Year: 2003 Another Talisman wonder.
May 142007
May 072007
Year: 2000 I love this song. I didn’t even know the name of it until I heard it on SNL a few years ago, but since then, this has never dropped from being one of my favorite songs. It’s always uplifting.
Apr 302007
Year: 1975 When my French teacher first played this song in an attempt to teach us aural language skills in a fun way, several students who were already fluent in French started laughing in the way one laughs at a Celine Dion song. Apparently, the song was one of those stereotypically French songs that everyone knows and every French student learns in order to understand those random word conjugations like the conditional and the subjunctive. I heard the song a lot during SUMaC a lot, then didn’t hear of it again really until I heard it again about a month ago, when I downloaded a bunch of songs by Joe Dassin.
Apr 232007
Year: 1903 Atonal? Occassionally tonal? This piece (and all of Scriabin’s etudes and poèmes) just has this rich quality that most pieces don’t have. Scriabin’s synesthesia just comes out in this piece–if you listen close enough, you can hear him painting this masterpiece, and when the melody appears, the foreground slowly appears with bright crisp colors, emerging above the homogeneous base like a bird flying into the sky from a turbulent ocean.
Apr 162007
Year: 2005 I’ve heard a few of their songs on the radio, but I finally found out I liked them after hearing this song.
Apr 092007
Year: 1937 After hearing Shostakovich for the first time, I wanted to obsessively find all his music and listen to them all. This piece is one of my top two favorite Shostakovich pieces, the other being, his String Quartet #8. The piece opens with a forte minor 6th, then descending into some other dissonant intervals. This piece is so visual and tactile (perhaps a result of Shostakovich’s synesthesia) that you see and feel the sounds almost as much as you hear them. I went to hear this live from the San Franciso Symphony in late 2006, and it was purely penetrating. The orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, managed to inject the sounds into me.
Apr 022007
Year: 2000 I found this song when I was first searching through my music library before spring break 2006 for songs that could be good pump-up songs for the ride to the Big Sur for backpacking. I found this song, “Road Trippin’,” and thought it probably fit and put it on my mix. When listening to the song in the car, I discovered that the lyrics actually contained the Hwy 1 and also the Big Sur, the highway we were driving on, and the region in which we were going to be driving. I was so excited that I put it on repeat until I thought that some variety would be better. This year on spring break, when we arrived [more . . .]
Mar 262007
Origin/Composer: Albert Hammond / Mike Hazlewood Year: 1972 Well, it’s supposed to according to the weather forecast, but we don’t care. We’re in San Diego in an amazing house with some really fun people, so we can pretend it never rains.
Mar 192007
Origin/Composer: Phil Collins / Arr. Ben Gibbard and Dntel Year: 2004 Originally a Phil Collins song, this song by supergroup The Postal Service (consisting of Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie and Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel fame) appeared on the Wicker Park soundtrack album that came out in 2004. Most people have not heard this Postal Service song though I consider it one of their best. From the dreamy electronic major ringing in the beginning to the sudden change to the forceful minor beats to the gradual fade away of the vocals, this song is both powerful and musically complete.
Mar 122007
Year: 1999 Every so often, I just can’t help giving in to that desire to dedicate the song to a certain Jessica…