MP3s are shared to try to convince people they should like the same music I do (As in... "then she told a friend, and she told a friend...) Of course if you love music, you should (responsibly) spend lots of your disposable income on music, concerts, and merch. If you are an artist or from a label, and would like a song removed, please e-mail me at kofis.hat [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll promptly do so.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Sweet & Sappy Overload: A Valentine's Day Playlist
Happy Valentine's Day! Yesterday's Anti-Valentine's-playlist post was the wordy one. Today's post is the cut-to-the-chase one.
The Valentine's Day playlist is at this drop.io site, where you can listen to the tracks and/or download them, individually and/or in a zip file. Life: it's partly about choices! The password for the drop.io is: cupid
Sweet & Sappy Overload: A Valentine's Day Playlist Track Listing:
1. Husky Rescue - "New Light of Tomorrow" (on Country Falls)
2. Klee - "Gold (English Version" (on Honeysuckle)
3. The Singles - "I'm In Love With You" (on Better Than Before)
4. Dusty Springfield - "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten" (on Dusty: The Very Best Of Dusty Springfield)
7. Dave Lawson - "Songwriters in Love" (from the audio archives at Suburban Sprawl Music. The site is chock-full of free MP3s)
8. Tim Chaplin - "They Don't Know" (Kirsty MacColl cover, on The 80s Girls EP)
~ The image at the top o' the post is Valentines 09, a silkscreen print by Rob Ryan from the Soma Gallery. Tip of the hat (no pun intended) to Delicious Industries for the keen find. ~
The Best Hearts and Chocolates are Dark. And Cold. And Bitter. An Anti-Valentine's Day Playlist
February 13th is not just Los Angeles Freedom to Marry Day (which does not imply everyone in Los Angeles does not currently have the right to marry.) It's also a great day in American cinema, as it's the day the new Friday the 13th motion picture is released!
Plus, it's the eve of one of the few major American holidays yet to be commercially exploited on a grand scale by Hallmark and their corporate brethren. They're usually so eager to peddle unhealthy candy as a festive treat and encourage people to associate spending money with love. Yet somehow they respect this holiday dedicated to romantic love enough to not treat it in that much of a cynical, greedy fashion—wait;I'm thinking of Friendship Day. Yeah, Valentine's Day is commercialized into the ground, year after year. Ugh, it's really annoying.
Hey, do a lot of people also spend lavishly on Friendship Day, driven by corporate, societal, peer, and self-inflicted pressure? Most of my friends might be incredible cheapskates. That seems like the sort of thing I should know. I wouldn't want any Friendz-4-ever candy and I don't think I could enjoy owning a Precious Moments figurine, even on a wacky, ironic level. Neither those bare facts nor my semi-occasional rants against the commercialization of holidays or capitalism in general should discourage people from giving me stuff. How can you tell people care about you if they don't buy you a ton of ridiculous space-and-money-wasting stuff you don't need?
I do love the genuine, sweet, lovey-dovey, sappy, and fun parts of Valentine's Day... which, for me, overlap with some commercialized aspects. They also include some candy. I'm a complex creature; aren't we all? The U.S. has Sweethearts, the U.K. has Love Hearts. They count as pop culture; they are not merely candy. Internationally, the online ACME Heart Maker is fun though its 4-character-per-line limit provides a frustrating challenge, which some of us respond to by throwing up our hands and making non-holiday-related hearts... Some greeting cards aren't so bad, and I love the tradition of kids exchanging lots of cute little Valentines, even if it entails profits for Hallmark.
But that's a lot of concession for an anti-Valentine's post.
Check out www.meish.org for some blunt, funny Anti-Valentines (including the one pictured at the top of this post.) They can be semt by e-mail or in a number of other Interweb-related ways. Paper cards are also available. Irony will never be dead, never, I tell you!
Listen to and/or save the songs on the somewhat-angst-ridden playlist at this drop.io site. The password is: hallmarkholiday There's also a zip file with all the songs at the site.
The Best Hearts and Chocolates Are Dark. And Bitter. And Cold. An Anti-Valentine's Day Playlist Track Listing:
5. Beangrowers - "Quaint Affair" (on Not In A Million Lovers)
6. Panda & Angel - "Dangerous" (on the Panda & Angel EP)
- Thanks and apologies for the inspiration behind the playlist title to Marc Almond, whose "Bittersweet" twirled in my head as I played with title thoughts, but I wanted to do something with dark chocolate because it is so clearly superior to bittersweet (and for that matter milk) chocolate. Thanks also to The Living Blue, whose catchy lines from "Tell Me Leza" ("Do you feel that a secret can become a lie/when your back's on the wall and your heart is as black as mine?") likely gave a subconscious spark for the idea of a dark-chocolate heart.
These are a few of my favorite recent songs...as in what-I'm-listening-to-the-most-lately, considering that one is from 1989)...the majority still have that new song smell (I've tried lemon juice, baking soda, and soap, to no avail.)
1. Bishop Allen - "Oklahoma" (on Grrr...) One of my favorite tracks off an album that's grrr--oh forget that. But, yeah, it's a lot of fun. Danceable like whoa.
The sweetly quirky lyrics ("Let's pretend so we can begin again...You've got eyes like Oklahoma") remind me of a couple guys I recently met who rather impulsively drove to L.A. from Oklahoma with $100, just to spend a couple days here and check out the fair city. They plan to move here this summer and neither had been here before. They had some time, so the wacky kids decided to take a road trip. Love their adventurousness.
They have my idea of "eyes like Oklahoma". I think it means wide-eyed. For one thing, Oklahoma is very wide. On the more personal-association level, those kids were very nice, rather wide-eyed, and excited about traveling west to start their own lives...the concept also resonates with me as some mixture of those elements.
2. Blind Pilot - "The Bitter End", "Three Rounds and a Sound", "One Red Thread", and "Go On, Say It" (on Three Rounds and a Sound)
Israel Nebeker and Ryan Dobrowski make charming alt-rock with a blend of romanticism and cynicism reminiscent of Fox "I Want to Believe" Mulder. Not to call any of them morbid (or pale), but it wouldn't be wrong to say they share a certain interest in death.
This second, synth-soaked take on the song was sent by the band as a spoonful of sugar along with a bitter pill to swallow: while they still love us very much, and they still care about each-other a lot, things have changed, and it's time for the group to go their separate ways. The end of Camilla Florentz and Mikkel Max Hansen's marriage, while not a great sign, wasn't necessarily going to mean the end of the group they shared with Ivan Petersen. Why look at the White Stripes...although Jack White sure does spend a lot of time with the Raconteurs lately.
While the former members of Oliver North Boy Choir are still "friendly", they say since Florentz and Hansen parted in October, "it's become increasingly hard to find the time to record". So "Blackmail" will be their final single. Their compilation Shameless Pop Songs, will be released February 22nd, along with the Blackmail EP.
This sweetly sly, kicky synth version isn't available on either. Check out more ONBC MP3s at their website, particularly if you're new to the group and don't yet realize how cool they are...were. May they rock in peace...not that a break-up is akin to death.
4. Paul McCartney - "My Brave Face" (on 1989's Flowers in the Dirt) Heard part of this song playing in a store recently and managed to scribble down enough of the lyrics to identify the song later, with the help of the Internets. I had also written "Sounds like Split Enz"...and was correct that it wasn't the work of an American artist. Also pegged it as vaguely historical...and it is from an era in time before the advent of computers, CDs, VCRs, and cellphones. Probably why people kept busy with silly things like those big MC Hammer pants; they didn't have anything else to do.
"My Brave Face" was co-written by Elvis Costello, under his birth name (Declan MacManus). Knowing of Costello's role, the song instantly makes a lot more sense. Some of those snappy rhythms and catchy melodies sound right up his alley and could easily bear his fingerprints... At other times, the song sounds a bit like Wings.
Not far beneath the surface of this take on an "I miss you" song" lurk less-than-idyllic nuances. Such murky material, along with some stylistic quirks like biting off words, finds Costello in comfortable territory. However, a fair amount of good songwriters who a) have been through a difficult break-up and/or b) find themselves writing a song with Elvis Costello might be capable of writing such material.
5. Erin McCarley - "Lovesick Mistake" (on Love Save the Empty). [Dieter from Sprockets] A lonely little bird wanders on a beach at midnight, Her heart is twisted and bleeding, from so-called "love". Distracted by pain, she wanders into a freshly painted bungalow and becomes disoriented by the fumes. Maybe she begins seeing dancing bears where no bears dance and decides to serenade these bears. She is creatively inspired by something anyway, and puts her gorgeous agony into song, and her voice perfectly captures the beauty of her alienation and torment. Two thumbs up! [/Dieter from Sprockets]
6. Annie Lennox - "Shining Light" (will be released as a single in the UK om March 2nd and on The Annie Lennox Collection.) The greatest-hits collection also includes a very pretty, attention-worthy cover of Keane's "Closer Now", retitled "Pattern of My Life", but the "Light" cover is the glittery attention-grabber--and it's fantastic.
The colorful, shiny (but of course) disco-fab video, which includes an all-Lennox band:
