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I found a letter in the mail box today and I said thank you for your thoughts but I'm done I said that I would never build this up right here He said that's why I can't work with you son
But I can't let this go I'm on my way And you can only hold my diamond ring I'll go crawling back to the city I love Cause it's already taken everything
Okay, so technically not about letters, but it perfectly describes the way I felt about DC when I first moved there. Good Old War is catchy and with descriptors such as "people with their cotton candy eyes" wins over the poet in me. They're a Philly band with New Jersey leanings. Embrace them!
In proper epistolary fashion, M.O.F includes both a salutation and a valediction. It asks the questions millions before have, " why do we suffer?" The best part about this song is definitely the soulful start. For those of you unfamiliar with Monsters of Folk, it's what happens when Conor Oberst (& Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes), M Ward, and Jim James from My Morning Jacket. It is simply amazing. Check out their other songs, Magic Marker and Whole Lotta Losin' for some sad music that will make you feel upbeat.
I'm pretty sure I downloaded this song after it featured on Trueblood this season. But actually, it is fabulously ethereal. A shoutout to those of us tired of the situations we find ourselves in.
Chain Letter by The Billys Ah the curse of the chain letter, back when folks shared these banes via snail mail.
Letter from Belgium by The Mountain Goats I'm including this mostly because I just watched Band of Brothers and am kinda thinking of this letter being during that time, although it's not. It also has one of the weirdest lyrics, "That's good, we can always use some more electrical equipment."
Mother Mother by Tracy Bonham Okay, technically a phone call rather than a letter, but sounds like a letter to me. The kind of letter a parent dreads!
strawberry letter 23 - shuggie otis another floaty song, but sparklier this time. wikipedia says 'Otis wrote the song for a girlfriend who used strawberry-scented paper when she wrote letters to him' which is pretty darn cute if you ask me. buy some shuggie otis
you are invited - the dismemberment plan not really a letter, but an invitation is close enough right? i haven't listened to this song much recently but it's always been a personal anthem of sorts, just a little a reminder that i am invited, by anyone, to do anything. and now you are too! buy emergency & i
I'm away for a few days and what do I find? Not only does this community have new posts, but an actual THEME for the first time in years! I of course can't resist joining in on this rare occasion. :P
In order to post quickly though, I haven't really had time to scrutinize my music library and find every song about letters. So, I wrote down a quick list of the ones that came to my head, from rock to folk to country.
A bit late, but as I just remembered I have a LJ and have long loved this community, I thought I would share my top 40 favorite songs of 2010, accompanied by vintage photographs that capture the mood of the songs:
I've put free and legal downloads where available.
Here are my favourites from last year - not all necessarily new releases, just everything that utterly dominated my playlist... plus descriptions so you know which ones are up your street!
once a year, every year: the songs I listened to in 2010
1. Ring Ring – Sleigh Bells from Treats Not Christmas music, nor are there bells present.
2. ‘39 – Queen from A Night At The Opera I was at a New Year’s party where there was no TV or CD player, only a record player, so we listened to A Night At The Opera during the night and it was wonderful.
3. Alas I Cannot Swim – Laura Marling from Alas I Cannot Swim I once made Evian listen to this song 30 times in a row and she still thinks it is pretty good.
6. Written in Reverse - Spoon from Transference You don’t realize the energy in this song until you see it live and then it’s like a punch in the face.
7. Little Lion Man – Mumford & Sons from Sigh No More One of those songs I heard and immediately got all the rest of their music and bought concert tickets and listened to ten times in a row.
9. Dog Days Are Over – Florence and the Machine from Lungs Something about the ‘happiness, it comes like a bullet in the back’
10. Be Calm – fun. from Aim and Ignite The great tragedy of my year is that they were on campus for free a week before I heard their CD and I didn’t go see them.
11. Meantime – the Givers from The Givers EP The great success of my year is that I went to the concert even though I hadn’t heard them yet.
12. The Chain – Ingrid Michaelson from Be OK How many songs are sung in a round? NOT ENOUGH.
13. Madder Red – Yeasayer from the wonderful Odd Blood (download it, their website has a special offer) Once a day, every day.
14. Camera Talk – Local Natives from Gorilla Manor How many good concerts did I go to this year? So many.
Almost forgotten today, Agi Jambor was a student of Edwin Fischer at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik 1926-1931. She was briefly married to the British actor Claude Rains, of Casablanca fame ("I am shocked, shocked that gambling is going on here!") before moving to the US. It is impossible to buy any of her LPs and there have been, to my knowledge, no CDs of her work. This is cruelly undeserved, because she is one of the best pianists of the mid-20th century, with crystal-clear, serene sound and a fantastic sense of structure. A nice person put these up on YouTube, however, whence I converted them into 320kps mp3s. Spread the Agi Jambor love!
Hi. I'm very new to LJ and just found an old post (2005-7-18) by singer_d , asking about "The Ballad of Robban's First Ride." As it's been so many years, I pasted part of singer_d's post below.
Malvina Reynolds did write this song about folksingers John Roberts and Tony Barrand and the baby born in the back of their car. Margaret MacArthur also recorded it on her album, The Old Songs. You can find the lyrics at http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/MALVINA/mr009.htm.
Note: According to Tony, the car was not second-hand, despite Malvina's lyrics.
@ 2005-07-18 14:11:00
Theme: It Really Happened! Well, mostly....
I tried and failed to find any documentation about this song online. The only performer I ever heard sing it was Margaret MacArthur, and this is my dim memory of her introduction at a concert many, many years ago, added to the skimpy liner notes of the ancient cassette I ripped it from. Tom and Mary Toleno were renting a little cabin from the MacArthurs, who were away on November 14th, 1972, when Mary went into labor during an early Vermont blizzard and they were trapped on the property by a fallen tree. Tom called a couple of other friends, and incidentally folk musicians, John Roberts and Tony Barrand, to meet them on the other side of the tree with their car and take them to the hospital. The next weekend, John and Tony were performing at a tribute festival for Malvina Reynolds at Cafe Lena, and of course were very excited about what had happened and told everyone. Master of Ceremonies Michael Cooney joked at the evening concert that Malvina was in the habit of writing a song before breakfast every morning, and wagered she couldn't complete a new song in time for her performance the next day. This is what she wrote the next morning before breakfast. Solo by Margaret. The Ballad of Robban's First Ride (The Baby Was Born In the Car)
Having a party later this summer in which my backyard will be transformed into a fictional tropical island and looking for some good tropical/exotic sounding music.
You don't have to post tracks if you don't want to. I just need suggestions.
music. I was listening to the Format CD I got (I got the fun CD first, actually) and Dog Problems' (click that link, their website is super fun) titular track came on. When it was over, I said "again" and punched the back button on the CD player. And this got repeated about seven times. If you like fast/slow dynamics, tongue-in-cheek lyrics superimposed onto serious, heartfelt ones, horns, piano, a little bit of vaudeville, and Hush-Sound-esque lyrics and peppiness, then you should download Dog Problems. From the "you should see me, I smoke myself to sleep" to the cheeky "boys in swooping haircuts are bringing me down" and the heartfelt: "Was it worth it? when you slept with him? did you get it all out of your system?"
If you can figure out what he's trying to spell at the end of the song, please tell me. Her name...? BECA. it's really not a word. Someone speculated he started to spell out 'BECAUSE' but then says "I never finish phrases" and leaves it at that.
Also when I imported all my music in iTunes it kept all my old playlists and playcounts so thanks? but all the links are broken and so I have to manually go in and re-find my files for every song. (well, if I wanna keep my playcounts, I do. so for everything with >10 plays, yes.) So yesterday I was doing it for Regina, because she's my favorite, and I missed her at Bonnaroo's webcast, and stumbled upon A Canon and forgot how much I loved her unsold demos. Really, the only song I don't like by her is Aching to Pupate, and some of 11:11 is more forgettable than I would like. But this song is fantastic for its "I have given you love and I have given you anger and I meant them both" and the "I always knew a big boat would come and take me away, take me away," and the "they think I'm saying hello and goodbye, when what I'm really saying is---" so give it a listen.
also all the bonnaroo concerts I wanted to see webcast I've missed. Tori, Regina, Mumford & Sons. :(
First: What song is played during the newish AT&T ad for the Samsung and their wide coverage? The only specific thing I remember is that the ad focused on how awesome AT&T's coverage is and advertised a Samsung phone of some kind, and that the main image in it was a sort of orange-gold cloth--people running down a beach with a big banner of it, and...actually that's about all I can remember. No idea what song plays during it, because I can't find the ad itself anywhere online and can never catch enough of the lyrics to look them up. ragingquietly found it! The ad is here and the song is by Nick Drake.
Second, another ad: Lincoln supposedly lists all their songs on their website, along with download links for the songs featured in said ads, but there's a new one...for the 2011 MKS, I believe (anyway I know it was the Lincoln MKS, and it wasn't any of the 2010 spots), and it's not on the website and I can't find it on Youtube. It's also not Shiny Toy Guns' "Burnin' For You" on the EcoBoost commercial; I'm 99% certain it was for a brand-new 2011 MKS. And I don't remember anything about the song because I haven't seen the ad in a while. >_<
Finally: I've heard this song a couple times on the radio but no one at the station ever said the name of the song or singer, and I thought I remembered enough of the lyrics to Google them, but nothing came up that looked right. It's a female singer, I think there's a steel guitar in the background of all or part of the song, and the lyrics I can remember go something like "I'm an acrobat, let me show you what these legs can do" and there's something about bending instead of breaking, I think...? I suspect it's by a fairly obscure singer since Googling the lyrics didn't help me any and it was on a college radio station. Sound familiar to anyone?
I drive about 45 minutes to work each morning, so I have a lot of time to listen to music. And I drive the Hal Rogers Parkway, which is a sort of straight no-turnoffs interstate kind of road that you can safely drive at about 70 or 75 mph. And all the cars that pass me (which is most of them) usually drive at about 70 or 75mph. They don't seem to appreciate my efforts to drive my car in neutral for as much of the parkway as I possibly can, probably because this leads me to not care if I go the posted speed limit of 55mph. But I digress.
The point was that I get a lot of time to listen to music. I do this drive 6-10 times per week, which is about 5-7 plays of any CD and since so far I'm going at about a CD a week I thought I should say something about them or give you a song or something. So far it's been all ladies--
Kate Nash was the first week, and luckily I could fit both her CDs on one blank CD if I took the songs I didn't like from her first CD off. I loved Made of Bricks the first time I heard it, it's poppy fun and all that. But My Best Friend is You sort of went the other way? She could have gone two ways--the pop-star punk-rocker way or the Regina way, because her first CD was split about half and half between them, and she definitely went more pop-star punk-rocker. I really like Paris, which is the pop-star fun part with horns that sound like the audio equivalent of little starbursts on your powerpoint presentation. But I think my favorite is the regina-esque Pickpocket (have a download) because I had to stop and listen to it about a million times. Another one of those uncomfortably close lines--"get out, get out of town, before it catches up to you and you cannot withstand..." Mansion Song's spoken-word intro makes me really uncomfortable, but I never turn it off, so does that qualify it as art? I just have to keep listening for that Marla-Singer line: "just another undignified product of society-- THAT GIRL SHOULD HAVE BEEN A MANSION" and I don't regret it after that point.
Sleigh Bell's Treats (yes, I linked that, sorry) was last week and for all that I've been soooo excited and checking pretty much every day in may to see if this was leaked/out yet I'm not sure about it? The stuff that we've heard before is all fantastic--Infinity Guitars, Crown on the Ground, Ring Ring/Rill Rill (I'm really upset that they switched the pronouns on the "you're/we're just the weatherman, we/you make the wind blow" line, that was my FAVORITE and now it's backwards and I WANNA MAKE THE WIND BLOW) etc. But a lot of the other ones are just ehhhhh. And ever since that awful overplayed ahhhhh Boulevard of Broken Dreams I can't take that guitar effect seriously, the one at the beginning of Straight A's, I think it is. It's a bit like Japanese punk to me, too, am I the only on getting this vibe? Maybe the guitars + cute high girl singing just makes me think Japanese punk. It would be better in a movie, I think, with some badass action scene and a blonde chick wearing all black. You know, someone who goes from timid to badass in the course of the movie, and at the end there's a kind of Boondock Saints action/assassination/robbery/criminal/badass montage with Sleigh Bells playing. also lol and ditto on 10 Listen's "I want to rent out musical halls and destroy their PAs with this album. I want to see if this album can literally raise the dead. I think it can. I want this album to take my hearing because it’s the last thing I want to hear before I die and I don’t want to die yet." Preferably Riot Rhythm, kthxbai.
This week I'm listening to Basia Bulat's Heart of My Own. Do you know those bands that have no context? Some bands you hear about in blogs, or on the radio, or in magazines, or from friends, and you know what kind of music they're classified as, their label, the genre, where they fit: they have context. Basia Bulat has no context for me--I heard Go On on stereomood and immediately downloaded it, then heard Gold Rush somewhere and decided that getting the whole CD would be a good idea. So I did. And it still doesn't have much context. I like it, quite a lot--have this rollicking ditty (how often do I use the phrase rollicking ditty? I think this makes the first time, or the second if you count the use in this parenthetical phrase) called If Only You which starts out "I'm giving up, I'm going home" which is so much how I feel right now. Look out for fantastic lines like: "I've said hello to Jekyll and to Hyde / I still can't say who I want by my side / And truth be told / I love them both / and I'm no better half" ahhhhh look at that. Just look at that. And it's all good! you know, the sunny tree-covered parkway with sunglasses and windows down and all that and it's good for that. For real? All I know about her is that she's Canadian. And I'm okay with that. Music in a vacuum is easier to appreciate, sometimes.
Well, where do I begin? A little while ago someone else posted a short travel/driving playlist, and I figured I would post one of my own soon after. However, in the span of less than 24 hours, everything's changed. I got a call yesterday from my mom, saying that my grandmother who lives across the country is gravely ill, and I should try and see if my finals can be moved around, because I will probably be flying out for a funeral soon. I'm not horribly upset... I was never really that attached to her, and she's had a long and full life. But just the craziness of how quickly this has been sprung on me, and how all of a sudden my semester may now be finished tomorrow and I have to think of things to to pack, has led me to revisit a playlist I made years ago on my iPod to help me through tough situations.
And I'm not totally abandoning the travel playlist idea, because I have a lot of flying and driving to look forward to in the coming week. Usually my travel playlists are very peppy and designed to make you excited about where you're going, but this one is obviously different. I know I'll be in somewhat of a fog... sort of like driving along, half asleep at sunrise. So that's what I've tried to select here.
In 18 days I'll be done with graduate school and making the 10 hour drive home from Virginia to Ohio. Living in the South wasn't bad, but I'll be overwhelmingly excited to see it slip away behind me. Any way, here are some songs that I like to rock out to while driving. I just have 3 selections here because I am feeling lazy.
The trail we blaze Is a road uncharted Through terra incognita to a golden shrine No place for the traveler To be faint-hearted We are part of the sumptuous grand design
This is probably the ultimate driving song for me, especially because most of the time I'm going somewhere I've never been before (one of the hazards of moving out of state). The movie this song comes from is pretty fun, too, even if it makes my inner historian balk.
She wants a piña colada in a pint glass... She wants to be where the summer won’t stop, She wants gin clear water and milk white sand, A sunburned nose and a drink in her hand With a pink umbrella on top!
This song really hits home for me because it's all about not wanting to be where you are and working to change that. It also reminds me of my boyfriend - he's keen on Hawaii (wants to move there actually) and tropical shirts - we're celebrating King Kamehameha Day this year with a luau.
Oh, Virginia All my friends are there to greet me Just a smile down 64 and on the open road.
Because I do have friends in Yorktown, Williamsburg, Newport News, and Richmond whom I will miss getting to see regularly. I will be taking the "highway to the sun" on my way back home.
busy
