Music
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No Country Music
by I like to think that my music tastes are fairly eclectic. While something like ¾ of my current rotation consists of 80s rock across various types and genres, the remaining 25% runs the gamut from classical to certain flavours of techno. There’s a little jazz and (don’t tell anyone) a dash of opera, bits of rock and pop from the 60s through current (although less and less beginning in the 90s when I feel most music started to be so over-produced that you had a hard time hearing the individual instruments – that’s started to change in the last few years as the current version of the internet age…
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Concerts of Old
by I’ve talked about it before, but sometime in early 2019, a conversation with my oldest daughter eventually led me to watch the footage of Queen playing Live Aid in 1985. That, in turn, led me to a variety of conversations with friends and coworkers to think about the concerts we’d missed when younger, that we wished we’d gone to, that would have been awesome but happened before we were born. The first concert I always came up with was Rush with any date on the Signals tour. Signals was first Rush album I owned, a gift from my Uncle for my 12th birthday. I don’t know how many times…
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Random 80s Songs in My Head When I Wake Up
by I don’t try to analyze myself exactly. Oh, I regularly look at things I apparently believe to see how they stack up against reality, but I don’t necessarily examine the links between things my brain throws up or try to understand why it throws things at me. I just recognize that there are associations proceeding at an unconscious or subconscious level and try to enjoy the results as I work things in the conscious world. Sometimes it’s odd, though. Every so often for the last several months, I wake up with a random 80s song playing in my head, usually just the chorus. It’s generally something I liked at…
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Concert Quest
by So I had a story idea several years, jotted down the first couple of paragraphs of the opening scene and then, as so often happens, left it in an idea file and haven’t really looked at again. Although, it’s one of the things I’m certain is in there. Lots of things in the idea file I don’t remember at all. The idea was basically that at some point in the near future, the person with the only legal civilian Time Machine mostly uses it to go to rock concerts he wishes he had been able to at the time, some of them before he was born. I always thought…
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My Christmas Play List
by Whatever you’re celebrating this time of year, I hope it’s good. I hope it’s everything you need to be. I realize a previous post may lead you in the direction of me not liking Christmas. Actually, I’m fairly certain I said that I kind of hate it. I also explained, which only matters if you took the slightly misleading title of the post to heart, that what I hate is what our society has made of Christmas. I do, however, mostly hate Christmas music. Even once you peel out all of the blatantly religious songs that do still seem to get play everywhere, the majority of what you have…
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The Music of Our Youth
by Often, the music of our youth speaks to us. Sometimes it has specific messages, and sometimes it just reminds us of what it was like when we were young. Sometimes both. I didn’t do a lot of concerts as a teenager, and I really haven’t done that many as an adult, either, but I enjoy music and I enjoy live music, so there’s really no easy explanation for that, other than possibly budgetary concerns at the times when I’ve felt the desire to go see a particular group or artist live. But Peterborough does a series of outdoor concerts every year, free to attend, and works to get some…
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I Should Be A Tragically Hip Fan
by So, I’ve never really been a Tragically Hip fan. There are plenty of reasons I should be, the least of which is that I’m related to one of the band members on my mother’s side, not that I’ve seen him since I was a little kid. As close as I’ll get to name-dropping. Far more importantly, the tragically hip is a Canadian success story, on a similar level, although perhaps with a touch less longevity, as Rush or Neil Young. Their lyrics are intelligent, clever, often poetic. That’s right up my alley. The music is a blend of pop and some not quite identifiable sound that makes them distinctly…
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Change is Bad, Right?
by Why is our first impulse for anything different ignore it or try to force it to meet our preconceptions? It shouldn’t be, and I’m not sure why human nature resists change so much. Let me give an example. Earlier this week on Facebook, I came across an eye-rolling meme in my time stream, re-posted from some other source for the mumblety-thousandth time: You can probably guess that most of the comments were just a flat-out agreement, with the occasional stronger agreement for emphasis or an extra word or two to display the importance of the opinion, and once in a while even, gasp, a whole sentence. There was, on…
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State of Graceland
by Once upon a time, there was a teenager named Lance. Growing up in the pre-Internet era, Lance was still quite fond of media: TV, movies, and especially books and music. He read voraciously, started to figure out writing (though that would mostly come later), and always had the radio or a record or cassette playing in the background. This as the 1980s. There would eventually be CDs, but they were expensive in the early days and he didn’t have a CD player until the summer he was nineteen. In the fall of 1986 he heard, “You Can Call Me Al” on the radio. Without knowing exactly why, he found…
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Paul Simon Inspired SF
by Once upon a time, there was a teenager named Lance. Growing up in the pre-internet era, Lance was very fond of pre-digital media: TV, movies, and especially books and music. He read voraciously, started to figure out writing (though that would mostly come later), chased girls, and always had the radio or a record or cassette playing in the background (yes, eventually CDs, but that took a little while–they were expensive in the early days and he didn’t have a CD player until the summer he was nineteen). In the fall of 1986, he heard the song, “You Can Call Me Al” on the radio. Without knowing exactly why,…