I'll Send This Message to You

Hear me calling

On Fridays when I am leaving work I like to put something on that will get me pumped for the weekend. Today a song immediately popped into my head and I had to put it on, from that moment until I got home I had some pretty heavy rock blasting into my ears. It made me excited to have some time to myself to do whatever I wanted, and it put me a great mood.

The song was This is Yr Captain by C’Mon, and this is a pretty awesome song. It has this guitar riff that makes you want to jump around and head bang and I definitely did some head bobbing on the streetcar. The guitar is so distorted and hard hitting that when I hear it I want to run or something. I’m not really explaining this very well, but there is a reason that people play these sorts of songs before they play sports. I think that the thing that I love the most is that it is catchy without having a lyrical hook. There are a lot of bands/artists that rely on the lyrics and melody to bring people in, but This is Yr Captain is so guitar driven that you don’t need that same sort of hook to make people interested.

I suppose that This is Yr Captain is one of those songs that you have to hear to understand, and not everyone will like it I’m sure, but give it try it might surprise you. And if you get pumped up for whatever event is happening next then all the better!

Check out This is Yr Captain by C’Mon off of In the Heat of the Moment

Bring the Beat in

Baby it’s you

You’re the one I love

You’re the one I need

You’re the only one I see

I feel like I didn’t listen to a lot of music today, or maybe nothing really grabbed hold of me today, so I put off written the song of day until after 9:00pm. Well, I decided to just get my iPod and put on the first thing that made me smile. It’s Beyonce. I have a soft spot for Beyonce and I put on Love On Top and it made me feel happy. Sometimes I think that when it comes to music you can’t always get caught up in what is good and what is not and just go with your gut and listen to what ever makes you feel good. This is how I feel about Beyonce. She is crazy, and she isn’t what I usually listen to, but I love her.

Beyonce has a really great voice, and, although I hate to admit this, I have loved her since Destiny’s Child. Beyonce is so confident, and I find that really inspiring. She knows what she wants and she gets it. She doesn’t let anyone tell her what to do, and because she is fiercely independent she create some really unique music. Love on Top is the song that I put on because it is so danceable and cool. I love the way that Beyonce uses her voice and the crazy amount of key changes is also really awesome!

So here’s to guilty pleasures that aren’t really something to feel guilty about. I saw like what you like and be proud. Right now I think I am going to dance around my apartment to some Beyonce.

Check out Love On Top by Beyonce off of 4

Peanut Butter Pulitzer Prize

I’m highly suspicious of you.

As I left work today I put on my headphones and pressed play, but sound was only coming out of one side. After playing with the cord for a while I determined that my headphones had decided to stop working. Annoyed I made a detour to pick up some new headphones because I can’t live without headphones. Then on my way home the traffic on King Street took forever, it took me 45 minutes to get home when it should have taken 20 minutes. By the time I got home I was grumpy puddle, a puddle because I was sweating so much from being crammed on a hot streetcar for way to long, but then a song can on my iPod that made me smile.

Highly Suspicious by My Morning Jacket is a song that you can’t help but like. It is so ridiculous and so awesome at the same time. I can’t understand a word that Jim James is singing, and actually believe that he is saying peanut butter Pulitzer Prize through the song, but it’s the feel of the song that just grabs me. Highly Suspicious is so much fun, so silly, and at the same time such a hard hitting rock song that it blows me away every time I listen to it. The heavy guitars combined with Jim James’s crazy falsetto creates one crazy song, but I love every second of it.

The moral of this story, I guess, is that if you are grumpy make sure that you put on a song that is awesome and makes you smile. I can tell you that it works, or at least it worked for me today.

Check out Highly Suspicious By My Morning Jacket off of Evil Urges

This Summer

We won’t regret what we cannot know

They can rip the roof right off of this house

They can cancel all our shows

Since today is probably the hottest day ever I thought that today’s song of day needed to be summer themed. Superchunk has a lot of really great summer sounding songs, but I can’t get their latest release, This Summer, out my head. This is a song to blast during those sticky nights when you are happy to be warm, because we all know that cold weather will be here before we know it.

This Summer honestly sounds like summer; the sun high in the sky and a sandy beach. I think that the thing I love the most is the drumming. There is a very distinct surf rock beat which really helps to create the feeling of summer. The distorted guitars have an almost sunny feeling, and Laura Balance’s bass weave is wonderfully around the guitars adding depth to the song. Of course the hand claps that are heard throughout the entire song really help to set the tone, a summer tone.

Superchunk is pop rock at it very best and This Summer showcases their sound really well. I don’t know how they get the summer sound so perfect, but I love it! Every time I listen to This Summer I can’t help, but grove along with the beat.

Check out This Summer by Superchunk off of This Summer B/W Cruel Summer

Hey, That's A Morning Moon

“The sun is a light blub

And the moon is a mirror

There are times you can see both the blub and the mirror

And that’s a morning moon”

I always listen to music on my way to work, actually I just always listen to music, and this morning I put on the Tragically Hip album We Are The Same. The first track is Morning Moon; I have always loved this song, but it never spoke to me before in the way that did while walking to the streetcar at 7:15am.

Morning Moon reminds me of the morning, I can almost picture Gord Downie sitting out at the crack of dawn trying to make sense of life looking at the sun rise on one side and the moon on the other. Morning can be such a peaceful time of day, and it is always cool to see both the sun and moon in the sky. This is what popped into my mind this morning on the way to the streetcar; I often think about things, sometimes random things, on the way to work. Sometimes I get some really good thinking in, and other times I just get my crazy thinking out of the way.

I love how Morning Moon is so mellow; it is the perfect early morning song. The music sounds like morning too, the day is new and you never know what is going to happen. Gord Downie’s vocals are also so great! I love it when Gordie sings softly; you can really hear the tone and emotion in his voice. In this song Gordie almost sounds like he is contemplating out loud which really helps to paint the picture of him watching the sunrise.

Check out Morning Moon by The Tragically Hip off We Are The Same

Downtown Owl Review

Downtown Owl is Chuck Klosterman’s first novel. I have been a fan of his non-fiction writing for some time now, and when I discovered that he had penned a novel I decided to put it on my must-read list. Downtown Owl is sold as a snapshot of a small town, and while this is basically true, it made for a very uninteresting read.

Downtown Owl is told through three different perspectives: Horace, Julia and Mitch. Horace is the typical widower who goes to the coffee shop at the same time everyday and talks with other men about the people who live in town. Janet is new to Owl and has come to teach history at the public school. She soon becomes the object of every single man’s desire and therefore spends the evenings getting drunk on the free drinks that they buy her. Mitch is a, somewhat, typical high school kid who spends time with his friends and plays football. The only strange thing about Mitch is that he is obsessed with his football coach/English teacher.

I believe that Downtown Owl has the basis for a good story, but unfortunately Chuck Klosterman doesn’t really flesh out a plot. Nothing actually happens in this book until about 20 pages before the end. There is a lot of remembering things that happened in the past, but nothing actually happens. There also isn’t any character development at all. All three characters start and end in the same way, but I guess that is what happens when you don’t have a plot. In the end you read these three perspectives on life in a small town and in the end it all seems pointless.

I will say that there were some things that I enjoyed. For the most part I liked Klosterman’s writing style. Sometimes it seems a little bit to “flowery” or pompous for a novel, but it did seem like he at least knew about the subject that he was writing about. I grew up in a small town and from time to time the situations in the book felt familiar, however, I don’t believe that is enough to make this book readable.

I the end I was disappointed by Downtown Owl. I high expectations for a novel by Chuck Klosterman and I feel like he let me down. It was a struggle to actually finish this book. I wanted to find out if the book was going anywhere and it didn’t. While Downtown Owl did paint a good picture of small town life it didn’t have a plot or character development. I don’t recommend this book to anyone; even if you are a fan of Chuck Klosterman’s other writing.

BEDA - Day Thirty

Well, I made it through April and BEDA. I can’t believe that today is the last day and that tomorrow I don’t have to write a blog if I don’t feel like it. It has been an interesting month, but I’m really glad that BEDA is over. It’s really hard to think about things to write a decent blog about every day.

Out of all the blogs that I have written over the month my favourite are book reviews. I love to talk about books, and writing reviews really helps to get the urge out. Whenever I finish a book I always sit back and think about the book as whole, this is how I determine whether or not I actually liked the book. I think about the characters, the plot, the writing and how much I enjoyed reading the book. Writing about these points really helps me to wrap my head around my thoughts on the story, and usually by the end of the review I can tell if I will recommend the book or not. I guess that it could be the English major part of me but I will always like to think about books critically after I read them, even if I don’t go quite in-depth English essay in a review.

I also really love to write about music, and the couple of times that I wrote about music during BEDA have been really fun. I always have music playing, and I can’t stand to have my apartment to quiet. I love to listen to lyrics and to discover how I relate to them. I love the emotion that an artist can convey through instrumentation and how a certain song can make me feel. I also love to spread the music that I love around to other people, and writing about what a song means to you is a really good way to do just that.

I’ve written at least one movie review during the month, but I don’t think that I’ll get into that. I enjoy movies, but I don’t really enjoy writing about them. Movies have always been a way to relax and to veg out, I feel like if I try to write reviews about movies it will ruin movies for me.

I’ve written a bit about my personal life, and things that have happened during the month, and while that is a good out let, I don’t think that I’d want to do it all the time. It can be difficult to write about your personal life because you don’t want to share too much and at the same time you want to keep it interesting, it can be a fine line. I’m sure that I will write about my life from time to time, but I don’t think that it will be the bulk of my blogging.

I guess that what I am saying is that from now on I will be blogging about books, and music. I think that suits me fine. They are two of my favourite things, and it will keep my blog fun for me. So, let me say a big thank-you to those of you who have been reading my blog this month, it has been fun! I can’t believe that I have written every day, well I did miss two days but with almost 17,000 words under my belt I’d say that I won this challenge!