Catchy Name Needed

I was editing another entry and I realized I missed a day on this. I don't know if anybody but me will notice, but I'm posting it anyway.

This is Cry Cry Cry (which is apparently a folk "supergroup" consisting of Dar Williams, Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky) covering R.E.M.'s "Fall On Me":

 

Since this is two versions of the same song, I'm going to see if I can get them into the same post.

First, David Byrne:


#musicadvent 2018Day 10: Miley Cyrus does Nancy Sinatra - :https://youtu.be/zK7z2mPay1A

I was half-asleep last night when I put this on Music Advent but I think it's a good choice, still:

Another version of "Dancing in the Dark" - this time from Mary-Chapin Carpenter:



#musicadvent 2018

It occurred to me that American Idol was a well of good covers (as are those other singing-competition shows, presumably), so I went looking for examples. This wasn't the one I started out looking for, actually, but I remembered that I liked this one, so here's Haley Reinhart doing Lady Gaga's "You & I":


I've got this (hopefully) set up to start when the song starts. Because this is Idol footage, there's a bunch of stuff at the beginning and then the judges at the end. I didn't even hang in there to listen to the judges here, but the part at the beginning is actually kind of interesting because this was an unrecorded song at the time - Gaga had been doing it at concerts but it hadn't been released on an album.
 


#musicadvent 2018

 I always do Music Advent (which happens primarily on Twitter) - I don't know how long that's been going on in December, maybe 5 years? I think other people frankly put a lot more thought into it than I do, but still, I manage. Sometimes I get a few days ahead, but doing a whole playlist in advance? Probably never gonna happen, with me. Anyway, this year the theme is covers. So far I've only come up with famous artists playing other famous artists - hopefully I'll manage to get in some less-famous ones as well. The way I've been coming at this is to look for artists I like, or songs I particularly like. I was actually looking for somebody else covering Pearl Jam, but so far that's mostly led me to Pearl Jam doing covers of other artists, which is also cool (and Pearl Jam does that a lot) but I don't want to just post 25 days of Pearl Jam singing covers, either. (I do have a Spotify playlist with some covers on it so I'll probably go browse around in that eventually and see what's in there. And I'll probably do some Christmas songs later on, because I do have a lingering fondness for Christmas songs still.) 

The first day didn't end up being Pearl-Jam-related at all, it was Prince doing "Creep" at Coachella, ten years ago. I love this song and I'd never heard this cover.

(Note: I've had some trouble with the embeds in past years and I think I'm going to just post them here daily rather than try to do several days at a time like I've done in the past. That seems easier.)

 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.

Day 15 in Music Advent was The Police's King of Pain - so my next set of connections involved Alison Krauss, because she has worked with a lot of different people, including Sting (formerly lead singer of The Police). This song is from the soundtrack to the movie "Cold Mountain" and was nominated for an Oscar, I believe. (A lot of bad music gets nominated for Oscars, but I really like this one.)
Alison Krauss & Sting You Will Be My Ain True Love
https://youtu.be/IHbmJb3aXE0

And then Alison Krauss also worked with Robert Plant (formerly lead singer of Led Zeppelin). (I'm trying not to make assumptions that people know these names. Both The Police and Led Zeppelin go back a long way!)
Led Zeppelin - Kashmir (Live Video)
https://youtu.be/hW_WLxseq0o

I talked in the last Music Advent installment about how I had stopped planning ahead with the videos but then I decided for the last week to go back to planning ahead again. So the next video below is where the planning started again - but I kind of screwed up getting there. I knew where I wanted to end up the weekend, which was at this Eddie Vedder song, and I had vague ideas about how to connect from "King of Pain" which is where I was at the time, and get there by Monday. I had the basic steps figured out, which was Sting > Alison Krauss  > Plant/Led Zep > The Who > Pearl Jam/Eddie Vedder. I came up with two connections between Led Zep and The Who - one was that Who drummer Keith Moon is said to have come up with the phrase, something to the effect of "that went over like a lead zeppelin" and the other is that there were always rumors, at least, of a feud between these two bands, enough that even I had heard about it and I didn't really follow rock music that much back in the 70s. (By which I mean I listened to it, yes, but I didn't read magazines or join fan clubs or anything like that to hook up to the gossip pipeline!)  And then Pearl Jam's sound is heavily influenced by both of these bands, but I had seen quotes from Eddie Vedder where he talked specifically about Pete Townsend and The Who.

So that's my reasoning, but I screwed up the number of days somewhere in there and ended up skipping The Who and PJ and going straight to Vedder solo, just because it's another song I really like a lot.
Eddie Vedder - Hard Sun (Extended) - Into The Wild Soundtrack
https://youtu.be/tz927SK5gYM
(I actually wasn't aware that this was a cover, originally done by Indio.)

And then there was another song with "sun" in the title that I became aware of recently (it was released in 2015, so it's a fairly new song). That was a really really obvious connection. (In fact you'll see that just because I planned these out ahead of time doesn't mean they're particularly more inventive connections.)
Death Cab For Cutie - "Black Sun" (Official Video)
https://youtu.be/eTbVIfqeDq0

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)