By Any Memes Possible

Total volume of music files on my computer?
11.8 gb. The advent of 56k brought the low number. If, in a parallel world, I still lived with my parents and their glorious broadband, ridiculous amount of information would once again be stored on my computer. (Wait. Is that just a new way of saying how many cds you own? 'Cause I've got about 500 of those.)

The last CD I bought was... Shicky Gnarowitz and the Transparent Wings Of Joy. I am so glad you asked me. It's as if the musical interludes from every Decemberists album had been upped about ten notches on the gloriously beautiful scale, and I highly recommend it, and not just so you'll also have the joy of informing someone how much you love it. Sexy klezmer music that will make you weep, or dance madly about in a joyish enthusiasm, taken over by the gods of violin, string bass, and guitar.

Song playing right now:
Mountain Goats-Horseradish Road..."the enigma variations/ on the radio, things that I could guess at/ the things that I already know/the twelve thousand dollars /that turned up in your purse/You've done something awful/I've done something worse." Mmmm....good.

Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me (In no particular order):
1. Pedro The Lion-The Only Reason I Feel Secure (Is That I am Validated By My Peers). I have that memory of when this album utterly changed how I viewed the world, or at least focused these feelings that never had definition before. I wish I could pick a song and say that it was the one that really did it, the one that meant more than the others, but the record as a whole is indivisible when tackling these postmodern Christian themes with a surprising amount of honesty and, most importantly, grace. I remember driving around Portland and surrounding for hours just replaying and replaying the short span of the eight songs. Eight songs? Is that really all there was to this conversion experience?

2. Crooked Fingers-Reservoir Songs-I listened to this cd once or twice every morning for God-knows-how-long last year. It's that rare beast, a subtle break-up record. Eric Bachmann (formerly of Archers Of Loaf) put out a 6 track cover album comprised of the cathartic evolution of:
Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down
Neil Diamond's Solitary Man
Prince-When You Were Mine
Bruce Springsteen-The River
Bowie/Queen-Under Pressure
They rebaptize these themes of love and loss and redemption under Mr.Bachmann's Neil Diamond in a Southern Gothic church voice, and there's an air to the progression that heals.

3. That damned "Such Great Heights". There was this time when I would put on the Postal Service version and swear this song was the sweetest creation of bips and childlike romance to ever meet my cd player. When I discovered the Iron & Wine cover, I nearly dissolved into fits of rabid appreciation, listening to it in hushed rooms with reverent silence. Ever since, it's dominated emotional moments in my life with a callous agenda to do nothing but give me overly-sentimental memories. It'd mix with the smells of bacon frying in he mornings, and we'd sway. Sway, dammit! I'm not a home swayer, but for this song, anything.
"Since then, it has caused me nothing but bittersweet grief in various forms by coercing itself to be played at a variety of functions and events where I have been in attendence, with or without an ex-significant other that shall go unamed, sometimes pre-ex-status, sometimes post-ex status, and sometimes in that little in-between area between post and pre."-a previous statement by myself regarding the same topic.

4. Everclear-Nervous and Weird- There's the grit of high school angst rubbing itself off on this song, and I couldn't have felt more at peace in my restless skin than listening to lyrics that talked about splintering out of sheer awkwardness and a desire to metamorphisis into someone who could feel bright in the day.

5. Blackalicious-Feel That Way-It's righteous prozac for the soul, you see? A direct counterpoint to the heaps of drama spinning in my stereo, a song that can do no harm. I remember the first time I heard a Blackalicious song, back in '99, I think, when I was still working at the mall and there was that kid who'd bring in his dancey-trancey music sprinkled with hip-hop and the Cut Chemist Workout fomr A2G was playing and it blew.my.mind. I loved it, and I followed the trail until I found Blazin' Arrow several years later and this song, this song was what I'd been looking for all that time (Another memory from that era was listening closely as one of my employees defined "emo" for me, as I had never heard the term.).