L’esprit d’escalier

First of all, have you gone and voted for Ian Gibson’s Stuff of Legends yet?  No?  Shoo!  Gogogo!  Today’s the last day.

Next, there’s a rant forthcoming on a big bookseller DOIN IT WRONG, but I’m in a good mood today, so instead I will share awesomeness rather than working myself up to the point where I’m foaming at the mouth.

I’ve had a Jonathan Coulton song in my head all morning, and because it makes me grin and sniffle at the same time, I thought I’d share.  Fellsie linked “I’m Your Moon” to me originally, and I heard it without accompanying video.  The conversation, as I listened to the first verse and the chorus, went something like this:

me: …is this about Pluto? Fells: It is. And how awesome is it. me: SO AWESOME Fells: I knoooow me: omg geek music ftw
It is the sweetest song about the de-planeting of Pluto you’ll ever hear (I don’t care if it might be the only song about the de-planeting of Pluto.  Shut up.)

There is also a very cool fan video of it up on the site, which I now embed for your viewing pleasure.

This thread is officially about geeky songs.  Share away!

Torteya has a post on songs you blow out your voice to, usually in the car.  Rather than clutter up his comments with youtube links, I figured I’d treat you to some of mine.

Every now and then, work sends me somewhere within driving distance — a conference, a trade show, the occasional face-to-face sales call.  I actually prefer these to the ones further away that require me to get on a plane.  You’d never know it by how often I make Greg drive, but I actually don’t mind solo car trips.  I take my time getting where I’m going, I bring music I love, and I just kind of… go.

Road trips with other people are all kinds of fun, too, don’t get me wrong.  But in addition to singing until I’m hoarse, when I’m by myself I’ll also take a long stretch of highway to work out a scene in a story I’m writing.  Yep, I’m the chick behind the wheel in the next car over talking to herself, working out beats in dialogue to make sure it doesn’t sound awkward or ring false.  I do it in my head on the walk from work to the train station, too, but, well, you start talking to yourself out loud where others can hear you, even in Boston, you get funny looks.

But!  The weird shit I do for writing is another post for another time.  This one’s about the songs most likely to leave me voiceless when I get to my destination.

First, “Anna Begins.”

The song has this slow build, from low, stilted, and insistent to the higher, drawn out “her kindness bangs a gong/ it’s moving me along/ and Anna begins to fade away.”  I’ve always, always loved this song, from my first listen of August and Everything After.  There is only one Crows song that tops it, and that’ll be on this list, don’t you worry.

Funny thing about “Anna Begins.”  The name makes it sound like an obvious choice for the playlist for one of my WoW characters, Annalea, but I didn’t think of it as an Anna-song for a long time.  I do now, and finally caved and added it to her list.  I’m still not sure if in-game events made it hers, or if it’s always been hers and has always informed the character and I’ve just been denying it.

Next.  “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues.”

Something you might not know if you didn’t spend way too much time on Counting Crows message boards once upon a time (though this may be more common knowledge now, ten-plus years since Recovering the Satellites was released):  there’s a kind of unofficial trilogy comprised of “Anna Begins,” “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues,” and “Margery.”  I can’t seem to find “Margery” on youtube, so you’ll have to live with the lyrics for now.  The version from Flying Demos is a weird cross of pop and country and not at all the version I’d want you to hear.  For one thing, Adam’s voice is way too reedy in it.  Should you go looking, find the version from Sleeping in a Perfect Blue from August of ’94.  Or ask me.

Anyway, the connection is in “Margery,” here:

I looked up at Anna
She turned back to look at me
It’s best to kill the ones that matter
Render blind the ones who see

But oh, Margery
Takes the blade and walks away from me

Those lines give me chills every time.

I’d guess that a good part of my love for “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues” is, aside from wailing along with the ba-da, ba-da-da at the end, the song’s story refers to a play by one of my favorite playwrights — Sam Shepard’s “Geography of a Horsedreamer.”  I’d love to see it onstage.  There’s a man who can dream the outcomes of horse races, but (and it’s been years since I’ve read it, so forgive any inaccuracy in the summary) the bookie? mob boss? he’s been working for has pretty much drained him of any joy he took from it, keeping him locked in a room and demanding the dreams all the time.  By the time the play starts, he can barely even dream about the horses; the best he can do is predict the dog races.

Time to dig that off of my bookshelf and add it to the reread pile.

Onward, then, to my all-time favorite Counting Crows song, forever and ever:  “A Murder of One.”

There are at least six versions of this in my mp3 folder, plus uncounted ones on bootlegs I have yet to rip.  No two are quite the same.  The band tends to take out the “I’ve walked along these hillsides” lines in concert and add in any number of other things, all of which give the song a slightly different meaning.  And there is not one of them I hate.

I do, however, have a favorite, and the only version of it I have is on a cassette tape that cuts off at the end of the song.  My mom and I went to see them in October of 1999, and… oh my god.

If you listen, at about 4:38-4:39 mark, there’s this little riff.  Three notes you might not even really pay all that much attention to.  I don’t have my guitar available, and I’m awful with picking things out by ear so far, so I couldn’t tell you the notes (Torteya, halp!), but they are, in most versions of the song, just a neat little thing going on in the background.

In the show we saw, they became so much more.  From the lyrics to the Sordid Humor song, “Doris Day,” then softly, so softly, that little riff became melody.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry now.  I’m sorry, sorry now.”  Which, here you go, from 2007:

Five minutes in, they go into “Doris Day,” then the “I’m sorry,” but not with that same melody.  Hell, I’ve never heard it the way they played it in 1999 ever again, not even in a bootleg of a show they put on two days after the one I saw.  Most of the time the sorries are nearly screamed.  But that one time, that tiny little bit of melody.  Ohgodperfection.

If I ever manage to get that version off of the cassette and onto a CD, my vocal cords are doomed.

“The Mariner’s Revenge Song” is fucking awesome.

Decemberists tickets. I has them.

Just a bit of housekeeping today. Updated a few links over there on the side that I kept reminding myself to put up, and promptly kept forgetting to do.

I haven’t been up to anything terribly interesting. Garden’s still alive (but not doing science). There are more tomatoes, since my mother grew some from seeds and more of them sprouted than she’d expected. The great part of having your mom live ten minutes away? “Here, I don’t have room for these in my garden. Also, I’m pulling up my broccoli tomorrow because the deer and rabbits are eating it. Can I put it in here?”

A couple of the tomato plants have these tiny little tomatoes-to-be growing. They’re round and green and will hopefully someday taste awesome. A few summers ago, I happened to stop by my parents’ house when my mother was trying her hand at fried green tomatoes, fresh from the garden. (On occasion, I have awesome timing.) They came out really good. So, hopefully in a couple of weeks, I’ll be trying my hand at my own.

I submitted “Kate” to Strange Horizons on July 1st. Probably won’t hear anything until September. Cross your fingers for me.

I opened up “Running” and stared at Lil for a while last weekend, and she stared back at me. I have some better ideas of where the story is going for her, but I’m not quite ready to go back to it yet.

Also, I snagged tickets for Great Big Sea in October! /squeeeeee

Apparently, we weren’t the only ones who had to attend a wedding last weekend. Von went to one too (duuuude, like, synchronicity…), and it turns out her thoughts on wedding music are very close to the ones I was having last Saturday.

Says Von:

The music was really really bad after a very promising start. The happy couple’s first dance was a beautiful song from Rob Thomas that I’d never heard before. After that it was all “Celebration” and “We are family” and blah blah blah. Just plain BAD. I hate that.

Our wedding was one of those package deals: the venue where the reception was held took care of everything but the photographer. So when we went to the company they worked with for DJs, we had very specific ideas in mind. There were several tapes of their DJs, and I watched the first few in horror.

I understand that you want someone playing lively music, who will keep up the guests’ energy throughout the night, but there were several of these guys who went beyond that. When your DJ is out on the floor whooping it up with the guests, and breaking out a box of sombreros and feather boas, he’s stolen the show. Now, I’m not that big on being in the spotlight, but goddammit, it was my wedding, and I wasn’t about to take a backseat to some loud guy with a microphone and maracas.

The last tape was of a guy in his late 40s, just… playing music. He announced the bride and groom without yukking it up, he reined everyone in for the cake cutting without being a dick, and seemed pretty all-around unobtrusive. I’m not sure why he was at the bottom of the video pile – up until we popped his tape in, I was feeling more and more dejected, figuring we’d have to re-watch all of the previous DJs to see which one was the least obnoxious. Then there’s Eddie and I nearly leapt out of my seat going “OMG YES. THIS. THIS ONE. BOOK HIM NOW.”

When we met with him a week or two later, he had this big folder with all the songs in his repertoire. You could see the first few pages were lists of the ones that got played all the time. As soon as we got started, we declared that that shit was right out. No “Celebration.” No “We Are Family.” No “Old Time Rock and Roll,” no “December ’63,” and dear sweet zombie Jesus, NO CHICKEN DANCE.*

He lit up. Well, he lit up as much as a low-key, very laid back kind of DJ can. I’m guessing it had been a while since he’d been able to actually play different music at a wedding. Sometimes it feels like the DJ can just pop in a CD of typical wedding songs and then zone out for the next four hours. No way in hell was I going to have that.

Now, I have a feeling this post is going to be one of those foot-in-mouth moments, where one of you will be all “Gee, thanks, falconesse. All those songs you’re snobbing it up over were played at my wedding.” Let me state for the record: I’m not out to insult anyone. I will not love you any less if you rocked out to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” I just don’t like the idea that the guy I’m paying several hundred dollars to entertain the guests can put in a CD of Stuff We Play Every Frickin’ Night and then essentially go afk. Okay? Okay.

So, yes. The wedding Greg and I went to last weekend was much the same as the one Von attended, only with a live band.

I am also likely kind of bitter. I’m guessing this song came back into wedding popularity with There’s Something About Mary – I know I’ve heard it as the exit-music song at just about every wedding I’ve attended since the movie released. I have been unable to get “Build Me Up Buttercup” out of my head for the last FIVE GORRAM DAYS.

*We had to allow the Electric Slide, which broke me a little, but Greg digs it, so, y’know. Marriage and compromise and all that.

The Decemberists have canceled the rest of their tour.

Fuck.

I’m a sad bunny.

Or I will be.

The Decemberists are coming to Boston.

November 3rd and 4th, a Saturday and a Sunday.  The Orpheum Theatre.  I almost deleted the Ticketmaster spam this morning, but then I thought “what the heck,” and scrolled through to see who’s in town.

Now I just have to find someone to come with me.