What Memes May Come

Sean has seen fit to tag me with a meme. So here it is:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

Oh, and howdy back.

Well, this is an interesting one; since I’ve been writing some songs over the last little while, I’m not listening to much. The way to do songs, at least for me, is to stay out of the immediate influence pool — except for live performances, which are always good to see. ‘Cause they’re not part of the influence pool, they’re part of the inspiration pool, natch…

‘Course, I haven’t been seeing much in the way of live bands lately, either. Just as it happens. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a bunch of music circulating in the big crappy Sargasso of my mind, even so…

1. Springer/Ducommun, “Sneaker” — this is a tune from a friend’s old jazz duo, “f.”, as the kids say, Coco Love Alcorn on this track…I just missed seeing Coco play this weekend, due to unavoidable logistical difficulties, so her lovely voice has been going around and around in my head the last couple of days. When Chris gave me a copy of the CD, last summer I think, I listened to it a couple of times, then asked him: “am I a sap for liking “Sneaker” best?” Reasoning that it was the most boring-guy friendly song on the record. He laughed.

2. New Pornographers, “Letter From An Occupant” — this is all Sean’s fault, because he put it up on Supervillain. Ah, the hometown heroes! They do some hooky, hooky records, don’t they? It must be five weeks later or something, and I still can’t get the thing out of my head, but according to the “limiting influences” rule, I’ve resisted spinning the disk.

3. Ween, “With My Own Bare Hands” — was washing dishes to this the other weekend. Throw in “Your Party” and “Object” as well, off the same album…my brother took me to a Ween concert last year, and I gotta say, it was pretty damn impressive.

4. Belle And Sebastian, “White Collar Boy” — how this damn thing got into my head again I’ll never know. I think it was three years ago, or was it four, that it was everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. And I’d actually rather be listening to Skylarking in my head, if it comes to things that shape the summer (having started swimming in the ocean, I consider it summertime now), but…always what gets me with this one is the looseness of it, the reliance on little vocal flourishes that lie more in the realm of accent than athletics: if you listen closely (at least, on my system) you can just hear that the phrase you think is “narrowly avoided” is actually pronounced “narra’la avoid-ded”, and for some reason that gets me every time. Not a masterpiece of structure, at least not vocally, it just crams a whole bunch of crap in there willy-nilly, and there’s something inordinately fascinating about that, for what it is. Also, I still can’t believe I listened to this for ages before I realized what the allusive intention was behind it — it takes me ages to distinguish lyrics well, so without a lyrics sheet I had no idea that I was listening to something that mashed together the story of Adam and Eve with The Defiant Ones…imagine that! I totally missed that for like, two months! And yet it’s just the sort of arbitrary play-for-play’s-sake that I like to engage in myself, so…

Yeah, I’ve got it stuck in my head, now.

5. Lemon Jelly, “Nice Weather For Ducks” — another oldie, and it just came up, I’m pretty sure as a direct result of reading too damn much Alan Moore all in a day. Seriously. Shortly after crossing into Promethea Book Four, it just started…

6. The New Main Street Singers, “The Good Book Song” — I will never, ever get tired of listening to the soundtrack of A Mighty Wind, I think…I’m convinced all the actor-groups were told to go away and write three songs, one of which had to be sorta-kinda good (and the most mind-boggling thing about that to me is that I think The Folksmen’s “good” song is probably supposed to be “Skeletons Of Quinto” — HOLY SHIT!), but my second-favourite of all of these is “The Good Book Song”: always amazing, total madness.

Though my first favourite of all the Mighty Wind songs is, sadly, not on the CD: Catherine O’Hara’s solo effort “Sure-Flo”, which is some kind of work of genius or something.

7. Bauhaus, “She’s In Parties” — I can’t even explain why this song has suddenly resurfaced in my brain, I haven’t thought about it in years, and now I’m wondering why the hell I haven’t.

And, BONUS: three songs that all for totally different reasons are continually cycling in my brain — Slow‘s “Have Not Been The Same” (“Come here baby…give me a kiss…I want a target, a target I can’t miss”) because it’s awesome…the goddamn “Pina Colada Song” because, well, it’s a long story but suffice it to say I found myself singing it in the voice of a German conceptual artist several years ago, and now it SIMPLY WILL NOT GO!…and finally, “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads, because…

Because…

Because maybe I had a fever at the time or something, that’s possible, and would probably explain a lot…but somehow or other one day I found myself thinking, “what if Talking Heads showed up to play a concert, but a whole bunch of their audio equipment wasn’t working?” Like, suppose that during “Psycho Killer” they’d planned to pour David Byrne’s vocals through the keyboard, or however they do that, to kind of get that Cher/Stephen Hawking effect? But then they find out too late that it won’t work, so instead of just not doing it they decide to improvise…David Byrne decides to try to create that effect by just plain singing funny:

“Zy-go-gee-la, gez-ger-zay-ee…brup brup brup brah, brup brup brup brup brah browww…”

And the crowd just stands there, going “wha…?”, as the band members cast worried glances at each other out of the corners of the eyes…

For some reason, I just CANNOT get that out of my mind.

Okay, now that my weird thought-processes have been thoroughly exposed, I’ll tag:

Jim

David

Prof and Gorj (although really, they’re already answering this meme on a pretty consistent basis)

Madeley

Johnny B.

Spot 1980

and Haute Corbeille (Haute Corbeille?), because he hasn’t been on the scene much lately. Well, neither has Spot, come to think of it…

Musical diversity? Not around here, buddy…but between these seven, there’ll probably be a bit more of it…