By the way...

I have not abandoned this blog. Work's just kept me busy and I'm actually starting playing the guitar again and undertaking some self-help work on your creativity project, so I haven't had as much time to blog as usual. I wanted to hit this blog at least once a week but well, maybe in a bit I can get back to that.

I want to write more "People I'd Like to Take Out To Dinner" articles, and am thinking of someday soon lengthily singing the praises of Franz Ferdinand, Sonic Youth, Sebadoh and Pearl Jam, I just need to find the time to sit down, write something and do the article justice!

So stay tuned, you faithful 2 readers!

Songs I Can't Stand Part 2

I feel old doing this one, because I remember laughing at old Tonight Show footage where Steve Allen was reading in a very serious tone the lyrics to "Be Bop-a-Lu-La" or something like that and as the audience was laughing with him, thinking "My God, Steve, you're right this makes no sense!" I was laughing at him, thinking "My God, get a life, it's just lyrics."

And yet Fergie's London Bridge lyrics just make me wanna go "Huh?" And it's sung in one of those ways where it leeches onto your brain and sucks the life out of it.

How come everytime you come around,
My London, London bridge, wanna go down like,
London, London, London, wanna go down like,
London, London, London, we goin’ down like…

Is it in your head now too? Good. Let's suffer together!

Jeff Buckley, God Bless Him!

Jeff Buckley’s voice makes me weep like a baby. It’s just so fucking beautiful. Three full octave ranges in his voice. At least. I’m listening to the only album he completed almost 10 years after he died, and I can’t believe he’s gone. I remember talking with a friend about him when I was in university a few years ago and she told me how she loved Jeff Buckley and I said to her “It’s terrible what happened,” and she actually looked at me and said “What?” Then I got the painful job of telling her how one of her most favorite singers of all time in the entire world had lost his life when he drowned in a Memphis river. I felt like a complete asshole.

His voice seriously is like an infection. It just stays under your skin and you’re not the same after hearing his songs. After pinching a few of his songs off the Internet I finally bought his Grace CD today and am in the middle of listening to it. I’ve been tearing up every now and again, for the beauty of his voice, for his death which just seems to serve as one of many examples as to how life is far from fair sometimes, and for Hallelujah, the song MTV latched onto when covering the September 11th attacks five years ago. The coverage will soon be relived all over the TVs and the Internet tomorrow. As I lived in Washington D.C. then, I’m really not looking forward to seeing any of the coverage, but I know I’m not a special case. I highly doubt anyone else is, too.

Anyways, my most favorite (so far) Jeff Buckley song, “I Want Someone Badly” isn’t even on this CD. In that song, he just completely bares his soul, stretches his voice high up over the lyrics and the backing vocals which are quite reminiscent of something out of the early 1960s soul groups. I love this song so much because his voice is just oozing with pain, dripping with loneliness and I can totally sympathize with it. I just wish I could emote like that too. Everyone has so much to say, has so many feelings they would like to share but he just does it in a way that is unbelievably articulate and vulnerable and just plain amazing.

I’m a woman obsessed now. I can’t stop playing his songs, even though they make me long for an alternate universe where he has grown older and has made a few more albums and I have seen him in concert. Anyone stumbling onto my small pathetic corner of the Internet, please get away from my page and point your browser in the direction of amazon.com or CDnow.com or whatever else and buy his CD Grace. Don’t be stupid like me and download his songs. BUY HIS CD. Really! You certainly will not regret it.

Skeletons In My Closet (Part 1)

I think I like The Feeling.

This belongs in here as a skeleton in my closet because every time I look at the lead singer, Dan Gillespie Sells, I am strangely reminded of Orlando Bloom, who is really too pretty to do anything but be pretty I think. Dan Gillespie Sells, who is right in the center of the picture, may be talented, which would make him really interesting to me, but then he has this Orlando-esque aura to him (is it only me who sees this?) which unsettles me.

Also, on the band's debut CD, Twelve Stops and Home," a promo sticker which labels The Feeling as a "soft rock" can be found quite prominently on the front of the CD.

Soft rock to me is Chicago. It is Air Supply. In short, it can be nothing that I really like, and I just so happen to find two of the songs I have heard from The Feeling pretty darn catchy.

Am I getting old?

And what sort of band of twenty-somethings embraces the label "soft rock"? They don't have to crank it up to 11, but who really straps on a guitar and yet seemingly wants to be featured on Magic 95.7 or whatever it is?

It really is just because of the whole soft rock thing they've been lumped into (and who knows, maybe it's been unwillingly) that I feel a wee bit embarrassed I like their music.

Come on guys, prove me wrong! When you go on your tour, blow out your amps. Smash a few guitars. Be as un-Neil Diamond as possible! I dare ya!

Musicians I Would Like To Take Out For Dinner (Part 2)

I can’t remember when it was that I became enamored with Paul Westerberg and The Replacements. It might have been during my junior or senior year of high school when I saw the movie Singles, and two of his songs, "Dyslexic Heart" and "Waiting For Somebody" were featured on the soundtrack. It might have been a few years later when I heard his version of Cat Stevens’ “Sunshine” which was featured on the Friends soundtrack.

That Paul Westerberg is far removed from the Paul Westerberg of The Replacements, a band who was notorious for showing up to its own shows past drunk -- as in completely obliterated -- and who would play nothing but a set of cover songs, if they damn well felt like it. Those shows, and unfortunately, I am too young to have even seen The ‘Mats toward the end of their career at the end of the 80s, were legendary -- you’d go and not really know what to expect, in terms of set list or the band’s temperament.

Paul Westerberg is just cool. He knows how to write smart, abrasive lyrics, like his dissing of MTV in “Seen Your Video” or when he snidely looks down on flight attendants in “Waitress in the Sky,” and then he can turn around and write something that makes him sound so vulnerable like when he sings “How do you say I miss you to an answering machine? How do you say I’m lonely to an answering machine?” in "Answering Machine" and in “Unsatisfied” where he dares someone to look him in the eye and tell him he's satisfied, before screaming out at the end “I’m so unsatisfied! I’m so dissatisfied!”

I think The Replacements were never a band wanting to be taken ultra-seriously, as seen in their goofy songs “I Don’t Know” from Pleased to Meet Me and “Gary’s Got a Boner” from Let It Be and in a more subtle way, where they show they are just like any other fan of rock music by covering Kiss’ “Black Diamond” in Let It Be and writing an idolizing love-letter song about one of their rock heroes, “Alex Chilton” on Pleased To Meet Me. They understand very well what it’s like to feel an instant connection to a song, even when you don’t know all the details about it just yet: “I’m in love! What’s that song? I’m in love with that song!”

Another can’t miss song is “The Ledge” also off of Pleased to Meet Me. This is a song about a suicidal man, who is threatening to jump, and Westerberg gives us a look inside his head, where he talks cynically about how the cops have called in his ex-girlfriend to convince him not to jump and how the media have made a circus appear down on the street below, and he seems smugly content that for the first time in his life, he is the focus of someone’s undivided attention. It’s quite apparent what becomes of the person deciding whether to jump. Instead of this being a song of redemption and taking it on the chin when adversity smacks you around, the song ends with a fading scream.

I really like this song because it isn’t one of those “Oh yeah, hold on and life will get better” platitude-type deals. (Remember the old “The World I Know” video from Collective Soul?) I’m sure there are people who stare down from a bridge at the water below or count out a number of pills from a bottle and then snap out of it, wondering what the hell possessed them to think about offing themselves, but there are, of course, those people who go through with their suicidal plans and Westerberg again shows his skills as a writer by making the narrator of this song not an adolescent cliché but very real, and very human.

And speaking of all rock stars who don’t die as a result of suicide or a drug overdose or a plane crash, Paul Westerberg just plain got older. As a result, his songs changed too. He no longer screams his throat raw into the mike, though years of doing that and smoking countless cigarettes have made his voice perpetually scratchy.

One of my most favorite Paul Westerberg songs is “Love Untold” where he talks about two people getting ready for a date, and you can almost see him watching it all unfold, this world-weary but sympathetic 40 year old man watching excited 20 year olds get ready for what could be the first night of the rest of their lives. But then something goes wrong and the meeting doesn’t take place. At least it doesn’t take place like it should have, anyways. “It never came to be, I’m told,” he sings and then asks almost sadly “Does anyone recall/The saddest love of all/The one that lets you fall/With nothing to hold?” Maybe they met, and expecting the world, only saw the equivalent of a vacant lot sitting across from them. Who knows?

I’m not sure what I would ask or talk to Paul Westerberg about if I had him over for dinner. It’d probably be something dumb, like “That song? Alex Chilton? I really think it’s cool!” (long pause) and then “You remember the video for ‘Bastards of Young?’ I love that video,” (longer pause), mimicking that Saturday Night Live skit where Chris Farley interviews Paul McCartney.

In short, I think Paul Westerberg is cool because of how well he writes his songs, how funny and heartbreaking he can be at the same time. How he was living a life that seemed to be on the fast-track to self-destruction, but pulled himself out of it, and is now writing songs in a different style that are still quite good.

Top Five Paul Westerberg/The Replacements songs (and this is absolutely tough because I could easily add five more, but that would make that much harder to rank them!):

1. Alex Chilton
2. Answering Machine
3. I Will Dare
4. The Ledge
5. Love Untold

Songs I Can’t Stand (Part 1)

Rihanna is an R and B artist who seems to have a promising career as she looks beautiful and can sing well to boot. For the record, I love “S.O.S,” but maybe that is because while it has nothing to do with ABBA, it features a sample of another so cheesy it’s good band, Soft Cell and their 1981 hit “Tainted Love.”

So here I am wondering what she’ll do next. Something that features Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance”? A song that samples Howard Jones’ “New Song”? No. What she does is this overly grandiose ballad full of typical R and B wailings (and the video is filled with typical drama-rama posturing) called “Unfaithful.” In it she talks about how she has a boyfriend, but she also is keeping a lover on the side. I apologize for not knowing much about the song, and damning it anyways, but the one thing I have the biggest problem with is the chorus.

I don't wanna do this anymore
I don't wanna be the reason why
Everytime I walk out the door
I see him die a little more inside
I don't wanna hurt him anymore
I don't wanna take away his life
I don't wanna be...
a murderer

A murderer? A murderer???? Now, I am positively sure that Rihanna did not write this song, and so she is only playing the messenger I suppose, but who in their right mind is so presumptuous to assume that if her boyfriend figures out what’s been going on between her and some other guy, that instead of dumping her clothes and all her things on the front lawn, instead of kicking her skanky ass to the curb (yeah, I personally hate the idea of infidelity in a relationship), instead of idly entertaining thoughts of hurting her, he’s going to go and off himself? What?

And yeah yeah yeah, I know what the argument for this is. Rihanna might be as much of a cheater as John Lennon was really a walrus or Johnny Cash really shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. However…a murderer! Ha ha ha…someone needs to get their head out of the clouds.

Musicians I Would Like To Take Out For Dinner (Part 1)

I'm cribbing off a friend of mine who has her own series, but since I think a) she has a great idea but b) she has some hugely glaring omissions on her list, I figured it'd serve me well to compile my own list of musicians I really dig. These are all people I would like to have a chance to sit down with and talk to over a good meal, preferably not from my own kitchen. But that is another post on another blog.



The first one I would like to consider is John (Cougar) Mellencamp. John Mellencamp, not only being a fellow Libra, is also someone who strikes me as being completely unpretentious, a straight-shooter, and someone who doesn't stand for much bullshit.

While I don't know much about Mellencamp's earliest recordings, I have heard that a) he sang covers of rock tunes from the 1950s and '60s and basically sounded like a wanna-be Bruce Springsteen, and b) his stage name ("Johnny Cougar") was given to him and showed up on the front of his first record without his knowledge or consent.

I got to know Johnny Cougar when I was maybe 7 or 8 and watching Solid Gold with my mother. He was performing "Hurts So Good," strutting across the stage and wildly waving one of his hands in a circular motion toward the end of the song. Even then at the young age I was I thought he was a really weird dancer, and while I didn't know at the time that he was most likely lip-syncing, I think there had to have been something about his performance that has made it stand out all these years later.

A few things I admire about John Mellencamp is how he has never forgotten where he has come from, a small town in Indiana. After all, he may have married a former supermodel, but they currently reside in Indiana most of the time. After 1985's Live Aid made hundreds of thousands of people turn their attention to starving children in Africa, Mellencamp and Willie Nelson put together a benefit show that raised awareness of another group of people struggling to get out of poverty -- American farmers. And unlike Live Aid, which had one show in 1985 and another one to commemorate its 20th anniversary in 2005, Farm Aid has gone on every year save for two since its inception. The 19th Farm Aid will happen September 30th in Camden, New Jersey.

I also admire how over the years, he not only gradually renounced what essentially was his slave name (ha), he has constantly looked for new ways to express himself in his music. Earlier I stated that he was a kind of Springsteen clone, someone who sounded like they'd be perfectly happy as some bar's house singer, who covered hits like "Do You Believe in Magic?". 1985's Scarecrow mirrored his work in Farm Aid, celebrating Middle American life with songs like "Small Town" but also cautioning the rest of the country about how a necessary American demographic was slowly fading away in "Rain on the Scarecrow."

1987 saw John Mellencamp reinvent himself again, playing music that was now incorporating elements of bluegrass, country and folk. I'm not generally a fan of these genres of music, but I love what he was doing on Paper and Fire and one of my most favorite John Mellencamp songs, "Check It Out," a song that features an accordion and a fiddle, along with the standard drums, bass and guitars.

And then later, he worked with Junior Vasquez, who is famous for making dance records. Not the kind of dancing Mellencamp claimed he was good at way back in "Crumblin' Down" (and John, I love you, but...no, you really aren't a real good dancer!) but honest to goodness dance music producer and DJ.

In short, I admire him for his integrity as a musician and for his humanitarian side.

My Top 5 John Mellencamp Songs: (thanks to Rob Fleming/Gordon for the inspiration!)

1. Small Town
2. Check It Out
3. Pink Houses
4. Rain on the Scarecrow
5. Lonely Ol' Night

Looks Like Keane Are On Their Way...

Keane singer Tom Chaplin admitted recently that he has decided to check himself into rehab for his own growing concerns over the amount of alcohol he's been drinking.

Usually it's a musician's friend or loved one who puts them in rehab, but maybe Keane are doing this to ensure that VH-1 will make a Behind the Music special on them now that this piece of news has come out.