It occurred to me recently while listening to some song that I can't recall off the top of my head (maybe Portugal the Man's "Feel It Still?") that I really like bass/baritone saxophone. Something about it really seems to hit a sweet spot in a lot of songs for me.
Instruments you love? Songs they are featured in? Let's hear what ya got.
(hehehe)
We'll be accepting Summer Mix suggestions through the weekend, then we'll be banging it out shortly after that. Please put your candidates in SPOILER form below. Please list up to 3 choices (further choices will be ignored). The first choice is automatically in, and the other 2 choices will be put in a pool to be selected from to fill out the mix.
Feel free to drop some lists too.
Alright, everyone, it's that time of year. Please put your candidates in SPOILER form below. Please list up to 3 choices (further choices will be ignored). The first choice is automatically in, and the other 2 choices will be put in a pool to be selected from to fill out the mix.
A kindly volunteer will corral the suggestions* and then we'll pound the mix out after that.
Also, drop yer lists below too.
*Since it's processed anonymously, it's possible that someone could get all 3 songs on the mix. I can't recall if that's happened before...
Note: If you've done this topic before, well, sorry. But it was the best one I could come up with.
If you've followed Jeff A week, you've noticed that the songs are all oldies, mostly from the '70s. The reason for that, of course, is that the '70s are the time I was growing up. All of my high school and a good share of my college years came in the '70s.
I think for most of us, the music of our youth holds a special place in our hearts. It's not so much that the music of our youth is better than any other kind of music (although in my case, it clearly is). It's that this is the music that was playing during the years when we were becoming the people we were going to become. Hearing that music takes us back to that time, and usually back to happy memories. It even does that for those of us for whom the high school years do not have that many happy memories. Maybe it's because the music was a kind of refuge, a place where we could go to forget the way things were and think about how things might be better for us someday.
I don't just listen to these oldies. I listen to some contemporary pop music and some contemporary country music. I listen to some contemporary Christian music, too. But my go-to music is still the music of the '70s. It's where I go when I want some music to put me in a good mood, or music I can sing along to. The music of my youth.
So, what's your go-to music? What's the music that puts you in a good mood? What's the music of your youth? Put it here. Or, put in a random ten list. Or, do whatever you want. I'm not the boss of you.
Watching the game last night, I heard Target Field play "Let It Be" during the challenge review. "Pretty clever," I thought, before realizing that that's surely happened at football and hockey games too, and long before baseball.
Still... it generated this idea. Go ahead and select the musical score for a baseball game. Here's the standard categories, and add your own as you see fit (or steal from others that others see fit). Heck, suggest a category for others too - no need to have an answer before you ask the question!
Single
Double
Triple
Home Run
Walk
Intentional Walk
Strikeout (swinging? looking?)
Stolen Base
Caught Stealing
Double Play
Great fielding play
Umpire Review (overturn, uphold)
Injury time out
Pitching change
Second pitching change in an inning
Starter gets pulled after a great outing
Rain delay (just one song)
Delay because of streaker/animal on the field/other unusual
Walkoff win
I live on a farm site. There is a large grove. In that grove are a few piles of... stuff. Yesterday afternoon one of those piles spontaneously combusted, so a lot of time was spent hauling water out there and moving sprinklers around and just standing around looking at the flames and/or embers.
Anyway, give us your best "fire" song, and be as creative as you feel inspired to be.
When in the car I've been listening to a lot of Oldies radio lately. Oldies as in "songs that were considered oldies when I was a kid" not "songs that were popular when I was a kid." So basically 50's and 60's. Growing up, when I wasn't listening to children's music, I was usually listening to this class of oldies. It had been a good while since I'd found a station to scratch this itch, so now that I have one, I tend to listen to it pretty much every time I'm in the car and the Twins aren't on. Admittedly a large part of that is the dearth of good radio stations out my way.
I've been thinking about trying to expose my children to some of the era. They get a fair amount of Beatles and Elivs in their musical diet already, but not too much else. We've got a road trip coming up this summer, which might be a good time to work on the musical education of my kids. So the question I'll pose today: if you were making a 50's and 60's mix without any Beatles or Elvis, what would be a necessary add?
A few months ago we talked about "Shake it off" songs, that help you get over the rough patches. Today, I want to go the opposite direction. Sometimes a person craves the songs that hit a deeper chord and help fully open up the emotional expression. I once put together a mix of these songs - not quite sad, more melancholic - but it was lost so long ago that I'm not sure I could list more than two or three of my selections.
If you were putting together such a list, what would it look like? Would you pick songs that are sad in terms of lyrics, or sad in a more sonic fashion? I know that personally the music makes a bigger impact than the lyrics when it comes to this kind of mood music. Indeed, I'd often pick songs that aren't so much "sad"
To kick it off, here's a couple of nominations:
Death Cab For Cutie's "Transatlanticism"
Cloud Cult's "There's So Much Energy In Us"
Chumbawumba's cover of "New York Mining Disaster 1941"
Joseph Arthur's "In The Sun"
"Into the West"
Willie Nelson's cover of "The Scientist"
Neko Case's "I Wish I Was The Moon"
So... what's good for melancholy?
What's your favorite use of a popular song in a movie? The Pixie's In My Head at the end of Fight Club comes to mind and of course Tiny Dancer from Almost Famous is another. Martin Scorsese practically invented the genre in his first movie Mean Streets by using the Stones' Jumping Jack Flash to introduce the Robert DeNiro's character.
Any other good examples? Drop your lists.
I've been listening to a lot of my old albums lately. Meaning the things I listened to in high school and college. My physical collection is largely packed up and put away right now, so as I'm inspired to pick an old album I just pull it up on youtube. That's handy.
Anyway, lots of them have not held up as well as I thought they might (The Love Below was disappointing. Still kind of a fun concept album, but the execution is just far too inconsistent.) Others were even better than I remembered (Chumbawumba's WYSIWYG is fan-freaking-tastic.). Lots were nicely familiar (BNL's albums), and well worth the time.
Anyway, for this week maybe we can talk old albums. What's something you haven't dusted off in ages that you used to listen to regularly?
