...is that this chick is considered talented in some circles. Cause, REALLY?! REEEEAAAALY?! 21 MILLION plays on youtube, people. REALLY?! God help us cause these kids nowadays wouldn't know good music if it was thrown at them. The part that has me scratching my head the most is near the end when you have absolutley no fucking idea what she's saying. The only good that came out of this track is that "Swagger Like Us" got it's title and sample from it. That is all.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
I don't even know where to begin.
Let me preface this by saying I'm hardly a connoisseur of music journalism. I'm not a connoisseur of music journalism for the simple fact that it peaked somewhere in the early 90's, which can also be earmarked as the true dying days of Rolling Stone being somewhat credible. Since then I regularly read Blender, but admittedly for the funny commentary and not any genuine insight into the state of music, or the industry, or anything that actually matters to me as a music fan.
That said, I recently stumbled across an article by Boston Globe writer Joan Anderman, and have not felt so genuinely compelled to respond to an article in more than a decade. Let's take a look, shall we?
Does that sound familiar? Blame it on John Mayer.
In August I dutifully arrived at the Rod Stewart show at the Comcast Center in time to catch the opening act, Josh Kelley. Kelley, known to gossip hounds as Mr. Katherine Heigl, is a singer-songwriter. He writes pop-rock tunes, plays the guitar and the piano, and sings well. He's attractive and personable. His songs are sturdy and pretty. And he makes me feel . . . nothing.
Nothing is worse than feeling nothing at a concert. If you hate a band, at least you can whine about it to your friend in the next seat, and if you're me, you can register a public complaint in the newspaper. And odds are good I'll receive plenty of mail from readers who love the band just as much as I don't love the band, which confirms my view that music that makes somebody feel something is worth listening to.
Listening to Kelley, I just felt empty, and I found myself marveling once again that he and his ilk have become the mainstream standard-bearers for the genre.
"Garden-variety" is the term I used to describe Kelley in my review of the show - i.e. common, ordinary, of no special quality or type, according to the dictionary. And he's not alone.
So up until here I have no complaints. I've never found Josh Kelley overly burdened with talent, and have been genuinely more entertained by other artists telling stories of him stumbling around the Rock Boat completely tanked than I have been by his cds. A quick search of Joan Anderman's other articles for The Globe reveal that as many times as she finds reason to reference Josh in articles that have little to do with him, she trots out the "Mr. Katherine Heigl" moniker as if he's showing up in the pages of the Enquirer with nothing but that to carry him. I read my tabloids, girlie, can't remember the last time I even saw an article on Katherine, much less on Josh and trust me I'm no fan of hers either, so I'm on the lookout.
Another quick search gets much deeper to the root of what we're dealing with here. The review of the Rod Stewart show in question was largely positive, and very indicative of someone who has clearly had a lot of years to get familiar with his catalog. My knowledge of Stewart largely consists of people singing "Maggie May" to me on a regular basis, a Tom Waits cover that was better off left alone, and a daughter that looks like a cocker spaniel.
The description suits a whole slew of singer-songwriters making the rounds of theaters, airwaves, and soundtracks with their inoffensive, unremarkable, soul-numbing songs.
Matt Nathanson, a Lexington native who lives in San Francisco, performs a sold-out show at Berklee Performance Center tonight, the same night Howie Day plays at Northeastern University's Blackman Auditorium. Jason Mraz comes through town Oct. 17 for a show at the Orpheum, also sold out. Matt Wertz has been on the road opening for Gavin DeGraw, Mat Kearney is making a new record, and Josh Hoge just put an album out. Ari Hest, exhibiting a flash of ingenuity, has been writing and releasing a song a week this year.
All of these artists are competent. None of them has a sound.
Okay wait...what?
Hold the phone.
This is the point where I put down my glass of water and almost laughed and ended my own life by choking.I mean...seriously? Maybe someone spent too much time in her late 20's in the 80's listening to arena rock and hair bands and therefore has some damaged ear drums that led to making such a sweeping generalization on such a wide range of artists. I'm friends with a lot of musicians, or very involved music fans. I myself am someone as versed in the discography of everyone from the likes of Britney Spears, Jay-Z and Fiona Apple as I am with those of Matt Nathanson, Death Cab for Cutie, and Hit the Lights. I'm hardly a musical elitist, I just can't seem to consume enough of it. Granted, some of it is completely lost on me - the majority of country music, screaming rock anthems, and the Dave Matthews Band for a general cross section, but I know enough to know who is who when I'm stuck in traffic and hit the scan button and it settles on a station that I never listen to.
We all know that I could go on for days about the mere passing mention of Matt Nathanson, but let me just sum it up by saying that someone who can't seem to find a unique sound would never be able to sustain a career that's now spanning 15 years and was built solely on crisscrossing the country and selling out rooms wherever he goes. Howie Day may have hit the mainstream with the generally generic "Collide" but his first album showcased his unique abilities as a writer and singer in songs such as "Sorry So Sorry" and "Kristina". Hearing him pound out "Sorry So Sorry" live could put anyone's doubts to rest.
Jason Mraz has hit his stride with his new record and the reworked version of "I'm Yours" but is another artist who, with his own blend of wordplay and quick beats over his guitar playing has carved out his own niche that makes him another sure sell out road act each and every summer. Mraz has a quick tongue and churns out gems on his albums that range from quiet love songs to stumble over your own tongue rhymes and slick and sexy ballads. I don't remember anyone ever confusing a Mraz tune for a Mayer tune, even in the "Remedy" days.
I'm hardly a huge Gavin Degraw lover (I leave that for Nikki of course), but there's no denying that he's probably got the strongest voice out of his entire genre of young singer songwriters. He can literally sing the hell out of anything, from the defiant and slightly cocky "I Don't Want to Be", to a cover of "A Change Is Gonna Come" that Sam Cooke himself would approve of.
The point of this is that the genre itself is deep and unique. Insisting that this crop of artists have no unique sound is about as ridiculous as getting a Jay-Z song confused with a Soulja Boy song, just because they happen to file into the same genre when you're browsing through the iTunes store.
They seem for all the world to be using a template to write their songs. Sit down to listen to a batch of them at the same time, and you'll notice that the same pattern crops up again and again, usually in the chorus. It's made of four chords that repeat in a cycle, sometimes tenderly and sometimes forcefully but always winsomely, suggesting lost love or found love or the bad love that inspired him - no, impelled him - to write this song.
As wrong and this woman is, this argument can be applied to any genre of music. During the reign of pop it was largely argued that every pop hit was composed of the same few chords and key changes. With some slick production and a catchy hook, anyone could have a number one song. During the reign of rap it was the era of a sample. Grab a beat, obtain a sample, enjoy the millions rolling in. This is not new information, sweetie.
Love songs will always be the ones that get people talking, because those are the songs that everyone can relate to. If Jason Mraz wrote "Remedy" (a song about a close friend fighting cancer) 14 times over and released it as an album, he would have never had the chance to make a second record. If John Mayer had released a handful of albums consisting of different versions of "Your Body Is A Wonderland", he'd still be playing at coffee shops in Atlanta on nightly basis. Being cute and holding a guitar may work as a novelty for a little while, but is hardly enough to grant you the ability to tour the country and live comfortably when not doing so, especially not in this day and age. Let's face it, they all can't have the ability to churn out such obscenely creative jams as "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?", but they do what they can to entertain those that somehow manage to find meaning in their meaningless and talentless songs, you know?
I don't buy it. This musician has studied hard. His introspective lyrics read like a composite of sensitive-guy clichés. He doesn't so much sing from the gut as use his voice, expertly, in the service of a sentiment. It cracks just so to evoke his broken heart and grows bold when it's time to be strong. He's a little soulful, a little wounded, totally ready to be saved, and with the help of a skilled producer he pushes people's buttons - especially those belonging to young women, a demographic that's especially susceptible to a cute boy's connect-the-dots charms.
And who can blame them? These guys get the job done. It's like the recipe for McDonald's Secret Sauce; you can count on it. It tastes the same every time. Nobody clamors for new ingredients every time they order a Big Mac, because reliability is a good thing when it comes to fast food. But sameness is depressing when it defines an art form where emotional veracity has always been the most compelling piece.
Singer songwriters are not the new bubble gum pop stars. The guitar boy equivalent of Lou Pearlman is not sitting behind a desk holding auditions at theme parks for the next group of boys he can clean up, give a Fender and an MTV reality show to, send to Max Martin, and then swim in the millions he makes off of them like it's the beginning of Ducktales and he's Scrooge McDuck. This would be valid if I walked into a store and was faced with seeing Jason Mraz and Gavin DeGraw lip gloss, or John Mayer and Matt Nathanson lollipops that I could buy to enjoy while watching Josh Kelley's feature film about traveling the country with some of his friends to find his long lost mother.
This is not 1999 and Howie Day will never sell 2.1 million records in a week. There is no longer endless money to be made for getting air headed teenage girls to stand outside of the MTV studios for you. To put it into reference the writer may understand better, this is not the same thing as anxiously awaiting Davy Jones' appearance on the Brady Bunch because he's OMG SO DREAMY!
I blame John Mayer. He paved the way for this wave of well-groomed troubadours with the unlikely success of his 2001 album, "Room For Squares." Mayer is a better musician than the lot of them, but the mass appeal of his sweet strummed pop tunes triggered a record-label spending spree on cookie-cutter tunesmiths. And it's working, because in this era of branding and multi-platform careerism, originality isn't the goal. Quite the opposite: The business needs innocuous, multipurpose songs that can service radio formats, dorm rooms, television dramas, film credits, and iPod ads.
The original pop troubadours carved their niche (and set the bar high) with distinctive visions spanning the literate commentary of Jackson Browne, James Taylor's graceful meditations, and fiery soul-searching from Cat Stevens. And there are formidable talents working today, among them Conor Oberst, Damien Rice, Tom McRae, Joseph Arthur, and Rufus Wainwright. Which makes it even harder to listen to the assembly-line sentiments and achingly familiar refrains of the Mayer descendants.
Ugh. I'll give you Damien Rice and Joseph Arthur. Those two have moments of pure transcendence on their albums. But Conor Oberst? Really? That almost negates the rest of the list for me. I do enjoy a couple of Bright Eyes songs, but holy Christ, pulling that name for a list of formidable talents making the rounds today is almost like putting Hanson on a pedestal or loving the Terrence Howard record...oh wait, Anderman already did that in previous articles. I guess somehow those two artists managed to avoid the trappings of the terrible pre packaged singer songwriters that you can't help but be overrun with these days.
There's enough wallpaper in the world; we don't need uniformity from the very people who are meant to be scouring their hearts and baring their souls in song. But that venerable task has been co-opted, at least in part, by music supervisors looking for a faux-emotional tune to underscore the season's faux-emotional teen drama, and nervous music execs hoping to reach the most people with the least distinguished palette of sounds.
It's bad math for music lovers, but it adds up in the short term, and these days that seems to be the main frame of reference.
To sum this all up somehow, I'll say this: if this writer wanted to bash an entire genre of music based on it's depth and genuine contribution to music a whole, she was way off base to pick this one. Go to a Matt Nathanson show, watch him play upwards of 30 songs that he himself wrote from the ground up, and then tell me that he's in it for the money and not for the genuine love for music and his gift for sharing it. Listen to a live Mraz record from top to bottom and tell me that he isn't a great lyricist and and amazing vocalist. Sure John Mayer has become commercialized and trite, but he wasn't always that way and with any hope the other greats in his genre will never see that side of themselves.
Being that Anderman still finds Motley Crue culturally relevant none of that is likely. Writing a badly researched and completely off base article damning an entire genre of music isn't exactly a reflection of a well rounded music fan, much less one that should be writing for a major newspaper.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some cds to listen to.
That said, I recently stumbled across an article by Boston Globe writer Joan Anderman, and have not felt so genuinely compelled to respond to an article in more than a decade. Let's take a look, shall we?
Does that sound familiar? Blame it on John Mayer.
In August I dutifully arrived at the Rod Stewart show at the Comcast Center in time to catch the opening act, Josh Kelley. Kelley, known to gossip hounds as Mr. Katherine Heigl, is a singer-songwriter. He writes pop-rock tunes, plays the guitar and the piano, and sings well. He's attractive and personable. His songs are sturdy and pretty. And he makes me feel . . . nothing.
Nothing is worse than feeling nothing at a concert. If you hate a band, at least you can whine about it to your friend in the next seat, and if you're me, you can register a public complaint in the newspaper. And odds are good I'll receive plenty of mail from readers who love the band just as much as I don't love the band, which confirms my view that music that makes somebody feel something is worth listening to.
Listening to Kelley, I just felt empty, and I found myself marveling once again that he and his ilk have become the mainstream standard-bearers for the genre.
"Garden-variety" is the term I used to describe Kelley in my review of the show - i.e. common, ordinary, of no special quality or type, according to the dictionary. And he's not alone.
So up until here I have no complaints. I've never found Josh Kelley overly burdened with talent, and have been genuinely more entertained by other artists telling stories of him stumbling around the Rock Boat completely tanked than I have been by his cds. A quick search of Joan Anderman's other articles for The Globe reveal that as many times as she finds reason to reference Josh in articles that have little to do with him, she trots out the "Mr. Katherine Heigl" moniker as if he's showing up in the pages of the Enquirer with nothing but that to carry him. I read my tabloids, girlie, can't remember the last time I even saw an article on Katherine, much less on Josh and trust me I'm no fan of hers either, so I'm on the lookout.
Another quick search gets much deeper to the root of what we're dealing with here. The review of the Rod Stewart show in question was largely positive, and very indicative of someone who has clearly had a lot of years to get familiar with his catalog. My knowledge of Stewart largely consists of people singing "Maggie May" to me on a regular basis, a Tom Waits cover that was better off left alone, and a daughter that looks like a cocker spaniel.
The description suits a whole slew of singer-songwriters making the rounds of theaters, airwaves, and soundtracks with their inoffensive, unremarkable, soul-numbing songs.
Matt Nathanson, a Lexington native who lives in San Francisco, performs a sold-out show at Berklee Performance Center tonight, the same night Howie Day plays at Northeastern University's Blackman Auditorium. Jason Mraz comes through town Oct. 17 for a show at the Orpheum, also sold out. Matt Wertz has been on the road opening for Gavin DeGraw, Mat Kearney is making a new record, and Josh Hoge just put an album out. Ari Hest, exhibiting a flash of ingenuity, has been writing and releasing a song a week this year.
All of these artists are competent. None of them has a sound.
Okay wait...what?
Hold the phone.
This is the point where I put down my glass of water and almost laughed and ended my own life by choking.I mean...seriously? Maybe someone spent too much time in her late 20's in the 80's listening to arena rock and hair bands and therefore has some damaged ear drums that led to making such a sweeping generalization on such a wide range of artists. I'm friends with a lot of musicians, or very involved music fans. I myself am someone as versed in the discography of everyone from the likes of Britney Spears, Jay-Z and Fiona Apple as I am with those of Matt Nathanson, Death Cab for Cutie, and Hit the Lights. I'm hardly a musical elitist, I just can't seem to consume enough of it. Granted, some of it is completely lost on me - the majority of country music, screaming rock anthems, and the Dave Matthews Band for a general cross section, but I know enough to know who is who when I'm stuck in traffic and hit the scan button and it settles on a station that I never listen to.
We all know that I could go on for days about the mere passing mention of Matt Nathanson, but let me just sum it up by saying that someone who can't seem to find a unique sound would never be able to sustain a career that's now spanning 15 years and was built solely on crisscrossing the country and selling out rooms wherever he goes. Howie Day may have hit the mainstream with the generally generic "Collide" but his first album showcased his unique abilities as a writer and singer in songs such as "Sorry So Sorry" and "Kristina". Hearing him pound out "Sorry So Sorry" live could put anyone's doubts to rest.
Jason Mraz has hit his stride with his new record and the reworked version of "I'm Yours" but is another artist who, with his own blend of wordplay and quick beats over his guitar playing has carved out his own niche that makes him another sure sell out road act each and every summer. Mraz has a quick tongue and churns out gems on his albums that range from quiet love songs to stumble over your own tongue rhymes and slick and sexy ballads. I don't remember anyone ever confusing a Mraz tune for a Mayer tune, even in the "Remedy" days.
I'm hardly a huge Gavin Degraw lover (I leave that for Nikki of course), but there's no denying that he's probably got the strongest voice out of his entire genre of young singer songwriters. He can literally sing the hell out of anything, from the defiant and slightly cocky "I Don't Want to Be", to a cover of "A Change Is Gonna Come" that Sam Cooke himself would approve of.
The point of this is that the genre itself is deep and unique. Insisting that this crop of artists have no unique sound is about as ridiculous as getting a Jay-Z song confused with a Soulja Boy song, just because they happen to file into the same genre when you're browsing through the iTunes store.
They seem for all the world to be using a template to write their songs. Sit down to listen to a batch of them at the same time, and you'll notice that the same pattern crops up again and again, usually in the chorus. It's made of four chords that repeat in a cycle, sometimes tenderly and sometimes forcefully but always winsomely, suggesting lost love or found love or the bad love that inspired him - no, impelled him - to write this song.
As wrong and this woman is, this argument can be applied to any genre of music. During the reign of pop it was largely argued that every pop hit was composed of the same few chords and key changes. With some slick production and a catchy hook, anyone could have a number one song. During the reign of rap it was the era of a sample. Grab a beat, obtain a sample, enjoy the millions rolling in. This is not new information, sweetie.
Love songs will always be the ones that get people talking, because those are the songs that everyone can relate to. If Jason Mraz wrote "Remedy" (a song about a close friend fighting cancer) 14 times over and released it as an album, he would have never had the chance to make a second record. If John Mayer had released a handful of albums consisting of different versions of "Your Body Is A Wonderland", he'd still be playing at coffee shops in Atlanta on nightly basis. Being cute and holding a guitar may work as a novelty for a little while, but is hardly enough to grant you the ability to tour the country and live comfortably when not doing so, especially not in this day and age. Let's face it, they all can't have the ability to churn out such obscenely creative jams as "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?", but they do what they can to entertain those that somehow manage to find meaning in their meaningless and talentless songs, you know?
I don't buy it. This musician has studied hard. His introspective lyrics read like a composite of sensitive-guy clichés. He doesn't so much sing from the gut as use his voice, expertly, in the service of a sentiment. It cracks just so to evoke his broken heart and grows bold when it's time to be strong. He's a little soulful, a little wounded, totally ready to be saved, and with the help of a skilled producer he pushes people's buttons - especially those belonging to young women, a demographic that's especially susceptible to a cute boy's connect-the-dots charms.
And who can blame them? These guys get the job done. It's like the recipe for McDonald's Secret Sauce; you can count on it. It tastes the same every time. Nobody clamors for new ingredients every time they order a Big Mac, because reliability is a good thing when it comes to fast food. But sameness is depressing when it defines an art form where emotional veracity has always been the most compelling piece.
Singer songwriters are not the new bubble gum pop stars. The guitar boy equivalent of Lou Pearlman is not sitting behind a desk holding auditions at theme parks for the next group of boys he can clean up, give a Fender and an MTV reality show to, send to Max Martin, and then swim in the millions he makes off of them like it's the beginning of Ducktales and he's Scrooge McDuck. This would be valid if I walked into a store and was faced with seeing Jason Mraz and Gavin DeGraw lip gloss, or John Mayer and Matt Nathanson lollipops that I could buy to enjoy while watching Josh Kelley's feature film about traveling the country with some of his friends to find his long lost mother.
This is not 1999 and Howie Day will never sell 2.1 million records in a week. There is no longer endless money to be made for getting air headed teenage girls to stand outside of the MTV studios for you. To put it into reference the writer may understand better, this is not the same thing as anxiously awaiting Davy Jones' appearance on the Brady Bunch because he's OMG SO DREAMY!
I blame John Mayer. He paved the way for this wave of well-groomed troubadours with the unlikely success of his 2001 album, "Room For Squares." Mayer is a better musician than the lot of them, but the mass appeal of his sweet strummed pop tunes triggered a record-label spending spree on cookie-cutter tunesmiths. And it's working, because in this era of branding and multi-platform careerism, originality isn't the goal. Quite the opposite: The business needs innocuous, multipurpose songs that can service radio formats, dorm rooms, television dramas, film credits, and iPod ads.
The original pop troubadours carved their niche (and set the bar high) with distinctive visions spanning the literate commentary of Jackson Browne, James Taylor's graceful meditations, and fiery soul-searching from Cat Stevens. And there are formidable talents working today, among them Conor Oberst, Damien Rice, Tom McRae, Joseph Arthur, and Rufus Wainwright. Which makes it even harder to listen to the assembly-line sentiments and achingly familiar refrains of the Mayer descendants.
Ugh. I'll give you Damien Rice and Joseph Arthur. Those two have moments of pure transcendence on their albums. But Conor Oberst? Really? That almost negates the rest of the list for me. I do enjoy a couple of Bright Eyes songs, but holy Christ, pulling that name for a list of formidable talents making the rounds today is almost like putting Hanson on a pedestal or loving the Terrence Howard record...oh wait, Anderman already did that in previous articles. I guess somehow those two artists managed to avoid the trappings of the terrible pre packaged singer songwriters that you can't help but be overrun with these days.
There's enough wallpaper in the world; we don't need uniformity from the very people who are meant to be scouring their hearts and baring their souls in song. But that venerable task has been co-opted, at least in part, by music supervisors looking for a faux-emotional tune to underscore the season's faux-emotional teen drama, and nervous music execs hoping to reach the most people with the least distinguished palette of sounds.
It's bad math for music lovers, but it adds up in the short term, and these days that seems to be the main frame of reference.
To sum this all up somehow, I'll say this: if this writer wanted to bash an entire genre of music based on it's depth and genuine contribution to music a whole, she was way off base to pick this one. Go to a Matt Nathanson show, watch him play upwards of 30 songs that he himself wrote from the ground up, and then tell me that he's in it for the money and not for the genuine love for music and his gift for sharing it. Listen to a live Mraz record from top to bottom and tell me that he isn't a great lyricist and and amazing vocalist. Sure John Mayer has become commercialized and trite, but he wasn't always that way and with any hope the other greats in his genre will never see that side of themselves.
Being that Anderman still finds Motley Crue culturally relevant none of that is likely. Writing a badly researched and completely off base article damning an entire genre of music isn't exactly a reflection of a well rounded music fan, much less one that should be writing for a major newspaper.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some cds to listen to.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
16 Things About Me
So, it's been a while since I've been compelled to blog. Not sure why...methinks there's a bit of a funk in the air around me, but I'm coming out of it. I was checking out a blog I frequently visit and I saw them do this, so I figured, well what a bloggy thing to do! Maybe it'll get me all up in it again! Here goes!
Sixteen Things About Me
4 Things I Did Today
1. I took a nap in the morning time, even though I really should've just stayed up and read stuff for work or something.
2. Went to Barnes & Noble for the second day in a row. This is like a record for me...you see, I'm not that much of a reader. But this time, I got an interactive type book thingy...you know those self help type things (let's call it Personal Development, sounds better)? Yeah, I need it and I'm not ashamed to say it.
3. I stayed for an hour after class at the gym talking to one of my fellow Zumba girls. We were walking to our cars and before we knew it, we had talked for an hour. The only thing that made me actually leave was that my niece called me...for no apparent reason.
4. I played MarioKart on the Wii for like an hour and a half with people from all over the world on Wifi. I lost pretty much every race I was in, too. I pretty much suck at that game but it won't stop me from playing it.
4 Things on My To Do List
1. Get certified in Zumba. I'm using it as a fitness goal. Not sure I'd ever actually teach. I got other shit to get done.
2. Actually solidly plan my next trip to LA. Wheels are in motion for it already and there might actually be some meetings/invitiations on the burner, so maybe it'll end up being fruitful this time.
3. Find the focus that I need to get the shit done that I mention in point 1.
4. Take a nice, nice vacation. I'm talking like a week or two just away...somewhere I've never been. Australia? Who wants to go?!
4 of My Guilty Pleasures
1. Pop Music
Much like my blogmate there, I unabashedly love simple pop music. Although I can't get behind that new Britney Spears song, I will say she's had others that have been and will forever be in constant rotation on the workout playlist on the iPod. "Slave 4 U" anyone?!
2. Snapped
If you've never seen this show on Oxygen, then you're just not watching TV. I inexplicably get caught up in it every time there's a marathon and I've probably seen every episode they have done or almost all of them. The gist? It's a show about women who snap and kill their boyfriends/husbands. Some of them have gotten off, others are locked up. But it's basically a half hour little show about how they got to where they were when they snapped.
3. YouTube
I'm pretty sure that youtube is one of the signs of the apocalypse. It's down right demonic cause really, I could sit on it for hours and hours before I realize it's been hours and hours. Commercials, videos, TV shows from my youth...all end up on youtube. Missed something in that latest episode of that TV show you're all up into now? Well, wait about a half hour after it's over, it'll be on youtube! Didn't see that Britney video on 20/20, where should I go? Youtube! *sigh* Man, I love me some youtube.
4. My iPhone
That's right folks, I no longer have iPhone envy. I've caved and gotten it and it's the most glorious phone thingy I've ever had. I know people have issues with it and sure, it's got little problems like the inability to do MMS messages, but whatever, I had that when I had my Sidekick, too, and this thing is infinitely more advanced than that. The keyboard's still taking some getting used to for me, but I adore the damn thing. I'm an Apple girl, anyway, so the fact that the thing can sync my contacts and all that stuff so easily just makes me love it more. I find myself doing emails on it, even when there's a computer inches from me...it's just weird. But it's come in so handy with it's applications and maping and GPS and all. Every day I discover something new to do on it.
4 Random Facts About Me
1. I Remember When I First Fell in Love with Music
I was 5 and in Mr Gardener's Kindergarden class. We did little musical plays and he always had music on and I just remember being obsessesive about it from the start. Always wanting to be in the lead roles in our little productions. I will never forget that man's name, even all these years later because he helped me find my passion.
2. I Don't Know if I want kids
Even still...as I'm in my 30s, I don't know. I have this whole, it'd be nice if I did but if I didn't I wouldn't die either. I really only get that internal ticking clock when I go to sporting events it seems. Odd, right? Well not so much. You see, when you're at sporting events, you see all these men with their little ones in their itty bitty jerseys doing the father thing and it really just makes my heart melt. So, there, I think the only way I would want to have kids is if I am in a committed relationship and it's a decision we make together. I have friends that want them regardless but I know I don't want to enter into it alone, if I don't have to.
3. Of all of the guys from Entourage Turtle is the one I like the most. Everybody is usually all about Vinnie, but not me. It's Turtle. - Direct quote from who I stole this from. I'm not touching it cause I wholeheartedly agree.
4. Sometimes I wish I just went ahead and lept into what my dreams were in HS/College. I know everything happens for a reason and all that fun stuff, but man, that's probably the one "what if" I have.
I'm supposed to tag 4 people with this, but this took way longer than I thought and I would kind of feel bad asking someone else to do this. But if you feel so inclined you can put some random facts about yourself in the comments. It's not like we don't love finding out more about our readers.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
It's a song with pretty much one lyric.
But I am inexplicably loving Britney's "Womanizer" all of a sudden. It was the video that did it. Sure, its Toxic 2.0, but the sheer fact that I can even manage to watch the entire thing means that it must be good, since I check out of most videos like a minute in. I'm past the point of having to apologize for my guilty pleasure musical tastes. The short of it is this: the video is good. Watch it.
Friday, October 3, 2008
I'm not a princess...
Well I am, but that's another blog for another day. Let me just preface this by saying that I am not a country music fan...like, at all. There's something in the twang and how every song is about the same damn thing that makes me insane. There are exactly two country songs that I have ever admitted to liking in my 26 years of existing. The first is a song by The Wreckers called Leave the Pieces. The Wreckers barely register to me as country because I was such a huge Michelle Branch fan, and there are a few reasons that this song means something special to me.
The next song came to me by way of Grey's Anatomy which admittedly is how I've found a lot of the songs and artists that I've fallen in love with over the past few years. That said, Taylor Swift has been on and off my radar since she appeared. Not really on a musical level since I couldn't recall one of her songs if you paid me, but I've seen her on various shows and always thought she seemed cute and fun, and I could see why she appealed to people, but I immediately just assumed that I wouldn't fall in love with any of her songs.
Boy was I WRONG.
I've pretty much been listening to White Horse on a loop for the past day and a half. It's a simple song, beautifully delivered, and as it always goes for me, the lyrics totally get me. I love it.
The next song came to me by way of Grey's Anatomy which admittedly is how I've found a lot of the songs and artists that I've fallen in love with over the past few years. That said, Taylor Swift has been on and off my radar since she appeared. Not really on a musical level since I couldn't recall one of her songs if you paid me, but I've seen her on various shows and always thought she seemed cute and fun, and I could see why she appealed to people, but I immediately just assumed that I wouldn't fall in love with any of her songs.
Boy was I WRONG.
I've pretty much been listening to White Horse on a loop for the past day and a half. It's a simple song, beautifully delivered, and as it always goes for me, the lyrics totally get me. I love it.
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