolution of the time. Having everything under Nazi control be in black and white until you liberate it…it’s something that had been done before in movies, but it seemed particularly effective in a video game where you weren’t just seeing it once or twice, but actually seeming to move around in it. 

As for the song itself, (oh yeah, that’s what this is supposed to be about!) it’s kind of perfect. The singer lays out each note like a collection of postcards from somewhere sad and beautiful. Time goes by, people change, and they yearn for what they once were, and the feelings they once had. The ever widening gyre of life continues to confound the compass of desire. The video…is not what I picture at all when I listen to it, although it has some things going for it. The band that created the song is actually two dudes from Sweden. But whatever. The song is pretty. I like the song. Maybe they made other pretty songs? I haven’t found out yet.

Other good February songs:

A Girl Like You – Edwyn Collins

A Girl Named Go! – Cory Branan

Aquarius – The Fifth Dimension

Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love – Pink Martini

Uninvited – Alanis Morrisette

Michelle – Beatles

Got to Get You into My Life – Cliff Bennet & the Rebel Rauser

All I Have to do is Dream – The Everly Brothers

Carol Brown – Flight of the Concords

Melody Dean – Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra

Concept – Cranberries

Cupid – Sam Cooke

Never Far Away – Jack White

Like a Stone – Chris Cornell

Madonna No. 18 – Fantasys Core (couldn’t find a video for this song. They’re an obscure Japanese rock band that I saw in Memphis here’s another song of theirs though)

Head Over Feet – Alanis Morrisette

Ain’t Misbehaving – Tommy Bruce & The Bruisers

January Songs

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December is the time for Christmas songs, but what do you listen to when Christmas is over? That thought led me to organize my music collection into twelve playlists, one for each month. I also try to rank the songs over the span of a year to find the best ones, the ones I’m not going to mind listening to several times on a sixty song or so playlist. The idea is that each month I listen to my favorites songs that follow a theme of that month, and then the next month I listen to another set of songs. I get the pleasure of knowing the words better and getting the nuances that come from repeated listenings, but I don’t get too sick of the songs before the month is out.

For this year (2020) I’ve decided to write a blog about my monthly playlists for anybody looking for songs to add to their own sets. There are probably fifteen apps that do that for you automatically. Still, Pandora, I Heart Radio, and some others I’ve tried don’t seem to be eclectic enough. They all operate under the idea that you’re going to like songs that are similar to other songs you like. This works to some degree, but just because I like Pearl Jam, doesn’t mean I only want to hear 90s grunge for the rest of my life. So I’m stuck actually creating my own playlists, which is a time-consuming, but entertaining endeavor. It also gives me an excuse to clean out some duplicate mp3 files, delete some songs that are just stinkers, and revisit ones I’ve forgotten about. And often, oddly, I find out new things about artists I like that actually lead me to new music.

I also kind of wanted to write more blogs and this gives me something to write about. So here’s my list for January 2020 I’ve written a bit about the first three, songs but the rest I’m just leaving as exercises for the reader.

January is a cold month. It’s a month about beginning, and time, and making resolutions. In a vaguer sense, it’s about figuring out what’s important, and having the courage to leave behind what’s not…

Nothing Else Matters- Metallica

  • “So close, no matter how far
  • Couldn’t be much more from the heart
  • Forever trust in who we are
  • And nothing else matters”

A classic Metallica song. One of the reasons why Metallica’s music exists outside the bounds of the heavy metal genre is songs like this one. This song is in some ways a call to arms, in some ways a love song. It’s all about being true to something and moving on, which is why I think it fits into January. This is a song about resolve and January is a month about resolutions.

Nocturne/ Bohemian Rhapsody-Lucia Micarelli

Back when Netflix sent out DVDs in the mail there was a little more drama in the process. You would select what DVDs you wanted to see, but usually you’d forget what you had selected by the time they arrived in the mail. Also Netflix’s recommendations seemed like a bigger deal (they still are a big deal, but they aren’t as obvious as they were back then), they’d suggest things to watch based on what you’d liked previously and they’d be right maybe half the time. So you’d get the red envelope in the mail, and you’d open it and read the description on the disc sleeve, remembering all the reasons why you thought the movie might be good and wondering if your bet would pay off, or if it would be a dud. A lot of times even the duds had something worthwhile in them though. Such was the case with this one disc I got, which was a live recording of a Josh Groban concert. 

Now Mr. Groban was something of a sensation back in the early Aughts. There were fan message boards (like reddit only less convenient) dedicated to Josh Groban, which, in their off time raised millions of dollars for a charity. Clay Shirkey ended up writing about it in his book Cognitive Surplus, which was about how people on the internet can get amazing things accomplished in the time they’re spending not doing traditional work.  But this Netflix disc arrived a couple years before I read Shirkey’s book. Netflix had been trying to push it on me for a while. “No, really,” Netflix was saying “This will be right up your alley!” 

For the most part, however, it wasn’t. Groban’s genre is basically good, pretty-sounding music. I liked a rendition he did on Vincent, a song praising Vincent Van Gogh, but nothing else really jumped out at me, and even that was a little too…nice.

Groban had a guest musician however, and that guest was Lucia Micarellii

You can see her performance in the YouTube video, but for the full effect, imagine you’ve listened to an hour or so of elevator music. Elevator music that’s expertly, and lovingly performed, mind you, but elevator music nonetheless. And now here’s this lady walking on stage barefoot, looking like some kind of forest spirit. She starts playing this mournful, heartrending piece of music. It’s quite pretty and you can see the passion she has for the music in her playing, and then…wait a minute…Holy shit! That’s Bohemian Rhapsody! Drums join in, along with other instruments. Everything rises in intensity until it hits a breaking point and finally returns the original mournful music. Just awesome.

This was the first time I heard about Lucia Micarelli. Later though she showed up as an actress in a series created by David Simon (who created the shows Homicide and The Wire) called Treme. I didn’t care for the Treme much. There were too many characters and not enough focus on any one storyline. Furthermore, the tone was dismal and it got a bit too political. Still, one of the bright spots was the music in general, and Lucia Micarelli in particular. Her character, Annie, had her faults, but she was always looking for ways to improve herself and the situation around her. While everyone else in the show was pursuing political gain, investigating murders, and committing suicide, she was playing music. Of course that was a fictional character, but still, it was a role Micarelli chose to play and she played it well. 

So I think of all that when I hear the song, but of course the original Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen is a classic. The new movie starring Rami Malek was pretty good, and it also reminds me of the scene in Wayne’s World where they are all head banging in the car. The lyrics in the original are also about resolve (“Time to leave you all behind and face the truth…”) . It fits January for that reason, but the Nocturne bit at the beginning and end make me think of a cold, January morning, when it’s still too early to see by the sun, and everything’s trying to remember a good reason to wake up. 

Fire Escape – Fastball

  • “I’ll be the rain falling on your fire escape
  • And I may not be the man you want me to
  • I can be myself, how ’bout you?”

This song is 90% about saying “Screw you! I’ll do what I want!”… but then there’s that odd poetry of the chorus and some of the lines that mellows it somewhat and makes it more than it would be otherwise. Rain falling on a fire escape. I suppose that’s a dangerous thing, something that makes things less safe. The feeling I get from the song though is more that the rain is kind of nice, just providing atmosphere, existing outside and informing what goes on inside, but not really being a part of things. 

It reminds me of James Joyce’s book Ulysses, which follows a character Leopold Bloom as he makes his way home on a day’s journey. The places he goes mimic the places the character Ulysses goes to in the original epic by Homer. In the chapter that relates to Ulysses’ encounter with Circe. Leopold and his friend Stephen Daedalus find themselves in a brothel. Things start to get a bit strange later on, but there’s one part where there is a commotion outside the window and someone wonders what it is. Someone else replies that it is God. God is the commotion outside the window.

God, then, could also be the rain falling on the fire escape. So sure this is actually most likely a song about a guy setting boundaries in a relationship , but halfway in my head I also kind of see it as a god (or more secularly the Universe) explaining itself to its creations. I may not be what you want me to be, but I can be myself, what about you? Like, maybe, stop asking me for crap and do some work yourself, huh?

Other good January songs