[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMYOUeknzMwOnce December comes round, I take my Christmas CDs down from the shelves and delve in. One More Drifter in the Snow by Aimee Mann is a firm favorite, and I can listen to it for hours (preferably while baking cookies, but doing some other works is just fine as well). Calling on Mary is…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ0L7O_khbsI have very mixed feelings about Suzanne Vega. When I was at university, for six months I lived next door to this very nice girl named JoAnn, who loved listening to music. Really loved it. Did I mention the walls were thin? Her favorite albums were Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing and Tracy Chapman’s Tracy Chapman….
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGinwDu0L8This song is what I call an insidious earworm: It sticks to the back of your mind even after you’ve just heard the first few notes, and doesn’t leave you for days. I don’t even particularly like this song. I understand it’s emotionally charged with memories of 09/11 for many, and for that reason I…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoWcgP7SUD4For me, Marianne Faithfull is a true “mood” musician. Sometimes, I don’t listen to her for months, next I take an album of hers and listen to it non-stop.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-7Vu7cqB20Although I only watched the competitions now and then, I enjoyed the Olympic Games in London hugely. By all accounts, they were especially happy and friendly, and I think you could sense that even from the TV screens.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PTJHhUeAfcI’ve been listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run a lot recently, and the song Jungleland is the one that has stuck with me the most. I love the way the different melodies and instruments are weaved together, and the urgency of Springsteen’s voice as he delivers it. Unfortunately it’s too complicated for me to…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPIA7mpm1wU
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0v7e3e7toURecently I asked a group of seventeen-year-olds whether any of them had ever heard of Tom Petty. They just stared at me.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJdgSRzv8wEThis is one of the songs about which I can’t really explain why they stick to my brain the way they do. It’s incredibly ’80s in the almost negligent way it’s presented. I still haven’t figured out what it’s about. I don’t know any other songs by Tanita Tikaram.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0c7MPgKm54Times Square is not an earworm for me in the sense that I sing it myself all day long, instead I press the “repeat button” and listen to it five times in a row or more. I discovered Marianne Faithfull as a performer in the 1990s through a track sung on a compilation of Kurt…
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