elrhiarhodan

Day Thirty - A song that reminds you of yourself makes you feel something profound
Randall Thompson - Alleluia (Tanglewood Festival Opening)

And so we come to the end of the journey, with an incredibly beautiful and profound piece of American music. This is an elegiac, a condolence, a threnody - a memorial for all that is lost and will never be recovered. I had intended to post this as a bonus Day Thirty-One, but I think I am done.

Doing this meme has been an incredible - and sometimes very difficult - journey through memory. I hope you taken something from this trip - in introduction to a new song, a bit of an insight into the person behind the weird name and the rather haughty user pic, or perhaps an inspiration to do this trip yourself.

Thank you for traveling with me, for a day or a week or for the whole month.

Be well and stay safe. I'll see you again soon.




( If you want to play along, here are the thirty days of song )

Day Twenty-Eight - A song by an artist whose voice you love
Art Garfunkel - All I Know (Angel Clare)

Of all the songs I've talked about, this is one of the very few pieces of music that I associate most strongly with Middle Sister. Our tastes in music don't sync up too much, and there was practically no overlap in our teenaged years (she had once, rather infamously, referred to The Moody Blues as "acid rock"). I do remember her nearly unquenchable and unholy love for The Eagles, and one summer, driving with her to the not-so-local university where she was taking Organic Chemistry (she was going into her junior year at university and was pre-med), and needed a companion for the drive, so I took an intro to philosophy class (I was going into my senior year in high school). For six weeks, three days a week, two hours each way, I had to listen to (and show appreciation for) The Eagles. I still can't hear Witchy Woman without getting a cold sweat.

Anyway, I digress. I associate All I Know with Middle Sister because she came home one summer and played this song in our bedroom and sighed, saying how much it was such an accurate picture of her love life (I forgot the name of the guy she'd been dating and who kind of broker her heart).

Unlike the aforementioned former backup band for Linda Rondstat, I developed an appreciation for this song. After all, Art Garfunkel can actually sing, and this is a beautiful piece of music.



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Day Twenty-Six - A song that makes you want to fall in love (not!)
Janis Ian - Between the Lines (Between the Lines)

I've already talked about what this album means to me (Day Two - At Seventeen), and while I love every song on this album with a love bordering on obsession, there's something about the title track that gets to me. I don't know if it's the music, the way it goes from achy and soulful to an almost frenetic mazurka, or the way Janis Ian sings in a practically conversational tone, but it moves me in ways that few songs do.

Moves me away from the idea of love and marriage and a committed life with another person.

Listening to it again in preparation for this entry, I realized what it reminded me of, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the lies that couples tell each other, the games they play with their partner's emotions, the yanking of chains and insincere apologies and lines crossed that can't be retreated from.

Love as an ideal is beautiful, but love as an experience is one I am grateful I don't have to suffer through.





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Day Twenty-Four - A song by a band you wish were still together
R.E.M. - I Remember California (Green)

I have some very specific memories of R.E.M. and this song.

It was the summer of 1989 and I was in law school and living in the basement and first level of a Philadelphia "trinity" (called so because of the three floors - the "father, son and holy ghost") off of South Street, which was - and probably still is - the equivalent of NYC's East Village. At the time, I was fairly good friends with the tenant in the "father" apartment, who was a lovely and quiet woman named Noelle. She was a nurse and worked the night shift at CHOP and therefore, was only awake in the early evenings, after I got home from class and/or work.

But because she worked nights, she also had a lot of time off and we'd end up going to her family vacation place in the Pocanos or to concerts at the Fairmont Park band shell. Once of those concerts was R.E.M., on tour for Green. We didn't get seats under the cover, but got deeply discounted "lawn" tickets. And on a lovely summer evening, with our thermoses of iced tea, bags of Pepperidge Farm Milanos and beach towels, we listened to R.E.M. under the stars. We also go extremely contact high and giggled like three year olds at this song because it made no fucking sense.

It was a fun night.




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Day Twenty-Two - A song that moves you forward
Oysterband - The Deserter (Deserters)


"A song that moves you foward" - I don't know what that means. But I do know that the album Deserters and the title track was the first solo Oysterband (or then, The Oyster Band) I'd ever heard. But that doesn't tell the full story. In 1991, June Tabor - English folk singer for the ages - had collaborated with The Oyster Band on Freedom and Rain, and had gone on tour to promote it. A strange tour it must have been, because they were performing in local record stores, not concert venues.

I had been living in Philadelphia at the time and was just getting deep into the English/Irish/Scottish folk music scene (advancing beyond Fairport Convention and The Chieftans). The industry magazine, Dirty Linen had noted the upcoming appearance of June and the Oysters at Third Street Jazz on a Saturday afternoon.

I went, and was immediately smitten. But The Oyster Band was not really marketed in the U.S., and the local Tower Records didn't have their CDs. It wasn't until I moved back to New York and found Deserters in the Long Island Tower Records. (Funny how difficult it could be to find music. It took years of dedicated searching to locate the rest of their back catalogue!)

While I love every track on this album with an undying passion, The Deserter forever will be my favorite.



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Day Twenty - A song that has many meanings to you
Tannahill Weavers - Braw Burn the Bridges (Cullen Bay)

Sorry for bailing on you guys yesterday, and don't know if I'm going to be much better today.

I can't say why I picked this song for today's entry - it isn't one that has many meanings to me. It's a beautiful modern song in the folk tradition that might be one of my favorite songs ever. It's irrevocably tied to July 4th, 1990, when I was living in Philadelphia. I had an apartment that faced the Delaware River and a rooftop deck, where I watched the fireworks go off. In New York, the equivalent location would be a condo on the South Street Seaport.

After the fireworks ended - probably 10:30 PM, I went back to my first-floor, inner courtyard apartment and put on this song. Not the album, but the song. I might have had the windows open, but as a rule, I don't turn the volume up past 4 or 5 (sensitive hearing). As the song ended, someone called me - it was the landlord's office, requesting that I turn down my music, I was disturbing other tenants.

I was stunned and not a small bit humiliated and I turned off the stereo. In my now quiet apartment, I could hear the other tenants' stereos, as well as the very raucous nightlife just a block away. I shut the windows and spent a sleepless night wondering if the person complaining just picked an apartment at random.

Because honestly, there's no bass and no percussion in this song, it's all gentle violins and penny whistles and sad voices longing for home.




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Day Eighteen - A song from the year you were born
Simon & Garfunkel - I Am Rock (Sounds of Silence)

I was honestly shocked when I went to look at songs from 1965 and found this one on the list. It always surprises me that S&G's entire ouvre was produced before I turned six - they broke up in 1970.

And yet their music is still as relevant as it was when it was new.

As for I Am a Rock, when I was a lonely, friendless teenager, I had the lyrics scrawled over every notebook and binder and book cover. I think I probably wrote "Islands never cry/And rocks feel no pain" a hundred times during my horrible ninth grade.




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Day Sixteen - A song that’s a classic favorite
Elton John - Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road)

There isn't a version of this song that I don't love - the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" version that I first listened to at the tender age of seven with Eldest Sister, or the Central Park concert version (I wanted to go but I couldn't get my dad to take me - he didn't like Elton, and while Eldest Sister and I did many things together, spending a hot summer day in Central Park in 1980 was probably not on the list of things my mother would have approved of). Watching the video of the performance, I am absolutely amazed at the physicality of Elton and how he really fed from and fed into the crowd's delight. But then, watching the 1974 live performance (the first video), it's part of a well-established act.

I also adore The Who's version, which is much harder (naturally) - I remember reading that they recorded it as part of Elton's deal to star as the Pinball Wizard in Tommy.

And of course, there's Taron Egerton's version for Rocketman, which has - for the moment - become the one I most prefer. It feels so authentically honky-tonk.










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Day Fourteen - A song you’d love to be played at your wedding
Oysterband - Blood Wedding (Trawler)

Like every other little girl, I dreamed of a grand wedding day. By the time my sisters were married, I was firmly in the camp of "give me the money instead". The idea of spending so many thousands of dollars on a fucking party where the food is terrible and the music worse and everyone is hot and miserable just seems like an enormous waste of good cash.

So consider this an anti-wedding song, and of course, it's from my most beloved Oysterband. No particular memories associated with this tune, other than laughing my ass off the first time I heard it and threatening to play it at my sister's engagement party.



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Day Twelve - A song from your preteen years
Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way (Rumors)

I think (I'm not sure) that my middle sister got a copy of Rumors for her fifteenth birthday (checks, yup), which means I was twelve and therefore, a pre-teen. I can remember the album playing incessantly for years, to the point where the grooves had worn away and my sister had to get a replacement. The music - and this song - stirs up all kinds of feelings in me, and not really great ones. I listen to it and I'm once again the overweight, alienated pre-teen who like weird things and had no friends.

(In the forty+ years, not much has changed, really).





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We're a third of the way through and I haven't missed a single day!

Day Ten - A song that makes you sad
Annie Lennox - Into the West (Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King Soundtrack)

This is one of the few songs on the list where the music itself engenders the emotion, not the memories associated with it.

I love all of the music to the Lord of the Rings movies, and cheerfully shelled out much money for the "complete" soundtracks for each movie, but out of the gorgeous Howard Shore composition and symphonic (and vocal) performances, Annie Lennox's closing song to The Return of the King is the best three minutes out of the nearly eight hours of music and never fails to move me to sadness and tears, albeit with a touch of hope.






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Day Eight - A song about drugs or alcohol
Billy Joel - Captain Jack (Piano Man)

This one is almost too easy, no?

But the point of doing this meme, at least to me, is putting up songs that have meaning and don't just tick the box.

Does Captain Jack have any particular meaning to me? Not in the conventional sense - I have never used heroin.

But, I was eight or nine when the song first got some airplay, and then an intense thirteen year old when Billy Joel simply exploded on the scene in '77 with The Stranger, and all Billy Joel's songs consumed the radio. So it was inevitable that Captain Jack became a formative part of my pre-teen life. Growing up on Long Island, Billy was the Hometown Boy made good. And for me and my junior high classmates, he was the hometown boy from the next town over.

I had terrible English teacher in seventh grade. Mr. Fontaine. He was a trashfire of an educator and a horrible human being all the way around (I'm pretty sure I've talked about he here). But there was one day where he rose above his petty competition with the thirteen year olds who were a lot smarter and creative than he was, and we spent a whole class discussing Billy Joel's music, including Captain Jack.

I don't remember what he said about the song, I do remember classmates sniggering about him explaining "closet queens" and him telling them to shut their traps. So a good memory, I think.





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Day Six - A song that makes you want to dance

This girl doesn't dance (despite 4 years of ballet lessons when I was in elementary school plus Hustle lessons in 7th grade that had been an exercise in terminal humiliation). But there is one song that actually will get me up an onto the dance floor.

Unfortunately, videos of Hava Nagila are weighed down by disgusting antisemitism in the comments, which I don't want echoed here, so I'm putting up something utterly unobjectionable.

David Bowie's Let’s Dance (Let’s Dance)





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I'm posting this one without comment.

Day Four - A song that reminds you of someone you’d rather forget

Ani DiFranco - Untouchable Face (Canon)




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Look at me! Posting two days in a row!

Day Two - A song you like with a number in the title

Janis Ian - At Seventeen (Between the Lines)

This song could have gone on a number of different places in the list, especially because I have two entries for Day Two, but I love it so much and it has so much meaning for me that I wanted it early in the list.

I wasn't seventeen when I first heard this - I was probably closer to twelve (but maybe as young as eleven). My eldest sister had a car with an eight-track player in it (!) and we used to hang out a lot together - the mall, the pizza parlor, the beach. It wasn't unusual for her to take me to Record World and spend hours browsing the racks - and on this particular day, she bought a copy of Between the Lines to listen to in the car (she had the LP for home listening). Of course, after we left the store, she popped it into the deck and we listened and drove and I remember talking about the lyrics (we did that a lot). At Seventeen was the song we talked about the most.

In later years, when I did turn seventeen and was the ugliest of ducklings, I had my sister's copy of the LP on permanent borrow, and listened to At Seventeen so often, I heard it in my sleep.



Bonus Track: Eurythmics - Seventeen Again (Peace)

I definitely did not love the Eurythmics when they hit the charts with Sweet Dreams (are made of this), during my senior year in high school. It was overplayed and ridiculous and nothing like the music I preferred (I'd been heavy into folk, singer/songwriter, British Invasion, and classical - my tastes were about 20 years out of sync). But years later, driving with a friend, I was re-introduced to the group and fell deeply in love.

Fast forward to the early Oughts and the iTunes Music Store. I thought I had all of the Eurythmics on CD, but discovered that I'd completely missed their 1999 reunion album. I bought it and typical me, didn't listen to it for years. And by years, I mean almost a decade. I even remember the first time I listened to it - January, 2010, just as I was falling deep into the White Collar fandom - which is why several songs will always be associated with Peter/Neal and Neal/Kate.

However, this one isn't one of those. This one bookends with the Janis Ian song, and tells the opposite story of the ugly duckling who is shunned and degraded by her more physically attractive peers.



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