We We We? Yes, Yes, Yes.

We Will Not Be Lovers by The Waterboys (taken from The Live Adventures of the Waterboys)

Right, it’s 10pm on a Monday night – time to bash out a post. It’s a good thing there ain’t no good TV on a Monday night any more, because having (usually rare) busy Sundays means I’m leaving writing posts until now.

I thought that after ‘Wait’ and ‘Walk’ I might get onto the ‘Wh-’ question words, but nope, I gots me a whole lotta ‘We’ to get through first.

I think I’ve talked about the use of plural first person pronouns before, right? Well, even if I hadn’t, they’re kind of self-explanatory – they not only include the speaker but also the person they’re speaking to (there must be a more technical/English languagey term for that, but I can’t be bothered to check… the ‘speak-ee’, if you will) and often, everyone else too.

Songs are often focussing on a relationship between two (or sometimes three) people – the singer/writer and someone else. But a lot of the time you get songs that are using the word in a more universal sense – ‘We’ can be all-encompassing, meaning ‘The People’, ‘The World’, everyone. I think I’ve talked about this idea before, possible just with ‘Every’ and ‘All’, but maybe somewhere else with a pronoun or… something. It alludes me at present, but feel free to traipse through all my previous posts. *Waits*

OK. Here ‘We’ are (brace yourself, there’s quite a few):

We Are Ghosts – James Vincent McMorrow (I have two versions of this actually; the other one’s an acoustic version which came with the limited edition album)

We Are the Battery Human – Stornoway (ah, lovely Stornoway. Only question is – when will there be a new album?!)

We Are the People – Empire of the Sun (talked about them briefly in my previous post)

We Built This City - Starship (*cough* Rock of Ages *cough*)

We Can Work It Out – The Beatles (this and Hello Goodbye are my favourite of the more ‘simple’ Beatles songs)

We Don’t Eat – James Vincent McMorrow

We Used to Vacation - Cold War Kids (from the album Robbers & Cowards that was initially culled from my old iPod due to memory shortage, but has made the cut on the new iPod. Not completely sure of it, though; it’s not thrilling.)

We Will Not Be Lovers – The Waterboys (from the live album and great because of the intro Mike Scott does at the beginning – “Mussus Tatcha”)

We’re Away - Elbow (from The Seldom Seen Kid. Not really into Elbow, though. Bit of a mistake buying the album, but never mind.)

We’re Not Gonna Take It – Twisted Sister (the Rock of Ages soundtrack is doing its best to embarrass me tonight…)

That be it. I don’t know why I felt the need to comment on nearly all of them. It made this post even more unnecessarily long.

I think there are probably a million more ‘We’ songs, so I won’t even mention any of the more famous ones here, you can just think of them yourselves. I’m so NOT avoiding mentioning any more because I can’t think of any others apart from the Ke$ha song We R Who We R right now, oh no sir-ee…

Right, bed time.

L x

You can hear the live version I was talking about of the Waterboy’s We Will Not Be Lovers here:

Take This

This Is the Sea by The Waterboys

Hello. I’m onto the letter ‘T’ and the first word I get to is ‘Take’.

‘Take’ can be a bit of an aggressive verb; not quite stealing, but almost. You can take someone’s heart away, for example. Although saying that, you can also ‘take care’ of someone, which is the opposite of aggression. Interesting… I suppose it just depends what you’re taking as to whether it’s seen as a positive or negative action.

Anyway, enough of this pointless chit-chat, the ‘Take’ songs are:

Take a Chance On Me - ABBA (no need to explain this, I don’t think)

Take the Right One – Bombay Bicycle Club (I’ve only discovered a love for Bombay Bicycle Club quite recently. I already had their song Shuffle from their latest album - A Different Kind of Fix, and really liked it, but I had never really paid attention to their previous work. It was only when I was in HMV on one of my trips that I saw their first two albums I Had the Blues but I Shook Them Loose and Flaws for two for £10, so decided to buy them on the basis of Shuffle. After a few repeated listens I wasn’t disappointed, so recently bought the whole of A Different Kind of Fix, from which this song is from.)

Take What You Take - Lily Allen (I have her Alright, Still album and have given it a second chance on my new iPod after getting tired of it originally. The songs are all quite ‘fun’.)

That’s that for ‘Take’. But this is this for ‘This’, or something…

This Is the Sea - The Waterboys (from The Live Adventures of the Waterboys which is not the album my mum had on tape back in the old days I don’t think, but it has most of the songs I know from when I was younger. I like the metaphor of this song – “That was the river, this is the sea” – I’ve put the lyrics to one of the verses on my Tumblr blog. Yes, I have a Tumblr now.)

This Land - Hans Zimmer (instrumental piece from The Lion King soundtrack. Makes me cry almost instantly when I hear it – seems to be one of those triggers that brings back childhood emotions almost subconsciously… yay for being a sentimental Disney child.)

This Love (Will Be Your Downfall)  – Ellie Goulding

This Old Dark Machine - James Vincent McMorrow (had heard of him before, think my sister Kath has some of his songs, and then found out he sang the version of Higher Love on the LoveFilm advert. Then followed him on Twitter, found a version of Wicked Game by him too, and then decided to buy his album when I saw it in HMV again. It’s fairly decent, but think I need to give it a bit more time to build.)

This Old Routine - First Aid Kit (from their second album, which is proving to be really good, though not quite near the first one yet. The song In the Hearts of Men, the third track on this album, is wonderful though.)

This Song - Badly Drawn Boy

This Year’s Love - David Gray (sappy, but lovely, though I need to ration my listening)

I’m not going to talk about ‘This’ much – it’s just a pronoun and one that indicates near presence, rather than far, like ‘That’. And that’ll be it.

See you next ‘Time’ *heavy wink*.

L x

The Waterboys perform This Is the Sea live on The Old Grey Whistle Test:

Oh Old Oliver

Oh Mandy by The Spinto Band

No repeat of before – I’m posting again sharpish.

This post will mostly be focusing on the letter ‘Oh’, ‘Old’ and ‘Oliver’. Well it will be completely focusing on that, but y’know, turn of phrase, Fast Show etc.

So, ‘Oh’. Like ‘No’ I don’t really know what this word would be categorised as – just an ‘exclamation’? Let’s see what the dictionary says, hold on… *goes and looks at Dictionary.com* OK, apparently it’s an interjection or noun. All right then. Anyway, I suppose in song titles it’s mostly a way of expressing either loveliness, sadness or exasperation – I think that covers all bases right?

I then have ‘Old’ songs. There isn’t much to say here really is there? It’s just an adjective relating to the age of something, and it appears in around the same quantity as ‘New’ too, so obviously artists like to write about both fresh, spanking new ideas as well as the aged, wise or experienced.

Finally, I have ‘Oliver’. This is a bit of a cheat because I only have two songs and one is a song from another Disney favourite of mine, Oliver and Company, that is listed under ‘Oliver’ rather than the song title. But I felt I had to include it because I really like the name. It’s probably just because I have known some nice Olivers in the past and it has pleasing sounds – L, V, I O – the best letters, obviously… Plus it also gives me the chance to list a Fleet Foxes song.

So, here we are:

Oh Creole - The Rumble Strips

Oh Mandy - The Spinto Band (from the album Nice and Nicely Done I bought back in high school, but then randomly used on a coffee advert at one point later I think. I also used it as my ringtone on my old phone and then my sister Jess still used it once she had my  the phone, so the beginning of it just makes me think of a phone ringing. Riveting story, I know)

Old England - The Waterboys

Old Man on the Mountain - PG Six (from the Sun It Rises album curated by Robin Pecknold and given away with Uncut magazine)

Old Time Rock & Roll - Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (used famously in Risky Business. Awesome)

Oliver and Company – Street Smarts - Billy Joel (I’ve just looked this up and it seems to usually be called Why Should I Worry? actually, don’t know why the copy I have is called Street Smarts but there you go. Anyway, this is a brilliant, brilliant song. I love 80s/90s Disney. They got songs so right and this is one of them. There are so many great songs in this film too – Once Upon a Time in New York City, Streets of Gold and Good Company (I cry if I hear this, no joke). Fan-frickin’-tastic.)

Oliver James - Fleet Foxes (a great Fleet Foxes song, but there is no bad Fleet Foxes song in my eyes)

I think I will have ‘One’ more post for ‘O’ *heavy wink*, so see you ol’ pals next time.

Love,

L x

It was a tough call for this one – do I go FF, Street Smarts or Old Time Rock & Roll? Play on to find out.