Category Archives: Music

I’m here to either remind you or educate you about the 1992 Annie Lennox album, “Diva.”

Somewhere in all of the hubbub I had forgotten about the whole album. “Walking On Broken Glass” is in my “Favorites!” playlist and gets heard fairly often. But for reasons which aren’t relevant here, I ended up playing the entire album again.

Damn, it’s just such an excellent freakin’ album.

I’m going to listen to it again right now, just because I can. But I’m also going to put it on my phone in its entirety. There are a couple of potential cross-country flights coming up next month and “Diva” would be wonderful to listen to with headphones, eyes closed, no distractions…

(Why I can only spare the time to listen to it “properly” like this if I’m locked inside a titanium and aluminum tube at 35,000 feet is a different discussion.)

TFW it’s been a loooong week in a looooooger month and you’re so tired that you can’t even remember what punctuation is let alone how to use it properly and you’re listing to some cool tunes trying to think of something to write about and you suddenly get Taylor Swift song popping up in your “favorites” playlist.

Taylor Swift? Really?

This particular song didn’t suck too terribly, but seriously, can she sing about a single subject other than teen romance angst? We get it – men are pigs! We’re trying to become less boorish, more civilized. We understand that we’re doing a piss-poor job of it.

Thank goodness the next track was from Alanis Morissette. There are a couple of polar opposites for you!

That young Alanis was a seriously pissed-off human.

Sometimes when building toward detonation in a 2-D or 3-D world, it’s important to remember than we are in fact N-Dimensional creatures.

We don’t think that way, we don’t act that way, we don’t generally recognize the power that it gives us. But when we do, it can be a critical tactical move.

So tonight I started listening to “Hamilton,” which I’ve wanted to do for close to a year. Like I’ve had two hours plus to spare in the past year. But that doesn’t mean I can’t listen to the first twenty-five minutes.

Good choice.

Fascinating.

As one who has on occasion attempted to find rhyme and scansion in words coming out of my brain, I have a great deal of admiration that those that can do the strange and unusual with that art form.

One classic example just ran across my SiriusXM feed – “Nemesis” by Shriekback. Anyone who can use “parthenogenesis” in the chorus and make it not just fit, but fit well, is hitting on all cylinders.

A similar gem from the country music gengre is Luke Bryan’s “Country Man.” The use of “Hoobastank” is not only good for a double word score, but its context in a country song is priceless. The fact that it’s a really funny sounding word is gravy.

Any other suggestions for this highly specialized genre?

“Running On Empty” – yep, that’s about it. I remember listening to that song and knowing EXACTLY how it felt, back when I was in college, taking a full load of courses as a physics major and working a full-time graveyard shift job to pay for it, plus a second part-time job in the summers.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. But now, while my brain might still think I’m twenty years old, my cells aren’t always jumping onto that particular bandwagon.

It’s not fair.

On the other hand, Jackson Browne also wrote “The Load Out,” so that can make everything better real fast.