Category: Music

So I heard “One of Us” on the radio, the 1995 hit from Joan Osborne, and I immediately had a mental image of a nose ring linked to an earring and hair that was spiked tall on top and long braids down.

Does that look like Joan Osborne to you? Take a look.

Then I remembered, no, you old fool, you’re thinking of Jane Child who looks like that.

You can see why I would be confused briefly:

• I’m an old man.
• Joan/Jane
• One major hit each.
• Nose rings.

And to be honest, I don’t really like either of the songs. But I didn’t change the station when it came on. “Don’t Want To Fall In Love”, on the other hand, isn’t getting a lot of radio play 23 years later. “One of Us” isn’t, either, except for the silly “We’re playing our complete playlist in alphabetical order!” thing that one of the radio stations is currently running.

It was the 1980s: when we were close to them, we couldn’t see the senselessness.

We can’t go on just running away.
If we stay any longer, we will surely never get away.

Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s a direct contradiction of a density to warp time and space.

Also, children, the rumors were true: 1980s architecture did feature doors made taller specifically to accommodate teased hair.

Popular singer Eydie Gorme dies at 84:

Eydie Gorme, a popular nightclub and television singer as a solo act and as a team with her husband, Steve Lawrence, has died. She was 84.

I bought Blame It On The Bossa Nova recently; I got it on vinyl at either the spring Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library or at the local antique mall. We’ve listened to it a number of times, including her biggest solo hit:

I just last week got one of her Spanish titles on CD, Canta en Español.

What a wonderful voice, silenced. Rest peacefully.

VodkaPundit’s Friday Night Video is last week’s QA Music: "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen.

Steve says:

I first become aware of this song — and Leonard Cohen — in the 1990 Christian Slater vehicle, Pump Up the Volume.

. . . .

It’s impossible to convey my disappointment that long-ago summer when I picked up the soundtrack, only to find it featured an inferior Concrete Blonde cover of “Everybody Knows.”

As I alluded to in my book report on Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems 1956-1968, actually discovering who sang the version that appeared in the movie throughout except for the scene in the Jeep. In those days before the Internet, if you heard a song but not the artist, it could take aeons before you tracked it down. It took me years of radio listening to catch onto who sang “Baker Street” (Gerry Rafferty) or “Hungry Heart” (Bruce Springsteen). You could ask around, but my cohort at the time didn’t listen to older music. I suppose I could have called the radio station, but it was never that pressing.

At any rate, once I associated Leonard Cohen’s name with the song (Was it in the closing credits? Was it an article about the film? I forget), I went right up to Camelot Music to get a cassette version of I’m Your Man. I’ve since replaced the cassette with a CD and ripped it into iTunes, which explains why I was listening to it just a couple of weeks ago.

Here’s the version I put on the other blog, which has scenes from the film:

Also, there’s no telling yet what Mr. Green thinks of Meco. If he thinks of Meco.

Neneh Cherry:

Neneh Mariann Cherry (born Neneh Mariann Karlsson; 10 March 1964) is a Swedish singer-songwriter, rapper, and occasional DJ and broadcaster.

The Swedes are behind much more than we’re aware of. Connect the dots, man.

What is Herb Alpert’s favorite glass?

One might respond a glass of Tequila, but no:

This advertisement is from 1993, and, forgive me, I associate Herb Alpert with the 1960s and maybe the 1970s because of his prevalence on LPs. Most of my Herb Alpert LPs are from the early years (The Lonely Bull, Going Places, What Now My Love, S.R.O., Sounds Like, and Warm means I own most of his 1960s catalog and nothing after), so you can understand why I am sometimes taken aback when I realize he has continued releasing albums even to this day.

Which is why in 1993, he would still be a relevant pitchman, although I would have expected to see him selling Reddi-Wip.

Libbey, his favorite glass, is also still still in business, although its magazine advertising campaigns seem to have fallen off.

Studying Finnish:

Michael Brown’s long hours of studying the exotic language of Finnish may seem like a pretty noble use of time.

An American international-relations major at the University of Washington in Seattle, he aims for a life in foreign service. Finland’s strategic role in the Arctic and as a vocal member of the euro zone means his investment in the language could be a good bet.

But, Mr. Brown’s interest has a much more casual origin.

“It was heavy metal, unmistakably,” Mr. Brown said when asked what inspired him to pursue a language spoken by a nation that has fewer people, at 5.4 million, than Washington state. Finnish bands perform with a “dark woodsy resonance” that he has come to love, he says, and “the poetic and obscure nature of the Finnish tongue really gave it a unique wave.”

Mr. Brown isn’t the only one to channel a love for the metal genre into the pursuit of learning an obscure tongue. A band of young metal heads—spanning Romania to Singapore—have taken up a Northern European language in order to better appreciate or even mimic their favorite metal bands.

All right, so I read a book on Swedish history, which led to my new taste for lingonberries and then to commenting on Swedish news. When will it end? When will Brian J. cease with this little blog goofery fixation on Sweden?

Not yet.

So I mentioned I went to the Friends of the Clever Library book sale this weekend; I didn’t say that I avoided the Friends of the Springfield Greene County Library sale, although I sort of did.

Because I knew I’d buy a bunch.

But I did not avoid it entirely; instead, we went on Saturday, half price day, twenty minutes before they closed and about seven minutes before the volunteers started checking the charges on their cattle prods. The limited time frame, I knew, was all I could count on to limit myself, and I headed right to the LPs.

Where I scored:

Apparently, this is the 1966 album that started it all for the Samuelsons, who together or separately have released albums together or separately as late as 2005 (although Rolf, the older, passed away in 1981). Or so I kinda glean from the Swedish Wikipedia page.

The album is mostly in accented English, although a song or two are in Swedish. I’ve only listened to it once, but it’s not bad, and I’ll listen to it again although gospel is not a native genre for me to follow, I seem to be acquiring a couple LPs here and there, especially when they’re in a foreign language.

Oh, what else did I get? A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album (….Sounds Like…), a couple of Doc Severinsen albums, a couple Mood compilations (one for dining, one for sleeping), a Longines Symphonette Society Christmas collection, and a collection of music from Brazil. The sorts of things I listen to on my hi-fi. I keep meaning to bore you with a regaling of my listening zones where I listen to music and the different kinds of music I listen to while I’m in that zone. One of these days.

Brenda Lee’s “All Alone Am I”

Or Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”

when I sing them in the voice of Gollum.

How much coffee have I had this morning? Not enough.

A song that takes me back 25 years, roughly: A slow, inspirational song by RTZ called “All You’ve Got”:

RTZ included elements of Boston back when they were on hiatus from Boston.

You’re forgiven if you confuse them with The Storm, which was composed of elements of Journey while Journey was on hiatus and had its one hit (“I’ve Got A Lot To Learn About Love”) at about the same time as RTZ had its hits.

At any rate, what’s so hard about this song in the meta is that it’s sung by Brad Delp, also the lead singer of Boston, who committed suicide in 2007.

So it’s not as encouraging in toto as it is in text.

Man, how it pains me to say the words, but I do have a favorite Kenny Chesney song in spite of how he briefly ruined an element of country music with the whole Beach Cowboy schtick that even affected George Strait, for crying out loud.

At any rate, I heard it on the radio the other day. “Young“:

The strangest thing about it is the double-effect nature of it (I am Mr. Double Effect Narrator right here). When I first heard it ten years ago, I was a little wistful appropriately for my teenaged years (although briefly and only at a surface level, of course, but that is the will o’ the wist).

Now, of course, I can be both wistful for its content and wistful for the time when the song was new.

In related news, that particular clock has started on this current song from Eric Church, “Springsteen“:

The first couple of times I heard it, I thought it was a pitch-corrected song by Willie Nelson. I even did the math in my head to figure out how old Willie Nelson would have been when Springsteen came out. Not 17, but young enough to be wistful for now that he’s almost eighty.

Hey, why not something wistful from Willie, then? “Mendocino County Line“, also from 2002 and featuring Lee Ann Womack:

So I ordered Eddy Grant’s Killer on the Rampage based on the strength of its thirty-one year old hit “Electric Avenue”:

And I learned the following in my Internet research to find the album the song was from:

• Electric Avenue refers to Brixton Avenue in London, which was the first market street to be lit by electric lights in the 1880s.
   
• The song itself refers to the 1981 Brixton Riots, a “confrontation” between residents of Brixton and the police. The Wikipedia entry gives you a full panoply of excuses for the riot, but it’s the usual economically depressed populace of a one race reacts violently to the death of one of their own that they blame on members of the police who are of a different race.
   
• They include ‘1981’ in reference to this riot because there have been others, such as the 1995 Brixton Riot which broke out, in a stunning turn of events, when economically depressed populace of a one race reacts violently to the death of one of their own that they blame on members of the police who are of a different race.

Do I sound a little dismissive of race riots? Well, they are just about the same as people turning cars over and lighting them on fire after a sporting event. Message: Something bad happened to our team. In these cases, and in the cases of race riots in our country, it’s something bad happens to someone on a team who was not exactly a team player.

At any rate, it’s an interesting trail of things to learn from a couple minutes looking for an album title. And this afternoon, the album should arrive (on vinyl, natch). I look forward to it, since I haven’t bought a new album in a while.

You’re not mistaken; the Good Book Hunting posts have dropped off here recently. I only hit three or four book fairs a year these days, since they’re not as prevalent in Springfield as they are in St. Louis, and we’re reaching an epoch where an average garage sale these days doesn’t feature many books, and if they do, it’s not books that I need to read. Garage sales, if you find them, are heavy on the relating to God, What To Expect When You’re Expecting, and public school teaching books. Even if you’re going to a large church garage sale. Plus, I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve bought enough books. So until I get to reading them by the cartfull, I’m going to slow down the purchases.

Saturday, for example, I went to a garage sale at St. Agnes, and I only bought one book.

I’m more on the lookout for interesting record albums. In addition to the normal big band, jazz, or classical LPs I’m on the prowl for, I’ll pick up something on the cover looks interesting or for other slender pretexts.

For example, Saturday I picked up The Songs of Terry Ber because she covers a Leonard Cohen song on it (and I mistakenly thought it was an album of spoken poetry anyway).

I also picked up a copy of Rocio Jurado’s 1979 album Señora because the album cover and everything are completely in Spanish, and I want my musical collection to be multilingual (we already have an album in Hebrew, a collection of Israeli brass music):

How Spanish is it? There’s an inscription in the corner:

I can’t quite make out the pivotal word in it; with the something of forever/always. It’s hard to read handwriting in the best of cases, but in Spanish, the pattern-matching skill necessary is lacking. But it’s a love inscription, probably, from 1980. I can’t help but wonder if they’re still together 33 years later. Probably not, or I wouldn’t have the album now.

The music itself is light pop from the era, kinda with the vibe of Debbie Boone, but in Spanish. Did I mention I bought a record in another language? It would only make me more of a hipster if it could somehow throw up some subtitles.

At any rate, I’ll listen to it again, and every time I do, I’ll wonder about the people from the inscription. Starting with their names. What is that, nuts? nita? I have no idea.