remember that song? (music tangents)

I'm rather inclined to go on tangents. This post will make that clear.

I just watched a video that a friend posted on Facebook. It's a Justin Bieber song that was slowed down 800%.  All I know about Justin Bieber, is that he's very young and has the latest "squeaky clean" image. He's popular with tweens. When a Bieber song that I don't know is slowed down, the result is an eerie piece of music you can imagine hearing on a movie soundtrack.

That got me to thinking about the song "Twisted Hair", on the Robbie Robertson album Music for the North Americans. It incorporates a chorus of crickets. The speed of the recording is so reduced, that it ends up sounding like a melancholic human chant.

And that got me to thinking about songs I was so excited to discover when I was younger,
say, while I was in highschool and university.

Here's a song that I have long favoured by U2. I'm a U2 fan, (as in a fan from their heyday). The fact that I discovered this band and loved it when I was 13, is that now my entusiasm for them  is laced with nostalgia. With that in mind, here is "Red Hill Mining Town", a song I first heard when I was 16:



Moving on to the incomparable Annie Lennox in the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams". You have to love the synthezier sound of the 80's...



Or at least, tolerate it. I didn't always like the synthetizer, hence my devotion to R.E.M. They were a breath of fresh air. I became a huge fan of R.E.M. when I first heard the Document album, (released in 1987). R.E.M. had a unique sound. I loved that album so much that I wanted to hear everything they'd done. I loved that too. I continue to check out their latest music offerings. Here is: "It's the End of the World, (and I feel fine)"!

Today, I'm focusing on the popular 80's songs over the obscure stuff I used to listen to. Therefore, I can't not include this next one. The whole album is incredibly good. This is a live version of my favourite song on Graceland, "The Boy in the Bubble".




When I first heard of the Indigo Girls, I was on the cusp of moving across the country to go to university.  By that time, I was really getting into folk and folk-rock... I was as interested in contemporary folk as I was in the folk troubadours of the 60's: Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I'd vaguely heard of Leonard Cohen in highschool, but I only really listened to him after I turned 18.

Oh yes, back to the Indigo Girls. They have many great original songs, but this one is a fab cover done by Amy Ray. The first real conversation my partner and I had, (that was not about theatre), was comparing this version with the original by Mark Kopfler. We disagreed. Here is... the better version. (Sorry, it's audio only.)



I could go on, but this article needs to end.