As for example...
You gave me a present
The paper was blue and green
I unwrapped it with pleasure
These are the best shades I've ever seen
You can be my girlfriend
Forever and a day
I never thought I was worth much
Or that anyone would treat me this way
[Chorus]
I'm not
The kind of guy
Who dresses like a king
And a really fine pair of shades
Means everything
And the light that blinds my eyes
Shines from you
It makes me come in the night
It makes me swim with delight
I like this pain
I like this mirror
I like these shades
It's from a German bootleg I picked up eons ago called Funtime, Live Rarities, R.E.M. through the U.S. Years 84-91. That track is a poorly recorded demo from 1984 but it is amazingly gorgeous and I put it on lots of mixes.
If I batted my eyelashes enough would you be willing to upload it to buffistarawk? Or would the thought of an obese 33yo man batting his eyelashes just creep you out too much?
That and a CD-quality version of "Academy Fight Song" were totally worth the price of the CD (which I remember being kind of steep).
CD-quality means the bootleggers had a really nice copy of the Christmas single.
REM does a nice job on AFS, though Buck can never rightly do justice to Roger Miller's frentic riff.
If I batted my eyelashes enough would you be willing to upload it to buffistarawk?
Will do.
CD-quality means the bootleggers had a really nice copy of the Christmas single.
Yep, but that 's not how I know it. They played it live the first time I ever saw them (tina f. "Buffista Music II: Wrath of Chaka Khan" Feb 3, 2005 7:04:02 pm PST)
and I got a bootleg of that show and for many years after it was "my favorite R.E.M. song" (I didn't know it was a cover).
In order to put that song up on buffistarawk, I have to plug lePod into my computer which will mean I will lose my spot in my mega-playlist. I was going to do it anyway, but to close out the weekend - my awesome commute this morning from my apartment door to my desk at work:
lodi - creedence
the legionnaire's lament - decemberists
goldheart mountaintop queen directory - guided by voices
autumn sweater - yo la tengo
the sign - mountain goats
in the devil's territory - sufjan stevens
game shows touch our lives - mountain goats
waiting for a superman - iron & wine
falling out of love at this volume - bright eyes
I bow before the Pod for it has put me in a good mood on a Monday morning.
English muffin:
It's up at buffistarawk (where I see Michele has been putting up a Mountain Goats mix - woot!).
Also, the link in my previous post goes back to when we were all posting the setlists for our first REM shows, and I had just moved to Chicago and was *so* excited about my new roommate and his music collection... ah, the times, they do that wacky changing thing.
Now, to work.
Curses! My surprise is foiled. *g*
I couldn't post the "No Children" triptych I'd promised earlier, because I'd forgotten my Kiki & Herb version was an iTunes protected AAC file. Curses! Look for it on iTunes, and drop the 99 cents if you're a big fan of the song.
So, instead, I posted my pimp-my-band mix, which is called Ab Urbe Condita: An Introduction to the Mountain Goats. (and the Latin (which means "from the founding of the city" and is the Roman equivalent of BC or AD, if you're curious) was inspired by a TMG T-shirt that used the same quote. Darnielle's big into the Latin and the Sanskrit. And the Aztec. Among other things.)
The mix is weighted towards the more recent stuff, and is short on some on the non-relationshippy songs - it doesn't include "Golden Boy," possibly the best song ever written about peanuts, for example. I might tweak it again before Xmas, the way I did with my multiple iterations of the "The Death of Country Music" tape I made in the mid-90s. So, suggestions from the, erm, peanut gallery welcome. Track list in following post(s).
Woo! Michele, I can't wait to listen to your mix. I'm almost totally unfamiliar with the Mountain Goats, but I have a feeling I'll really like them.
Ab Urbe Condita: An Introduction to The Mountain Goats.
1. Mountain Goats Mix CDs - spoken clip from a live show, courtesy of the Live Music Archive.
2. Alpha Incipiens -- The most lo-fi and user-unfriendly track in this mix, so of course I put it first. From 1994's Zopilote Machine, the first (narratively if not, I don't think, chronologically) song about the "Alpha Couple," a husband and wife who can't let go of each other even as they destroy themselves and each other. Bits and pieces of their story appear throughout The Mountain Goats's first five hundred or so records.
3. Grendel's Mother -- from the same record as track 2, despite the very different sound. First-person from the perspective of, yes, Grendel's mother. (There's a reason this is critic catnip, people.)
4. Rules for the Set -- another spoken-word bit. At least a third of the fun of the live shows is John Darnielle's stage patter, so I thought I'd share it.
5. No Children -- from Tallahassee (2003), the album that served as the culmination of the Alpha Couple's story. The song's title is an ironic counterpart, not directly related to its content, as so often happens with Mountain Goats songs. Mean and funny and surprisingly cathartic.
6. Dance Music -- At the Halloween show, Darnielle was dressed as a priest, and introduced this song by saying "This is a song about God's plan for the salvation of humankind. No, really." From The Sunset Tree (2005).
7. Hellhound on My Trail -- Darnielle is also a music critic, writing about anything from Thai pop to death metal to John Prine on his zine-turned-blog, Last Plane to Jakarta. He'll play covers in concert, but this is one of the few he's recorded, from 1996's Nothing for Juice.
8. Going to Port Washington -- In a recent New York show, Darnielle admitted he wrote this song to get to use the name "Throg's Neck Bridge." Part of the "Going to..." series of songs from the first umpty million records, which are all about dreams of escape. This is the sweetest one of the bunch, and the most uncomplicated love song in his canon. Originally appeared on a CD that served as a wedding invitation for a small record label owner - reissued in 1999 on Ghana, one of three rarities-and-B-sides collections.
9. Jenny -- From the last lo-fi album, 2002's All Hail West Texas. A crowd-pleaser of a song about escape and piracy. As a grammar nerd, I love the fact that in concert he always corrects the grammar of the line that begins "We were the one thing..." to "We were the two things..."
10. This Year -- The anthem, if you can call it that, and the single, from The Sunset Tree.
11. My Favorite Things -- Unreleased. If you don't have iTunes, I apologize for the extry banter at the end. Joe! you want this one!
12. Palmcorder Yajna -- From 2004's We Shall All Be Healed. A yajna is a Hindu ritual of sacrifice in which gifts are burned for the Devas. Don't say you didn't learn anything from this exercise.
13. Oceanographer's Choice -- I don't know what the title here has to do with the action of the song, but it's one of my favorites on
Tallahassee.
14. Dilaudid -- Don't listen to this one while driving, I'm just saying. (
Sunset Tree
)
15. Your Belgian Things -- From
We Shall All Be Healed.
Not a song I can talk about, really.
16. You're In Maya -- Unreleased. Maya is another Hindu concept; roughly, it's the world without the spirit: the illusion of a limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. The chorus and I think part of the tune comes from a Gaelic drinking song: the Gaelic means "the milk of the cow is good for the calf." The only explicitly autobiographical song until 2004, and something of a precis for
We Shall All Be Healed
and
The Sunset Tree
, which are inspired by and directly based on Darnielle's life, (continued...)
( continues...) respectively.
17. Up The Wolves -- There are a lot of classically inspired songs in the TMG canon, including at least two directly based on Greek and Latin sources. This one is more allusive, but did inspire the T-shirt for the Sunset Tree tour that in turn inspired the title for this mix.
18. Letter From Belgium -- I had to spend a night in an emergency room for something that turned out not to be an emergency - this song was the perfect soundtrack for that night. (WSABH)
19. Peter's R. Kelly ringtone -- More stage business, and another cover of sorts.
20. See America Right - On Halloween, I was close enough to the stage that Darnielle pointed right at me when he started in on "I was driving down from Tampa..." It's an intense enough moment that I was freaked. (
Tallahassee
)
21. The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton - From All Hail West Texas. One of the best of the 400+ they've recorded, and in this live version it has a majesty that turns out to suit it perfectly. If you know it, he needs you to sing, and when you figure out the end of it, he needs you to holler.
The mix was made to fit on a CD, and so comes with a CD case cover with track listing. The cover illo makes more sense after you've listened to it once through.
And as a PS, there's the live version of "No Children" I mentioned for Tina. There are some great, rocked-up versions of old songs in a few shows from the end of the last tour, presaging the fuller rocking-out they did on this last swing through, but Gmail is just being a pain in my ass, so I didn't post them. Look for recordings of the last tour to get posted to the Live Music Archive starting around Xmas, though, I'm told.
