Catchy Name Needed

I've been doing Music Advent on Twitter for quite a few years now (look at hashtag #musicadvent if you're interested) and I always end up posting some of the videos here. There's usually a theme, and in honor of the pandemic and all, this year the theme is just "HAPPY" (songs that make you happy or give you joy or whatever). It's late as I'm writing this and I'm making typos right and left but we'll see what I can manage.

Hmm, so far I am not having any luck getting the video embedding to work, so I'm going to have to come back and figure that out later, maybe - I know I've gotten it to work in past years!

For now, we'll just make a list, with links for the songs I've used so far:
1. She Drives Me Crazy - FIne Young Cannibals
2. And She Was - Talking Heads
3. Shambala - Three Dog Night
4. Mad World - Pentatonix
5. With a Little Help from my Friends - Ringo & friends (at the Hall of Fame)

I notice that these are all old songs, even if they're newer recordings. I forget, actually, that "Mad World" was a Tears for Fears song - I remember listening to Tears for Fears back in the 80s, and I knew this song, but I didn't really pay attention to it until the Donnie Darko emo version came along much later. And then FYC and Talking Heads are 80s too. Three Dog Night is 70s, and of course the Beatles are 60s, although this is a newer recording. I wasn't doing that on purpose. I'm going to have to make sure and use something newer than 1990!

I was going primarily from my "best-loved" playlist, because basically my whole criteria for a song to be on that list is that it's something where I feel happy when it comes on. And it's definitely not just older music on that list.

What I did notice about that playlist is that a good many of the songs on that list are not really happy songs - like "Mad World." I was trying to decide if that says something about me, or if other people are that way too. I don't know. (What about y'all, do sad songs make you happy sometimes?)

I posted a video and some links about the music of 1983 yesterday, and then, because the embed code is apparently wonky, I published another entry with another video. It had a paragraph of text so I went ahead and used that for a Holidailies entry just now, even though I really think that's cheating. It's not cheating by Holidailies' own standards, I know - I remember Jette saying ages ago that you can just post a picture every day if you want to.- but it's cheating by my personal internal standards of what constitutes an entry. I guess I'm a little old-school about that. I don't necessarily think you have to have five random things, as they used to say, but I feel like I have to have at least, say, two or three paragraphs of random drivel before it counts. (Or one long paragraph would do, too, I suppose.)

I'm not even sure how long I've been doing Holidailies. More than ten years, for sure. I think I started in 2004? Or was it 2003? It was 2003 at the earliest - I had no journal before that - and I'm pretty sure 2005 at the latest. It was so long ago that I started out on Diary-X, for god's sake. (I could check my Livejournal, or check the old LJ entries here, for that matter, because I know there was a point where I mention on Livejournal that I was doing Holidailies on Diary-X, but every time I go look at the old entries I fall into an hours-long wormhole, so that would probably end any chance that I would finish this tonight. I have to go to bed before dawn tonight.)

Oh yeah, that - the staying-up-til dawn thing, I mean. I literally watched TV all night last night. That's not really terribly unusual for me, if it's baseball or some movie, but it's unusual for me to watch MSNBC all night and end up going to bed during Morning Joe, at least it is nowadays. I stay up that late a lot, but I don't usually stick with MSNBC that long. I really do love MSNBC, but usually when it starts over with some show that I already paid attention to the first time, I turn it off. But I was transfixed enough by the Alabama election results that I just turned off the sound when they started repeating Chris Matthews' midnight hour (I guess that was at 3am) instead of turning it off, and turned it on again at 4 when the early-morning news started up. I'm not really sure what time I actually went to bed - maybe at 7? I was very sleepy by then, and I got up at 1:30, I know, so that's not really enough sleep. I got through the day ok, but if I do it again I'm going to be very sorry.

Ok, I linked to videos for the first few days of Music Advent back here, and I just posted day 4 here, because I was seeing if the embed code I finally found would work. So I'll talk a little about Day 4 and then go on from there.

4. The Back of Love, Echo and the Bunnymen
I'm sure I've talked about my love of Echo and the Bunnymen in some past year (most recently here). "Porcupine" was the name of the album that came out around this time. I looked it up the other day but I've already half forgotten - maybe it came out in 1982 but was a single in 1983, or something like that. I knew I had used "The Cutter" which was also from that album in some past year, and I try not to repeat. Also from 1983 is "Never Stop" which came out as a standalone single in '83, but I love that song so much I had already broken my "no repeating" rule and used it in two different years. So I knew that one was out. Luckily this is an excellent song too. (If I ever need another one of their songs from 1982-83, I'm going to have to dig deeper into Porcupine.)

5. Wishing, A Flock of Seagulls

(Dreamwidth note: I fixed this where the links work, at least, but if you want the version with the nice embedded links you have to go back to the original Livejournal entry.)


To go back to the last MA post, the video that I posted on the 20th was "Black Sun" and the day before that, "Hard Sun" - there was sort of a method to my madness there, because the 21st was solstice and I wanted to go from the sun to the stars, for solstice. It just seemed appropriate.

And it also seemed appropriate that it be Bowie.
David Bowie Starman (1972) official video

I made a decision when I decided to do this "connections" Music Advent theme that I was going to let myself wander a little out of my comfort zone, if that's where the connections took me. So far I've sort of wandered back and forth, into my usual kinds of things (like 80s New Wave) and back out of it again. You'll see that happen again here.

So I ended up the last entry with Joe Jackson - late 70s but wandering into a New Wave sort of vibe. I was in college in the late 70s, and while there was nothing especially avant-garde about my tastes then, I do think this isn't the only place in my album collection where those sort of influences were creeping in. This song is also from 1979 but to be fair I don't think I knew it until later.

(The connection here is that Joe Jackson later did a song for an XTC tribute album.)

Did anybody know that the three surviving members of The Monkees released a new album this year? I have to admit that I did not. I do actually like their old stuff, though - I'm old enough to remember when their show was originally on, but I was a kid and I didn't understand what the heck was going on with it then. (I looked at it much later and thought, "It's a take-off on A Hard Days' Night" but did I know that when they were huge and I was 7? Heck no.) I learned a better appreciation for them later by watching reruns, seriously. (Nick at Night, maybe? I'm not sure.) Don't mock me, Last Train to Clarksville is a good song.

This is also a surprisingly not-bad song. It was written by Andy Partridge of XTC, which is how I got to this in the first place. I didn't try to listen to more of the album but there were some other well-known songwriters involved so there may be some more "hey, not bad!" moments in there. Also Micky Dolenz' voice sounds quite good for a 70-year-old man.

While I was looking up The Monkees, I saw something about how Don Kirshner was their producer early on - he was the one who wouldn't let them play their own instruments. If you know anything about the history there, that's a pretty well-known argument that went on. Kirshner was eventually fired so The Monkees won that one. But the main reason I know Don Kirshner's name at all was (like a lot of people Of A Certain Age, I think) from Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, which was on all through the 70s. (Also because Paul Shaffer used to mock him roundly on early SNL.) So I went looking for clips, and there are a lot of them on YouTube; they all have these same annoying white titles across them regarding the licensing. (But it could be worse, at least they let them put them up on YouTube at all, I suppose!) Anyway, I ended up with very early Jackson Browne:
This is "Looking Into You" off of his first self-titled album (the one everybody used to call "Saturate Before Using" because it says that on the cover).

I had all of Jackson Browne's early albums, back in the late 70s, and I also had and loved Karla Bonoff's albums. So, fortunately just in time to keep this from being an all-white-men entry, we have a later (80s) Bonoff song, her only big commercial hit. (She is better known as a songwriter, now, really; she wrote several of Linda Ronstadt's songs and some for Bonnie Raitt and others.)

Honestly I had forgotten that this song was hers at all. I actually meant to post a different song, but this is not a terrible song, just sort of middle-of-the-road. And Jackson Browne and Karla Bonoff were moving in the same circles at around the same time, so I imagine that you could connect them up in a number of different ways, but the way I followed was through the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band: Jackson Browne was a member, very early on (which I didn't know at all) and Bonoff recorded a song with them much later. (I flirted around with using a song of NGDB's and couldn't come up with anything I was too crazy about!)

I said last night that I didn't have any nail polish icons, and so after I posted, I went and poked around in the icon communities, and to my amazement, among all the fandom icons I actually found a nail polish one. So don't think this is my nails or anything (my nails haven't been as long as the ones in that icon for some time now!) but hey, I have a nail icon! (And this is my 200th icon, for the record. I've been on LJ for a long time and I was a paid member and then a permanent one, so because of all that I have a lot of space for icons. I think it said I can have up to 235, now.)

That said, I'm not planning to write a whole entry about nail polish again, I'm not saying that might not happen before the end of Holidailies, if I can't think of anything else to write about, but definitely not today, anyway. Instead - as I usually have regularly for the past several years - I'm going to write about Music Advent. (Although there is a nail polish connection down here somewhere.)

I think this is the fourth year they've had Music Advent, where you pick out a music video daily from Dec.1-25. (This mostly takes place on Twitter using the hashtag #musicadvent, but has also expanded to other social media platforms to some extent, I think.) They've had other themes in other years, but this year it's modeled on something called The Chain, which is a BBC Radio thing. You just have to come up with a connection between one song and the next - any connection. I sat in the car one night on the commute home and came up with most of the ones I've used so far, but now (after the four in this entry) I'm just winging it. I figure if I get stuck I can just google the song and figure out some sort of connection to some other song - same producer, maybe, or same year - the possibilities are pretty endless.

So I started out with a connection in mind that I didn't actually use, but I figure if I get organized enough to be clever, I can work back around to it at the end and make it a circle. The one I didn't use was that this first song was on the mixtape that we used at our wedding reception. So if I end with another song from that tape, then I'll have a circle. (I don't think I remember what all the songs were on the tape, but we spent quite a lot of time on that tape and I remember quite a few of them, even after nearly 30 years.)

This song, was, in fact, the first song played at our wedding reception - "Chapel of Love" by the Dixie Cups:

Rob came up with some stuff that I wouldn't have thought of, and some of my friends from Austin helped, too. I was never a really huge fan of all the 60s girl-group stuff, so on my own I would never have thought of this song. (If you followed all my many Music Advent posts from past years, you may already know that I'm a much bigger fan of the oldies of the 80s - although we got married in 1987, so they weren't even oldies at the time - than the 60s.)

For Day 2, my connection was "from the chapel to the wedding" - which maybe wasn't the most glib phrasing I could have come up with, but anyway, it works as a connection.

This is definitely one of my 80s songs. I remember watching this one on MTV, back when MTV was relatively new and people actually sat and watched it.

So this second song was actually the first connection I thought of, because I had some Pandora 80s channel on in the car that night. It's not highly original but oh well. It's Billy Idol/American Idol. Rob and I watched American Idol for years so it was a pretty obvious one to me. And then I picked this particular song because it fit into the next connection, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Once I got to American Idol, I figured I could use anybody who was ever on Idol, really, but the most obvious people to use were Kelly and Carrie, because they were the biggest stars to come out of Idol in the US. Then once my brain got to that point, I thought, "Ooh, nail polish." Because Deborah Lippmann nail polishes all have names that are song titles, and I knew for sure that there was at least one that was a Kelly Clarkson song. I actually got on the website and made a list of songs I might want to use. The song I originally thought of which I knew was a polish was Stronger, but in fact I found at least four songs that I could have used: Miss Independent, Stronger, Before He Cheats, and Superstar. (I don't know which "Superstar" Ms Lippmann actually had in mind, but I knew that Clay Aiken sang it on Idol at some point.) I did get as far as looking for a video of Clay singing "Superstar" but I wasn't blown away by that video, so I went with Miss Independent instead. I do like the "Stronger" video but it's not my favorite of her songs. And I'm not a huge country fan (although I do like Carrie Underwood alright) so that's why I thought the older, more rock-inflected Kelly video reflected my taste the most, of those choices.

And then the other video I used the next day, which is also a Lippmann nail polish, is another 80s song, Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game":

This video feels familiar to me, but I doubt that this is the exact video MTV used back in the 80s because it's a bit risque for back then. (I mean, it's really not, because you can't actually see anything much, but just the fact that the girl in this video doesn't seem to have a top on for a good portion of the video probably was too much, in the 80s, even if it was cable.)

(and four videos is plenty for one entry so I'll continue this later)

I don't seem to be much into talking about our Christmas and stuff right now - maybe later, if I get in the mood - so I guess I'll do this instead. Then - again, assuming I get in the mood, which is pretty chancy these days - I'll do one more post like I did before about the stuff I didn't choose. That seems to be what I'm most reliable about wanting to talk about these days.

The first two are Christmas songs (which is another reason to get these up sooner rather than later) and then I gave up on Christmas for the year (although I did listen to a Pandoria "holiday music" channel in the car on Christmas Eve). Both of the Christmas songs are old favorites of mine.

I had the first one on the list twice: I skipped it at O (in English: "O Come, O Come Emmanuel") since I had more options there, and saved it for V, where there were fewer. I knew there was an Enya version (which I think is in both Latin and English, on successive verses), but I went with a full-Latin version by Hayley Westenra. So this is "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel" instead. (Note that the translation in the video is a more literal English one, but there's a link under the video that has the traditional one.

This is the one I was talking about in this entry, the Wassail Song (specifically, Ralph Vaughn Williams' arrangement of it. c.1910):

And then we skip X (#musicadvent's official decision, to fit into the advent-approved 25 days) (plus, y'know, how many X songs are there?) and go on to Y.

So now we're out of holiday mode, and while I would like to be able to say I'd been a bit more creative about this, I went with classic Pearl Jam, "Yellow Ledbetter" - just because I love this:

And for Z, a little Zydeco Stomp for Christmas:

I used this icon because I drove down the beach this afternoon. The water is so pretty in the winter. (I was distracted a bit from that, though, because the powers that be have built new beach where there used to be no beach - it was just rocks - in the 7 years or so since we lived in Galveston, and it startles me every time I see it.)

I said I was going to do four more installments of three Music Advent songs, but actually four days have done by since then so I think maybe I'll do three installments of four instead. Next week's likely to get crazy anyway, so that's probably better. So this post will have N, O, P, & Q. (and this post has all the links to the first half of the alphabet)

N: Never Stop, Echo & the Bunnymen
This was my very favorite song in 1984, as I recall.


O: Opaline, Dishwalla
Dishwalla was never very famous for any song besides "Counting Blue Cars," but I really like this one.


P: Pyramid Song, Radiohead
Because I love the song and this video goes so well with that sort of eerie vibe.

I'm fairly certain that I first head this song and saw the video at the same time, on the computer, when it first came out. In 2001, that was pretty radical. (YouTube didn't come along until 2005, remember.) I noticed watching this - on YouTube, of course - just now that it looks pretty pixellated in full-screen mode. I'm pretty sure that's because it wasn't really meant to be watched that way. Almost 15 years is a long, long time in internet time, and back then, you could usually barely get a small-sized video to download in a couple of hours, and usually when you did it was really stuttery. (I remember watching this at work, where the connection was much faster.) I believe it was a big deal at the time that Radiohead released it this way, too. Now that I think of it, the song has a sort of stuttery sound anyway - maybe it's meant to match!

Q: "Quelle est cette odeur agreable?" Clare College Choir
(I like this, but mostly I was trying to pick something that hadn't been picked already. "Queen of Hearts" which was also on my list was long-gone.) The official translation of that - presumably because it has the right number of syllables - is "Whence is that goodly fragrance flowing?" but I think a more modern, syllables-be-damned translation would be more like, "What smells so good?"

Here's a translation, and I have to say it doesn't make much sense to me. It starts off talking about fragrance and shepherds and then in the second verse it starts talking about light - the light of Christ. Which I guess smells good? I don't quite understand. (I don't think it's just a bad translation, either, because my French is good enough to get the gist of things, usually, and the French version seems to be along the same lines.)

First, a dose of old-school holidays, if you haven't seen this one already:

It's supposedly actual K-Mart in-store music from 1974. (I say "supposedly" but I can't imagine why anybody would fake such a thing, and it certainly sounds right. I don't remember that particular K-Mart jingle but that doesn't mean it's not real.) I've been listening to this off & on in about 5-minute chunks because that's about all I can stand at one time. It's nostalgic and horrible, all at once.

Okay, so for Music Advent, we are at J, and for that I wanted Jolie Blon' - although I actually ended up using a version called "Sweet Jole Blon'" so I cheated a little. It may be a standard, but not even the spelling is standardized.

I don't know how generally famous Doug Kershaw is (the link is to Wikipedia, and I suspect the answer is "not very"), but I have a longstanding interest in cajun & zydeco music so I've known who he was for years. He's such a genuine Cajun he didn't even grow up speaking English. (He's 79 now; I doubt that that's very common today.) He's from Cameron Parish, which is the far southwest corner of Louisiana, right across the Sabine River from Texas. That's major swampland.

For K, I had a couple of possibilities (in fact I may do an entry later about the things I didn't pick) but I had - for some reason - Steve Martin's "King Tut" in my iTunes collection, and I eventually went with that. I'm just going to link to the original version, because it wouldn't display in Twitter and I bet it doesn't display here - that's on NBC's website. It's from season 3 of SNL, which is when I was in college so I probably saw it when it first aired, live. We used to always watch SNL unless we were out somewhere, I know. From YouTube, though, here's a live version that's only slightly later. (Although it lacks Martin's funkier costume of the SNL version, not to mention the dancers and the SNL band in full regalia.) (As I recall, Martin did a comedy tour in his heyday where he wore the white suit through the whole thing, so that's probably where this came from.)

(I was initially confused about why he suddenly says "Henry Winkler!" in the middle because I wasn't paying attention to the guy holding the piece of scenery, but he is indeed back there.)

For L, I did Genesis' "Land of Confusion" - which is a song I've always liked, but I mostly picked it because it has an entertaining (if somewhat creepy) video full of puppets:


(And I just posted my M video but I'll get to that next time.)

Music advent for 1986 (although it's a later performance, as Eddie Vedder's presence might tip you off to):
R.E.M. w/ Eddie Vedder - Begin the Begin
(Dreamwidth note: I can't get embeds to work so far so here's the link.)

So, the parade of reminiscences about concerts and such stops abruptly at the end of 1985, because at the beginning of 1986, I left Austin. I gave you the hints in the last entry - I hated my job, I hated my roommate. I loved my friends but I was 25 and I felt like my life needed to go on and I didn't feel like that was going to happen in Austin, mostly because there was so much competition for every decent job in Austin. And I had a teaching certificate that I hadn't done anything with, and a library degree I hadn't really done anything with either. To be a school librarian, you have to have teaching experience, so I decided I should get some. So I moved home "temporarily" with my parents. The idea was that I would get a job and be gone again.

(Aside: the main reason I didn't go to concerts after this is because in Houston at that time, all the big concerts were on the wrong side of town. The main concert venue is The Woodlands, which is on the north side of Houston, and I lived - still live - on the south side. It's about 75 miles from Galveston, a little less from where we live now, but anyway, it's out of easy distance. You have to be more motivated than I was to go to concerts. These days many of the concerts are downtown, so those are more accessible, but concerts are so expensive and I'm far too unmotivated to even consider it, most of the time.)

Unfortunately I waited rather late to apply for the jobs for the semester, and the jobs were pretty limited at that point. (I was and am way too impulsive about these things. I think it would have been more logical to wait - to stay in Austin a few more months, maybe, and start looking for jobs in the summer. But I didn't do that, obviously.) I came really close to getting a job in my hometown, but I didn't get it. So I spent the spring substituting - mostly in elementary school. Mostly I enjoyed it. But then school was out and I got a summer job - in Galveston, at Gaido's, which is a fancy seafood restaurant.

Those of you who know me may have seen this coming by now. I met a boy. I thought he was my age, but it turned out he was a couple of years younger than me. He was a bartender, not college educated. But I was in love, I didn't care. In October we got engaged. I spent the winter working at Gaido's part-time, substitute teaching, still, and planning a wedding. (I made my own dress, and did a lot of other things myself - in many ways I was a forerunner of the "handmade" kind of weddings that are popular today.) I picked the 1987 song because it was on the mix-tape we played at the wedding reception:
Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over
(again, if I the hang of embeds I'll try to fix this later but here's the link)

Yeah, we had a mix-tape. (See below for a bit more about that.) We got married at my parents' house, which was not the house where I grew up, but out in the country, and we had the wedding in the back yard, on a tiny budget. I loved how it turned out.

My parents never said a word to me about the wisdom of marrying somebody who wasn't college-educated. I suspect they knew it wouldn't do any good - I was always stubborn. My dad hadn't paid for my sister's wedding the year before, though, and he wouldn't pay for mine, either. (He said he paid for college for both of us, and that was enough. Which I guess is fair.) (And my mom still found ways to pay for items here and there.)

And well, it hasn't been a bed of roses, but that'll be 28 years ago this spring, and we're still married. So I guess it all turned out pretty well, right?




We had a lot of fun with that mix-tape. We went around and collected oldies singles to put on it. It started with "Going to the Chapel." We also had that Aretha Franklin and George Michael song which turned out to be the number one song the week of our wedding:
Aretha Franklin & George Michael - I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) [Official Video]
(here's the link)