elrhiarhodan

I can't resist a song meme...and so I've ganked this from deepbluemermaid.

The rules are simple:

Step 1: Set your primary playlist to random and shuffle it.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 20 songs that play (or more, if you like!), no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Anyone is allowed to guess the answers.
Step 4: Strike through and add the artist and title below the lyric when someone gets one right.
Step 5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is cheating. Please don't.

And for anyone who can get more than 5 right (including artist and album), I'll give them a WC ficlet.

( Lyrics Are Here )

Now that long!fic is done, and I can reclaim some of my life, I've got a few random recommendations. 

White Collar Fic:

photoash's Secrets Series:  Neal's First Heist | Music Full of Memories | Remembering Her Touch :  These are exquisitely written stories about Neal's past.  They are lovely and lyrical and make me weep just a little bit every time I read them.

On AO3, there's a terrific gen fic, Precious Few Heroes by OnYourMark.  It is one of the very few fics that have ever surprised me. 

A while back, I was looking for more WC fic (can one ever get enough), and I went out to the Internet and Google, and found Romanology, which is an enormous multi-fandom Master/Slave 'verse based on the premise that the Roman Empire never fell.  There are quite a few different fandoms represented here, and the White Collar story, which mirrors Pilot and Free Fall, is exquisite, particularly for fans of the genre. Maybe if a bunch of LJ fans send the author email, she'll write more WC in this awesome universe.


( Really cool stuff under the cut )

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Please observe the same courtesy and do not repost my comments without asking for permission first.


OH...and one more thing.

Has anyone downloaded the new iTunes yet and connected to Ping?  You all know how much I love my music...and love to share my interests.

As I noted in the author notes to My Heart Lay Waiting, Braw Burn the Bridges by the Tannahill Weavers is my favorite non-Traditional Celtic song.  From the first time I heard it 20 years ago, it broke my heart.

This morning, I found the original Cullen Bay recording on MySpace, and wanted everyone to enjoy it. 

The link takes you to a MySpace ilike.com player - Braw Burn the Bridges

Enjoy!

One moment, I'm listening to the soothing sounds of Kourosh Dini - an album appropriately called "Calm" and then the next thing I know...Depeche Mode (Sounds of the Universe) is playing.

That will teach me to listen from the master music list when it's sorted by "Most Recently Added."

I AM SO CONFUSED AND FRIGHTENED...MUSIC SHOULDN'T DO THAT TO ME.

Going back to my Annie and my Oysterband and my French Romantics.  They don't mess with my head.

I've been on a singer-songwriter kick lately - since I've "discovered" Ani Difranco (thank you gyzym for all the awesome recs).  And coincidentally, I've renewed my Magnatune membership, which gives me complete and unlimited download access to their catalog.  If you're not familiar with Magnatune, you should be.  They are the anti-recording company.  Artists that sign with them get 50% of the revenue from any sale, and up until recently, they had a sliding scale for payment (you could choose how much to pay for a download).  As of last week, the site has gone competely membership based, so for $15 a month, you have unlimited access - all you can eat - to DRM-free downloads.

I've been exploring their Rock and Pop section (usually I'm buried deep within the World and Classical catalogs), and I've discovered a few really wonderful artists that I need to share:

Sophia Marie: This is a total departure for me - but the girl!bass is incredible, and so are the songs.  Love, sex, hard rock.  The album is called Twisted.

Mercymachine:  A hybrid between Leonard Cohen and Kate Bush.  Check out In Your Bed, a concept album about unrequited love and sexual politics

Brad Senne:  Rough country folk - the ruined voice reminds me of early Dylan.  Of the three albums on Magnatune, I most recommend Aerial Views, and the song "Road Trip," which has been playing in my head for days.

Lastly, check out Robin Grey, who has a bit of Cohen and Richard Thompson (the notes also say Tom Waits, but I don't hear it myself).  English, and extremely sardonic.  The album is Strangers with Shoes.

For those of you with iPhones, Magnatune has an app that gives you complete streaming access to the catalog for free.

(Well, maybe I can work WC into this post without astroturfing too much...)

The other day, I responded to the Writer's Block question regarding preferences for a single genre of music for the rest of my life, and I said classical, simply because it gives me the broadest range of choices.  Last night, I was checking out some playlist metadata in iTunes and I saw that none of the top 100 most frequently played tracks were classical.  In a way, that makes sense, because 50% of the 40,000 tracks (not exaggerating, at one point I had three concurrent subscriptions to eMusic) on my computer are some form of classical, so I tend not to listen to the same set of tracks over and over.  But there is a clear pattern to the music I listen to over and over again - the top 100 most frequently listened to tracks are either Annie Lennox or Oysterband.

I presume that most people have heard of Annie Lennox - part of the New Wave duo, Eurhythmics for 15 years, then a dynamite solo artist in her own right, and of course the Oscar-winning singer of "Into the West" from Return of the King (she also has a songwriting credit there as well).  Annie's my go-to girl for hurt/comfort/angst lyrics, and I am definitely going to write an entire White Collar fic cycle set to either "Diva" or "Bare" (see, I could do it - legitimately!). 

But my other most favorite music is from Oysterband (no, not Blue Oyster Cult), an English rock group  that has been around for over 20 years.  They are extremely non-commercial, so you'll never hear or see them in the US, but they've got a devoted following throughout England and Germany.  The best way to describe Oysterband is that the music is hard driving social poetry - which sounds pretty dumb - but it's probably the most accurate lable.  Their early albums were more folk oriented, cross-pollinating Fairport Convention with Jethro Tull - think  "Merry Old England" meets "Warchild."  I discovered them when they did a free concert at 3rd Street Jazz in Philadelphia, promoting "Freedom and Rain" - an album they did with June Tabor, and while they were still more folk than rock, you could definitely hear where they were going. 

The musical composite of Oysterband still reads like a basic English folk band - a violinist, a cellist, acoustic guitars and a variety of percussion, but the music's like nothing else I've ever heard.  Their latest (2007) album, Meet You There  is constantly playing - I've listened to most of the songs over 500 times - and I am sure that other tracks of theirs have higher playcounts, but were listened to on CDs and tapes (remember those???).

So, if you're looking for intelligent, compelling lyric driven music, check out Oysterband.  Most of their albums are on iTunes, but if you want to try a sample of tracks - I recommend the following:

Only When You Call (Deep Dark Ocean)
The Deserter (Deserters)  
By Northern Light (Shouting End of Life)
Blood Red Roses (Shouting End of Life)
Jam Tomorrow (Shouting End of Life)
20th of April (Trawler)
Don't Slit Your Wrists for Me (Trawler)
My Mouth (Rise Above)
If You Can't Be Good (Rise Above)
The Boy's Still Running (Meet You There)
Just One Life (Meet You There)
Ways of Holding On (Here I Stand)
In Your Eyes (Here I Stand)
I Know It's Mine (Here I Stand)

There are others - but these are the ones that I've pulled together as a playlist of my favorites - my go-to music when I need to get back into or back out of my head.