Arcade Fire

Grammy award winning indie band. Yes! This is my dream come true. Grammy recognition of real music. To be specific, Arcade Fire won Best Album for "The Suburbs"(sorry Beibs). So many stati were like "Great, Best Album went to someone I've never heard of before." And to them I say, well maybe you should invest!

So let's  talk about "The Suburbs." This is one of my favorite albums right up near "Songs for Silverman" by Ben Folds and "For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver and "In Rainbows" by Radiohead.

I believe it's centered around Nostalgia. Check out their album art work:

There were eight total photos, some of them giving a more tropical feel. But without even listening to the music, the mood is set. The typical suburban hut like homes, the tall fences for privacy needed in the flat, treeless mid-west, the car you probably inherited from your parents. The dulled yet saturated colors, similar to a black and white mood, transports you to a much simpler, less vivid memory of childhood. Almost too familiar to the point where it's no longer familiar.

Moving onto the music. Trance like, echo-y, streaming sounds. All real instruments, all real voices. You have to listen to it yourself. Allow yourself to be transported, carried away.

They even have this interactive music video that visually transports you to your first home, your first neighborhood. It utilizes google maps to mesh the original video footage with images of your hometown.

For me, nostalgia is a feeling that makes me want to weep. This album comes close to  when I use it for me sole listening pleasure (as opposed to background music to whatever my predominant task is). It's interesting music to meditate on and I suggest you do so.

Music FTK

 

First of all- THON raised 9.56 MILLION dollars this year! Unbelievable. I am still in shock.

I am a Springfielder and also an OPP committee member for THON. Yes, it was my life, and yes now my life is over. So what do I do? Blog about it.

There are some iconic THON songs that anyone involved (or even not involved) know about. They are not just songs, they resemble certain emotions and certain moments that we all feel throughout THON. They resemble the passion that THON fundraising participants share, they resemble the unity. During THON weekend, the music propels THON, it's the fuel for the dancers, the standing supporters in the stands, the committee members and captains and the families. 

I had heard over and over again that when they play "Angels Among Us" during Family Hour and the end of THON, you better find some tissues. I knew, as I was standing there with my fellow Springfielders that this time was coming. I knew that probably the most moving part of THON was coming. Finally, Angels Among Us came on and we held each other as our THON child was listed as one of angels that we had survived. It occurred to me that I had never heard the song before. I had no idea it was a quasi-country ballad and I didn't even know the tune.  But, it didn't matter that country really isn't up my alley, it didn't matter that I had never heard the song before. What mattered is that we were all there together, supporting each other and supporting the families. Now, after hearing it just once at THON, that song is the most moving song in the world to me. It embodies what THON means to me and it reminds me why I have joined the fight against pediatric cancer.

We grieve, yes, but we also celebrate. We celebrate life and how the Four Diamonds Fund allows families with a child with pediatric cancer to live life as well. Cue "My Love is Your Love." Unfortunately it seems that Larry Moore (the THON DJ) is the only guy who has the right, upbeat version that we jam to at THON. It's only played once, and it's right after the numbers with total go up. We all look forward to it, we all have been aware that it hasn't been played all weekend and so when Larry hits it, we all lose it in the most joyous way possible.

My love is your love and your love is my love. It would take an eternity to break us.

And it would. I will be survived by THON. I will know that energy in that room until the day I die.

Sounds corny, right? Well it is, but it's heartfelt, and its something that anyone who has participated in THON before would tell you.

FTK

FOCUS

Have you ever sat yourself down to write a paper, do math homework, or just get something done and always find yourself singing along to the words blasting through the tiny speakers you have jammed into your ears? Music with words distracts me from my work. Having a good no-words, lazer-beam-focus play list of songs can be a handy tool. It's like legal adderall.

Either you can go with no words, or a band with a singer impossible to understand. So obviously I mean Radiohead. You never quite know exactly what he's saying, but I think that both the listener and Radiohead know that's really not the point of listening to Radiohead.

If you're looking for something to make your Chem homework more epic, turn on The Pirates of the Carribean or John Adams soundtrack. As the music builds in intensity, the speed of your frantic scribbling increases until at last it changes key and switches to some funky 7/8 time and YES! You have found the empirical formula at last! ONTO THE MOLECULAR FORMULA! Honestly, there couldn't be something more satisfying.

Another option is Classical music. This can take many forms. I'm a fan of the Pavarotti pandora station. Opera is almost never in english, so it's rarely distracting. Unfortunately, an opera itself isn't distracting even when its supposed to be in a theatre (ZZzz....) I'm a fan of Bach and Debussy as well, if you're going for a more calming focus. Classical music creates pleasant background noises and drowns out the gab of annoying people around you. It typically makes me feel pretty sophisticated. Is that pretentious of me?

Finally, my favorite. Ratatat. Hip-hop/electronical/rock slide-y sounds that just perfectly echo the way I imagine my brain functioning while I'm studying. Sustained sounds tend to stream line my brain power and put me into a deeper work-trance for a longer period of time.

So find your favorite! I typically don't combine these different types of sounds into a single playlist, but I want you to sample them all! Plus, I like them for different things. Ratatat for paper writing, Pavarotti for Chem, radiohead for high-stress situations, classical music for when I'm in a comfy chair or by a window with a nice view.

 I'm sure you have your favorites too. Leave recommendations for me with your comments!

BEN.

So it's about time that I've told you about Ben. By Ben I mean Ben Folds.

It's not often that I deliberately label a band/artist as my favorite band or artist because there are just so many. But Ben has stood the test of time, has been the soundtrack to my life, and has mystified me time and time again as far as his incredible talent, performance skills and his ability to always produce an awesome album. I have just about everything he's put out both with the band Ben Folds Five and as a single artists. About 6 LPS and a few EPs and a couple specials.

This is not the first time I have blogged about Ben. Check out my really extensive, almost scientific disection of his entire musical career if you like.

http://screamweare.blogspot.com/2010/10/ben-folds-15.html

My brother and I and his friend Henry made this "Ben Folds 15" album which is intended to be a Best of Ben compilation. It wasn't really our ultimate compilation but it was more of "if someone was only going to listen to a certain 15 Ben songs...which ones would they be?" type basis.

So here they are: 

1. Saskia Hamilton
2. Effington
3. Trusted
4. Cologne
5. From Above
6. Narcolepsy
7. Rockin the Suburbs
8. Brick
9. Doc Pomus
10. Not the Same
11. Jesusland
12. Zak and Sara
13. Late
14. Army
15. The Luckiest

But, I want to take this post to show you MY favorites..and why. I'm only going to pick a few (this is very hard for me to do). Hopefully you'll find it as exhilarating as I do...
 

1. Landed

Landed is a classic Ben song. He underlying piano counter melody just rolls off his fingers, yet when it's time to sing he uses simple block chords so that you can hear the story of the song. Almost every Ben song has a story... it's one of the reasons I've kept listening to his songs.

2. Not the Same

This is the song that that every one looks forward to at concerts. Ben gets the whole audience to sing the chords at the end of chorus. It's beautiful. He tells the same story every time about how he started doing this after 9/11 when his audience broke into perfect harmony, a capella at the end of the song. He's done it ever since. And every time it gives me chills.

3. Song for the Dumped

It's the  best angry song because it's...so angry. Yet it's so artistic. Most artists can't pull this off. Very conducive to private rock out sessions with your mirror and a comb. Because this song came off one of his very first albums (when he was still with the band), it's been around me for a long time and has always been a song that has stuck out.

4. Levi Johnson's Blues

I have to admit, this song is a cheap pick. Ben  did the music while Nick Hornby did the lyrics. And basically my favorite part is the story behind it...which was all Nick's idea. Essentially this song is about Sarah Palin's daughter's baby daddy being forced to marry her daughter to cover up for their sex before marriage scandal. Here's the  best part: the lyrics to the chorus came straight off Levi Johnson's myspace page. Give it a listen. The chorus is incredibly catchy as well (props to Ben).

5. Bitch Went Nuts

See, Ben has had 3 ex wives and now is with Fleur Folds, his fourth wife. So, like, I don't want to know about his personal life, but I'm totally okay with it because it produces awesome songs like this one. 

6. The Luckiest

This is off the album "Rockin the Suburbs" which was probably Ben's most popular album. My family listened to this on every single car trip when I was younger. This was when my brother and I were at the age where my mom still had to turn the volume every time Ben swore. And uh, Ben swears a lot. This procedure didn't last very long before my parents decided to get over the censoring thing. Anyways, this song is the last song to play on an LP filled with angry rants and general good, hearty, piano rock. I remember looking up at my mom in the front seat when this song would come on and seeing her tear up every time. Now I tear up too. It's the perfect love song and it truly does speak to me. Ben has a way with words.

7. In Between Days 

 I stumbled upon this when I was angry that I didn't own every single Ben song out there. It was my favorite off the EP "Speed Graphic." I just started noticing that I kept choosing it for play lists or liking it when it came on Pandora.  My blog is named after this song!

Thanks for enduring my expression of my obsession with Ben Folds. Hopefully you'll get a chance to listen to his stuff this week.

ps. a lot of his new songs from Lonely Avenue aren't on "Playlist.com" yet, so they don't appear in this playlist. Check them out anyways. From Above and Saskia Hamilton have some pretty nifty music videos up on youtube.

One Hit Wonders

Hey all.

Housekeeping: I added the car trips play list back in case you wanted to revisit it. I'm going to embed all my playlists to my actual blog post now so that my posts will be more easily referenced. Just make sure you click play now- they won't be on automatic start (so they don't all start playing at once).

I know I've been writing about my own personal stories more than I have about the music. So I'm going to take this post to dig deep and focus on the music. 

One hit wonders...bands that have survived on only one big release to the extent that their one song name might as well be the band's name (I'm lookin' at you "Come on Eileen"). Honestly, does anyone really know who wrote that song? Well, I just had to look it up. It's Dexys Midnight Runners. Who knew.

Let's be honest, the 80's really cranked them out. Baby-Got-Back, Take On Me, Mickey. The list goes on. 

So what makes them one hit wonders? I've noticed that a lot of them are up-beat, wedding-reception-esque dance music. For example, has it ever occurred to you that some band/artist actually wrote the Macarena? In my head I imagine some party committee sitting around a large table discussing the need for a new choreographed song a la electric slide. 

Take "It's Raining Men." It resolves the awkwardness between you and your cousin's bride's maids that you don't really know for about 3 minutes on the dance floor. It's a DJ's secret weapon to revamp the energy on the dance floor. It's something we all love dancing to. But does anyone really have it on their iPods?

Or what about songs like Baby-Got-Back? After that song hit, who could really take Sir Mixalot seriously? or "Who Let the Dogs Out" by Ba-ha Men or "Whip It" by Devo? The video definitely doesn't help Devo out... Whip It! (I couldn't embed this link, sorry guys). 

To avoid any more serious throw backs, I thought I'd mention a couple of the one hit wonders that have blessed our dancing years. I'm talkin' about "Mambo #5",  "I'm Blue (Da Ba Dee)","Cha-Cha Slide" (the millennium Macarena), "Shake it" by Metro-Station, "Pop, Lock and Drop It" by Huey, "I love College" by Roth, and more recently, "Fireflies" by Owl City among countless others.

So why are these one hit wonders? It's because they have one of the three components: 

a)humor

b)is a great song but has an unoriginal sound (suggesting that the rest of their songs have a common sound but none of them got as lucky)

c)is a great song and has a very original sound (suggesting that the rest of their songs have the same "new" sound but they couldn't pull it off).

See if you can figure out which songs I listed fit into which category. Fun game, I know. 

I'm not including this as a criteria for a one hit wonder because I feel like it's not as common, but some times songs are just good because of the dance moves that go with it. Like the Cupid Shuffle (down down do yo' thing do yo' thing): so catchy, and if you cant keep up with that "line-dance" get off the dance floor! No matter how many times it repeats you still find yourself goin' "to the right, to the right. to the left to the left." 

One hit wonders have a stigma of being kind of pathetic but when it comes down to it, they always seem to make people happy. After all, they did all made it into the top 40.

Chorus Member

 

All through my life, I've been in theatre. In High school, my favorite shows were musicals.

My first EVER musical- Bye Bye Birdie in 7th grade. That was the best show of my life to this day. I was a chorus member and I was completely fine with that (that's how good the show was!). I learned how to stage faint, I was allowed to run around shrieking on stage and when asked to fawn over Conrad Birdie I wasn't just acting. Our Conrad Birdie was a babe. I'm sure we were yelled at, I'm sure we had to do scenes over and over again. But I have successfully blocked that out of my memory. Now anytime someone plays a song from it, or decides to perform a number from it, I have this selfish reaction like, "What? That show's mine!"

As I entered High School all I wanted was to just get into Seussical my freshman year. The dance for the audition was being choreographed by my (now ex) boyfriend's mother. I thought this would be an advantage for me.

It wasn't.

I had practiced every step. I did the ponies, the  ball-changes, the weird downward fist pump walk she had us do, and I was confident that I would win her over.

About 2 minutes before I was supposed to enter the room, I was going over the dance in my head and marking the motions half heartedly when my heart started going a mile a minute. This was not typical anxiety. My heart literally started into almost a murmur. Now, as you could imagine, I'm freaking out. I'm grabbing peoples hands, slapping them over my chest and asking them if they felt how fast it was  going. I was trying deep breaths, pacing up and down the hallway outside the choir room where we were dancing.

My group was called. As I  fell into line I silently panicked that this heart thing wouldn't go away by the time it was my turn to dance. Soon enough, heart still racing, my turn came.

I was preoccupied with my heart racing and then preoccupied with looking like my heart wasn't and that left little to no brainpower for the stylizing the dance. I plopped around the front of the room, a wiry smile plastered across my face.

It was disastrous. As you can imagine, I did not make it into the spring musical that year.

The next year I auditioned for Anything Goes and got in as "Model." I thought this meant I would have a line. What it actually meant was that I was a chorus person that had a special stage cross during a particular scene. Big woop. Nonetheless, I tried my best to make a come back with my dancing abilities. I was rewarded by being put in the front of the stage (almost center! I told myself sometimes) during a big production number, "Blow, Gabriel, Blow."

The funny part about this song is that recently, our director had seen some people doing the Soulja Boy Superman dance around school. In every dance number, we leaned on our right foot,  crossed in the middle and leaned on our left foot. 1920's musical...with some Soulja boy.

We thought this was hysterical.

It's interesting that I don't remember the shows where I had a bigger part as well as I do being in the chorus. There were no lines to memorize, and until there was a  big production number we giggled in the wings, fixing each other's wigs. We re-did our lipstick a hundred times over and practiced our dances in the tiny back hallways together.

Whenever I hear these songs I remember all the auditions, all the laughs, the rush of being under the lights, the smiling so big it hurt. I would give anything to do it all again.

I am a proud chorus member.

Car trips

Growing up my family went on a lot of road trips to visit family in either Tennessee or Chicago. On the way we always had a box of CDs in the car that seemed to be almost designated for the road trip. Sometimes I would be allowed to pick them out before we left, or choose them while we were in the car.

I distinctly remember sitting in the captain seats of the car looking out the window as the fields and telephone lines  that you would normally find in Ohio whipped past our car. Porcelain by Moby was playing. Despite all the motion and chaos, the calm streaming sounds of Moby made my view out the car window seem like poetry worth contemplating. This wasn't uncommon. As I grew older, I started packing less and less to take in the car and spent more and more time staring out the window. Moby is one of the few artists that has the capability to successfully make everything more serene, more contemplative and almost mind boggling. I mean that when I listen to Moby it occurs to me that we live on an earth that rotates the sun that is in only one galaxy and we are just a floating orb in a vast space that never ends. Yeah. He does that to me.

But that's only one aspect of car rides in my family. We also leave at the wee hours of the morning when my mom is ready to start truckin' down I-80, and Ian, my brother, and I are ready to sleep 7 hours of the 10 that it takes to get home. So when we all grumble and stumble into the car (except for Mom, who's exceptionally chipper) we are all coherent against our own wills. I have all of these fuzzy memories of a dark car, my head squashed up against my seat belt in a desperate effort to seek comfort, freezing feet...and Counting Crows.

Now, there are so many words in a Counting Crows song. It's like he took 3 poems and squashed them into a kinda-melodic, almost Dave Matthews-like "ramble" verse form. But if you're only half there, like I was in the car in those wee hours, those lyrics can make for some pretty interesting dreams.

There is yet another aspect of our car rides- the four of us get really excited and hyper for about 45 minutes- the perfect amount of  time for a typical LP. From my childhood I remember these times being filled with Ben Folds (who you will soon learn is my favorite artist of all time) or Propellerheads. But what I remember the most is the White Stripes. The dynamic duo: Jack White on the guitar, absolutely wailing, and Meg on the drums...just hittin' it.

Dad and I have this joke about Meg White's simplistic, driven drumming style: "Hey, uh, Meg?"
"Yeah?"
"Hit, uh... that."
"Okay"
And the song begins.

I tried desperately to pick another song besides Seven Nation Army...but I just couldn't do it. The song is just too good- especially for what our family needed in those hyperactive 45 minutes. All of us singing, Ian and I bobbing our heads next to each other, Dad slapping the steering wheel  to the beat (obviously trying to emulate Meg's style), Mom is gettin' a little too funky with the dance moves in the passenger seat. I pretend to not like car trips  but what can I say? Family bonding is the best.