2008-03-14
Top Eight
I hardly ever write about music.
Well, okay lately, I hardly ever write.
Believe me that when June rolls around and it's 18.3 million degrees and there's nothing for me to do but lie on the floor and wish my skin wasn't touching me, I'll have a lot more to write about.
Currently, I am busy Doing Stuff.
I have a Crush - a good one. An appropriate one, not that my Casa Video Hunk or my Coffee Man were wrong for crushitude but this crush is like, 39 and employed in a non-service industry position so good on me for setting my lust sights a little higher than I did when I was a mere 33 or a babyish 32.
Anyway.
I'm obsessed with music lately.
It's the iPod's fault.
My Top Eight That I Can't Get Enough Of (In No Order)
10. John Saw That Number by Neko Case, from the Fox Confessor Bring the Flood album. "And flew from the pit with the moon 'round his waist, gathered wind in his grip and the stars 'round his wrists"
If I were an angel and God was telling me to go see about John the Baptist, I'd fly like that.
I have a thing for John the Baptist, the real one, not the analogous version I use to describe the ascetic hippy with whom I moved to Arizona.
Besides being fascinated by John the Baptist stories, I love the revival feeling of this song. I was never into Neko Case or New Pornographers but I love love love this song.
It makes me want to clap my hands and sing along with my own hearty halleluiahs.
2. Southern Cross by Crosby, Stills, and Nash from the Daylight Again album. This is a perfect song, to me. "In a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call you but on a Midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away."
This song is a love song of searching and it feels so broad that I know if I were to spread my arms out and try to hold it, it would just keep expanding, eventually lifting me into the air like a little cartoon floating away over the desert and then the sea and then some islands, on and on it expands.
Sort of like the actual search for self and love.... it just keeps getting bigger in the face of an eye of comfort on your nostalgic past and the gut-truth of really wanting and loving what might be ahead on your trip.
3. Fist City by Loretta Lynn I'm not sure of the album.
I am sure that a girl on my team mentioned it as a possible intro song and I am sure that I have many people to whom I would like to say, "Come on and tell me what you told my friends, if you think you're brave enough. And I'll show you what a real woman is since you think you're hot stuff"
This song's about being a Badass, not a Badgirl. It's about a Badass busting out a Badgirl and I love it because the girls who think they're so tough or so bad.... they just aren't, even though a lot of folks confuse badassery with badgirling.
And I am SO SICK of those two archetypes being confused.
4. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa by Vampire Weekend from the album Vampire Weekend. I love this song. Lots of people love Oxford Comma from this band but I love the feel this one evokes in me, "Is your bed made? Is your sweater on?"
It reminds me so strongly of growing up and being in that time when your parents don't realize how close you really are to them, how much you really aren't rebelling even though you are spending longer nights with your friends in the summertime (Jason, I'm looking at you).
5. Good Man by Josh Ritter from The Animal Years album.
Le Sigh.
Oh Joshy, I could listen to you tell me that you're a good man all day long.
"Babe, we both have dry spells, hard times, and bad lands."
This song has a hopeful feeling and it's got that train-like sense of movement.
Yet it makes me choke up, sometimes to the point where I want to go have a privet and big sloppy cry.
It makes me think about the couple of really great guys that I wanted to hear this sentimetnt from and that, even when they said it, I wasn't in any place to hear it.
It makes me hear myself not listening and I swear, that will never, ever happen again.
6. Love is a Losing Game by Amy Winehouse from the album Back to Black.
When I listen to this song, I go to a stale small bar somewhere in my mind and sit there, smoking and sipping steadily a scotch on the rocks until I am ready to go home.
7. Promises by Eric Clapton - not sure of the album.
I looked for this song on every jukebox at every bar I ever went to for like, 5 years.
If it was there, it was a good bar to be in. If it wasn't, I didn't need to hang out there a lot.
Given my whole thing with Jesus, the analogous Jesus, I feel like song more than I hear it.
"I don't mind if you just keep on rowin' away on a distant sea cuz I don't love you and you don't love me."
Yeah right.
And it's the "yeah right" that's the important part of the song, the part I still struggle with and probably will struggle with until the day when I meet someone I love as much or more than I loved Jesus.
And vice-versa.
8. Sheep Go to Heaven by Cake from the album Prolonging the Magic.
At one point in life, there were more Cake cds than any other band in my collection.
But this pick really could have been any of the following: Punk Rock Girl by Dead Milkmen, Wendy by Descendants, a slew of Violent Femmes tunes. The main thing with this pick is that I'm sort of into music that is intrinsically familiar to my generation.
Specific to this Cake song, when we went to see Hillary Clinton, I got to quote it. A non-Hillary supporter guy was standing behind his big sign and yelling at us about Christianity and yelling, "Sheeeeeep! You're all sheeeeeeeep!"
And I stopped and said, "Sheep go to heaven. Goats go to hell."
I do not have many moments of awesome but when I have one?
It is a fucking awesome moment.
Like the time at a dinner party my father was trying to get me to stop cracking jokes and being pretentious.
And I looked him dead in the eye across the table from me and pointed my fork and said, "It was you to me who taught."
I think that was probably the defining moment of pride in my father's short life. I had quoted the Travelling Wilburys and given him the touche he knew he had coming.
It's the point at which I think my dad knew I would always be alright in the world.
arizonasarah at 1:45 p.m.