Who’s She?

She's Got You High by Mumm-Ra

Right, back to normal posts after my rant about HMV. And things are quite a-changing: I have a new iPod Touch, which I may have mentioned, once or twice, on Twitter… ahem. So, that means I have been able to put a lot more songs on my iPod which may affect this drill-down of songs I am rambling through. At first I put absolutely everything onto it, which was nearly 1700 songs, but then I soon realised I wouldn’t be able to listen on shuffle without getting annoyed with some songs. I had usually been filtering by artist, but I decided this time  I would spend the time going through my whole library and ‘un-ticking’ the songs I didn’t want, as there are quite a few artists that I wanted some songs of but not others. You don’t always like everything an artist does anyway. So now I have full albums I had taken off completely, back on, and some songs I had on, taken off, e.g. I now have a full Maxïmo Park album back on, and some of The Cure’s best of album taken off.

If I hadn’t said already – I love my new iPod! Not only does it have bags more memory, it has more things for me to play with! A camera that takes video too, more space for apps and iOS 5 which means I can have apps like iPlayer and 4OD etc. and just prettier graphics and slight tweaks that only people who get excited about technology would appreciate.

Anyway, geek-out over. Time to crack on with the songs. Onto ‘S’ then, and it does take a while before I get to enough word repeats to be worthy of a post. This first ‘S’ post will be on ‘She’. Before that I just had:

S.O.S., Sadness, Safety, Sailor, Saint, Saints, Salt, Salvador, Same, San, Satellite, Satisfy, Savage, Saw, Say, Say, School, Scientist, Search, Second, Secret, Secret, Semi-Charmed, September, Set, Sex, Sex, Shake, Shaker, Shame and Shape.

So, there were two of ‘Saint’ (sort of), ‘Say’, ‘Secret’ and ‘Sex’, but I think there may be too many for ‘S’ if I did every set of two words. And besides, I want to avoid the awkwardness of talking about the word ‘Sex’…. awkward!

So: ‘She’. Interesting in that ‘He’ didn’t come up at all (I’ve just looked and all I have is He Doesn’t Know Why by Fleet Foxes). I would imagine that there are, in general, more songs about the female of the sex (oh no, here we go again…) for some reason. Are there actually more men in music than women, still? Or is it just men like to sing/write about women more than women like to write about men? Actually, I think it could be that women write about men and women, but men write about men less. Would that be a fair assumption? Who knows really, it could just be my musical taste once again. Right, I’ve written too much already, so without further ado:

She Loves You - The Beatles

She Moves In Her Own Way - The Kooks (don’t really like the Kooks, but I obviously downloaded this at one point, and I have no major objections to it)

She Needs Me - Fyfe Dangerfield (had his album on here before and gave up on it, giving it a second chance now)

She Wolf - Shakira (shut up, this is good)

She’s A Rainbow  - The Rolling Stones (also deleted Forty Licks before but this time just cut out the songs I didn’t know very well/were a bit meh) – Just going to put a link on Rolling Stones and I hadn’t even mentioned them AT ALL on this blog before. OH DEAR!

She’s A Star  - James (from Ultimate Nineties album that my friends bought me a while back. Basically, all decades have brilliant music)

She’s Always A Woman - Fyfe Dangerfield (he likes talking about ladies in the third person, although this is a Billy Joel song originally. And yes, THE John Lewis song. Boring, I know)

She’s Got You High - Mumm-Ra (this is nice. Feel it was probably used in an advert way back when. Or just played on the radio quite a bit.)

That’ll be it now. Sorry for the length of this post. Well done and thank you kindly if you managed to get this far.

L x

 

(She’s Got You High by Mumm-Ra)

SPECIAL POST ALERT – HMV Love

Save HMV! Look at the cute dog - don't let him starve!

Right. I was just on Le Twittere when I started to talk about HMV and I realised I couldn’t do it in just a couple of tweets – this deserves a whole blog post! And my first off-topic blog post too. Extra special.

Basically, I went Christmas shopping back in December in Brent Cross shopping centre and I was hoping to buy some DVDs and a CD. So, first port of call – HMV. Since Zavvi and Virgin Megastore went under it is the go-to place to buy media items when you’re on the high street. Obviously it would be better to buy them from an independent store, but the effort to keep most of those afloat died a death a long time ago, making it tricky to find one unless you make a special effort.

Anyway, so there I was looking around for an HMV and I found a shopping centre map (I’m dragging this out to make it more dramatic – can you tell?) – I looked under ‘H’: nothing. Under ‘Technology’, or whatever category there was,: nothing. Shock horror! Where am I supposed to go for CDs or DVDs? WHSmith? No! Well then my buying plans are screwed and I can’t make those purchases today, I have to either buy them from Amazon or on another day. And it is here that I realise how much I love, and need, HMV.

I have nothing against Amazon and other online stores, in fact they are pretty amazing, if you want something a bit more obscure especially, but by driving down their prices they have completely pushed HMV out and now they are in danger of folding. Not only is this bad for business, economy, staff etc., it means if you want to buy physical items like albums and DVDs whilst out shopping, you just can’t, you are forced to do it online.

Yes, online shopping is the norm now, prices are low, and you can get almost anything you want, but it does mean you have to wait for your items to be delivered, rely on the post system and have the faff of collecting bigger parcels if you’re not in when it’s delivered (and most people who work won’t be). And, this is my main annoyance with Amazon and the rest, you can’t properly browse. I mean, they do offer you items based on your past purchases and pages dedicated to genres and the like, but there’s only so much there until you have to start searching yourself. The good thing about HMV is that there is so much laid out on display, particularly at the front of the store, that you can find things you would never have thought of searching for, and probably wouldn’t have been suggested to you by Amazon. It reminds you of films that you remember being released at the cinema but never bothered to see (usually the not great films but which are fun, easy-viewing types) and it’s useful for finding things for other people as it gives you more ideas – though probably more dilemmas too – than you would usually have.

HMV is obviously also at risk of dying because of digital downloads from iTunes and streaming or downloading films and TV programmes on the internet. I think eventually everything will probably become digital – we’ve been slowly making storage devices smaller and smaller and I think it’s natural for media to be found on the smallest form yet – digital megabytes. But for now, and I do hope it continues as long as it can, I like having something tangible. I always feel with music if it’s a band/artist/album I really like, then I need to have the physical copy of it. There’s something about examining the cover and the sleeve notes that you can’t replace online. And it feels like you’ve made an effort when you’ve bought a physical copy – an effort that you feel that band deserves for making such great music. I have also made a conscious decision to buy more music physically since I realised my love and pride for HMV, hoping that I can do my little bit to keep them going.

Basically, HMV is a hub for music, films, TV and games; all the things that bring me, and most people, much joy. It would be a damn shame if there was no longer a physical space for you to go and explore these things. I also feel similarly about Waterstones and books. We need to keep these stores alive that allow us to be in the same place as all these words, lyrics, notes, scenes and pictures.

So, I don’t know if it needs it yet, but I want to start the Save HMV campaign. I’ve seen there is a page on Facebook already for it, but as I’m not on there I can’t ‘Like’ it, or whatever you do these days. The problem is I don’t know how to run a campaign. Am I supposed to organise an event? Maybe we could all have HMV parties where we go to our local HMV with as many people as possible and just spend the evening there (hopefully buying things but not going broke)?? That would be cool, but I don’t really have enough of a ‘following’ to start something, so I’m just going to have to state my love for them and get quietly very annoyed and angered if, or probably when, they go under.

So: Save HMV! Save the high street! LOVE HMV!

OK, ramble over.

L x

Red Runner

Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush

I am onto ‘R’ and I will basically be able to cover it with just one post. What’s with these rubbish letters that have no word repeats?? Or it could just be that I don’t own that many songs. I think it’s more likely to be the latter.

So, I only have two words to talk about with ‘R’: ‘Red’ and ‘Run’. And each of these only occur twice themselves.

‘Red’ is, like ‘Black’ and ‘Blue’; a staple colour and so often used in songs. I would have thought I would have more songs beginning with ‘Red’ because it represents so many things: blood, the heart, love, anger, danger, stop etc., but no, only two:

Red Morning Light - Kings of Leon

Red Red Wine - UB40 (I do own the best of UB40 – one of the albums my mum used to listen to in the car, but as usual I got a bit bored with their songs once I’d heard them too much, so I took it off my iPod. This song is here because it’s on the Anthems: Alternative 80s Ministry of Sound album I bought recently – 60 tracks of pure, unadulterated, Eighties joy!)

The other word, ‘Run’, is not a word I would have expected to come up a few times. I suppose running is more ‘exciting’ than walking, but then you do have walking songs too - Walking on Sunshine, Walking in Memphis, Walking on Broken Glass, Walk Like an Egyptian. Wow, yeah, quite a few, I surprised myself there. But surely there are lots of ‘Run’ songs too? Run to the Hills - is that a song? I don’t think I can think of any more off the top of my head, let me go look it up…OK there are LOADS. Run by Snow Patrol, Run to You by Bryan Adams and Run the World (Girls) by Beyoncé are just a few I’ve heard of. I think, once again, I’m going to use the word ‘dramatic’ to explain why the word ‘Run’ is used quite a lot – it’s quite dramatic, running, innit? You can run away in fear or sadness, you could run to someone in excitement or anger – endless possibilities. So, yeah, that’s why you find it fairly frequently in song titles. Right, after all that palaver, here are my ‘Run’ songs:

Run  - Vampire Weekend

Run the Heart - Sleigh Bells

The Runner - Kings of Leon (yes, this does count, shh..)

Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush (also from the Alternative 80s album, and, I think, the subject of my picture and video I’ve decided)

So, that is it for ‘R’ now too. I thought I might have to pad this post out by listing all my ‘R’ words, but I think this is sufficient. I’m really speeding through now, although next is ‘S’, which I’d imagine will have quite a few words to talk about, but we’ll soon see.

‘Til next time, ta ra.

L x

(Dancing like only Kate Bush could:)

Let’s Queue for a P

Perpetuum Mobile by Penguin Cafe Orchestra (from Preludes, Airs and Yodels)

I’m on to the letter ‘P’ and it’s another one of those letters where I have no repeats of words – what is up with that!?

So once again I will be just listing all the words that begin with ‘P’ that start song titles I own – like I did with ‘M’ and ‘C’. Yeah, this is cutting edge blogalism (blog journalism – I think I should coin that word).

I think I will list them all first, and then have a look to see if there are any of them that I would expect more song titles for. You can play the ‘guess the song from the beginning word’ again – what fun.

So my ‘P’ words are:

Pacemaker, Pack, Pan, Papa’s, Paperback, Party, Patricia, Penny, Perfect, Perpetuum, Pickup, Pictures, Pieces, Pissing, Pistol, Plains, Poker, Pony, Pool, Pork, Post, Pressure, Promised, Pull, Punky, Purple, Push, Put and Pyro.

Not that many really. I didn’t include two songs that are listed under ‘P’ – Pocahontas – Colors of the Wind and Pocahontas – Just Around the River Bend because ‘Pocahontas’ isn’t really their song title, just the film they’re from, and it would muck up my ‘there are no repeats’ angle…

I would have thought there may be more ‘Party’ songs because, woo, every musician likes a party, and maybe more ‘Put’ songs because it’s a common verb, but not in my collection anyway. I’ve had a looksie online for ‘P’ songs and there are lots of words that come up actually – ‘Picture’, ‘Pretty’ etc. But I think there are generally not as many ‘P’ songs as some other letters… that’s not based on any hard evidence though.

Well that will be it for ‘P’ then – there isn’t much to say seeing as I don’t have any words that come up a lot. And now for what to put as the picture and video for this post?! I haven’t mentioned any particular songs, except Pocahontas ones and I think I’ve over-Disneyed on this blog already. So I will have to choose a favourite ‘P’ song I have – it’s a close call between a nice instrumental song by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra , a Jack Peñate song or a new purchase from Real Estate (I recently downloaded their two albums – nice kind of chill-out, lo-fi indie). So am I going Perpetuum Mobile, Pull My Heart Way or Pool Swimmers?

Oh and I might as well as do ‘Q’ while I’m here:

Quiet Houses - Fleet Foxes

Bye!

L x

(Used in films etc, prime. And look – an actual orchestra playing in the video, classy)

 

Got It On One

On the Radio by Regina Spektor

It has been quite a while. But it was the festive season, so it can be excused. Anyway – Happy 2012! Here’s to more great music, nonsensical ramblings on words and making myself cringe by reading my own writing!

I’ll begin where I left off – on ‘O’. After ‘Oh’, ‘Old’ and ‘Oliver’ I have ‘On’ and ‘One’, and after that it’s basically ‘O’ over with.

So: ‘On’. A simple preposition. There’s not much to say (I always seem to say that though..) apart from how it can be used to sort of mean ‘on board’ with things, metaphorically, rather than just physically ‘on top’ of things. Or you can be ‘on it’, ‘switched on’ and ‘on the ball’, sort of like ‘in the mix’ and ‘in the know’. Not that any of my songs use it in this sense, but I think it’s interesting how we stretch the use of simple words like prepositions to mean so much. Interesting to me anyway.

So I have:

On Call - Kings of Leon

On the Radio – Regina Spektor (great piano player and singer. Not sure how I came across her, or this song, think it could be because of an appearance on the Later Live with Jools Holland. I then really liked a song in 500 Days of Summer that was by her called Us, and I think she also did a song for the Prince Caspian film – slightly odd choice, but I like it when singers/bands’ songs begin to pop up in places and you begin to recognise them just from their voice/style)

On the Rocks - Stornoway

Now I have the word ‘One’ (and one ‘Once’). It’s a bit easier to understand this word’s use in song titles – not only is it just a quantifier, it also means the ‘one and only’, the solitary item/person/place etc. The singular. The single entity. The first of all. I could go on… and that’s not even mentioning the sickening use of ‘The One’ to mean someone’s so-called ‘soul mate’; the one person in the entire world of 7 billion that is meant to be with you and just so happens to, “coincidentally”, be in the exact same place and same time as you. Cynical much? Sorry.

Anyway… here are my ‘Once/One’ songs:

Once Around the Block - Badly Drawn Boy

One (Blake’s Got a New Face) - Vampire Weekend (“Blaaaaaaaake’s gt a nw fss” When are these guys releasing a third album?! May have to investigate later…)

One for All - Roy Harper (from Sun It Rises album)

One Love - Bob Marley (probably the best ‘One’ song)

One of Us - ABBA (I do love me some ABBA. I watched Mamma Mia once again recently and every time it reminds me how brilliant they were – so many thoroughly good songs! Though this is probably a weaker one to be fair)

Right. That’s it. And that is actually it for ‘O’. The only songs I have left are Ooh La La - Faces, Operation - Jamie T, Out of Tune - Real Estate (recently purchased both their albums – mellow but great), Over and Over Again - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Oxford Comma - Vampire Weekend.

So hopefully it won’t be long before I’m back chattering on about the songs I have that start with ‘P’ words.

BYE

L x

Sappy video, but: “On the radio, uh-oh!” Oh yes: