Here’s a hint: if you want me to pay attention to your musical project, involve Dan the Automator.
I admit right up front that I stole this particular usage for this song. It wasn’t my idea, but my best friend’s, and all due credit goes to her.
Still, it suits me, and I’ve been joking about it (SO not joking) for as long as I’ve been considering my own mortality enough to recognize that I will, in fact, someday have a funeral.
When Plans came out, I didn’t know what to expect, and wasn’t ready for what I got. I’d been put on to Death Cab for Cutie when a friend of mine put “We Looked Like Giants” on a mixtape for me. I’d ignored them until then, knowing their name, but not their music, laughing when my friend said he was going to start a parody emo band and call it Death Cab Confessional.
It turned around with that song. I bought Transatlanticism and got to know it like family. I wrote to it and about it. I loved it (save for the two terrible songs).
Wes Anderson has a way of invoking emotion through his use of music. His movies can be charitably described as whimsical, or less charitably as overly stylized, or least charitably as unbearably pretentious.
I have a weird relationship with the Smashing Pumpkins. I can barely stand some of their (qualitatively) best work, but some of their least palatable I find endlessly fascinating. They’re a band that definitely defined a fairly significant chunk of my musical awakening, both for their music in and of itself and, more tragically, for the fact that they were the girl to whom I sang Depeche Mode’s favorite band.
The fact that I use that word, “tragically”, and mean it makes me probably a very pathetic individual. If not pathetic, then at least sad. But that’s not where we are.
“1979”. A song that I don’t think I am capable of listening to unless I’m in a good mood.
I am naturally a very emotional person. I tend to feel things powerfully, take things personally, and react in kind.
This is, for my purposes, a negative personal quality.
When I was about twelve or so, I decided that I wanted to listen to my own music. I immediately eschewed the tastes of my parents; if they liked it, I didn’t. I wanted something of my own.
What can I say, I was on the cusp of being a teenager.
This one is a little different, a little special. There’s no YouTube video for this song, because it’s never been released. Not never been released as a single, either. I mean that it’s never been released for public consumption, beyond being excerpted briefly on a TV show and maybe existing on a streaming site somewhere or other for a short while.
I first found Schatzi back when people used P2P networks to find music. I was looking for music to make a mixtape featuring the names of my friends. I already had my own song; pretty much everyone I’ve ever met has sung it to me at one point or another.
Thanks, Rick Springfield. You fucking jerk.
I resisted the pull for as long as I reasonably could. I’d heard the name, in whispers and shouts, but dismissed her as another pop tartlet whose 15 minutes of fame would be up shortly.
Only she kept getting more famous. Creeping further into my consciousness. Gaining purchase in my mind.
It turns out Lady Gaga might be a genius.
When I was growing up, the Eagles were always on the radio. Their steady stream of hits made this a pretty solid programming decision, I suppose. I heard just as much Aerosmith. Hit singles get airplay, especially on classic radio station formats, where it’s less about how it actually was than about how it’s remembered.
So, a steady diet of “Desperado” and “Hotel California” and “Life in the Fast Lane”. I didn’t mind. I’d even go so far as to say I enjoyed the Eagles.
That changed.