Music Lovers

[PopeBeanieModerator]

I hope to keep this topic sacred in terms of presenting only our absolutely favorite music. Your criteria may vary, but the following two are my criteria for my favorites. I’ll try to limit my songs to those satisfying both criteria, but just one criterion my suffice if it’s particularly significant to me:

• Gives me goosebumps and or teary eyes almost every time.
• I can learn something musically deep, technical, or explanatory wrt why I really like it. (Reaction videos help me learn.)

Starting with:

[UnseenParticipant]

Let me start off with a question. Do you want the music or someone else’s reaction to the music?

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Unseen wrote:

Do you want the music or someone else’s reaction to the music?

Either’s fine. I’m just hoping for some explanation of why it’s extra-special to you and consistently at the very top of your list. It can be written by you and/or verbalized by a reactor made available with a link.

(I find it difficult to NOT post a bunch more of my favorite stuff. Long story short, long term mission, I hope we usually post most our favorites elsewhere, posting here only the best of the best, that should interest ten years of newcomers to AZ. I think of some AZ Groups as the most accessible time capsules that we have.)

[UnseenParticipant]

While currently my favorite songs are “23” and “Breathe” by The Warning’s drummer, Pau.

However, long term. the one I keep coming back to is “Here With Me” by Dido.

I confirmed its place in my heart when I played it just now and found myself weeping.

The combination of a great song, a singer with a very special voice, and a genuine cleancut good looks makes, for me, an unforgettable and irresistible experience.

[UnseenParticipant]

Now, I feel I owe you a little more on the song, digging a little deeper.

When I was doing photography of women I invented some categories of beauty and, bizarrely, I can illustrate the three most common ones using the three sisters comprising The Warning. These are the three main types of beauty, then: there is hot, which is Daniela/Dany; cute, which is Paulina/Pau to a T; and gorgeous, which is Alejandra/Ale, the one whose sisters claim coulda been a model.

But there is a fourth category which isn’t easy to explain, though I’ll try. I call it “so beautiful, she’s painful to look at.” A beauty so deep and surpassing it may seem unreal. So, at heart, it’s a feeling the meaning of which is almost captured in the phrase “an indefinable sense of loss.”

Here is the poem named “it may not always be so” by e.e. cummings that may help. It’s a sonnet with a very unusual, though standard (legal) rhyme scheme:

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another’s face your sweet hair lay
in such a silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be-
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face, and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

Those last two italicized lines kind of embody the feeling. An indefinable sense of loss.

Something desirable beyond compare that you might have had, perhaps, but not in this lifetime.

During the mental spacetime that this song occupies when I hear it, Dido is the most beautiful female in the universe with the voice of an angel and an equally angelic presence on the screen. Yeah, maybe Here With Me might have been just another good song had I been blind and never seen the  video.

But in terms of the video, she’s so beautiful she’s painful to look at. I can’t think of a single adjective that describes it, but this phrase may help “a melancholy aching in the soul” as if you have encountered a lover from a prior life who doesn’t recognize you in this one.

Does any of that help?

[unapologeticParticipant]

Hay lady, shut the fuck up and play the dam song.
And you are laghing! I can’t judge it if you keep inserting your idiotic opinion every 5 seconds.
I sometimes sing along with ‘Mad World’ when I’m depressed. So I hate this version.
I might have liked it if I took it as a mad version. But what’s-her-name spun it as silly. She ruined a great song. It’s not comedy idiot.

I strongly recommend that you never post a bloggers version of songs. I am unimpressed with ‘influencer’s‘ opinions. Let us interpret the songs.

[unapologeticParticipant]

Another of my favorites when I’m depressed:

https://youtu.be/kLBaNDQ6Ng8

People ain’t no good.

I can’t find the Mad World vid with the clown.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Spend some time listening to Rory Gallagher and you will be inspired. It could be his heavy blues or something like this, a song that gets me almost every time I hear it (Especially after some good weed).

Just look at the guitar and you will hit the play button 🙂

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@unapologetic – This version?

[unapologeticParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

This version?

Thanks for posting that Reg.

I still don’t like it, but it doesn’t piss me off like the constantly interrupted version did.

 

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

The songs that are reviewed are regularly interrupted to get around copyright laws.

[UnseenParticipant]

Some artists, management, or labels are paranoid about any presentation of the artist/artists work which they can’t control and/or directly monetize.

Rick Beato has pointed out how shortsighted this is.

The Warning has taken the opposite approach to the extent that I’ve seen reactors play a song all the way through and react to it afterward, perhaps playing it a second time to point out things they want to note or discuss.

Reactors and reviewers concerned about blocking take various approaches. Stopping and Starting, playing the video in a window with a transparancy filter applied, defacing the video with their name or logo, as well as playing it in such a reduced size that it can’t be enjoyed as well as the original.

Similarly, as to audio, the stop and start method takes care of that.

But The Warning views any playing of their material as promotional. You don’t find them blocking reviewers or reactors. They spend a good deal of their offstage time promoting themselves with daily life videos, videos answering fan questions for an hour, TV/radio station appearances, etc. A lot of artists should be and probably are learning from their success!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by  Unseen.

[UnseenParticipant]

@ Reg

Rory inspired me to drink a half a bottle of Jameson and do a line of coke.

More seriously, Rory was a monster on guitar, though looking at PB’s conditions, to remind you:

1. Gives (you) goosebumps and or teary eyes almost every time.
2. (You) can learn something musically deep, technical, or explanatory wrt why (you) really like it.

You should probably explain.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

unapologetic wrote:

And you are laghing! I can’t judge it if you keep inserting your idiotic opinion every 5 seconds.

OK, I didn’t predict this. I completely understand where you’re coming from. I would feel the same way sometimes, if I hadn’t watched the original version first. In this case, I’ve heard the Puddles/PMJ version so many times, and love it, that I was ready to hear other points of view on it.

Plus, I already knew that this reactor breaks in, A LOT! But for me, she adds a lot of her POV to my POV, which in this case is very technically oriented wrt singing abilities, shaping sounds, invoking emotions, and so on. I get a lot out of it.

There are many reactors who do NOT interrupt, whom I also like. And I almost forgot to mention, I love the very original version from Donny Darko, too. PMJ, Post Modern Jukebox also produces fantastically creative and fun re-arrangements of well known songs. There usually is something to laugh about, and it’s intentional.

But jeebus @unapologetic, I’m thinking I may need to add trigger warnings now!?

🙂

[unapologeticParticipant]

“1. Gives (you) goosebumps and or teary eyes almost every time.”
I can’t say this gives me goosebumps every time, as I’ve only heard it once.
As teenager I’ve heard the terms ‘Torch Song’ and ‘Torch Singer’ but didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t recognize anything I was familiar with in those terms. And I didn’t care enough to ask anybody. But when I went to see Woody Allen’s movie ‘Annie Hall’ and watched Diane Keaton sing, I was moved.
“Oh, that’s what a torch song is.” I was in love for about 3 minutes.
I don’t remember the name of the song or what it sounded like. I haven’t heard it for about 50 years. It wasn’t music I’m into, but I think it fits this thread.

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