For your Monday morning, and in honor of our return from our Scottish Holiday, I bring you Enter the Haggis. Which is actually a Canadian band. But they’re a great sound, and wear kilts and play bagpipes, so good enough, right?
I first noticed them because of their band name – I saw a sign outside the Ark in Ann Arbor, MI for the band. Their name caught my eye, so I looked them up. You can hear their new album right there on their website, just click on the link above. This song is the first one off their live album, Northampton, which is the first album I bought (listen to it here.) Highly recommend it, as does Maura, who likes their sound as well.
And that’s all my post-holiday brain can come up with. Yes, there will be a holiday re-cap. Just not this morning. Instead, listen to the good music. Music is good.
I think the first time I was exposed to this song, sadly, was while watching “Shrek”. The next time I really noticed it was when KD Lang sang it during the Winter Olympics. Then, somehow, it left my radar again.
It came back on my radar again, and I realized I needed this song – and then realized there are dozens of covers of it as well. It was originally by Leonard Cohen – which is a much more bluesy feeling song than the covers I’ve been exposed to. The Jeff Buckley cover seems to be very popular version, one that the newer ones seemed to be based off of. There’s even a cover of it by Bon Jovi. The one from “Shrek” is performed by Rufus Wainwright, in case you were wondering.
But the version I went with was Kate Voegele’s – the simplicity of the guitar and the fact that her version’s in my range sold it to me. You know, usually, I’m not big on covers of songs – but with this one, it makes sense that someone who loves to sing would want to cover it. And this way, a person can find their favorite version, like I did.
No, not the penguin movie that Maura loves and I’m certain has undertones of anti-religious establishment (why do all the old penguins sound like angry Scottish ministers?)
I’m talking about Kermit the Frog here and his happy feet.
There’s a commercial on tv here for some product that comes on about once an hour it seems. I have no clue what the commercial is advertising, but the musical track is Kermit singing “Happy Feet”. Maura loves this commercial for the song, and will dance to it (which is probably why I never notice what they’re trying to sell me.) I love Kermit the Frog, so have found myself singing this song in my head.
And then I thought “Why should I be the only one with this song in my head?”
So with the Power of YouTube, I can put this earworm into everyone’s heads! Woohoo! It’s okay, it’s Kermit and the Muppet Show. It’s all kinds of good.
It’s Monday. Who needs a song to get them moving today? Well, Train (one of my favorite bands) has a new song coming out tomorrow, and it’s out on their site now, so check it out!
If you check out other “Music Monday” selections, you’ll find a bit of Train in there. Josh called it once, when describing why our musical tastes are so different. Josh loves a good beat. The more bass the better in his world. But I like good lyrics. I do like a good tune, something to dance or jump around to, but I love good lyrics. I like a song with a soul. Train delivers that for me.
Meanwhile, in our world, the craziness of Christmas holidays are over. The kids have all gone back to school, Josh has gone back to work, and I’m here, alone, in my house. Just me, the puppy, and a huge mound of laundry to keep me company.
Zoey the Puppy has been keeping me busy all morning – she tries gnawing on things like the puppy she is, I stop her. She sneaks upstairs, I get her back downstairs. She wants out, I let her out, then back in, then out, then in again. It is a bit like having a toddler, except Zoey can’t scream “NOOOO!” at me and I can legally lock her in a cage.
The one thing I’m noticing about her is her eyes. Because she’s a blue merle collie, she has one blue eye and one brown eye. And I swear, those eyes tell different stories.
The brown eye is the happy-go-lucky good puppy eye. The blue eye though shows her disdain for the rules, her intelligence mocking us.
The brown eye says “Oh, look at me! I’m a cute little puppy! Pet me! Rub my tummy!”
Meanwhile, the blue eye is saying “That’s right, bend to my will slave. I will own you!”
Or maybe I need to just interact with more humans today.
One of the things that sticks out from my childhood is the music. My parents were really big into music and played it constantly. To the point that by age five, I could sing along with songs like “Hotel California”, “American Pie” and “California Dreaming”.
But one of my favorites was a local hit that I was just certain everyone else in the world knew about – like Atomic Cakes. It wasn’t until I left Chicago that I learned that most people don’t know the song…or sadly, the cake either.
While I’ve never forgotten the song, I sort of did. It’s been years since I thought about it…but the other day, while chatting with friends, I recalled the song and went to see if I could find it. Sure enough, I did. And then I found it on iTunes. Of course I bought it immediately.
There will always be a part of me that’s a South Side Irish, White Sox loving Chicago girl. But I haven’t actually lived in Chicago since 1993. We won’t discuss how long ago that was. I have to admit, I don’t know Chicago like I used to. I remember Soldier Field without the abomination of an addition and Marshall Field’s as the place to go at Christmastime with their windows and Walnut room. I remember when the McCormick place was a folly and when the Sears Tower was the world’s tallest building.
My Chicago is the Chicago of Just Yesterday – when Michael Jordan was king, Daley was Supreme Ruler, and Ditka was a god. I grew up loving movies like “The Blues Brothers”, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Breakfast Club” partially because they were filmed in Chicago.
This song takes me back to those days. When I was young, when Chicago was still a little gritty, and when Lake Shore Drive had an S curve. Even without the emotional ties, I can still appreciate the music. I’ve always loved the pianos, the harmony, and the violin right at the end.
And I have to laugh at the idea of five year old me singing “Snaking on by on LSD, Friday night trouble bound..”
Have you ever heard a song and instantly fall in love with it? This is one of them.
The source is a bit obscure for the average music listener – it’s from the recently released ”The Crowe/Doyle Songbook Volume III” – a collaboration by Russell Crowe (yes, the movie actor) and Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea. The female vocals are by Danielle Spencer, Crowe’s wife.
What can I say about this song? It’s lovely, haunting, and makes me want to write a story about it. I’m kinda jealous someone else gets to sing it. Yes, this song could get me over my fear of microphones and sing in public. I like it that much.
Ah yes, from the Discography of Great Big Sea, I bring you another musical selection…
This is a weirdly sentimental song for me. The first time I took Maura (then age 3 1/2) to a GBS concert, they played this song. But it wasn’t just the song, but the whole moment.
Maura and I - GBS concert - 2007
See, despite getting front row seats, Maura was still short enough that she couldn’t see the stage well if she was on the ground. But at the time, she hadn’t been diagnosed with the seizure disorder that threw her balance off, so she felt unstable standing on the chair. So, I held her for a good portion of the concert on my hip. I was certain I would pay for this the next day, but amazingly, I didn’t.
At this concert, the people around us were just absolutely lovely – which impressed me. Instead of looking at me oddly for bringing a 3 1/2 year old, they asked if it was her first concert (it was), cooed over her little GBS concert shirt I found for her online, handed her a spare Newfoundland flag (which we still have) and so on, and so forth. At one point, two college girls snuck down to the front and slid next to us, where they fussed happily over Maura. At one point, the woman next to me offered to hold her for a bit, to give me a break.
That’s about the point they started playing “Run Runaway” – a song that you just have to jump around to. And that’s what we were doing – my neighbor with Maura, me, the college girls who snuck their way forward…it was one of those high energy moments.
And then, the college girls pointed, I turned and there was Bob, one of the band members, the one Maura was most interested in that night because he had ALL the cool toys in her eyes – there’s Bob during the musical interlude of the song, playing to my daughter. He had come forward and got down to her level and played his fiddle to my girl. She stared at him with pure adoration and he smiled back at her as he played.
Needless to say, that moment warmed this mama’s heart. I liked the song before. After that, it always makes me smile. And to this day, we still jump around to the song
Someone on Facebook started a “You know you went to X University if…” group. This time though, that “X University” happened to be my very own alma mater. FUS. Or FU if you were feeling rebellious.
I went to the the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a small, very Catholic college in the Ohio Valley, located 42 miles west of Pittsburgh, home of Dean Martin. It was across the river from Weirton, WV, which was just recently blown to bits in the new movie “Super 8″ (good flick, we highly enjoyed it.)
So all us little FUS’ers started chatting on FB – “Do you remember stealing trays from the caf to go sledding?” ”Remember the smell from the steel mill?” ”Remember this or that?” All good times. However, being the bunch that we are, debates started. There were debates about whether we should be debating. All I needed was a cheap bottle of wine and a haze of cigarette smoke and I could close my eyes and feel like I was back on campus, what with all the chatter going around me.
One of my claims to fame is my awesome powers of memory. It’s like a party trick, how I can recall whole scenes of my life and replay them for friends who had forgotten them. Amazingly, my awesome memory skills are only good for life scenes, not things like four years of French or that I was supposed to buy dishwashing liquid at the store while I was there yesterday.
Being the quirky girl that I am, I also associate music to memories. A song can take me back to a day, time, room, group of people or incident. There are songs that are painful to listen to because they remind me of a time that wasn’t so great. Some make me cringe, remembering an embarrassment. A couple will make me cry, but most make me smile. Like “Come on Eileen” will always take me back to a friend’s wedding, when we were all there, stomping and jumping and loving life at that moment.
U2′s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” takes me back to the day we got cable tv. I was 12 at the time, my life changing all around me. Twelve years old wasn’t the best time in my life. Actually, it was kind of a crappy year, as years went. But I don’t remember that when I hear the song. I remember the cable guy punching in the number 34 on our new cable box, which was Mtv, back when Mtv had VJ’s and played videos. And there was U2, live at Red Rocks, playing this song that instantly stuck with me, 12 year old child that I was, jumping up and down on the couch to it.
Fast forward 8 years later, and I’m a college student at good old FUS, still a U2 fan. Achtung Baby had come out and was the soundtrack to so much of my college life back then. We road tripped to Pittsburgh with a big group of friends to see U2 live in concert one summer, yelling at each other in the Pittsburgh tunnel, teasing our one friend who cried when Bono sang “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, singing that song on the way out, stopping at the Dinor in Weirton to eat nasty fries and drink bad coffee and converse with two very friendly ladies who were probably prostitutes. And then weeks later, staying after another concert to try to meet the band, and succeeding.
So when, on Facebook, one of my fellow FUS’ers asked “What song reminds you of college days?”, this is the song that came into my head. U2′s “One”. It was played at dances on campus, at the concerts we went to, in our cars on road trips, at the frat parties we danced the night away at.
Myself on the left, my friends Anne and Jen - college days 1993
In a way, it’s the perfect choice to sum up college days, especially having gone to a very Catholic college. All those theological debates late at night, the arguments among friends, the unrequited college crushes, relationships that never were, and the ones that became so much more. Most of all, the song reminds me of friends, those sisters and brothers forged in those years, who have been there to help carry someone through rough times and good times. We sang this song at the concert, arms around each other, our voices hoarse from shouting all night. We sang this in dorm rooms, angry at some boy who was being stupid. We sang this at a dance, and laughed when some of the guys in our group picked up some of the girls in our group, acting out the lyrics, carrying us.
And now, all those years later, I still sing this song, with all the knowledge life has slammed into my brain. If there was a soundtrack to my life, this song would be in a pivotal scene.
The hardest part to believe is that this song is twenty years old. I can’t comprehend it. Instead, I shall play it and pretend I’m once again 20.
I’ve always wanted to sing with the band. Instead, I sing in the car. Well, I used to sing in the car. It was one of my favorite parts of living in the country – all those long drives into town when I could kick back, put in my favorite song and play it loudly as I sang along. In my car, I was a rock star.
It’s not that I suck outside of my car. Or in it. My kids (brutally honest little beings that they are) have told me I sound good. Josh (a more biased judge, but also brutally honest) thinks I have a great voice. What I lack is self-confidence. I’m sure years of speech therapy, being forced to listen to my lousy pronunciations of every other consonant in the alphabet didn’t help that. I spent my childhood shying away from microphones and when finally getting in front of a few, choking magnificently in front of crowds of people who were probably thinking “See? I knew she’d screw it up.” Or so the voices in my head told me.
I’ve been getting better at telling those voices to shove it. I haven’t had a speech problem since I was 12. I just didn’t realize how much baggage I carried from that until recently, when it hit me as to why I was unable to get up and sing karaoke even though I wanted to. I’d watch people go up and think “Man, even I know I’m better than that.” But I’d stay locked in my chair. One day it suddenly came to me, why I wouldn’t get in front of a microphone. And it all seemed so silly, holding back because of what happened to me 20+ years ago. Ah, childhood scars. They do run deep, but you can tattoo over them and turn them into something pretty, right?
And so I did. Instead of thinking “Man, I can’t do that” and let those voices remind me of how much people thought I sounded horrible at age 10, I mentally tattooed over them with “Hey! You overcame SO much! Your speech is amazing now, no one would ever guess you were completely unintelligible as a child. Now get your ass up there and do what you want to do!” And so I did. So far, the minor times I’ve gotten in front of a microphone recently, people haven’t rolled their eyes or left the room. I guess I refuse to give up my dream of singing with a band.
Now, if I had the abilities, this is a song I’d belt out. The tune is a unapologetic, in your face, but not “Please stop screaming at me” style. It’s all over the place musically, and I like that. And there’s harps in it. What’s not to love about that? And as I tell my kids, if you practice enough, who knows? Maybe I could belt it out in public someday.
So let’s all sing along with Florence and the Machine – Dog Days Are Over -
I was listening to Ann Arbor’s 107.1 (which was one of my stations of choice when we lived there and one of the only ones I can still live stream here) and this song came on. And the sun was even shining here in Dublin (which my neighbor told me is having one of the coldest summers in sixty years…)
Plus, we got a big box of wish list goodies from a most thoughtful and awesome friend.
So despite it being a Monday, it’s still a good day. A good day to kick back, enjoy the sunlight, walk barefoot maybe. If I had a car, I’d probably be blaring this song with the windows down. But I can’t do that. You can though ;_
