Catchy Name Needed

(Look, this actually makes four icons with Star Wars references that I've found. I have close to 200 icons so it's possible there's something else in there that has escaped me.)

If you haven't been following this all along, by "alternative" I mean the stuff that I didn't actually pick for Music Advent. Part 1 is here.

(Here's what I actually picked for N-Q)
So picking up again with N, the only thing I wrote down was "Nothing Compares 2 U" - which I think was just in case I completely didn't find a video for "Never Stop," to tell you the truth. Because that's just one of those songs that I have strong and ancient emotional ties with, you know?
So here's Sinead's version of that, in case you only know it from "The Voice" or something):

(Lyrics are useful for this song, I think - I always had trouble understanding her, at least.) This song was written by Prince, incidentally.

O: I think I mentioned somewhere along the line that I had "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" written down for O - that's always been one of my favorite old carols. (I have a weakness for the minor-key ones, generally.) What I actually used was Dishwalla's "Opaline" and I did have a couple of things besides those two written down: The Eagles' "Ol' 55" and also "One Headlight" which I think is the Wallflowers.

P: I used Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" but I had several other things written down. One was "Pat-a-Pan" which is most generally famous in this Mannheim Steamroller version. (Gawd, I just listened to that, & I didn't remember it being as boringly repetitive as it sounds to me at the moment. I suppose that's because it's one 30-second melody which they then proceed to repeat about 10 times.) Then there was "Psallite" which is also something I know from choir - it's not generally something you hear around at Christmas because it's too obscure for that, but from what I remember of the (Latin) lyrics it does seem to be a Christmas song.

That's a nice version of it. Much better than my 7th-grade choir one was, I bet!

The two non-Christmas songs I had written down were "Purple Rain" (speaking of Prince) and Jackson Browne's "The Pretender."

For Q, I had "Queen of Hearts" written down (which I know somebody else did use in Music Advent, because I looked) and something called "Queen of the Air." - I don't have easy access to my iTunes list right now so I'm not entirely sure what that is. (Possibly Everclear, because it's a song on an album I know I had.)

(R-U picks here)
R songs other than "River" which I used: Talking Heads' "Road to Nowhere" - one of my old favorites. Here's David Byrne in a 2002 performance:

Other R's: Radioactive, by which I'm sure I meant the Imagine Dragons song, not any of several older ones. (One thing I've noticed about the Imagine Dragons song: it's one of those songs people sing along with. Pay attention the next time you're in the supermarket or somewhere and it comes on, I bet you'll notice it.) Also Real Fine Place To Start, which is one of those country-ish songs that I picked up somewhere along the line.

I better quit talking so much about every single song or I'll never finish this.

S: I used the cheesy 80s song "Stone Cold" but my alternatives were Fixx, "Saved by Zero"; "Superstar" by which I think I meant the old Carpenters song rather than the musical; and "Second Chance" - the Shinedown song from a few years back. (All I wrote down were titles, which is why I'm going through my list and trying to decide which version of a song I meant.)

T: I used the 80s song "True"; my alternatives were Dan Fogelberg's "There's a Place in the World for a Gambler," Pearl Jam's "Tremor Christ" (but I used Pearl Jam twice this year as it was) and that old cheeseball classic "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

U: I used Simple Minds' "Up on the Catwalk" because neither one of the other songs I had written down had a video I liked. In the case of "Under Your Spell" from the Buffy musical - and that seems sort of odd (that I didn't like the video, considering that it was the original video), but it didn't appeal at the time, that's all I know. The other one was "Unwritten" (Natasha Bedingfield).

(V-Z videos here)
V: I used "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel" (i.e., "O Come Emmanuel" in Latin) for my actual pick, but I also threw another V song into this entry, Ultravox's "Vienna." I also had "Valotte" (Julian Lennon) and Vasoline (Stone Temple Pilots) on the list.

Possibly my favorite thing that I skipped is "Wig in a Box" (movie version) (but again, I had already used a Hedwig song):

other W songs, besides the Wassail Song which I used: another musical song, the "Watch Dog Theme" from Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and also Amy Obenski's "Words on a Page"

(Best Little Whorehouse is another thing that I have a weird emotional reaction to - or maybe it's more accurate to call it a heavily nostalgic reaction. The Chicken Ranch story broke in the summer, one of the years that I was a teenager, and we used to watch Channel 13 all the time and saw all of Marvin Zindler's posturing about it. I think we thought it was all pretty stupid even at the time, but I also remember being oddly riveted by the whole thing too. - Ask anybody from Houston: there was just something about that man you couldn't turn away from, possibly like a trainwreck.)

(I'm running out of steam here, so I'll be brief.) The Y alternatives were Coldplay's "Yellow" which I have always been unaccountably fond of, and another 80s song, "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record.) For Z, the alternatives I had were "Zat You, Santa Claus?" (if anybody actually used that, I didn't see it) and U2's "Zoo Station." (Frankly, I was at my aunt's house late on Christmas Eve after everybody had gone to bed, and I think the one I used was the first one I looked at, "Zydeco Stomp." I think I used it mostly because I was tired and I didn't want to look at any more videos. "Eh, I like that song, what the heck.")

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.)

Well, since I declared in the last installment that three videos are enough for one entry, and it's already the 6th, here are another three, D-F. (It's almost the 7th already, but I'll worry about that later.)

For D, I picked "Down in the River to Pray," which is from the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? and sung by Alison Krauss (& a chorus). I thought I remembered seeing a video for this song which featured Krauss herself, but I couldn't find that one, if it actually exists.

I have a choir background and a definite fondness for old hymns, which may also account for the next one.

"Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen" (or, in English, "Lo how a rose e'er blooming") - The King's Singers

This is the first holiday song this year but probably not the last.

And I know it doesn't particularly go well with the other two, but for F, I remembered how much I used to love "Fortress Around My Heart" from Sting. This video has a weird little wrap-around that I don't remember seeing before. (Maybe by 1985 I had mostly stopped watching MTV, though.)


(Expect the next three along about Wednesday, I guess!)