billy joel - two thousand years

When I was a kid we used to go camping with this group of families from my Primary School. My parents weren't super outdoors-y back then so camping was definitely a new and exiting thing for us. Some of the other families were veterans and had all the fancy gear (folding bunk beds!) so we didn't even have to rough it that much. Plus, a family holiday where there are other kids to play with? Golden. We were on one of these trips over new year 1999. I don't think I really got the significance of the new millennium at the time - I have vague memories of yk2 talk that came to nothing, but that's about it. I remember the trip, though. We scored a huge spot near the creek, and accidentally cleared out the family who'd set up next door by being too rowdy (I recall a prank we played on a girl who was about my age, where we wrapped pebbles in Roses wrappers and gave them to her - kids can be so cruel). There were rubber inner-tyres we'd carry up the creek and float down in, and some of the dads tied a rope across the creek at our site so we wouldn't get carried away by the current and end up in the deep pool further downstream. Some of the boys got hold of a box of matches and nearly started a fire. All the girls got their hair done in matching braids using a fork because no one had a comb. One of the mums drank too much and her husband did a hilarious reenactment of her trying to put on pajama pants, and I remember feeling like such a grown up when I was included in the conversation.

I first heard Billy Joel's Two Thousand Years as part of a sermon at church when I was a teenager. I don't remember what the sermon was about, but I remember thinking the piano riff alone was evidence for the existence of God. Theology aside, there are definitely things about human spirituality we don't understand. Maybe one day science will enlighten us, but until then it falls into the realm of philosophy. [On a side note, the argument that each scientific discovery shrinks the scope of philosophy annoys me. Each discovery alerts us to more things we don't know, which philosophers examine and raise questions about, which science then endeavours to answer. It's a process, people.]

I'm not sure if it's a romanticisation of childhood, or if the new millennium coincided with a leap forward in pre-digital camera technology, but when I remember the years before 2000 they have a hazy tint.

[I should add, the word on youtube is that Billy had had a few by the time he performed this song on the eve of the new millennium at Madison Square Garden, so it's not his most in-tune performance. Still though, can you even imagine being there? Incredible.]

fever dream - iron & wine/pineapple head - crowded house

I love talking about my dreams. I'm not really sure if I believe there's anything to be learnt from analysing the night time musings of my subconcious, but they always make for good stories. Sometimes they are a pain though. Like when you dream a conversation and can't remember if it happened in real life or not. Or when you're not fully asleep so your brain starts trying to rationalise what's happening in the dream, which both prevents you from falling fully asleep, and from waking up. Or when you know you have to get up early for something, so you dream about sleeping in and missing it over and over again.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that like the characters of these songs I, too, have bizarre and sometimes distressing dreams when I'm too hot. No fever required - just try an Australian summer without airconditioning.

i'm a cuckoo - belle and sebastian

I had such good intentions of writing regularly when I started this blog, and now look. It's been a month.

It's not that I haven't thought about it. But you know how it is. The longer you leave it, the better the post needs to be to make up for the absence. Too much pressure. Hence my procrastination.

Also, now that I don't have uni to procrastinate from, my blogging inspiration is significantly less. Who'da thunk?

It's a big call, but I think this is my favourite break up song. I love the aural juxtaposition of the music and lyrical content. (I also love the word 'juxtaposition'.) I love the repetition of the line "I'd like to see you" throughout the song. I love that someone else feels like they're in a wilderness punctuated by philosophy. I love the desperate exclamation "And I loved you/You know I loved you/It's all over now".

Sometimes I have to ban myself from listening to sad music. I have a tendency to wallow. I love this song because it acknowledges the indecision and overthinking and dramatic moods that accompany a break up, but it doesn't wallow in them. The music is always moving forward. (Kinda like the guy in the film clip, I guess, although I'm not a fan of it. Too distracting.)

That's not a whole lot for a month of thinking, but you've gotta start somewhere, I guess.

elbows - darren hanlon

I never think of myself as someone who's changing jobs all the time, but I've managed to go through quite a few in my relatively short time as a member of the workforce. My first was in a bakery. On my first shift the manager told me everything there was to know about every single variety of bread we sold. That night there were Vienna loaves and breadsticks floating through my dreams - quite literally. Later I learned it was a kind of initiation. Every time we had a new staff member, the manager would explain each loaf of bread to them in unnecessary detail. I'm still not sure if she really thought we'd remember any of it. Most of the kids who worked there were like me, just making their first foray into employment, still struggling to put on their uniform correctly. In hindsight I wonder if it was more for her own benefit, to prove to herself how good she was at her job and validate her existence. She was probably the most bitter woman I've ever met, though, so I don't think it was working.

After that there were a few office jobs, from which I mostly learned that there are lots of jobs in which you don't have to do much work and that most of them are chronically boring. I also developed a love/hate relationship with stationary. Most of it is so arbitrary, but some marketing genius has convinced every business/student/entrepreneur in the world that they can't live without it. Like post-its. You can achieve the same thing by sticky taping a square of paper, but no one does. (My favourite pseudo-neseccary piece of stationary is the staple remover. They're addictive. I used to staple things together just so I could remove the staples again. I also like tiny bulldog clips. Why use a regular paper clip when you can use a smaller version of a clip designed to do jobs too big for paper clips?)

At work yesterday I was handing change to a customer and my hand brushed theirs and I thought of this song. I love Darren's songwriting. It's just so clever.

Why I felt so alive I can't quite determine
There could be a word to explain it in German
Some take others home waking up to regret it
We only touched elbows but I'll never forget it 

orinoco flow (sail away) - enya

Whenever I order takeaway for dinner I sing Enya’s Orinoco Flow (Sail Away) to myself and replace the lyrics to the chorus with “takeaway, takeaway, takeaway”. I think it’s the first sign I’m turning into my father, who’s repertoire includes such classics as Helen Reddy’s lesser known “I am mower, hear me roar”.

In kindergarten, my teacher would always play Enya during naptime after lunch. I never wanted to nap, and me and my friend Kate would get in trouble for whispering and playing games together. We did most things together. On mufti days we used to call each other in the morning to co ordinate outfits. (Once the school scheduled a mufti day for April 1^st and my parents thought I was having them on when I came downstairs in non-uniform clothes. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince them I was telling the truth.) One time in kindergarten, Kate couldn’t hear what the teacher asked her, so she got told to move to a spot closer to the front and when I tried to go with her the teacher told me to stay where I was and that we didn’t have to do everything together. It was pretty lonely, sitting on my own up the back.

I didn’t like Enya for a long time after kindergarten. For naptime, we had to bring a pillow from home, and mine was an ugly brown and green one. In high school I stole the filling from it for a pillow case I sewed in Home Science, and now it’s on my bed. I’ve grown to appreciate naps more than I did when I was five. Music, too, I’d like to think.

picture window - ben folds & nick hornby

I've been thinking about starting a music blog for awhile now. I really like talking about songs; where I first heard them, what they mean to me, why I love (or hate) them. I tried doing this facebook thing a few months back where you post a song every day for a month in response to the criteria they give you - stuff like a song that describes you, a song from your childhood, a song you want at your funeral - but I found the categories cliched and boring. I tried making up my own, but lost motivation pretty quickly.

My idea for this blog came from Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs. (Incidentally, Nick Hornby is one of my all time favourite authors. I first realised how brilliant he was when I was reading High Fidelity at the age of 17 or 18 and noticed myself feeling an affinity with the main character, a 30-something year old male rehashing his sexual history in an attempt to decide whether to settle down with his current girlfriend.) Basically, 31 Songs is just Hornby talking about songs that've meant something to him. It's less about the songs and more about the stories. (I wish I had it here to quote, but I lent the copy I nicked from my parents to a friend.) So that's kind of what I want to do here, although unlike Hornby, I am a musician, so a little more musical analysis is bound to creep in. I can't remember if there's any significance the number 31, but I'm not awarding it any. If I get to 31 - great. If not - these things happen.

I'd never really listened to much Ben Folds before reading 31 Songs. I knew Brick and Rockin' the Suburbs from the radio, and I had a few others collected off various mix CDs people had made me. But that was about it. Anyway, Hornby talks about the song Smoke, and I loved the lyrics so much I went and got myself acquainted with a bunch of Ben Folds' music.

I decided Picture Window was an appropriate choice for this first post because it too was born of Smoke's inclusion in 31 Songs. It's from an album for which Hornby wrote the lyrics and Folds wrote the music. And I'm pretty sure 31 Songs was the reason they decided to collaborate. And it's my favourite track from the album. And that's the whole story. The next one will be more profound, I promise.