The fact that my car is awesomely set up for listening to my (apparently discontinued) portable MP3 player (on which I may post more later) means that 99% of the time when I am driving I am not making use of my car stereo as anything other than a way to route sound to my speakers. Since I mostly drive either by myself, or with just Sarah (who can’t complain), I primarily listen to audiobooks. The MP3 player is, of course, awesome for this.
However, sometimes you need to listen to tunes. Maybe your wife doesn’t want to listen to the second half of chapter 15, or maybe you’re driving the guys home from poker, or maybe you just need some tunes. In addition to audiobooks, my MP3 player has about 2 trillion hours of music, and it very nicely supports bookmarking just where I am in the audiobooks so I can come back to that spot after the music has finished. However, I am extremely lazy and often don’t feel like going through the process of bookmarking, selecting some music, and then undoing that process later. That’s like 10 key presses or something.
So, about once a month I burn an audio mix CD, which I keep in the car. When I’m in the middle of a book, but I need to switch to music for a while, I just stop the MP3 player and switch sources on the car stereo. The stereo remembers where I was on the CD and picks up from there.
I say “about once a month” since that’s roughly how long it takes for me to go around the mix enough times to need a change, given that the mix isn’t getting heavy use.
As it is now August, I can bring in the July disc and the remainder of this post, which is ridiculously long, can describe it.
(If you’re reading this in an RSS aggregator, or via some other tool that shows content without applying the stylesheets from my site, you might want to actually click through to this one and read it with the pretty formatting.)
* * *
01 – We Used To Be Friends * The Dandy Warhols
I admit it, I came to the Dandy Warhols because this song was used as the theme tune for the single best season of television produced this year. (It was a close call, but Deadwood comes second.) I fully expect the network to completely destroy everything that made this year so good as a condition for getting a second season, but we’ll always have Season 1. I’d go into more details, but raving about TV will ruin my whole high-falutin’ intellectual thing.
And hey, great driving song.
02 – Chelsea Hotel * Lloyd Cole
Almost every track on I’m Your Fan (the good cd of Leonard Cohen covers) is great, but this one is probably my favourite. The song is quite enjoyable on it’s own, for just that whole “Gotta go. Poet. Wandering man,” vibe, but when you know who it’s about it takes on a whole other level. (It was Doug “O.M.” Hern who first clued me in to this, by the way.)
And that closing lyric?
I don’t mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can’t keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
that’s all, I don’t even think of you that often.
Genius. It’s like the guy is a poet or something.
P.S. Here’s a great Lennie quote about the hotel itself: “It’s one of those hotels that have everything that I love so well about hotels. I love hotels to which, at four a.m., you can bring along a midget, a bear and four ladies, drag them to your room and no one cares about it at all.”
03 – Lightfoot * Aengus Finnan
I confess, I don’t think of myself as a fan of Gordon Lightfoot–I mean, I dig The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald (and how could you not?) and I quite like Sarah McLachlan’s cover of Song For A Winter’s Night, but that’s about it.
However, I am quite a fan of Aengus Finnan, and when I learned that the Lightfoot Tribute CD would have not just Aengus’ original tune about Lightfoot, but also covers by a whole bunch of artists I do quite like (Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, the Hip, the Cowboy Junkies, Terry Tufts, Harry Manx, etc.) I figured would have to pick it up. (Aengus is a folk festival discovery, by the way. I saw him make 1000 people cry with an a capella performance at 10:00 in the morning and he was following an applachian jug band that had done a Led Zepplin cover, so he was going against the grain to do it)
So I put Aengus’ tune on the mix to give myself a chance to listen to it a few times.
(I still have no urge to go buy Gord’s Gold.)
04 – Laughin’ @ Ya * Universal Soul
The first year we lived in Halifax we went to the ECMA Awards show. It was quite an eye-opener–lots of artists that we had never heard of in Upper Canada.
One of the performances was Universal Soul laying it down. I was impressed.
I know what you’re thinking–rap from Halifax? (even with all the Buck 65 evidence, you’re still thinking that)– and you’re wrong. I pulled this track off the album just because it’s really the answer to that. A plus is that, of course, it’s loaded with Helltown references–but also managed to pull in a MacGyver shout out, an Aquaman reference, and some Vincent Price samples among other things.
Hell, listen for yourself–the band has put up an MP3 of the tune.
05 – Hollis And Morris * The Trews
And while we’re talking good local acts, doing songs with local references…
I admit it, my threshold for picking up local artist is a lot lower than for others, so it only took a little bit of good buzz to get me to pick up House Of Ill Fame. And, I am pleased to report that it’s great. And it comes with a second bonus disc of live stuff. I like bonus discs.
You can’t hear this track legally online, but you can buzz over to their myspace site and hear three other tracks from the album, plus the new single from the next album.
If you check out the 08/25/03 entry in Colin’s Diary, this is what it says about Hollis & Morris:
Homage to our home away from home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A street corner that’s seen many a late night after playing empty bars all over the city as One I’d Trouser. The apartment belonged to Jack’s dad, Victor Syperek, Buck 65 currently inhabits it, and it’s on a corner where dirty old men pick up hookers. Just for the record, none of The Trews have been with prostitutes.
Note also that the band is named after Scottish pantyhose for men. Apparently Scottish men liked wearing women’s clothes, but kept making up new names to so they could pretend they weren’t. (c.f. “skirt”, “kilt”).
06 – Time Zones * Negativland
I think I’ve already covered this one adequately. Let’s give a quick shout out to Karl Mohr, though, who turned me on to Negativland 18 years ago. (I am so old.)
07 – Mass Destruction * Faithless
Alex sent me the link to the video. Watching it once was enough to get me to buy the album, and that was before I developed a tiny crush on Sister Bliss (girls with guitars… sigh).
Whether long range weapon or suicide bomb
A wicked mind is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether you’re soar away Sun or BBC One
Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruction
You could a Caucasian or a poor Asian
Racism is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether inflation or globalisation
Fear is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether Haliburton, Enron, or anyone
Greed is a weapon of mass destruction
We need to find courage, overcome
Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction
And, it’s got a great bass line!
08 – Married By Elvis * Barlow
I almost never listen to music radio these days. Hell, I almost never listen to the radio, and when I do it’s the CBC. So that experience of hearing a song and liking it enough to find out who sings it, and track down the album, is one I don’t have very often. (I don’t feel at all bad about this, as the few times I do listen to radio it’s pretty exclusively either crap or Grandpa Rock).
Still, every now and then something sneaks through. This song caught me on a passing listen–the combination of what is clearly a message song with the sheer pop perfection really grabbed me. It turns out that the entire album has that same blend of excellent message with great pop–never gets right preachy, and you can always bop along to it, but there’s really rather a lot of great policitcal/social commentary in there.
Plus, for this one you can see the video
(See also this.)
09 – You May Be Right * Billy Joel
Don’t we all want to be that dangerous man, that can capture a woman because we’re just a little too crazy? (c.f. Janine, below.)
I don’t have much use for composer Billy, but this guy, and the guy who wrote “Keeping The Faith”, him I could drink with. If he shaved.
10 – More Shopping * Bran Van 3000
I have no idea what the band was thinking of when they wrote this, but I’m a man who grew up on Jerry Cornelius, and who knows the difference between King Mob and Gideon Stargrave, so for me this is clearly a song about decadent, highly over-sexed, and completely fabulous super-spies arranging an assignation at the end of time. (See, that’s one of the important bits in art–leaving a hole for the audience to fill in and connect with the work. This is why the original Cat People is a lot scarier than the remake. This is what my old poker coach, in that inscrutable way that writers who are also drummers talk, succinctly referred to as “playing the spaces”. Apparently if you’re a bit more wordy (like the writer of this month’s best new comic, Smoke) you can talk about the same phenomenom as Lacanian transference.)
Even if you don’t have the requisite literary background to see the things I see, how can you not like a song that include both the lines “Cunnilingus kiss-o-gram/isn’t this what messages are for?” and “Ask no questions, I’ll tell you no lies/It isn’t exclusively all about size”?
11 – Riverbed 5 * Buck 65
I like Buck, and I really like this album. I’ve played it to death while driving. This track was one of the few I didn’t know all the words to already, so I put it on the mix. (Buck, of course, is another “local artist”, although in this case it’s a bit of a stretch since he spends more time in Paris than in Nova Scotia these days.)
The storm washes me over, she takes me apart
She masters my body and breaks my heart
I cover the clocks and try to remember
To forget, to forgive, to forsake and to forfeit
12 – Janine * David Bowie
It’s a love song between a guy who has some deep dark secrets that he take WAAYYY too seriously, and a wild girl. How could you not like it?
This is one of my most Mondegreen-y songs.
“You’re fey, Janine/A tripper to the last” — I’m not sure what I thought the first line was, but I was pretty sure the second line was “A trooper to the last”, with connotations of someone who hangs in there. Quite a different meaning in the real lyric.
“For you’re a lazy stream/In which my thoughts would drown” — I always sing that as “a laser stream”. The idea of her being some sort of stream of optical data that would completely overpower him always had that Bowie SF sensibility for me. Of course Dave would have had to be pretty with it to be using laser-based communication as a metaphor in the late 60s.
“I’ve caught your wings for laughs/I’m not obliged to read you statements of the year” — Again, I’m not sure what I thought that first line was, but I was confident the second line was “I’m not obliged to read your statements of the guerre“, with ‘guerre’ of course being the French for ‘war’. I thought he was rejecting her empassioned, but perhaps ill-considered manifestos in support of some cause of the week.
13 – God’s Comic * Elvis Costello
This is another of the songs that Danny Michel addicted me to by covering them (and the start of a run of Danny-related tunes on this mix).
And really, how can you argue with this:
And he’s reading Jackie Collins’ “Rock Star” with one eye and Danielle Steele’s “Star” with the other, and with his third eye he’s reading “Less Than Zero” by Bret Easton Ellis. And he’s listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber,because you know God can always get tickets to “Cats.” And he loves Andrew Lloyd Webber because he’s so like Puccini. And he says,” I don’t know. This is all you’ve managed to acheive in all this time? Maybe I should have given the world to The Monkees. You know, Davey and Mickey and Peter and Michael would have done a better job.” Then he gets out his guitar and plays “The Last Train To Clarksville.”
14 – When I Die * The Waifs
The first year we moved to Nova Scotia, Australian band The Waifs were one of the headliners at Stanfest.
They were quite the darlings of the festival that year, and I got Sink Or Swim while I was at the festival (and have since purchased copies of their entire catalogue). I quite like most of the tracks on that album, and this is one that hasn’t had enough “mix exposure” yet.
Of course this one touches on lots of my favourite themes too: the life of the rover, and coming home as one of the joys of travelling, plus that whole morbid fascination with one’s own death.
Ever since I was a baby child I knew was born to roam
I had to climb to the top of the hill just to see what lies beyond
Now seasons change but I’m still the same, I don’t belong to anyone
Atill a piece of me will always be sitting in my hometown sun
Oh, and just for that personal connection, apparently Danny became quite good friends with one of the sisters while he and the Waifs were doing the summer festival circuit together.
15 – Diamond Smiles * Bob Geldof (OK, really The Boomtown Rats)
My favourite piece of Geldofery, from the album with the best name ever in the entire history of rock and roll.
This is probably one of my ten favourite songs of all time. It is certainly in my top two favourite female suicide songs (along with Without A Sound). There are a couple of places where this song just crushes me every time, notably including the “In the low voltage noise /Diamond seems so sure and so poised / She shimmers for the bright young boys / And laugh’s ‘Love is for others, but me it destroys'” bit.
I’ve had this album forever, but I didn’t realize how much I liked this song until I started hearing it regularly live, during the time that Paul MacLeod and Danny were doing shows together at Jimmy Jazz. Funny how that happens sometimes. (I also didn’t realize how much I liked Daniel Lanois‘ tune Rocky World until I heard Adrian Jones play it live.)
16 – To Welcome Paddy Home * Alias Acoustic Band
Every now and then, you’ve just got to have a bright little Irish tune.
17 – The Commodore’s Compliments * Tanglefoot
As soon as I saw these guys I knew they were, in the Fabulous Lorraine’s perfect phrase, “in our tribe”. (Of course Trish had seen them earlier and tried to tell me, but I don’t listen.)
If you get the chance to see a live show, take it.
Tanglefoot has a very broad range of subject matter, and they can make you laugh or cry. Softie that I am, I can not listen to their tune Vimy without my eyes glistening.
This tune, telling a true story from the war of 1812, has pretty much the same effect.
18 – Troy * Sinéad O’Connor
You had to know her from before that Prince song that got her all the musiv video play, and made the name a household one. From before the SNL incident, before the public more-or-less breakdown, the excommunication, the ordination, the “I’m a bisexual” announcements, before the series of mediocre albums about motherhood.
You had to have had one of the people in the know put a copy of The Lion and The Cobra, an obscurish album by this strangely named 20-year old Irish chick, with the scary haircut and this amazing voice, into your hand. (Thanks Laj. That’s another one I owe you.) With the one exception every song on that album is great. A capital-R Romantic teenager could sit in the dark and listen to that album over and over again. There was pain, and there was anger, and there was passion–it was quite a change from the kind of pop music that you heard on the radio.
Why this track? Well, I haven’t had it on a mix in years–it’s not the most lyrically interesting of the tracks, but it is perhaps the most vocally… um… dynamic. Basically I just missed it.
Two almost non-sequitors: I have at least one other great song that references the fall of Troy, albeit only for the title gag, and Sinéad’s brother is a pretty decent writer (I prefer the non-fiction).
19 – Daring Lousy Guy * Shivaree
This song is just fun. Not because it comes from an album entitled “I Oughtta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump” (although that doesn’t hurt), nor because the singer is named Ambrosia Parsley (although that also doesn’t hurt, nor does it hurt that she’s cute). Perhaps it is because the lyrics to the song are formed from mistranslated captions from 70s and 80s Hong Kong cinema. Well, that, and the fact that they are clearly just having fun with it, not just mechanically beating the joke into the ground.
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