Category: music

This is an easy one, no thought required. A song that is always guaranteed to make me laugh is:

Be Careful, It’s My Heart performed by Bing Crosby.

Obviously, there is a story behind this one. It goes something like this:

Back in the fall of 2000, my Grandpa was going in for a major heart surgery. Quadruple bipass and a valve replacement, the latter part of which sounds very automotive; apropos, since my Grandpa was an auto mechanic. Now, my Grandpa was almost always cheerful, always had a smile, and had an indescribable laugh that was utterly infectious. Upon hearing his laugh, it would no longer matter what it was you were laughing about: his laugh was like a fission reaction that built upon itself, feeding other laughs which in turn fed others until there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

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Hmm? A song that I want played at my funeral? When I first started considering this topic, a couple of songs came to mind: there was Celebration by Kool & the Gang, of course; and Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo. There are a couple of problems with these songs, however. First, I doubt anyone would take me seriously and they’d end up playing something else. And second, Dead Man’s Party, at least, is probably a fairly common selection in this challenge and therefore completely unoriginal. So I pondered this during a meeting today, and I realized that there is a perfect song that is both obscure enough for people not to necessarily know it offhand (making it more difficult to object to) and quite apropos of the situation:

God’s Comic by Elvis Costello.

If you’ve never heard the song before, the opening verse is perfect for such a celebration, where many people are mourning, but how many people really knew you:

I wish you’d known me when I was alive
I was a funny fella

And of course it gets better from there.

I suspect if people actually listened to the song before they played it at my funeral they might object to it on some ground. But people get weird at funerals, and my uncharacteristically cynical guess is that most people would smirk, shake their heads, and say, “Yup, that was him all right…”

Being already married, I’ve already gone through the process of selecting songs for my wedding, fuzzy as that process is in my memory. There are lots of traditional “last songs” which are played at the end of a reception. “Last Dance” is probably a popular one, for instance, but the Puckish person inside me has always felt that the following song would be a lot of fun to play as the last song to close out a wedding reception:

Goodbye, Goodbye by Oingo Boingo

First, it is not a slow, sentimental song. Second, it is blunt and to the point. No one can miss the message in this one: time to go, last call, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, etc. etc.

That would be a fun wedding song.

Just like the song I listen to when I am angry, I don’t really feel the need to turn on music on those very rare instances when I am sad so this is a very difficult one to answer. The best I can do is refer folks back to day 4, a song that makes me sad. I don’t know of this constitutes cheating or not, but it is the truth. I can’t really ever think of a song that I’ve turned on deliberately when feeling sad. And if I have done so, I imagine that I’ve done what I would most likely do in such cases: pick a long playlist and put it into “random” play.

Let the fates and pseudo random algorithms control what song I listen to when I am sad.

Unlike the previous day, this one is easy. A song that I like to listen to when I am happy is:

Photograph by Def Leppard

I used to have the Pyromania album–the actual album, not cassette or CD. And I would listen to it endlessly. Nowadays, whenever I hear the song, I am happy. I don’t know if that is because I listen to the song when I am happy, or hearing the song makes me happy, but in either case, the result is abundant happiness, so I can’t complain.

This is probably the most difficult category so far. The problem is that it is not very often that I am angry. And on those rare occasions when I am angry, I am generally not in the mood to listen to any music. So trying to come up with a song that I listen to when I am angry is tricky mainly because I can’t think of a time that I was angry and then deliberately selected a song to listen to.

On the other hand, I could try to imagine what song I might choose to listen to when I was angry, if I could push the angry mood aside long enough to consider putting on song. Hmm? Nothing’s coming, but I suppose if I had to pick something I thought I might listen to it would be:

We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister.

It just seems like an angry, rebellious kind of song. I don’t know that it would help me feel any better, but I don’t know that is the point, either.

Picking a favorite album is a lot like picking a favorite song. It’s difficult to choose just one across all the varieties and genres. When I started thinking about this topic I thought that Pink Floyd’s Meddle might be my favorite album. But after giving it a lot of thought, I decided that Def Leppard’s Hysteria album is my favorite. I’ve like it longer than I’ve liked Meddle and while I listen to Meddle a few times a year, I listen to Hysteria, or songs from the album much more frequently and with much greater enjoyment. So a song from my favorite album is:

Rocket Man by Def Leppard

And not the remix they did later, but the original that appears on the album. A great song that got me through countless workouts and appears on just about every one of my workout playlists.

I imagine if I listened to a different radio station, I’d hear this song, but even when I listened to classic rock station, I’ve never heard it played on the radio:

The Last Resort by the Eagles

This is my favorite song by the Eagles and whenever I hear it, I am reminded of that book, Day of the Locusts for some reason. I suppose it isn’t played much on the radio because it is a long song, but so is “Hotel California” and that gets airplay. The truth is I don’t know why the song isn’t played on the radio. It should be.

For many, many years I didn’t listen to the radio. Mostly it was because I couldn’t stand the DJs banter or the commercials. When we got our new car in November, it came with SiriusXM Satellite radio. Since then, I’ve pretty much been hooked on the 80s on 8 station. The DJs are all good (they are the original MTV VJs), the music is good, and of course, there are no commercials.

They play a pretty good variety of 80s music, but there is only so much music produced in the 80s that falls into that genre and like any radio station, it seems to me that I hear some songs more often than others. One song that I seem to hear at least a couple times of the week is the iconic 1980s song from The Breakfast Club:

Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds

For many, many years, just hearing this song would transport me back to those dark days of 7th grade, when hormones where flooding my veins and every day seemed dreary and gray. In fact, it was remarkable how quickly that song could transport me there, change my mood, and make me thankful that those days are long in the past.

Now, I’ve heard the song way too many times for it to have the same effect.

When I was a little boy, five or six, possibly younger, I came to learn the lyrics of what had to be the first song I ever memorized (aside from children’s songs, of course). I would sing the song as often as I could and my parents found it amusing to have me perform for audiences of friends and relatives. It seems to me that I loved the song if I sang it that much. It was a hit on the radio at the time and I still have vague memories of singing the song (and I still know all of the words today). The song…?

Rhinestone Cowboy by Glen Campbell

The song is the second song on my massive, 196 track Autobiography playlist (which is in roughly chronological order) but it is there because of what it reminds me of, singing the song in my backyard while playing on the swingset–and not because I like it anymore. In fact, while I can’t quite bring myself to say I hate the song (hate is such a strong word), I don’t really like it all that much anymore and the only time I ever listen to it is in those nostalgic periods when I listen to my entire Autobiography playlist.

Can any one person be described by a single song? I suppose if that song were written about you, perhaps, but I’m sure no one will find it difficult to believe that there have been no songs written about me. It has to be pretty amusing to go through the various responses Day 15 and see what songs people have chosen to describe themselves. Because that’s what it is we are doing here: choosing the song that bests describes us. And for most of us, the person choosing the song is far too biased to make a decent choice.

With that caveat in mind, the song that I think describes me is:

Far Away Places performed by Bing Crosby.

My guess is that the majority of people actually reading this have ever heard this song, but the challenge is to choose a song that describes me, not necessarily a popular song that describes me. And yet this song was quite popular in its time, as any song that Bing chose to sing was. Those who haven’t heard the song before might wonder how a song titled “Far Away Places” describes me. Well, the opening verse of the song goes:

Far away places, with strange sounding names, far away over the sea.
Those far away places, with the strange sounding names, are calling, calling me.

I makes me think of myself when I was about six or seven and first looking up at the stars and just beginning to get the slightest impression of just how far away they are. It was something that started me on my twin loves of science and science fiction. Science fiction, of course, lets us imagine what all those far away places might be like. Science teaches us how to get there. And then there is this:

Going to China, or maybe Siam, I wanna see for myself,
Those far away places, I’ve been reading about
In a book, that I took, from the shelf.

I feel like I’ve been to many, many far away places, some upon which I never actually set foot. When I was about the same as, six or seven, my mother told me that in books, you could sit and read and be transported to different places and times, just as if you were really there. Because of that I’ve been to Mount Rushmore. I’ve listened to John Handcock make a speech in Philadelphia. I’ve stood at the far end of the galaxy and to its chaotic center. I’ve fought with ancient Roman soldiers and sat with Plato and Socrates. I’ve been to the beginning of time and the end of it. I’ve been to places that never were and places that might someday be.

And all of it, because those far away places with the strange sounding names are always calling, calling me.