July 2010 Playlist

I spent about an hour and a half tonight just putting these songs in a par­tic­u­lar order so that they ebbed and flowed like a proper playlist. I don’t always get the time to do that, but I feel like I should start not­ing when I do, just the same as when I let you know when some top 10 lists aren’t in any par­tic­u­lar order ver­sus when some are care­fully orches­trated and decided upon. I’m pretty sure that the time and atten­tion to these par­tic­u­lar details that con­sume me may elude any­one who doesn’t actu­ally sit and lis­ten to each song in this exact order, which is prob­a­bly every­one, if anyone’s even out there, but…hell.…it’s been DULY NOTED.

I’d also like to clar­ify what is meant by a monthly playlist: I do them every month to time cap­sule what songs made them­selves known to me in a given month. I may have blogged about them in a time before that month, just as I may blog about the songs in a future month, just as some songs may never be indi­vid­u­ally blogged about at all. There’s no exact for­mula con­nect­ing the monthly mixes to what’s hap­pened on the blog, though they may at times reflect sim­i­lar­i­ties. As a time cap­sule, I go to these playlists to (1) laugh about the bizarre extremes of decade and genre my head can jump around in a 30-day period; (2) observe myself: have I encoun­tered a lot of new music this month? have I turned to my stash rather than seek out new music?, have I gone back to the clas­sics?, what’s my pat­tern of lis­ten­ing?; (3) to review my moods of the month, as my song selec­tions often act as diary entries; and (4) to pro­vide my read­ers with playlists. I love and appre­ci­ate well-curated playlists, and maybe one day I’ll find read­ers out there that appre­ci­ate the same. I need to get this blog out there…

Okay, onto the playlist!:

1. Two Kites / Antônio Car­los Jobim - I freak­ing love this song. I know it’s cheesy as hell, but I so love it. Youtube only has live ver­sions of it though, and I really love the stu­dio ver­sion from his album Terra Brasilis bet­ter than any­thing live. I’m prone to hat­ing live ver­sions, I’ll admit. How­ever, even though youtube.com didn’t pro­vide me with the stu­dio audio I wanted, I did find this amaz­ing ver­sion of the song!:

2. Goldfinger / Shirley Bassey — I always sing the lyrics of this song to the melody of the next song. They are con­joined twins in the musi­cal womb of my mind. <—that sen­tence is SICK!

3. Johnny Angel / Shel­ley Fabares — Always reminds me of high school show choir, which makes me sad and moody. I mostly don’t enjoy think­ing about high school.

4. Ziggy Star­dust (unplugged) / David Bowie — I have no idea where this track came from…my file says it’s track 15 on The Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Star­dust and The Spi­ders From Mars but even on the 30th Anniver­sary lim­ited edi­tion reis­sue, there is not a track 15.…maybe it’s the demo? It’s def­i­nitely Bowie, this I know. Video link.

5. How Am I To Be / The Wat­son Twins - A cute track from Paste Mag­a­zine Sam­pler #44. Could cer­tainly be used in a future Tar­get ad, or cov­ered by She & Him, though that would prob­a­bly be TOO cute. Video link.

6. This Old Heart of Mine / Isley Broth­ers — This song was play­ing in the back­ground of an episode of sea­son 4 of HBO’s The Wire, and I was all like “WAIT! PAUSE IT! I KNOW THAT SONG!” I haven’t heard the song in a decade, had no idea it was the Isley Broth­ers, but of course knew all of the words by heart after all of those years.
7. Cake Parade / Georgie James — I bought this album, Places, for the song “Long Week” but soon had a break­through that “Cake Parade” was actu­ally the best track on the album. I really love this album, the dichotomy between soft girl vocals that seem harm­less and harsh, poetic lyrics, like these from “Cake Parade”: “The sun is gone, looks like a per­fect day, / to put our sol­diers in an early grave, / we can line them up and lay them on the lawn, / with all their pur­ple hearts, / and badges of courage on.”
8. Blowin’ Away / Laura Nyro — A nice song, Dad inad­ver­tently intro­duced it to me in col­lege when he told me about George Harrison’s “Blowin’ Away” and I down­loaded this sim­i­larly titled song out of curios­ity.

9. You Dropped a Bomb on Me / Gap Band — Clas­sic funk, fun to quote in a con­ver­sa­tion. Try it! “You dropped a bomb on me, baby”. AMAZING MUSIC VIDEO ALERT!!!:

10. Fireflies / Owl City — Learned this song and artist because of watch­ing this sea­son of So You Think You Can Dance, but as per usual, I already owned the album. I have so much music I need to go through, and it kills me a lit­tle bit each time I find a song on my hard drive that I’ve the­o­ret­i­cally had *this whole time* and could have been lis­ten­ing to for days, only I didn’t know it existed.

11. Hey, West­ern Union Man / Al Kooper — My post about the song “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” from last week included tons of research about the band Blood, Sweat & Tears. That track did not include con­tri­bu­tions by Al Kooper, but as I read the band (and even­tu­ally the man’s) wikipedia page, I came to under­stand that he was a very impor­tant fig­ure in the music world. Nat­u­rally I searched for his name through my files, because more than likely I already owned music by him that I didn’t even know I had. Of course, I was right—-I had his album I Stand Alone, a very eclec­tic and col­lab­o­ra­tive 1968 album. This is my favorite track from the newly dis­cov­ered album.

12. Mr. Piti­ful / Matt Costa — Learned the song from an Apple iPhone com­mer­cial! Of course, already owned it (thanks, Cat!).

13. Scenes From An Ital­ian Restau­rant / Billy Joel — One of my all-time Billy joel favorites, blogged thor­oughly about in late July.

14. Wild Night (f. Me’shell Ndegé Ocello) / John Mel­len­camp - My favorite J. Cougar M. song, blogged about exten­sively in July.

15. Every­body / Ingrid Michael­son — I enjoy this kind of album for road-tripping-on-sunny-days pur­poses, and it almost made the cut for our wed­ding road trip playlists, but it didn’t quite fit the major­ity of tastes that I knew would be receiv­ing the mixes.

16. The Death of Me / City And Colour — I’ve had this album since Octo­ber 2009, but hadn’t delved in past “Save Your Scis­sors”. My bad, because I really could have been enjoy­ing this album for awhile if I hadn’t decided to shelve it so soon after buy­ing it. I gotta spend more time lis­ten­ing to music—-lol. Or get­ting a job?
    
17. Won­der­ful / Annie Lennox — This song isn’t quite per­fect to me, because I don’t like how slow and quiet it is between the cho­ruses; the slow is TOO slow, the quiet is too quiet, and it is too much of a con­trast when it gets awe­some and loud and pump­ing. It just doesn’t work for me, but I want you to know about the song, because the cho­rus is really wor­thy of know­ing and singing around the house. This song needs a remix. Every time I lis­ten to this song, I don’t even remem­ber how the slow parts go; they are so for­get­table, whereas I can’t get the cho­rus out of my head!
18. Je ne regrette rien / Edit Piaf — I’ll give you a lit­tle tip on a great way to end a playlist: with an anthem. I already blogged this song to death, so I haven’t much more to say! Con­sider it highly rec­om­mended for the final slot on a playlist!