elrhiarhodan

Y is for Yellow – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road)

Ha! I bet you all thought I was going to use "Yellow Submarine".

Nope. This song – and the entire album, actually – is particularly evocative for me. My sister – the one who influenced so much of my musical tastes – got this for the holidays in 1973, and I remember it being a really big deal for her.

Of course, she grabbed me and made me listen to it dozens of times over Christmas vacation. We spent a lot of time analyzing the liner notes (oh, those were the days), listening and relistening to the songs (I particularly loved the eerie wordless opening "Funeral for a Friend"), and I remember being so proud to point to her that "Bennie" in "Bennie and the Jets" was a girl ("She's got electric boots, a mohair suit…")

( The List )

W is for Window – Boy in the Window, Oysterband (25)

We're almost at the end of the list, so I thought another Oysterband song was fitting - since so much of my listening habits revolve around their music. This is a rare song, from a rare and very early album, about a lonely boy wanting a different life.

It reminds me of an upbeat version of R.E.M.'s The Wrong Child.


( The List )

U is for Umbrella - Little Umbrellas - Frank Zappa (Hot Rats)




Not even bothering with the cover artwork for this one. I don't particularly like Frank Zappa or this song, it just happened to be in my collection. Someone who was trying to impress me sent it to me, and I've never even listened to it.

But it was there, and it fit the bill.

( The List )

S is for Sun – Searching for the Sun, Brad Senne (The Shapes that Shift Us)

I could have gone with a classic, like the Beatles, "Here Comes the Sun", or John Denver's "Sunshine on My Shoulders", or Yes' "Heart of the Sunrise", but I thought I might just prove that my musical tastes aren't completely fossilized. Obscure, yes, but I do listen to music created in the current millennium.

( The List )

Q is for Question – Question, The Moody Blues (A Question of Balance)

The Moody Blues, especially in their early years, was a band whose music bounced between extraordinarily accessible (Nights in White Satin, Tuesday Afternoon from Days of Future Past), to extremely unreachable (A Question of Balance - the entire album).

As I've mentioned in other entries to this meme, my musical tastes were formed by all of the hours I spent with my eldest sister, listening to her music. My middle sister didn't hang with us and she had her own preferences. But one Saturday afternoon, the three of us were on the way to the mall (it was the 70's, that's what we did on Saturdays), my eldest sister (driving, natch) popped in an 8-track cassette of some Moody Blues album (it could have been this one, or Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, or Days of Future Past) and my middle sister goes "ARGH, I hate The Moody Blues. They're acid rock."

It was a good thing eldest sister had stopped at a red light, otherwise she might have crashed the car out of utter shock.

The Moody Blues may be a lot of things - self-indulgent, inaccessible, album-oriented, twee, silly, over-commercialized. But acid rock? No, not hardly. Not even close. Not even on the same planet.

To this day, we still tease middle sister about this.

( The List )

O is for Octopus – Octopus' Garden, The Beatles (Abbey Road)

Another childhood favorite – I learned to sing this in day camp when I was 6 or 7. Had no clue about The Beatles or Abbey Road or anything other than it was a fun and silly song.

( The List )

M is for Monkey – Bungle in the Jungle, Jethro Tull (War Child)

Question: How do you explain this song to an impressionable ten year old girl, one who was growing up in the 1970s and without the dubious benefit of the Internet?

Answer: Very carefully.

( The List )

K is for Kangaroo – In the Land of the Patagarang, Patrick Street (Irish Times)

I came by the group Patrick Street by way of one of its founding members, Andy Irvine, who'd been part of a number of other folk groups, but I'd discovered when I found a CD of his work with Paul Brady in a cut-out bin. It was well worth the $.99.

When I was living in Philadelphia, I was able to take in the very vibrant Celtic and English folk music scene, getting to see The Tannahill Weavers, Fairport Convention and Oysterband. The last group I saw was Patrick Street - just three days before I moved back to New York.

Andy Irvine was a very charming frontman, and when they performed "In the Land of the Patagarang", he explained that the "Patagarang" was another word for "kangaroo". The song is about the deportation of Irish men and woman for such minor crimes as pretending to be an Egyptian. It's sad and it's funny and a fitting entry for today.

( The List )

I is for Ice Cream – Saturday In The Park, Chicago (Chicago IX: Chicago's Greatest Hits)

This is one of those songs that is indelibly associated with the year I turned ten. That summer, actually. And the association has nothing to do with the song playing on the radio – it had been a hit two years earlier and while I knew the song (who didn't) – the fixation in my brain didn't come until the year that the Ken Russell film "Tommy" came out.

My eldest sister was obsessed with the movie, with Roger Daltrey, and with The Who. That entire summer, the only thing she'd listen to was either the movie soundtrack, the original rock opera, or another Who album.

Or Chicago IX.

My sister and I went everywhere together that summer (or so it seemed), and she had an 8-track player in her car (a pale blue Olds Toronado). One day, coming home from the beach (Bayville), her Tommy cassette broke and the only other one she had was Chicago IX (she wouldn't keep more than two in her car in the summer, they would melt). I have the clearest memory of singing "Saturday In the Park" at the top of my lungs while driving home, happy and slightly sunburnt.

( The List )

G is for Girl – The Oxford Girl, Oysterband – Wild Blue Yonder

"Oysterband - The Oxford Girl (Union Chapel)" (Watch on YouTube)

Sorry I missed yesterday's post, but I spent most of the day in transit and was just too tired to even look at my computer when I got home. Actually, my eyes refused to focus after the five hour drive.

And also, my apologies for the YouTube embed and not the actual song. Originally, I'd picked two different versions of the traditional ballad, "New York Girls", for today's entry, but then I realized I was missing the opportunity to talk about a far more interesting piece of music.

The Oxford Girl, which originally appeared on Wide Blue Yonder, with Christine Collister actually singing the "title" role, is a beautiful and tragic song – about the damage that rumor and innuendo can do to an innocent reputation. Even in the days before Twitter and Facebook, the cruelty of gossip was exponentially destructive.

The song tells the tale of a young woman who disappeared from her home in Oxford, England, and how the police suspect foul play. No one seems particularly concerned about the girl, just very eager to spread damaging gossip – that she was sleeping around, even with her own brother. What makes the original version (which isn't on YouTube and I'll try to remember to post here when I get home), is Christine Collister's pain-filled rendition of a part of the chorus:

I never had a chance to prove them wrong
My time was short, the story long
No I never had a chance to prove them wrong
It's always them that write the song

( The List )

E is for Elephant – Elephant Seal March (George Fenton, The Blue Planet)

Elephant Seal March is one of the few items on this list that I don't have a deep emotional connection to. A few years back, I had a membership to eMusic, which, at the time, allowed unlimited legal downloads for a monthly fee. This enabled me to scoop up lots of stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have considered. I'd seen the BBC documentary, The Blue Planet and I'd enjoyed the music, so I took the opportunity to download the soundtrack.

Back in the day, before I moved into my own house, when I spent most of my evenings at the local Starbucks with my headphones all but permanently attached to my ears, this was one of the albums that was in heavy rotation. The music had enough drama to keep me focused on my writing, but not so much that I'd get distracted.


( The List )

C is for Cat – … And the Mouse Police Never Sleep (Jethro Tull, Heavy Horses)

Is there a sillier, yet more trenchant song about cats than …And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps?

I know a lot of people (in the group of people who consider themselves fans of Jethro Tull) don't consider the group's middle period (when they became more folk than rock) particularly good, but I've always taken great delight in Heavy Horses, Songs From the Wood and Stormwatch. Some of the songs, especially on Heavy Horses, are downright silly - what group of badass rock and rollers sings about Shire horses and weathervanes?

Anyway, I adore the absurdity of ...And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps - the music takes itself utterly seriously, but the lyrics can't be parsed into allusion and metaphor. It's a song about a barn cat, full stop.

( The Lyrics )


( The List )

Okay, folks – I had way too much fun with aragarna's 30 Day Movie Meme. I'd thought about doing the same questions with books, but since so many questions were location (i.e. at the theater) specific, it really didn't work. The other day, I was browsing through the bookstore (yes, I still go to physical bookstores for physical books) and noticed the old children's classic "A is for Apple" and I thought that would be a good meme – for music.

It didn't take long to pull together the music that would address most of the items on the alphabet list, of which there are several versions. A few, however, stymied me - but I've persevered and have all twenty-six letter filled. Because I'm a little nuts, I made it a point to include only music I actually owned, but I see no reason why you can't pull your songs from YouTube.

I've also dug up an embed code that will work on LJ, and if you do want to host your own songs and use this code, it can be found at the bottom of the list. (A shout-out to podfic_tips for the help. The code from a 2011 entry still works, despite the changes in LJ.)

Some of the entries will not require explanation, others (like the K is for Kangaroo entry) certainly will.

And so, let's begin…

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

A is for Apple - New York State of Mind (Billy Joel, Turnstiles)

Does this song actually use the word "apple"? Nope. Does that disqualify it? Nope.

New York State of Mind was written and first performed in 1976, just when New York City was beginning to promote itself as "The Big Apple". To me, there's no other song I'd ever associate with my home city, my "Big Apple" than this one.

( The List )