A Very Special Blog

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Never would have thought a 6 minute video would take so long and be so hard to make,

Never done anything with video before like this and may never again so please forgive my amateurism.

Finally, you may have to pause at times, his talk bubbles don't stay up very long. You'll also need audio.

 I've said too much already!

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Favorite Song. Part 2

When I left off last time I had narrowed the field of potential favorite songs down to the following four which again are in no particular order:

1. “Electric Heart” by Sia from “1000 Forms Of Fear”
2. “Slim Pickens Does The Right Thing…..” by The Offspring from “Days Go By”
3. “Heart Is A Drum” by Beck from “Morning Phase”
4. “Wood Chipper” by John Hiatt from “Mystic Pinball”

Before we determine which of these four is indeed my favorite song I find it essential to first discuss some of the surprising discoveries while delving into the number of plays each song has gotten.

Take for example Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness the epic double album by The Smashing Pumpkins. This album was  released at a pivotal time in my life. It is an album I initially didn't like and I recall telling my mom that and that I never liked any of my albums the first time I listened to them. This is a vivid memory I remember exactly where we were and where we were going. She was very upset because she heard, or I should say misheard, me say that I didn't like any of the music that I bought but what I meant was it in order for an album to have staying power, for an album to stay interesting, to continue to be listened it had to grow on me. This meant that some albums were to left on the shelf for years after an initial “meh” assessment. And then some twist of fate or strange happening or whim caused me to listen again later, sometimes years later. Perhaps I had to grow as a person or grow musically in order for me to fully appreciate the music.

No greater musical growth do I owe more to than Mellon Collie. When I first purchased the album I purchased it as a double cassette and I listen to it so much that I wore out the cassettes and had to buy a second set this was followed by the double CD set which in turn was followed by yet another double CD set after the first got scratched and then the digital purchase when it came time to import my music to Google Play because many of the songs were too scratched to import. So we're talking about an album that I purchased roughly 5 times.This is epic to me in every sense of the word because we’re talking about a double album. So double the price each time. As a 15 year old, my musical budget was not something which I took lightly.

Cost aside, we return to the musical growth aspect, the idea that 15 year old me could be enchanted by an album which begins with a piano solo that features cellos and violins. This is the same kid who bought the album due to the almost heavy metal anger of “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”.

I remember being in awe of the album which itself consisted of enough tracks to make two CDs worth of music. I remember being in even greater awe when I heard that more than 50 songs were recorded for this album. In fact one of the most popular tracks, “1979”, didn't make the cut or almost didn't make the cut. When Billy Corgan heard that the track wasn't going to make the cut he went back to the studio to redo the song which became a single and a big hit.

This epicness, this ability to turn out so many songs and so many good songs, led to many of them being released as B-sides. A concept new to me, and which led me to collect music.  I collected every single cd that I could find.

To this day one of the most prideful trades of my life was trading Garbage’s self-titled album for the single for “Bullet With Butterfly Wings which contained many b-sides, but the single was only available for one week and came with a poster which I believe is still in my attic.

Poor Cameron I can't remember your last name but you were on the receiving end of this lopsided trade and I can remember him begging in vain to undo that trade.

As for Garbage they were still in the “I don’t quite get it yet” phase for me. Years later I would come to adore them and collect all of their albums.

So with all of that musical growth, the onset of my collecting music, my first taste of the B-side concept……..not one of the songs made it on my list.

Part of this could be due to the fact that it is an album in the truest sense of the word album in that all the songs are tied together and together they make their own piece of art instead of a single song that stands out and can be listened to over and over again. To this day I can't hear a song from that album on the radio without hearing in my mind the start of the next song.

Another bigger less interesting reason is that with so many songs on the album, no one song will ever rack up that many listens so to speak, and the album is new to the digital musical environment I am so entrenched in.

On the opposite end of the spectrum and perhaps a little x-rated is that I discovered that I am a bigger fan of the band Orgy than I realized. I purchased a CD of theirs (Vapor Transmission) and I honestly can’t remember if I liked it originally or if it had to wait its turn and grow on me like so many others. When it came time to upload my cds it was just another in the stack, sitting there in the cloud...waiting. Finally, one day I’m sure I dug it enough to buy their first album Candy Ass and didn't think much more of it. Sure I liked them but didn’t realize how much I liked them until I gandered at the numbers.

The Google Play numbers revealed that the two albums I have of theirs are among the most played out of all the albums that I own and that's saying something when I own roughly 3400 songs. This can most typically be attributed to what I call “shuffle mood” where I have no idea what I want to listen to but still have the desire to listen to music. I go to the highest level of my musical hierarchy and hit the shuffle button and when I happen upon a track that I like, it makes me want to listen to an entire album.

So I surmise that I am in the mood for Orgy during shuffle mood more than I realized. After making this discovery I rediscovered a music video of theirs which is even more brilliant now than when it came out (and it was brilliant then too). The band always had a sort of futurist styling to them and the video for “Stitches” was no exception. But watching the video now becomes almost unworldly.

The video is filmed as a sort of museum exhibit for a teenager. He reads the clear glass description. He views the “perfunctory performance”, the labeled band members, written transcripts from the videos planning stage, lampooned by the “youthful image”, “the product” (music contained in a physical form! weird!). The last thing this futuristic museum goer inspects (and it is by far my favorite) the completely unrelated but music video staple, and necessity “The Obligatory Female”. This is done in sarcasm, even the Director isn’t spared with a table of cash labeled “Directors Fee”.

Now though, I can see vividly without much imagination on my part, one of my step kids walking about this music video exhibit actually learning about an art form I adore but is no more, at least not in the way it was consumed during this video’s time in the early 2000s. The meta-ness of all of this is simply delicious to me.

I will allow myself one more “miss” before getting to the candidates. I promised myself this would only be a two parter and I’m beginning to feel a bit like I like to imagine Billy Corgan during the making of those 50 songs for Mellon Collie. “Shit! I’ve already written 50 songs and only 24ish will make the cut, I need to wrap this up”.  In other words he writes music like I write...too much.

With brevity in mind I bring up John Hiatt but spare the story of how his music entered my life in a way that itself necessitates it’s own blog entry. I ask that you remind me to write that blog some day. Deal?

One of his songs DID make the list while another just barely missed it. The near miss was “Nobody Knew His Name”  the haunting tale of a Vietnam vet who lost the love of his life to a railroader and is now relegated to waiting by the tracks and drinking away the pain of both the loss of his woman and I imagine the war itself. All told by John’s raspy voice, like he’s retelling the story to his “boys” years and years later.

It contains one of the most vivid and most power lyrics I think I’ve ever heard. I would dare say it might even be my favorite and that’s saying something.

Red tip of a cigarette glowin'

Windows up against the rain

Night so dark, there was nothing else showin'

But nobody knew his name, boys

Nobody knew his name

The vividness of so few words is so brilliant. Perhaps I’m a little jealous of John’s ability to cram so much into so little type...without needing to say….take up two overly long blogs…..

This is the art of poetry/lyrics and why both are so difficult and why so many people suck at it or just plain don’t get it.

This song inspired me to pursue an entirely different form of blogging where I dissect the songs meaning, at least to me, and then compare it to the real meaning and share the results. Stay tuned for that.

Speaking of staying tuned, I have failed in my promise to myself of keeping this a two parter. Yes, this will have to be a trilogy, hopefully without the 3 month gap between now and the third and hopefully final installment.

Status

I have eleven blog ideas. Some more fleshed out than others, some dating back to early March of 2015.

My point is even though I'm not producing many blogs any more doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it all the time.

Dragons Roamed Here

Deferred maintenance
Weeds grown over rails
Abandon metal

Dragons roamed here
Wise and old recall
Steam, horns, fire and flight

No more

Natures hand reclaims
Tall weeds
Bursting trees
A dragons path reclaimed

Chilled windy silence now

Especially for those that remember

Favorite Song

Kids ask lots of questions.  My 8-year-old step-daughter is no exception.  When she queried what my favorite song was, I was a bit taken off guard.  The question is simple, for me, the answer is not. To her this is just one in a long line of questions you ask anyone you are getting to know, like a child version of a job interview.  What is your favorite color?  Animal?  Food? etc.  To me, the question of favorite song sends my brain, both left and right halves, into a spiral of variables, weights, and measures, which, actually can’t be measured or stood up against each other in any way.

I live, love, and breathe music. Some days I listen to music upwards of ten plus hours in one day.  I’m sure I’ve topped more than that, but I tend not to keep track.  Perhaps it would be a good idea to do so, just to see what my record might be or could possibly be.

So for all of that listening, what IS my favorite song?  Thanks to an accidental discovery several years ago, this is more measurable.  Like I said in the first paragraph, this isn’t THE sole measure but it’s as good as any.

This discovery was essentially a song count column letting you know how many times you’ve listened to a given song in your Google Play library.  This count doesn’t seem to propagate across devices; for example, the count doesn’t seem to be the same on my various tablets and phones, or perhaps it does… I know playlists won't sync.  I’ll have to investigate further.

So…………….

……...going solely by this metric, my favorite song is…….

“Bus Stop Boxer” by Eels for their album “Souljacker” played 374 times on my PC. Almost 220 more times than the second place song.  Surely this huge margin unequivocally crowns “Bus Stop Boxer” the winner.  Sure not all my listens are included such as in the car on CD, other devices, etc,.... but it’s like a survey vs a census. A survey is often more accurate anyway, right?  

“Bus Stop Boxer,” however, is NOT my favorite song.  I happen to know I got pulled away from my desk, at some point, with the song on repeat, and came back hours (or was it even days?) later to this huge song count.

“Boxer” is a cool song, but the only song I have by the Eels.  I wasn’t that interested, after the inevitable window shopping, in any of the rest of “Souljacker” and I don’t make a habit of listening to “Boxer” all that often.  If it comes up in shuffle mode I won’t hit skip, but I won’t jam out to it in my seat either.

The song on repeat behavior used to be a no-no. A self imposed sanction I placed upon myself preventing me from listening to the same album or song more than once on a given day.  As time went on, this loosened and eventually shattered.  In retrospect, I regret it now.

I felt, at the time, narrowing my enjoyment of music to one song and playing the be-jesus out if it was bad for my enjoyment of the art.  I didn’t want to burn out on a song only to replace it with the next disposable piece of music.  In other words, I didn’t want to consume music the way I felt everyone else did.

To a certain extent this is true, but I think good music, like any art should be enjoyed too, not just put on a pedestal.  Not to be rationed like M.R.E’s in a fallout shelter. Humorously enough technology at the time only encouraged this behavior.  Repeating a single song wasn’t easy on a cassette and you would involuntarily become very familiar with both the end of the previous song and the beginning of the next; not to mention, you had to stay within arms length of the stereo’s fast forward and rewind buttons.

I remember being horrified to learn, in the year prior to my arrival on campus, a future best friend of mine held himself up in his dorm like some sort of stand off with the A.T.F. and blasted a Shania Twain song at high volume for days on end.  Only to emerge, after much worry by my other college buddies, like nothing had happened. Therapy; whatever works for him. To me, it would have been more like torture and I would have grown to hate the song no matter how much I liked it beforehand. Perhaps this was what I was most afraid of with my “One listen per day” policy. Violation could result in over familiarity leading to distaste of a perfectly beautiful song.

Earlier in life I had a similar system, not automated like Google Play, but functioning in the same manner.

I had a CD tower with room for about 50 cds, if I recall correctly, and I believe they were organized by artist.  Next to my CD player (when I could finally afford one and after getting thrown out of BestBuy (a blog for another day)), was a stack of between five and ten CDs.

These were the heavy rotation CDs, a measure of who was on top. Every day, while doing homework or hanging out, I would remove the CD in the player, put it in it’s case, and place in on top of the pile; the next CD would be pulled from that “top five or ten” pile, placed in the player, and its case placed on top.

Every day I would order my music play in a manner where I would save the best for last, so my favorite album at the time would end up on top.

As time would go on, if something would get pulled from the tower it would last for a while before being subjugated back to the tower.  As new music was purchased or gifted, albums would get pushed back to the tower.  I didn’t stop liking those albums, they just weren’t what was hot anymore.

The trouble with this was it was “of the moment, or of the day.”  I kept no record, and I’m glad I didn’t.

Flash to today.  I still have CDs…. somewhere, but the vast majority of music consumption is done digitally with no stacks and stacks of CDs in towers on the verge of being knocked over.

This brings us back to Google’s song count. What then, is number two?  Sadly enough it’s “Reptile’s Theme” by Skrillex for some sort of Mortal Kombat tribute album.  Sure it’s a great song to butt dance to in your chair, but is more of a guilty pleasure than a work of great artistry.  Sure reggae style rap to dubstep is shamefully a soft spot of mine, but I don’t think I would hold “Reptile’s Theme” aloft proudly as my favorite song.  I suspect a similar circumstance as “Bus Stop Boxer” led to some inflated numbers, but I can’t recall a specific incident.  As I write this, it is only one play ahead of where things get interesting. At 153, 142, 136 and 134 come the real contenders.

In order they are:

1. “Electric Heart” by Sia from “1000 Forms Of Fear”
2. “Slim Pickens Does The Right Thing…..” by The Offspring from “Days Go By”
3. “Heart Is A Drum” by Beck from “Morning Phase”
4. “Wood Chipper” by John Hiatt from “Mystic Pinball”

Hide your kids, the faint of heart should look away, old anecdotes are over, old explanations of album tracking systems put aside, these are the true contenders.

In part two I will break down the contenders in detail and discuss some curious omissions and other odd findings. Stay tuned.