It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

So… I missed my post on Wednesday. And I’m making today’s post only moments into the day. This is really all because I’m going to a conference this Friday and Saturday. But it’s really, really because of a particular road trip fixation I have: having the proper music. And because I have a CD player in my car that plays data CDs, this boils down to making the perfect massive mixed CD.

Driving back from Virginia this January I engineered CDs that held seven or eight musicals, because musicals are the perfect music for road trips. But this time around I’m driving several other students of various backgrounds, musical tastes, and languages. So musicals didn’t seem the best choice (particularly in that one of my passengers hates musicals so much he dislikes “Once More with Feeling” even though he’s a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan). So mix CD it is.

But it was extra pressure. Figuring what of my music would go over with my friends. Not helped by the fact that two of my passengers are ethnomusicologists. People who study music for a living. So I wound up spending several hours that I logically should not have putting together the perfect playlist on Wednesday. Only to have my burning program malfunction and decide it would not work. So I switched to a different program and rebuilt my playlist. Well… I started to, because it crashed halfway through and erased what I had done so far.

So we’ll hope the CD works. Because if it didn’t I will realize that all that time was an even bigger waste of time than it seems.

This is yet another week when I’m reminded of the Canadian Music invasion.  It started with hearing a Dell ad that definitely featured Malajube’s “Montreal -40C“–yes, kids, even French Canada is after us.

The other issue was that I’ve had Wintersleep’s “Weighty Ghost” stuck in my head.  Admittedly, there are worse fates to suffer than this.  Even 2 days of this running through my head hasn’t ruined it–but I can’t help but wonder what kind of sinister Canadian plot this could be.

To own the truth, it took hearing a cover of this tune for me to really fall in love with it.  Back before Glee, radio 3 did a feature on a music teacher in the Maritimes who had his kids singing arrangements of Canadian pop music (think PS22 from Staten Island).

It feels strangely like an anthem (which is why I think it translated well to the school chorus–you can totally stamp your feet and clap your hands to this one), and yet, it’s basically about fading into nothing….and it’s humorous–I love the repetition of the line “..sick of those God damned clouds…”–but kind of depressing in that it’s talking about death and disappearing.

Between the strange dichotomies and the over all catchy-nature of the music, it’s no wonder it gets stuck in my head.  Well, that, and the Canadian Music Invasion Conspiracy.  I give it 6 months before I hear this on an American commercial, too….

Would we drink coffee with Debbie Gibson?

Kristy: My nine year old self demands that I say yes.  My thirty year old self realizes that could be a risky decision–after all, Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth was the first album I bought (on cassette tape–my sister already had Out of the Blue).  She was my first concert.  I seriously loved me some Debbie Gibson back in the day.  And it can be dangerous to meet your idols, because they usually turn out to be human.  I think it might be okay in this case, however, because while I still like Deborah (all grown up now) just fine, I haven’t really done anything that would qualify me as a big fan since buying Anything is Possible.  So any illusions that get shattered will be old ones I don’t really need anymore.

Besides I’d be interested to ask her a few things.  Firstly, whatever happened to the movie she was supposed to be starring in (I think it was called Skirts).  Nine year old me was really excited about that movie and loved the duet from it she sang in concert (“Love Under my Pillow” which I believe was never released on any album).  It might also be interesting to ask whether she has any regrets about the major shift in her image right before making Anything is Possible since the album didn’t do so well.  Or was it worth it to do what she wanted to artistically.  It might also be interesting to hear how she would compare solo singing to Broadway.

Cammy: Sure, what the heck.  I, too, was a DG fan waaaaay back in the day.  Out of the Blue and Electric Youth were my first forays in to music that was not filed under country.  This was a big thing for me.  So, I kinda owe her a cup of coffee.  Of course, Anything Is Possible kinda blew goats and it would be a good couple of years before I ventured out of the purely country realm again.  Given the long-term impact, I definitely want to hear her excuse in response to Kristy’s question.  And, I’d kinda like the chance to let her know that her bubble-gum pop is not as insignificant as some might make it seem.  No, Out of the Blue and Electric Youth may not have sold in the numbers of a Brittney Spears album, but they were still part of the soundtracks of the 80s childhoods of kids like Kristy and me.  I mean, I’m still jealous that Kristy actually got to go to the Electric Youth concert.  And that kind of thing was a source of kinship when we got to college (where I will admit that Kristy and I once rocked out at a stoplight in Newport News to Electic Youth while we were out thrift-storing).  I figure that kind of thing might be nice for her to hear.

Would we have coffee with Nanci Griffith?

Cammy: Maybe we should co-blog about how Nanci Griffith is the Queen of Awesome and listening to “Gulf Coast Highway” will cure cancer (okay, maybe not, but if someone told me that it did, I could totally believe that)

Kristy: To be fair, neither you or I has cancer yet, and we listen to “Gulf Coast Highway” a lot, so we don’t know that it isn’t a preventative. I’m just sayin‘

–conversation circa 2008

Back in the glory days of 80s country music a group called Shenandoah released a song called “Ghost in this House.”  I liked the song, even though I’ve never been wild about the group performing it*.  It painted a very different image of a break up–a lonesome, desperate, defeated kind of image.  It’s like a textbook description of clinical depression–phone and door unanswered, not picking up the mail, sitting in the darkened (and unmaintained) house.

I’m just a ghost in this house / I’m just a shadow upon these walls…

And backing up this accurate description of a person who has been rendered a shell of his/her former self is a haunting, but simple tune (I can hum this on my own without cringing at sour notes–that’s no easy thing, I tell you).

The combination was potent enough that Alison Krauss covered the song in the 90s–creating an even more beautiful and haunting version than Shenandoah’s original.  This version seems to be the one through which more non-mainstream-country fans have been exposed.

And now, score one more for exposure.

I was more than a little shocked, and totally stoked and giddy, when I popped in my newly imported copy of Sissel’s new album Til Deg….** and within 4 notes of Track 7 beginning I was bouncing my chair.  ”Levande Död” was undeniably “Ghost in this House” (and I totally started singing along in English).  It sounds beautiful.  This fits right in my deep love of good covers of good songs AND my deep love of hearing covers done in random languages (especially if the translation fits well….which means it’s not an attempt to do a one-to-one word swap, but still maintains the original theme story).

I haven’t had a chance to translate all the lyrics, but the title alone tells me that the lyrical theme of the original remains in tact.  ”Levande Död” was pretty obviously “Living Dead” to me (I confirmed this with Google translate).  So either Levande Död is the coolest way to refer to ghosts in a Norse dialect (fairly sure this cover is in Swedish)…..

Or maybe Sissel’s singing a really beautiful song about zombies.

That would be awesome, too.

*Shenandoah actually had a number of selections I loved as pieces independent of the particular performance.  I can’t fault their ability to choose gems.  They also had “Sunday in the South” and “Church on Cumberland Road.”

**In theory there will be a US version of Sissel’s album out eventually, but given it’s already been 4 months since Til Deg… came out in Europe, I’m not sure it will ever come out here, at least not with the high percentage of Norse-language content.  I’m cool with Sissel singing in English, French, Italian….but I have found more favorites when she’s singing in Norwegian, Danish or Swedish.  Unfortunately, that’s also the stuff that tends to get removed in US releases of her albums.  Apparently it’s okay to expose Americans to foreign influence if it’s a Romantic rather than a Germanic language….

I have no topic on my mind tonight that justifies a single post, so I’m going to rock this Twitter-style (though, probably not 140-characters…maybe more Tumblr?)

-Winter Weather:  Kristy’s already voiced her hatred for this never-ending winter.  I second that.  My company started 9/80 work weeks, meaning I should be getting every other Friday off.  My last off-Friday I had so much work to do, I clocked a 10 hour day in the office.  I was looking forward to this Friday off, promising myself a trip to the art museum and out to start shopping for a fountain pen.  That got shot to hell with ice and snow that started yesterday.  And led to the next point of discussion:

-Rear Wheel Drive Pick Ups On Ice:  I had no choice but to get out on these shitty roads in a rear-wheel drive pick-up.  Dad’s truck had to be re-tagged by the end of the month.  I’d purposely marked this off-Friday as the day to accomplish this.  I’d planned to get the inspection, do the registration and then head out to the museum in the truck.  Instead of an easy jaunt up to the inspection station, I had to wrestle heavy sand bags into the truck bed and fight to get them in place over the rear axel so I could get something approaching traction.  Even so, let’s just say it was a very interesting drive.  Very.

-Pandora Is Ignoring Me:  So, based on recommendations from some of you, dear readers, and the ease of access on my BluRay player, I’ve been using Pandora.  Unfortunately, it’s not being very intelligent.  It keeps trying to give me Tim McGraw.  And Lonestar.  And Rascal Flatts.  And assorted other people I don’t like (based off of my putting in Reba).  Even with my liberal use of “Thumbs Down” it appears not to believe me.

-Pinto Bean Milestone:  Despite the fact that pinto beans and cornbread have been a favorite staple of my family for as far back as I can remember, I have never actually attempted to cook this meal.  Black beans, lentils, navy beans–I’ve done all these numerous times and fairly well.  But the one bean that defined my childhood, I avoided. I suspect there’s some kind of psychological reason, like a subconscious fear of making something inferior and rendering me completely unworthy of being a part of either side of my family.  Well, this week, I couldn’t stand it.  I haven’t had a good pot of homemade pinto beans in over a year (since Mom hasn’t been around to make them, and I haven’t gone down to TX).  And lo….I am worthy of the family.  I feel terribly proud of myself.   And possibly a bit gassy.

Until 10 minutes ago, I’d fully intended to talk about the “Ballad of the Alamo” since 23 February marks the start of the 13 day siege of the Alamo.

But then I got an e-mail informing me of a not-unexpected death in the family and about the only thing I’m really feeling like listening to is Sissel’s rendition of “Lær meg å kjenne.”

You can google fairly easily to get the words/translation from Norwegian.  The lyrics are meaningful, but I mostly listen for the music.  Oddly, despite the rather somber nature of the tune and the lyrics, the best rendition I’ve ever heard of this was performed by Sissel at the wedding of Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise to Ari Behn in 2002.  Wouldn’t have pegged it for a wedding tune, but it worked and if I had the rather obscure link to that footage, I’d share it.  As it stands, the best I can do is point you to one several other videos from a concert special.

On a different night, I’d gush a bit about how much I love this song, but I’m not much up to it.  It will either stand on its own merits, or not.

Hmm, I feel I should look into what it is about Wednesday that results in my seeking musical therapy….While my usual solution is some Jimmy Buffett, today, I had to boost the dose of attitude change with something that was slightly less laid back–and to deal with the back log of, well, crap I find myself re-examining.

Enter Mother Mother’s “Body of Years“.

First of all, I like the pace.  You start with the drum beat that will keep you company the whole way through, build in the bass, then the rest–all steady, consistent, and just a little dark.  The vocals do nothing to detract from the pace, and with an opening line that mentions a cadaver, the words are far from shiny-happy.

The entire song uses bones, cadavers and remains as a metaphor for the memories and experiences of our years that we all have.  That “body” of years may be a rotting corpse, but it’s a piece of you that you can’t really ditch, and you continue to stumble over.  It may be a way back to days you revisit, but it can also be “a pile of shit, you can’t seem to forget.”   Normally I like to keep the decomposing bodies confined to episodes of Bones, but it works so well here, in part because there’s not a lot of attempt to unravel the whys or wherefores of the Body of Years we’re burdened with.  It’s not about fixing it, or explaining how it comes about that we wind up with so much past to weigh down and trip us, it’s just telling you it’s there.  They hand you the metaphor and you can read as much or little into it as you feel like.

And also refreshing is this little music-box-esque break this song takes about three minutes in.  For a brief period, that steady beat drops out, and the bodies give way to diary pages.  Then after only 30 seconds of this change that is so drastic, yet so smoothly executed, that same beat come building in again, taking you right back and on to the end.

It may not fit the normal feel-good rotation for a post bad-day decompression, but on occasion, it hits the spot.

As Kristy covered some time ago:  1983 was a year of some kind of musical magic.  Kristy’s original realization of the disproportionate amount of awesome that came out of pop/rock in 1983 led to me to look back at country since that’s the music I was being exposed to almost exclusively at that time.  I was pleasantly surprised–and slightly weirded out–to find that the statistically improbably percentage of musical gems was present in the country world just as in the pop/rock arena.  And, like Kristy, I found that the overwhelming majority of the songs listed were basically the soundtrack to some of my earliest memories.

Now, the nature of the country niche means that, unlike the songs Kristy identified before, not all the songs will have as wide a following.  But, part of the thing that amazed me in a look at just the Billboard country charts, were the number of songs that did break out of the genre.  The biggest example is “Islands In A Stream” (which was number one on 3 different US Billboard charts,  and several foreign charts including Austria’s…really?  Austria???).  Honestly, if you haven’t heard Kenny and Dolly on this at least once, I really don’t know what kind of intergalactic odyssey you’ve been on for the past 28 years.

But that wasn’t the only one that tends to get some love outside of country fans:  this was the year that Shelley West made sure we knew that “Jose Cuervo” was a friend of ours (oh, do I EVER beg to differ with that statement).   Anne Murray was just looking for “A Little Good News” (which has a nice, timeless message if you can overlook the whole part about “Bryant Gumble was talking about the fighting in Lebanon”) and at a time when everyone was worried about Japan taking over our jobs (yeah, remember when they were the global market threat?), the Oak Ridge Boys’ assured us their baby was “American Made.”  And somehow a very bizarre assortment of my friends who generally hate this genre learned that “Houston (Means That I’m One Day Closer To You)” from Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Bros.

For those more familiar with the country genre, there’s plenty that might not be known to the outside, but which that you should recognize as absolutely classic fare.  In 1983 not only were you getting the ascension of today’s mega stars like Reba McEntire (“Can’t Even Get The Blues” was the first number one of the year), and George Strait (“A Fire I Can’t Put Out” was #1 in September)  coming in with a neotraditionalist sound (which George has kept and Reba has mostly ditched), but the general epic fail of the country/pop crossover of the 70s had finally ripened into something awesome with the likes of Kenny, Dolly, Alabama (“The Closer You Get” although, it’s arguable that Alabama had some neotraditionalist tendencies because you also have “Dixieland Delight” the same year), Janie Fricke (“He’s a Heartache Looking For a Place to Happen”) and even Charley Pride’s “Why Baby Why” (because, yes, kids, there have been black country singers well before Darius Rucker).  You were also still getting the outlaw country, in particular the absolutely classic musical epic of “Pancho and Lefty” from Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson (I still remember the music video for that one–it was much higher quality than many videos of that time).  Even songs that didn’t make number one were awesome (honestly, until now I never knew that George Strait’s signature song “Amarillo by Morning” was not a number one in the US).

Maybe it was this unique transition and overlap, or maybe there was just some kind of weird planetary alignment, but something was just right in 1983, and while the rest of the 80s were also (in my far less than humble opinion) fantastic for this niche of the musical market, something about 1983 was just a stand out.

Okay, folks.  By now we’ve all consumed Thanksgiving dinner, which, in the world of Cammy, means it is now kosher to make with the jingle bells and crank up the Christmas tunes.

For those few of you who may not have known both members of My TV, My Peanut Butter for Christmases past, the official kick-off song of our holiday playlist is an obscure and hilarious bit by a fellow called Kølig Kaj.  The song is “Kaj i kanen” but we prefer to simply call it “Juleman.”  Not familiar with this Christmas ditty?  Allow me to explain it very, very simply:

Danish.

Santa.

Rap.

The only source I know of for the song is a European compilation known as Absolute Christmas 2–an album I’m still trying to get my hands on.  You see, the entry of this piece in our lives had a lot to do with shared files on a campus network which resulted in completely random things ending up on one’s hard drive.  Most of them were things long ago ditched, but in the midst of all the renditions of “Jingle Bells” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” something as unique as Danish Santa Rap is an absolute gem that you can’t allow to escape.

I love remakes, new takes, variations and alternative renditions of all kids of Christmas music, but even my love for hearing a new take on an old tune gets tried by mid December.  It’s a shame there aren’t more explorations of funky jewels from non-English speaking sources.  So, gentle readers, before you berate the repetitive nature of Christmas tune-age this holiday season, give a shot at branching out into new and uncharted territory, and when you find your own Juleman, share it with good friends and spread the multi-cultural holiday cheer.

And if Christmas isn’t your thing, then break out the sounds of the winter holiday of your choice and share with the class already.  What?  We’ve heard all about baby Jesus already–give us something else to work with here!