One for the Weirdos: Another 50-or-so Songs & Artists

[akirlu]

Largely because there seemed to be so many oddball categories and touchstones of my life that are not even hitting the board. Probably showing my age in so many ways, but there you go.

0. Favorite Warren Zevon: "Reconsider Me"
1. Favorite irresistable earworm: "Baroque Hoedown" (Main Street Electrical Parade)
2. Favorite song from a musical: "Bellman's Speech," Mike Batt's Hunting of the Snark;"Heaven Help My Heart," Chess, "Easy to Be Hard," Hair
3. Favorite song from language classes: "Die Gedanken Sind Frei," & "Sankta Lucia"
4. Favorite Cheap Trick song: "I Want You to Want Me"
5. Favorite song you couldn't escape in Jr. High: "Play That Funky Music," Wild Cherry
6. Favorite Jackson Browne song: "In the Shape of a Heart," "Soldier of Plenty," "Lawyers in Love"
7. Favorite Steeleye Span: "The Blacksmith," "Saucy Sailor," "Gaudete," "Cam Ye Oe'r Fra France"
8. Favorite Dave Edmunds: "Now & Always," "Crawling from the Wreckage," "Creature from the Black Lagoon"
9. Favorite Nick Lowe: "American Squirm," "Dose of You"
10. Favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers: "Give it Away"
11. Favorite song by Antônio Carlos Jobim: "The Girl from Ipanema"
12. Favorite Bond theme: "Live and Let Die" Paul McCartney
13. Favorite Eagles song: "Hotel California" (Live, Hell Freezes Over), "Greeks Don't Want No Freaks"
14. Favorite Tom Lehrer song: "The Elements"
15. Favorite They Might Be Giants: "Birdhouse in Your Soul," "We Want a Rock"
16. Favorite Bruce Cockburn: "Lovers in a Dangerous Time," "Anything Can Happen," "The Gift"
17. Favorite Blondie: "Call Me," "Tide is High"
18. Favorite song to hate: "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," or most other Steely Dan
19. Favorite Cat Stevens: "Oh Very Young"
20. Favorite Boiled in Lead: "Drowning," "Go! Move! Shift! (Moving On Song)"
21. Favorite Oingo Boingo: "Grey Matter," "Elevator Man"
22. Favorite Vangelis: "Albedo 0.39"
23. Favorite Mannheim Steamroller: "Classical Gas," w/Mason Williams
24. Favorite Walter Wendy Carlos: "Air on a G-String"
25. Favorite Indigo Girls - "Kid Fears"
26. Favorite Amimee Mann-"Stupid Thing," "That's Just What You Are," "Coming Up Close"
27. Favorite song from a CD-Baby find: "Soul on Fire," Jenny Bruce
28. Favorite song that was nearly impossible to acquire: "Back in the USSR," Baba Yaga
29. Favorite song from a Disney film: "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers"
30. Favorite Moody Blues: "Forever Autumn"
31. Favorite Loreena McKennit: "The Mummers' Dance" "The Bonny Swans"
32. Favorite guitar instrumental: "Actions Speak Louder," "Misirlou," "Sailor's Grave on the Prairie," "Malagueña"
33. Favorite REM: "Fall On Me"
34. Favorite Boomtown Rats: "I Don't Like Mondays"
35. Favorite Toad the Wet Sprocket: "Hold Her Down," "Crowing," "Fly From Heaven,"
36. Earliest favorite song you remember: "Zorba's Dance" (I think I was a year old at the time.)
37. Favorite Buddy Holly: "Rave On," "Every Day"
38. Favorite Linda Rondstadt: "Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me"
39. Favorite '50s novelty tune: "Martian Hop"
40. Favorite song off a children's album: "Rain, Rain, and Sun" from a musical King Arthur
41. Favorite song off an album *no one* has heard of: "Ani l'Odi" Ran & Nama
42. Favorite Bangles song: "Going Down to Liverpool"
43. Favorite David Lindley song: "You Never Knew Her"
44. Favorite Martin Stephenson & the Daintees song: "Wholly Humble Heart"
45. Favorite House of Freaks song: "Broken Bones"
46. Favorite Finn Brothers song: "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (Split Enz), "Whispers & Moans" (Crowded House)
47. Favorite Grateful Dead song: "Don't Fear the Reaper"
48. Favorite Alan Parsons Project song: "Nothing Left to Lose"
49. Favorite Abba song: "Slipping Through My Fingers"
50. Favorite Mike Oldfield: "Five Miles Out"

And boy, is 50 a uselessly arbitrary number.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When my in-laws were out for a visit once when we lived in the Bay Area, they stayed at the Hotel California. "Doesn't that worry you?" I asked. "Why?" they asked. I said, "You know, 'you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.'" My mother-in-law looked at me, baffled: "Why wouldn't I be able to leave?" (They are the only Baby Boomers I have ever met who had no idea what Bob Dylan's voice sounds like. My anti-earworm technique is to sing the song in the style of Bob Dylan. When I demonstrated for them, they looked at me as though I'd grown a second head.)

My other favorite Hotel California thing is when my household went to our dear departed Russian steakhouse with dd_b and lydy, and the crazy Russian lounge singer sang "hWelcome to the kHotel Kha-lee-forrrr-nya," and Lydy laughed so hard she felt she had to hide in her napkin. I miss the palacsinta there, but even more I miss having a place where Lydy had to hide in her napkin from laughing.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Wow, those in-laws are pretty out there. Baby Boomers who're not familiar with "Hotel California" have gotta be pretty rare.

I do like that anti-earworm technique, tho. Seems very likely to work.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If it's a Bob Dylan song or if Bob Dylan doesn't work, you do it in the style of William Shatner.

Even when this doesn't work, it's amusing.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Judging from these, we are amazingly far apart. One or two categories are ones I can relate to, and in these we check out okay. In others... well, amazingly far apart.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I confess I wasn't trying to hit the common musical experience, so, not that surprising. I've never been navigating by the same musical signposts as most people. My background is a bit...oddball. And my experience at various music parties also suggest that there's really no such thing as "the common musical experience".

Or do you just mean that you like very different Amiee Mann songs from my picks?

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

This has nothing to do with your post -- it's to do with Bug and airports but the wifi access I have here at the Univ of OK won't let me send email, though I can get it. (It could be worse -- at my mother's I had only dial-up.)

As Bug's ultimate host in Seattle I've been assuming I'd take her to the airport. Whenever it is that she's leaving.

MKK

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

As Bug's ultimate host in Seattle I've been assuming I'd take her to the airport. Whenever it is that she's leaving.

Yes, I had been assuming that, too. You could give Suzle a call to verify that thing, since she's the Administrator and all, but I don't think anyone wants to rip the privilege away from you. :)

Dunno when exactly she's leaving. It's sometime Friday, but that's all I know.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

We are in total agreement on number 42. God, I love that song. The Bangles' first album was absolutely great.

My favorite Finn Brothers song, because it's so sad and so phenomenally beautiful, is "One Step Ahead."

I am mortally certain I could not pick a favorite Abba or Grateful Dead song. So many of them mean so much to me.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

My god, it's been forever since I heard "One Step Ahead." Rilly must dig out the LPs.

I am mortally certain I could not pick a favorite Abba or Grateful Dead song. So many of them mean so much to me.

Picking a Grateful Dead song is easy for me because I don't know that many, and I just like the orchestration best on "Don't Fear the Reaper", whereas the ABBA song is ultimately due to my mother being fondest of that one so it's one of the few ways we can actually agree on anything. It apparently very much evokes feelings about both her mother, and me, so it's multigenerational in lots of ways.