incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Last night after Chad tagged in to Pip duty and I grabbed a bite to eat, I wandered out to the gazebo in the back of the Readercon hotel because I saw a sign that the Viable Paradise folks would be out there with instruments, and I thought it likely that there would be music.

There was indeed music. red_mike_yog sang all the verses of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze", which is long but I approve of the ending (we all agreed that it was for the best). ellen_kushner and deliasherman sang "From Galway to Graceland", which prompted me to ask Delia if they knew John Hiatt's "Tennessee Plates", another song about dodgy visits to Graceland. Someone whose name I never got did a country-ish version of "Mysterious Ways" on a ukulele (though somehow we never got to "lift my days, light up my nights"), among several other contemporary songs ("Mr. Jones" has a lot more words than I remembered).

Another Richard Thompson song that Ellen played and we all sang, "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," was probably my favorite moment, because it's lovely, it was brave and generous of Ellen to play it, and it was a good example of how performers can cheerfully wing some things. I may never hear the verse

Says James, "In my opinion, there's nothing in this world
Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl.
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeves won't do,
They don't have a soul like a Vincent 52"

without hearing Ellen sing "now fancy-motorcycle and fancy-motorcycle and Greeves won't do," because it made me smile in solidarity—that bit I actually knew, but most of the time I am not nearly so clever at half-remembered lyrics and just mumble.

Also, the last time I found myself in an impromptu music session at Readercon was several years ago, before the ubiquity of smartphones, and the ability to access lyrics sites immediately changes things a lot; it was the only way people got through "Stairway to Heaven," for instance.

Good times, and only one mosquito bite from it, amazingly; other people must've smelled better for a change.

The chorus of the Decemberists' "Don't Carry It All" includes the line "Let the yoke fall from our shoulders." The band's website renders this as "Let the yolk fall." Yes, here's a song about bearing a "neighbor's burden," and the chorus references eggs rather than a device used for pulling heavy loads. Uh-huh. (Though the image of fried eggs pinned on like epaulettes is somewhat amusing to me.)

Thus, a poll:

Oh, and speaking of music polls, I never identified the songs in last month's lyrics poll.

( So let me do that now, with links to listen: )

This was going to be a multiple-things post but it has languished for about a week waiting for the other two things, so:

Thing the first: I got a haircut recently and now have this persistent strong urge to cut all my hair off. Not boot camp short, but instead of all lengths falling to my hairline/mid-jaw, I don't know, shorter: close to my head in the back, and maybe bangs again in the front? Having stared in the mirror while pulling my hair back, I'm not sure I actually have the face for this, but I might try it anyway: I'm planning to get another cut as close to my due date as possible, so if I hate it, well, it grows fast; I won't be spending a lot of time thinking about my appearance then anyway; and it would be so much easier.

(Some reference pictures: freshly-cut, from the side/back, and longer, from the front.)

Thing the second: I think the Decemberists win the award for making songs that I want to sing along with but that are inordinately difficult. Take "Calamity Song," for instance (video; lyrics (click the song title)). Bouncy, starts out pretty simply, and I even got "Andalusian tribes," in the chorus, without too much trouble (well, I don't know why, but I understood what the words were). But then the start of the second verse? "Hetty Green / Queen of supply-side bonhomie bone-drab / (You know what I mean?)"

Supply-side bonhomie bone-drab? Seriously?

BTW: those of you who like Infinite Jest need to watch that video even if you don't like the song, because it's the Eschaton scene (NYT article with more detail). (It's understandable as a video even if you don't know the book.) Chad found the section for me in the book, and I read it (well, most of it; I skipped the math footnote). So very much not my kind of thing, but I can see the appeal.

(I see it is available as an ebook, and wow, I would not want to have been in charge of that conversion.)

Here are some lyrics that have snagged my attention lately, done as a poll for the reason in the subject and also because it amuses me. Links to listen are in the first comment (so if it amuses you to play guess-the-song, don't hover the one that says "artist's website").

And yes, I admit it, I winnowed these down based in part on which ones made something of a progression. So what?

(Also, I was going to save this for Tuesday morning, but I am so exceptionally grumpy about work right now that I'm doing it early. It's that or eat way more chocolate than is wise.)

This is the playlist that resulted from last Thursday's shuffle/skip fest, which I initially thought was called "Music for the Morning After (the Apocalypse)" but then decided it wasn't. It's currently "stark (rev. 2)" in iTunes [*], but I'm so sick of snow I can't call it "Winter Is Coming" even for the joke. Other titles under enh-maybe consideration are "Two Ends of Time" and "Holding Back the Vampires."

[*] Playlists are such an improvement over mix tapes when it comes to ease of putting them together. Why don't I do this more often? Oh yeah, because I have no time. Right.

Links are to places you can listen online; the Google searches should give you a "Play song" link near the top, which lets you listen free the first time. If it's a YouTube link, it's for the song not the video; half the time I haven't even watched the video, just put the tab in the background and listened to be sure that the song is all there.

( twelve songs, with links to listen, lyrics snippets, and occasional comments )

. . . this was almost entirely written when it occured to me that I fail at self-reflection and should maybe have considered why, less than a week before March 1, I found myself finishing a playlist, for the first time in literally years, that just happened to be about loss and determination and was picked with "bleak yet fierce" as the guiding principle. Clearly I should just call it "In Memoriam" and be done with it.

The Hold Steady are a weird, weird band (or, possibly, Craig Finn is a weird, weird dude), and I basically only like three of their songs, but those three make good Monday morning music, kind of up-tempo rock with lyrics more shouted than sung but still weirdly catchy. SteelyKid is going for an epic sleeping-in this morning, so here, have some music.

( three embedded videos )

Right, I'm going in to wake a sleeping toddler. Wish me luck.

I wasn't planning to make this post for a while, because I haven't finished listening to some of the albums these are from (the perils of shuffle and a really big backlog), but I figured I ought to make a substantive post after the last post at LJ (and a locked post after that), just to demonstrate. So here's a bunch of new-to-me music that I've been liking lately.

• Metric, Fantasies: a number of songs, particularly "Blindness," which is nicely creepy and rich with narrative (Google [*], YouTube) and "Satellite Mind," which is catchy and mildly NSFW (Google, YouTube). Alt rock (and with a female singer).
• Muse, "Uprising" (Google, YouTube): bass line, baby. More alt rock.
• Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Why Walk When You Can Fly" (YouTube): and now for something completely different, a gorgeous pop song. I first heard it without the piano intro and I like it better that way.
• Tracy Grammer, "Gypsy Rose" (YouTube, live): more gorgeous vocals, this time further on the folk side of things. Also, a song that would be very different if you gender-reversed it; I keep meaning to do a post about cover songs that are interesting that way.
• Band of Horses, Infinite Arms, particularly "Laredo" (Stereogum): pop rock, nice harmonies.
• Josh Ritter, "Long Shadows" (YouTube). Simple (for Ritter, who seems to specialize in songs with eight million words) but lovely. Chad also likes "Lantern" from that album (YouTube), which is growing on me.
• The Gaslight Anthem, "The Diamond Street Church Choir" (YouTube, live acoustic): reminds me of 80s rock, in a good way.
• The New Pornographers, "A Bite Out of My Bed" (YouTube): I have no idea how to describe this other than catchy.
• The National, "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks" (Google, YouTube): I seem to be on a run of "songs whose titles or meanings I don't really understand, but like anyway." Slow, pretty alt rock.
• Sara Bareilles, "King of Anything" (YouTube): I think this is going to be the best-known song on this list. Upbeat pop rock with piano.

[*] I think the Google links ought to give you, at the top of the page, a music-only option for listening in full for the first time through.

Finally, Chad has an Ode to a Rubber Dinosaur.

Answers behind the cut to last week's post, with links and suchlike.

( six songs )

As applied to a popular (U.S.?) children's song.

( cut for potential earworm )

Today was a very particular kind of perfect spring day, where the air is just the right temperature to lie completely unnoticed against your skin until a light breeze blows, and the clear sunlight fills everything you see and seems almost to be part of the air. It calls for open windows, grateful strolls, and music.

I used to make mix tapes on themes, and I still remember constructing one on a day just like this, in my old bedroom in Wilmington with the windows open and the breeze ruffling the curtains. I called it "The Wind From the Sun," a title I was never really happy with because it's an Arthur C. Clarke story that doesn't have anything to do with this, but it was all I could think of. [*] Because I am mildly obsessive, I have the contents still in a spreadsheet, and it amuses me as an artifact of my college years:

( track list )

Today I would add:

• "Show Me," Mint Royale (Youtube)
• "Say Hey (I Love You)," Michael Franti (sidebar)
• "Have A Nice Day," Stereophonics (Lala)
• "Island In The Sun," Weezer (Lala)
• "Crossing Muddy Waters," John Hiatt (Youtube)
• probably "Save It For A Rainy Day," The Jayhawks (Last.fm)
• possibly "Nine In the Afternoon," Panic At The Disco (Lala)

Did you make mix tapes, and if so, on what principle? Do you still, down to track order, or just set up playlists to shuffle?

[*] In the clever-titles vein, my favorite was "Anthem for Headlong Post-Adolescent Romantics," which is worth, oh, call it 10 points.