Day 277: Well, we have made it to July and we are now 3/4 of the way through this project. I am a bit shocked to realize that today is the first day that I have featured a song from one of my favorite albums of the 1990s and one of my favorite female-led acts. The act is the Boston band the Throwing Muses and the album is "The Real Ramona." I guess I have never really thought too hard about my all-time Top 10 albums, but I think that this one would make the cut. Top to bottom, it is just spectacular. So I would like open this, my chapter in which I pay tribute to my favorite female acts, with the song "Counting Backwards" the first track and first single from this great album. It is just a fun little pop song, but it captures that Throwing Muses feel perfectly. 3,2,1...
07/05/2015
Day 278: When I think of 80s bad-ass women, the first one that comes to mind is Pat Benatar. And when I think of Pat Benatar, the first song that comes to mind is today's track, "Love is a Battlefield." I had actually forgotten about the epic music video that tells the story of a young women who gets kicked out of her house and later as a dancer in a club leads a rebellion in which her and the other girls intimidate a pimp by dancing angrily. Because, that's how you made music videos back in 1983. But, you know that deep down inside, we all wish that more of the worlds problem's could be solved with a simple dance battle.
07/06/2015
Day 279: Back in February I mentioned a song by Heather Nova about comforting a loved one. But, the singer songwriter has a bit of an edge to her from time to time as well. Today's song, "Sugar" seems to tell the story of a young woman who meets a man and gets knocked up. I must admit that I am not 100% sure of the message that she is trying to convey exactly (does she want to get an abortion, but needs her mother's permission?), but there is just this defiant, dark, rockin' edge to the song that has always made it one of my favorites. If you give this one a chance, I think that you will find that it is a pretty sweet little song.
07/07/2015
Day 280: Not everyone might like my take on today's artist, but there is something that I need to get off my chest: the world owes Sinead O'Connor an apology. It all seems like ages ago, but back in 1992 O'Connor was made infamous by tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on SNL. The whole incident (which I felt was "impolite" but not much worse than that, as I am not catholic) was quite the kerfuffle, O'Connor was vilified for quite some time, and their were even incidents of mass demolitions of piles of her 1990 album "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got." If nothing else, that was quite a shame, because in all honesty, the album is one of the best in the whole decade of the 90s. But, the point that was missing in all of this was the reason that Sinead tore up the photo in the first place. It was not so clearly discussed at the time, but it is rather clear now that she did it as an act of protest due to the rumors of child abuse within the catholic church, abuse that she herself may have been a victim of in her youth. Years later, of course, the whole issue made international news. But we were all warned on that one Saturday evening so many years ago, whether we knew it or not. She was trying to tell the world something, and we were all not ready to listen. At the end of the day, she was right, and an awful lot of people were wrong. For that, we should all be sorry. So, it that spirit, I wanted to highlight perhaps my favorite songs from that great Sinead O'Connor album, the chillingly beautiful, "Black Boys On Mopeds." The song is a harsh reminder that the world is still not a perfect place: "These are dangerous days. To say what you feel is to dig your own grave." Perhaps that is a bit over the top, but the subject matter is sadly as applicable today as it was 25 years ago. I guess we all still need to listen a little more in order to make the world a better place.
07/08/2015
Day 281: Pat Benatar was the clearly the bad-ass diva of the 80s, but when you were in the mood for something a bit more quirky, you could always turn to Cyndi Lauper. But the ironic thing is, Cyndi Lauper may seem like just a weirdo with pink hair that sang about girls having fun, but in reality she is a *really* good song-writer. Case in point is today's song, the classic "Time After Time." If anything, I think this love song has gotten better with age: "Sometimes you picture me - I'm walking too far ahead. You're calling to me, I can't hear what you've said - then you say - go slow - I fall behind - The second hand unwinds. If you're lost you can look - and you will find me. Time after time. If you fall I will catch you - I'll be waiting. Time after time." That imagery is just amazing. The idea of your loved one being just out of earshot, almost as though they are slipping away... yet in the end if you feel lost or if you feel like you are going to fall, you *know* that they will be there for you. Isn't that all that we really want? The song is flat out brilliant. Now, on a more personal note, I will always on some level associate this song with a certain Friday night at MSU where our rag-tag College Bowl team (the college version of quiz bowl) pulled an all nighter writing questions for the pop-culture tournament that we were hosting the next day. At some point we wrote a bonus question involving stringing together song and book titles. In this case, our answer was "Time After (a) Time To Kill," and the only words that we could think of to describe the song was a Cyndi Lauper song about "love and loss." We liked the phrase so much that every question in the category became a song about "love and loss," whether or not the song was actually about that or not. Like most things, at 4 AM, it was pretty hilarious.
07/09/2015
Day 282: You might know this already about me, but I think that singer-songwriter Dar Williams is pretty cool. The first time that I remember hearing her music was during the summer of 1996 while I was an intern at Dart Container in Mason, MI working in the paint lab and commuting back and forth to Mom and Dad's house. During that time, today's song, "As Cool as I Am" was in heavy rotation on the Impact. One of my co-workers at Dart at the time was a fairly new graduate and we talked quite a bit about new music. He actually bought the CD ("Mortal City") during that summer, but gave it a pretty lukewarm review, so it wasn't until several years later that I rediscovered Williams and found out how good that 1996 album actually is. As for today's song, it is just a great folk-rock break-up song with an awesome didgeridoo part and lyrics such as, "And so I'm leaving, you can find out how much better things can get, And if it helps, I'd say I feel a little worse than I did when we met." Cool. Very cool.
07/10/2015
Day 283: In a chapter about influential female musicians, I would be hard pressed not to mention the folk-rock power house that is The Indigo Girls. I can't say that they are my favorite act or anything, but their musicality and harmonies are really hard to beat. I could probably mentioned a dozen songs of theirs in this slot (Galileo, Closer to Fine, Least Complicated, Joking...), but today I thought I would go with my of my dark horse favorites of theirs, "Trouble" form the 1999 album "Come On Now Social." I just love the way the vocals blend with the mandolin and guitar in this number. Everything just fits together perfectly, and if nothing else, I thought it would be fun to highlight another Hidden Gem. It ain't no trouble.
07/11/2015
Day 284: Today I would like to feature a song about menstruation. Yes, you can feel free to re-read that sentence again if you need to. The song is "Blood In The Boardroom," a little-know angry little folk-rock from Ani DiFranco's 1993 album "Puddle Dive." The song paints a picture of a women attending a high power meeting in which she is the only woman and her "period came early, but it's not a minute too soon." The song just has a lot of really thought provoking commentary on the roles of men and women in society, through the eyes of a very strong women, and to the tune of a totally bad-ass, angry acoustic guitar. It has another one of my favorite lines, "It ain't no hassle, no, it ain't no mess. Right now it's the only power that I possess. These businessmen got the money, they got the instruments of death. But I can make life, I can make breath." I just love the power of those words.
07/12/2015
Day 285: Back in my chapter on covers, I almost featured a song from the pseudo-Christian band Sixpence None The Richer. In 1997, the band went for a more mainstream sound with their self-titled album that featured the single "Kiss Me" as well as the cover of the La's song "There She Goes" that I featured back in April. For me, my favorite song by this band is today's track "I Can't Catch You." One thing that I have found throughout this project that sometimes it is tough to point out exactly why I think a particular song, but in this case there is just a beautiful interplay between the guitar chords and lead singer Leigh Nash's vocals in the chorus. She may not have been able to catch the person she is chasing in the song, but the vibe of this song sure caught me.
07/13/2015
Day 286: Suzanne Vega is yet another female singer-songwriter that I have yet to feature in this project. You probably know her from songs like "Luka" or "Tom's Diner" or maybe even "Blood Makes Noise," but for today's song, I thought that I would go with one of her earlier tracks, "Left of Center," which is actually off from the 1986 soundtrack to the John Hughs film "Pretty in Pink." The song itself is complex, but in a simple way, with several lines of similar, but not the same lyrics about essentially being an outsider: "I think they know that, I'm looking at them. I think they think I must be out of touch." All-in-all, it is not surprising that John Hughs decided to use this number in his film.
07/14/2015
Day 287: Back in the early 90s, I was a pretty big fan of some of the British shoegazer subgenre of alternative music. One of my favorite acts of that bent was the band Lush. Their first two albums, especially featured this other-worldly sound that combined a wall-of-sound, loud guitar with a pair of high, angelic voices that arose from singers Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson. I believe the first sound I ever heard form them was today's sound "Sweetness And Light," from the 1990 album "Gala" which I am sure that I first discovered on 120 Minutes. I recall standing one day in early high school in a Wherehouse Records store in East Lansing holding the cassette tape, debating with myself if I actually wanted to pull the trigger on the album or not. As I stood there, the guys behind the counter coincidentally decided to play the album on the store sound system. When I heard the first few chords of today's song (Track 1), I knew that it was meant to be.
07/15/2015
Day 288: The first female artist that I featured in this project was way back on Day 7, and that artist was Tori Amos. So, as I close this my chapter devoted to some of my favorite female artists, I thought that I would close it with perhaps my favorite Tori Amos song, "Cornflake Girl," from the very good 1994 album, "Under The Pink." The song just has this masterfully intense feel despite the majority of the instrumentation being simply piano. But, when it comes down to it, that it is the beauty of most of Tori Amos' music. She is consistently able to bottle lightning with her intense vocals and flat out bad-ass piano playing. I don't know about you, but for me that combination is part of this complete breakfast.
The women in my life have always been pretty important to me. Two years and 364 days ago, a new little lady entered my life, and it is safe to say that Jen's and my life have never been the same since. So tomorrow, I would like to open a new chapter as a tribute to some of the younger crowd in my life. Starting tomorrow, things are going to get a bit juvenile!
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