Waking Ear

"Bury Me With It" -Modest Mouse

I think that this song is the highlight of the Mouse's new album "Good News for People Who Love Bad News". I don't know if it is the cadence of the verses:
"We were aiming at the moon, we were shooting for the stars
But all the kids were just shooting for the busses and the cars"

or the blasting chorus:
"Please, bury me with it"

or maybe even the stirring bridges:
"We are hummingbirds who've lost the plot and will just not move
and we're good news for people who love bad news"

Modest Mouse has always had a talent for righting catchy licks, but this song really has some serious pop appeal. Perhaps the whole album does.

Cee-lo/"Glockapella" -- I want to know if the intro to this song is borrowed from somewhere. If anyone has any clue, let me know.

I'm a big Cee-lo fan, and Soul Machine has not let me down. It's not as adventurous or sweeping as his solo debut, and it suffers from unevenness. But it's more of a "moment" album, like when "Glockapella" segues into "We Want the Funk" or when "Scrap Metal" drops into the "We Will Rock You" beat.

I like "moment" albums, where the parts are greater than the whole. I think they fare better in repeated listens, because you don't get drilled into repetition, if that makes any sense. I'm talking here about albums where even the songs themselves might meander a little bit, but most have that key moment that make you go, "Oh, shit!"

Other moment albums:

Aerogramme/Sleep and Release
The Prodigy/The Fat of the Land
El-P/Fantastic Damage

Y'all got any?

"Escape (The Pina Colada Song)"/Rupert Holmes

I KNOW you KNOW this song. Just give it a sec and it'll come back to you. Now, the real question is, who the heck is Rupert Holmes?

My bf made himself a mixed cd of songs from the '70s. The selection is mostly rock (rolling stones, cat stevens, pink floyd, etc.) and motown (marvin gaye, commodores, etc.). But nuzzled near the end is the grand song which hasn't crossed my mind in many years.
It gets stuck playing in your head though. And it's good to sing in the shower.
And it tells a story. And it calls his wife, his "lady" which just cracks me up. The use of the word "lady" must have been more popular in the late 70s/early 80s than it is now.

Bring back the "lady"!!!

"Bring Me To Life"/ Evanescence -- Funny story about my dad, who's in town this week. He went to Virgin Records a few days ago to while away a few hours when I was at work.
"What CDs did you buy?" I asked, when we were eating dinner that night at my favorite Italian restaurant.
I'm thinking, Smokey Robinson, maybe a Phil Collins that he doesn't have... you know he went to that concert a few years ago and sat in the SIXTH ROW, and it was so fun!
"Evanescence," he said, as my eyebrows go up. "It's good to listen to in the convertible with all the window's down. Or, you know, when I want to clean."
Evanescence: The New Cleaning Music! "Wake me up inside! (Wake me up!)"

My dad RULES.

Schmubb, sorry about adding a post directly after you, but I know I won't have time tomorrow.....

"Killing An Arab"- The Cure

So, I have this new office policy where I can't really email (externally) or get on the internet for personal use. I am totally a rebel.

Anyway, this song has been in my head on and off since Sunday. I was talking about Albert Camus, my favorite author, and of course this song always pops in my head when I start talking about The Stranger. I haven't listened to the Cure in quite some time on purpose. Too many memories. How many people claim an association between The Cure and Mid/High School times in their room writing poetry or staring at a picture of a girl that you made out with once at church camp. Well...I will start the list stating that was totally me!

Lastly, Paul, thanks for the Posies CD. It is really good and your thoughts on their harmonies was spot on.

Roxette/"Listen to Your Heart" -- Total earworm. Don't know how this entered my brain. But Girlfriend and I were talking the other day about another Roxette slow jam -- "It Must Have Been Love." Classic.

Richard Thompson/"Tempted" -- One time Chelle was in my car for some reason and this came on my iPod and she realized it was the Squeeze cover and started singing and she knew all the words. I'm always amazed when people know all the words to anything, because I almost never do.

I know melodies, sure, often after only hearing a song once. So I hum. But I don't process lyrics that way. They have to be really, dramatically pronounced and different and out-there for me to think about them. Otherwise, they just kind of seep into the overall sound -- I'm much more interested in the way Kurt Cobain is singing "a denial" than in the fact that he's saying "a denial."

But sometimes I'll hear a lyric out of the musical context and it will surprise me. They are, I guess, there for a reason.

I just realized that it's Thursday.
I mean, I KNOW it's Thursday, but I just remembered that it's Thursday - my blog posting day.
Hello?

Therefore, my brain is all muddled with what to comment on. The folk music I've been listening to on my drive to work in the morning - Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens
- or, the Top 80's Hits that I'm listening to now at work, courtesy of Yahoo's Launchcast (i'm a fan, I have to admit).

I'll just say this - I love love love that I have the freedom to listen to what music I want when I want. If I feel the need to be sullen and granola-like, I can bop my head along to Gordon's "Ode to Big Blue" or "Beautiful" (ps - the latter was my parent's wedding song - a good choice, i think)
If I decide I want to listen to music I can sing to, that'll make me smile everytime I hear a new song come on, well....just program the online station to the 80's.

Simple and perfect.
Perhaps tomorrow I'll be down to jam to some Dirty South tunes that girlfriend suggests.
It's up to me. Yay!

Lil' Flip/ "Game Over" -- I know it seems I talk about Dirty South hip-hop a lot on this blog, but you HAVE to hear this song. The first go-round, you might not like it. But the second two or three, you'll go, "Is that Pac Man in the background?" And then the fourth or fifth time around, you'll be like me, shouting along with the chorus every time it comes on the radio. "But you don't hear me, Flip! Flip! Flip! Flip! GAME OVER."

The Carolina Panthers apparently used it as their theme song during the Super Bowl. And it was a huge club-banger in Dallas a few months ago...

I almost wanted to go out and buy the album -- which apparently sells quite well in Dallas -- but then I realized that an A&R man dreamed up the song's whole damn concept. I feel so used.

Tomoyasu Hotei/"Battle Without Honor Or Humanity" -- Sorry it's late. Didn't want to neglect to post. I just really want to see the second Kill Bill installment. That is all.

"Invincible"/Pat Benatar

The most important thing to note about this Waking Ear is that this song was in the movie, The Legend of Billie Jean.
Hells yeah!

I hadn't thought about this movie in ages. It's a campy classic. And I can't imagine that someone has NOT seen it. Seriously, anyone who owned a TV in the late '80s must have caught it at some point. The networks played it endlessly.

Quick recap: A Texas teenager cuts her hair short and becomes an outlaw martyr with her brother and friends (courtesy of IMDB)
The movie's tagline: When you're seventeen, people think they can do anything to you. Billie Jean is about to prove them wrong. (cue "Invincible")

Now, let's all have a watching party and then run out into the streets yelling, "Fair is Fair" over and over again. Then we can burn a statue of Helen Slater...err...Billie Jean. We're bound to get some trouble started...

"Lilac Wine"/ Jeff Buckley -- There's something haunting about listening to this song on the freeway at 5 a.m. The sun hasn't come up yet. You're practically alone on the road. (Why is anyone up at that hour?) And you keep thinking, as he hits all of his so-pure-it's-scary falsettos, Damn! This guy drowned in a lake!

If you have a time to kill, here's an interesting article about how it happened.

And this is totally an aside, but Phant does a really good imitation of this song. Huntsville Boys Choir rules.

"I'm Nuthin'" -Ethan Hawke

Oh god. Please get this song out of my head. It really is a terrible song. I, probably like many teenage boys, had a man-crush on Ethan Hawke's character "Troy Dire" from Reality Bites, but let's face it, he should stick to acting. I think that Ethan Hawke, Keanu Reeves, Jared Leto, and Russell Crowe should get together, start a band, and call it "we suck".

ha ha....zinger....

Urrrsher/"Yeah!" -- The best mash-up this year, a brilliant combination of Justin Timberlake's "Rock Your Body" and Lil' Jon's "Get Low." If you had told me it could be done, I never would have believed you.

Danger Mouse/The Grey Album -- Take something familiar and put it in a new context. It's a familiar artistic technique, and it's been happening in music for ages.

So why does The Grey Album matter? Danger Mouse rarely astonishes, splicing samples of guitar strums and picks into loops, then laying Jay-Z over them. Seldom do the The White Album and The Black Album tempos overlap enough to allow Danger Mouse to do more subtle editing, though when it works, it really works -- "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "What More Can I Say" twirl in perfect double-lutzes together, icy and gorgeous.

DM maintains pretty good faith to Jigga's vocal flourishes, accentuating a particularly crisp line with a stutter-stop or a guitar squeal. The Beatles material shines because it's that fucking good; even the little snippets of guitar in "Public Service Announcement" sound warm, resplendent and totally in character.

So it's a fun album, even witty in places, and well executed despite its limitations. Not any more groundbreaking, technically speaking, than Freelance Hellraiser's "A Stroke of Genius."

But there's something else going on here. Unlike "Stroke," The Grey Album takes two canonized artists in their respective genres and bleeds them together. It's like a cross-platform supergroup, like having David Byrne do the soundtrack for an Alfred Hitchcock movie. You and I and Danger Mouse can imagine the musicians we love playing together, and then we can actually make it happen.

What's ultimately wonderful and different about The Grey Album is how empowering it is. It takes a stoned music-geek conversation -- "So what if you, like, combined The Black Album and The White Album and made a Grey Album?" -- and turns it into a conversation piece -- "I would've used this song here instead," or, "He totally glossed over Jigga's line here," or, "I never heard that riff that way before."

It's engaging in a way more music should be engaging; you're invited to share Danger Mouse's dream.

"Modern Nature"/Sondre Lerche

I've recently discovered Mr. Lerche (actually, I think his last name is Vaular, but that doesn't sound very rock star). I purchased his debut CD, Faces Down, on a whim after reading a few good reviews of his latest album, Two Way Monologue.
Has anyone heard it?

I like Sondre. He's light. He's folky. He's simple.
Check out the lyrics to Modern Nature, a song that makes me want to frolick in the fields (and we all know how much I love doing that):
The time is here for being straight; It's not too early and never too late
People say I should watch my pace; "Think how you spend all your days"
They'll just have to wait and see; If things go right they'll have to agree
Oh, what a world this life would be; Forget all your technicolor dream
Forget modern nature; this is how it's meant to be

See, isn't that just the funnest?? Wheeeeee!!!