It’s the Final Countdown!

40 Day Dream by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros (from Up from Below)

(Thanks to Anna for the PERFECT title for this post.)

Try to hold back the tears, but this is the last post in the alphabet-countdown. I don’t know if this is the end-end of the whole Musicalexis blog, but certainly in terms of looking at words that start song titles in alphabetical order. Quite neatly in fact, it will be nearly one year exactly since I kicked this thing off with my first post on ‘A’.

I am sad that it is the end, and unfortunately I really have the urge to quote this:

And now, the end is here,
And so I face the final curtain

And also this:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end.

OK, enough of that. Let’s get down to the matter in hand – the three ‘Z’ songs and seven number songs that round out my list:

Zebra – Beach House (this is a nice song, and lots of people seem to rave about Beach House, but the other songs I’ve heard of theirs don’t seem that great, so I haven’t bothered to buy any more)

Zoo Time – Mystery Jets

Zorbing – Stornoway (the song that started the love)

Now for numbers, which Apple iPods like to list at the end of the alphabet, not the beginning as you’d usually expect:

1 in 10 – UB40

4th Dimensional Transition – MGMT

17 – Kings of Leon (awesomeness)

19th Nervous Breakdown – The Rolling Stones

40 Day Dream – Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros (the single that made me want to buy Up from Below and I actually bought their second album Here the other week. Buying it was a bit of a risk because, although I really like Up from Below, I hadn’t heard any of their new stuff so didn’t know if it would be in a similar vein, or completely different. Luckily it is still in the style of the first album, but not similar enough to be too samey-samey and boring. I recently learnt that there is actually no Edward Sharpe at all, it’s just a name for the band – just a nice little factoid for you there…)

78 Stone Wobble – Gomez

1234 – Feist (lovely song which was used in an Apple advert once. I already had Feist’s Mushaboom (an even better song) before that advert came about actually, so was already aware of her before this one. I should properly look into more of her work as I like both of these songs and I’m sure she has a lot of albums to explore).

And that is that. Finito. End of. It’s a shame that this idea didn’t develop the way I’d envisaged – in my optimistic naïvety I had thought people would contribute to this list and it would become more of a discussion of popular words in song titles, instead of just me indulging my ramble-mode and boring anyone who accidentally finds this blog. But, hey, I tried, and I enjoyed the process of writing anyway. I am thinking of ways to keep this blog going, though I have been leaning towards writing about something completely different (not even music-related) but then my whole ‘Musicalexis’ theme would fall down, so I think I will keep this blog for music-related rambles and perhaps start another one?! Although, going on the success of this one, I’m not sure that’s a good idea… Oh, I don’t know. I’ll just say, goodbye for now, but hopefully not goodbye forever. I’ll just take a sabbatical from this blog for a while, while I try to figure out what I’m doing with it, and the rest of my life in general.

Take care all and MASSIVE thanks to the few who have actually read some of this blog, you’re dolls.

Adios,

L x

Leaving you with this treat, 40 Day Dream (if you skip forward to 10.08), and the video I mentioned before in my Up post where they appeared to be in a bookshop (it’s actually a workplace I think). They’re a bit of a weird bunch, but the song is great:

All About You

You Really Got Me by The Kinks

It’s time for another train post, how exciting.

I have approximately 2 hours to tell you about ‘You’. Should be enough, though ideally I’ll do it in less because I have a magazine and two Collings and Herrin podcasts to attend to – lots of train material today.

So, ‘You’. After finishing ‘W’ I have X-Ray by the Maccabees, and then Yellow Submarine and Yesterday by The Beatles. Then it’s ‘You’ time. It really ain’t too surprising ‘You’ comes up a lot – writers like to talk directly to people frequently, so using the second person is expected. It also helps that ‘You’ can be singular and plural, so there is more opportunity to use it.

Anyway, there a quite a few to get through, so let’s crack on:

You Ain’t Going Nowhere – Bob Dylan

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet – Bachman-Turner Overdrive (yes, purchase spurred by the Harvey the dog TV ad, but it just reminded me what a good song it already was)

You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon

You Can’t Always Get What You Want – The Rolling Stones

You Can’t Fool Me Dennis – Mystery Jets

You Can’t Hurry Love – Phil Collins and The Supremes (I have both versions because it is THAT good a song…)

You Have Placed a Chill in My Heart – Eurythmics (another artist that comes up ridiculously a lot even though I only have one album by them – admittedly a best of, but still)

You Really Got Me – The Kinks

You Rock My World – Michael Jackson (said it before and I’ll say it again – didn’t like the guy, but you can’t deny some of his songs were good)

You Send Me – Jack Peñate (love Jack, love this old song, perfect combination. Randomly found this online somewhere and was very pleased)

You’ll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties – Jona Lewie & Man Like Me (thanks Ikea)

You’re Gonna Lose Us – The Cribs (not sure I’ve talked about The Cribs before – I used to really like them and have the album Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever, but for some reason I’ve gone off them a lot. I think my taste has just gradually leaned away from their sort of music…)

You’re So Cool – Hans Zimmer (for what felt like years I was trying to find a piece of music that was basically just xylophone/glockenspiel plinky-plonky sounds that was used in loads of films. Then, after much research I found it was this – though I think there are many variations and this isn’t ‘the one’ for definite – which is from the film True Lies)

You’re the Voice – John Farnham (randomly caught some of Hot Rod on TV once and this song is used. Like a lot of adverts, TV and film are prone to do, it reminded me what a great song it is. It’s probably cheese to the max, but I don’t care)

So that was all about ‘You’. I’m not sure writers like to talk as much about ‘You’ as they do themselves (there were about 4 posts on just ‘I’), but it’s still a popular topic. Are there any other famous ‘You’ songs? Probably a ton, but without the internet at the moment I can only think of You and I by the Gaga and You’re the One which must be a song title by loads of people… right?!

Anyway, I will sort out the picture and video when I’m home, now I’ve got an hour left of train journey to endure/enjoy.

Ta ra,

L x

Classic:

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)