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'm behind on both Music Advent and Holidailies, now. But as Christmas gets closer I feel less and less guilty about that.

Anyway, I was watching MTP Daily on MSNBC and Chuck Todd said, seemingly just out of the blue, "Give us any chance we'll take it, give us any rule we'll break it" - and I thought, "Oh, thanks for the earworm, Chuck!" But then it caused me to remember this version.


(I hadn't heard when I posted this about Penny Marshall dying; it doesn't seem like that could just be a coincidence, though. I think they must have said it and I just missed that part at the time.)

As I said, I'm behind on Music Advent posts - I don't have to catch up, but that's my intent, anyway - and I found another song that Sara Bareilles covered that I liked, so I posted that before I went to bed this morning.

 

This is a Karla Bonoff song, and really I love her version more than Linda's, but then it wouldn't be a cover, would it? 

If you like piano solos (I do) there's a very nice one at the beginning of this, but I set this where it will (hopefully) actually start where the song starts.

I tried to remember how I found this song and I have no idea. Man, I was out of it. (Sleep-deprivation: not really good for your mental health.) But apparently I recognize a good song even while I'm out-of-it.

 I'm having trouble juggling the posts here and the nail blog and Music Advent. I'll try to get a little more organized over the weekend.

Anyway, here is a really cool cover by a really great singer.

 I was poking around looking for interesting covers and I found this - I guess this is a British band, Hot Chip? I never heard of them that I recall, but I like this.

The only version of this I knew was the Springsteen one - I wasn't even sure it was his song originally, but Springsteen wrote it, I looked it up. (Although honestly, if you look at the lyrics, it's totally got that sad-working-man vibe that sounds like classic Springsteen. I'm not sure why I ever thought otherwise.)

 Here's your Pearl Jam (covering Tom Petty, another favorite of mine). If you have any problems playing this, click over to YouTube and it should play fine. On Twitter it wouldn't work for me. (Note: it seems to be fine here, far as I can tell!)

#musicadvent

 I guess I'll do another round of music videos, since I don't know what else to talk about today. I'm distracted because I'm going somewhere tomorrow, but I'll talk about that later. For now let's take another trip back to the 80s.

(I have the wrong Christmas-lights icon for the 80s, what was fashionable then was white lights. The retro lights like my icon were totally out. Tiny white lights were the new hip thing, and no colors were allowed - which is actually kind of weird when you think about it, because so many other things in the 80s were totally colorful.)

I've only posted days 1-6 here so we're way behind. I think I'm going to just post a list with links to most of the videos, unless I decide I really have something to say about a particular song, and I'll pick one to embed at the end. But the embeds have been so wonky that embedding would require doing separate entries for everything.

Quite a few of these songs are great but others, not so much. But this was more an exercise in nostalgia than in picking the very *best* songs,  for me. And while there are some songs here that were big hits, I also wanted to pick some things that everybody isn't necessarily familiar with.

Day 6, to remind you, was Talk About the Passion, R.E.M.

Day 7: Wonderland, XTC

Day 8: Modern Love, David Bowie (I saw Bowie on this tour so watching the concert video was really trippy for me.)

Day 9: Blister in the Sun, Violent Femmes

Day 10: Two Hearts Beat As One, U2

Day 11: One of Our Submarines, Thomas Dolby

Day 12: Oblivious, Aztec Camera

Day 13: A Million Miles Away, The Plimsouls

Day 14: The Metro, Berlin (man I loved this song - but I don't remember ever seeing the video)

Day 15: Cuts Like a Knife, Bryan Adams (see below)

Day 16: Save It For Later, English Beat (or just "The Beat" if you're in the UK)

Day 17: Mad World, Tears For Fears


And I went and hunted around for the old version of the Cuts Like A Knife video in particular, so that's the one I'm embedding. I mostly remembered the empty swimming pool.