the lovers, the dreamers and me
Dec. 21st, 2018 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingoneGod, information security is my absolute bane. :S
So I finally got my music put onto my new phone (having also bought a new laptop, figured out where music even goes on an Android phone, and thankfully discovered one single backup of my music that iTunes hadn't eaten), and so now I'm listening through a thousand songs figuring out what I actually want to keep on here.
The issue is, of course, that by habit, I talk on my blog about pretty much everything that passes through my mind. I had to lock down my old blog due to a plague of trolls that got me kicked out of my house last summer, but if I want to talk about my music specifically (and I do), the question is of course - how much do I share? My music is so closely linked to my life. There are songs on here that I first heard before I was born. There are songs I got five years ago and have never heard because I simply didn't have the spoons. This is supposed to be the blog where I talk about fannish things but without personally identifying information (with the occasional help of my friendly neighborhood white-hat stalker), but my sense of what information is personally identifying... is frankly shite. ;P
Also I'm still figuring out how to code Dreamwidth's new version of HTML without the quote marks, or whatever it is. Does anyone have a handy guide to that? I haven't managed to track one down yet, so renaming cuts is not a thing that is happening.
But anyway, a brief history of the JT, with reference to music.
* In utero: Brandenberg concertos (J.S. Bach), Sousa marches, and the Beach Boys. This is also the general spectrum of music I grew up listening to.
* I saw Mary Poppins first as a very small toddler. It's pretty much the perfect musical to me, and I think (I hope) I still have the entire soundtrack in this backup. The filenames and metadata on this whole backup are a wreck though. I really need to actually sort those all out, but let's get the songs I don't want at all deleted first, and the duplicates too.
* Early childhood: Raffi. So much Raffi. All the Raffi. I think I checked out all or nearly all of his albums from the library at one point and ripped them to my laptop, so there are Raffi songs in this backup that even I haven't heard, but we had a lot of Raffi tapes growing up and we pretty well wore them out. (I recently learned, a couple years back, that Raffi cites Pete Seeger as one of his influences, and I can absolutely see that.)
* Also early childhood: this singer called Janice Buckner that like nobody else has heard of. I don't even know if her songs are on YouTube. They're super quotable and catchy though. The album I have is called Strange Friends.
* That one Bing Crosby Christmas special, every Christmas season, without end and without fail. I don't know that I could recite/sing it from beginning to end without prompting, but I can do every one of the intro/outros individually. (Incidentally, one thing I'm noticing is that Bing Crosby had a really nice voice. He was sort of oversaturated in both my childhood and his era, so I hadn't really thought of him as an artist that qualifies for a whole lot of respect, but it's a really unique sound and style. It's just that he became the mainstream.)
* Early teens: Frank Patterson, an opera-trained Irish singer with an absolutely fucking beautiful voice. He died in his fifties of a heart attack, but he died singing, which is a pretty damn good way to go out. I think I have most of his albums, or had; my CD collection has probably gone the way of all flesh, like most everything else I've owned, over these many bouts of homelessness. I want to get the rest of his work.
* Mid teens: an album of international folk dance tunes performed by a group of musicians from the small Catholic liberal arts college my bio-parents went to. (I was supposed to go there as well but wound up rejecting the whole Catholicism thing instead, after a fuckton of soul-searching.) I know most of the dances, have taught some of them to gaggles of homeschooled small children in church gyms, because growing up homeschooled you kind of crowdsource culture. They're catchy tunes, a lot of them. I never quite got to the point where I could call the Virginia Reel (aka "Turkey in the Straw") in proper square-dance lingo, but I bet I could draw a diagram of it. Oddly, they don't have a lot of traumatic memories attached to them, probably because they're instrumental and my memory is so extremely verbal. I know two instrumentals well enough to hum them, and those are "Stars and Stripes Forever" and the Imperial March, both of which sort of have words even though it's more of a "doot-doot-doo" than lyrics with meaning.
* Late teens: The Monkees. My bio-incubator was a preteen at the right time to be a Monkees fan, and eventually she showed us the TV show, which I love with all my heart and would not recommend to anyone who isn't extremely willing to be a fan of problematic things. One of my better memories with her is that I managed (by a string of coincidences that may have eaten up my luck for the next seven years) to take her to one of the concerts on their 45th anniversary reunion tour, which turned out to be their last, as Davy Jones died the next year. That's still the only live concert I've been to, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.
* Also late teens, I think: Gilbert and Sullivan. I don't know that I actually have the soundtrack to the version of The Mikado that I like, or indeed the soundtrack to The Pirates of Penzance, but at least I have the DVD of the latter (and can of course sing along with the whole thing). Well, I don't have the DVD, it's in storage, but I own it.
* Early twenties: Pete Seeger. I have a long-standing interest in traditional folk music, which I have absolutely no idea where it came from, but once I moved out of my bio-family's house - well, let me rephrase. After the Remodel of Doom, during which I literally wore out the little iPod Shuffle that I had at the time, when I finally moved out into my own apartment and started going to college, I had a little more freedom to listen to music that was not Approved by the powers that be (aka my bio-incubator). So I went to the library and picked out a couple dozen CDs from the folk section and started exploring, and Pete Seeger was the one whose style really grabbed me. Not least because it's almost all live recordings and they have that amazing sing-along energy that I loved from Raffi's work, but without the bad associations.
Like I love Raffi songs, don't get me wrong, but Raffi and Bing Crosby were playing almost constantly in our house as a counterpoint to the screaming and quarreling, and the way my memory works? I think most people reading this are aware that I have a near-photographic memory for the written word. Well, my episodic memory is about that good when it exists at all (I lost most of 2010 permanently), so when I do the thing where you hear a song and flash back a little bit to something that happened while that song was playing or in relation to that song? Every goddamn song. :P Well, all but one. Somehow, Raffi's cover of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" never did get broken for me. I listened to it on loop literally thousands of times, maybe hundreds of thousands, between the start of the Remodel of Doom and now, through the worst of my depression. But that one's a bit magic, because - and I only found this out when I ripped it from the library in preparation for abandoning my old life - the backup singers on that track are in fact Stan and Garnet Rogers.
* Stan Rogers. This would be in the depths of the Remodel of Doom or in 2010. I'm not sure, because I was starving and sleep-deprived and generally traumatized and not really forming memories, but it was sometime after when I found fandom in 2008, because my first fannish friend and internet momlolmac Beth recommended me the song that has become somewhat of an anthem for me, "The Mary Ellen Carter". I listened to a fair amount of Stan Rogers' music; a lot of it was too sad for me to want to own it, but I bought "The Mary Ellen Carter" for 99 cents off Amazon at some point, which I think was the first piece of music I ever actually bought. And I may or may not have "The White Collar Holler" somewhere because it entertains the fuck out of me.
* Then I wound up abandoning, you know, my entire life to that point whenbookblather came along and swept me off my feet and got me into therapy and away from my abusers. I brought my music with, but couldn't listen to almost any of it because of the memories. Kat gave me a bunch of new music, Dar Williams and John Barrowman and Christian Kane, very little of which I've listened to yet, and also tracked down several Terrence Mann OBC (original Broadway cast) albums at some point for me because we were watching The Dresden Files and I had kind of a crush on him. Also he has a fucking amazing singing voice. (God, his breath control... I'm out of shape now, but even at my peak when I could match Frank Patterson pretty well, I would never have had the ability to put the kind of power into a long note that Terrence Mann can do. I had trouble listening to him for a while because - you know, genderfluid, every so often I get a pretty bad bout of dysphoria, and for me a lot of it centers around my voice. Terrence Mann is from the Midwest so he's got almost my exact accent, but in this amazing baritone, and it's the voice I wish I could have, but if you go on testosterone as a trans adult there's no guarantee you'll ever have any kind of singing voice in your new register at all. I still think about it every so often though. Right now I seem to be female and not minding my natural alto voice, but the obnoxious thing about genderfluidity is that the dysphoria and the transness always come back. Uh. Sorry? That got weird and awkward, possibly.)
* And then Kat stopped being able to put me up rent-free, and I wound up bouncing around homeless in various states for a while (there was this one calendar month where I lived in Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, and Arizona in that order, and had mailing addresses in each one in turn), and then lived with my aunt who was also rather abusive but I put up with it for a long time because she was so much less bad than my bio-incubator, but now she has kicked me out twice and I don't care what happens, I'm not giving her the chance for a third time. My aunt did give me an iPhone when my old flip phone died, so that's when I started having music on my phone.
* And now here's me, and I have an apartment and meds and a new laptop and a new phone and some really nice gaming headphones that I can no longer use for work because they changed their adapter system, and I'm perplexingly un-depressed and able to listen to "All I Really Need" without cringing. And! Now I've got my diabetes medicated and am not constantly having this weird hacking cough that seems to indicate low blood sugar for me, I can sing again! I sang a sea chantey last night for my D&D group, because our DM who knows literally nothing about boats keeps building these water-heavy worlds and sending us on boat trips, while I and one of the other players know a great deal about boats.
***
* Uh. Anyway. So I actually have no idea where this post is going, hundreds of words later, except that I've been listening to my music and having opinions and wanting to write those opinions down and share them, and Tumblr seems to be working very hard on going poof sooner than anyone imagined. So the rest of this post will be like... random notes on random songs you've probably never heard, and no links to YouTube videos because I'm almost out of my mobile hotspot data and it's only halfway through my billing month, because even though I set up my new laptop at McDonald's I had to use hotspot for some of it.
* So John Barrowman did a medley of Amazing Grace and Loch Lomond where it goes back and forth interspersing verses, and it's just intensely confusing to me because the moods of those two songs are so different even when you play them in the same key and everything.
* Yup, still have a strong antipathy to most songs about romantic love. They sound so unhealthy, with the "I'm nothing without you" and "I'll keep after you until you give in" and "my whole previous life means nothing" themes. Shame, because I really like the sort of acoustic ballad style of singing and songwriting, but... yeah.
* Being a fan of problematic things really is tricky. Tommy Makem's cover of "The Whistling G*psy" is a beautiful song, but... ethnic slur. Still a little iffy on whether to keep that one around.
* Tanglefoot! I almost forgot about this band,sophia_sol introduced me to them. They're a Canadian group that do sort of folk-styled original songs, often about Canadian history - I'm listening to "Angel of Long Point" right now, they've got one called "Secord's Warning", and so forth. I really like their musical style, it's a little peppier than you'd expect from the narrative ballad tradition but still very much tied to that tradition. My favorite of theirs is "Traighli Bay", which is a pirate ballad but more in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson i.e. not depressing. XD I'm me, so I nitpick a couple of modernisms in there (ships having third mates is an innovation that came in with the eight-hour workday), but it's a really fun song to belt out very loudly on roadtrips.
* The reason it's taken me five years to get to any of this new music Kat gave me is that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to try new songs, and I feel like I have to give each one a fair shake and listen to it all the way through, and it takes a lot of mental and emotional energy and honestly a fuckton of time. I may not get through all thousand songs in the next year or so, even now, but I'm in a lot better shape than I have been... possibly ever in my life before.
* Seriously, a thousand songs at a rough average of three minutes per song is about fifty hours of just sheer listening time. Some of those are duplicates, but... it's a lot of work. Let alone renaming the files and fixing the metadata and - yeah.
* Tom Chapin! Another children's musician from sort of the genre that Raffi created or popularized. His brother Harry Chapin is better known - "Cat's in the Cradle" is I think Harry Chapin's most famous song - but Tom Chapin does solid work. I don't love all his songs the way I do Raffi's or Janice Buckner's, but I have a few I really like.
* God, you know what I haven't gotten yet and really need to is the Moana soundtrack. I found the Lilo and Stitch soundtrack in here and that's reminded me. There's so much music in the world I need, and I haven't had any music for so long, and... yeah.
* You know, I have a fuckton of hymns on here, because of course, Catholic upbringing. For the longest time I couldn't listen to most of them. But Pete Seeger used to say "You know, us old atheists sing a lot of spirituals", and I'm sort of coming around to where I can listen to them as like art, as beautiful songs or catchy songs, without being as... bothered by all the religious implications I left behind. Some of them or most of them, anyway. I don't know if I'll ever be able to listen to the Pange Lingua without having feelings about the Easter liturgy and how I've cut myself off from that for the sake of my own sense of ethics. :S
* Yeah, this happens. I'm about to the end of the A's and I'm bored of listening to every song all the way through. So what I start to do is skip through the songs I know I want and just listen to the new ones, and then I don't want any of them and I get depressed and bored and stop altogether, and then my music is still full of stuff I don't necessarily want. Organizing is hard. ;P
* You know, for a half-hour direct-to-video show intended to teach kids about Christianity, VeggieTales did some really weird shit. This bullet point brought to you by the song "Belly Button", which if you're not familiar was a boyband-style music video about not having a belly button. I've never actually listened to either of the Silly Songs With Larry albums straight through, but that would be a trip and a half.
(Personally I think VeggieTales jumped the shark when they started focusing more on the visuals and riffing on current movies instead of on their message. I mean, obviously there are issues with the whole Christian children's propaganda genre, but if you start out with a message as your raison d'etre and then lose the message, you don't got much left.)
* This is so fucking much music. And a bunch of it is near-duplicates - I have four different Frank Patterson covers of "Danny Boy", and there's at least one I know I don't like as well (sounds like it was recorded on an off day, just a tad), and my inability to hold music in my head for very long means comparing them all is just hell, and yeah. Blargle. :P I'm still working on this, but I'm like halfway through the B's, and this is why I haven't had any music on my phone since I bought it. Sorry, this post is turning into just bitching. The near-duplicates are really annoying though.
And then I went and got my car from the mechanic and now I have work in the morning, so there may or may not be more of this later.
So I finally got my music put onto my new phone (having also bought a new laptop, figured out where music even goes on an Android phone, and thankfully discovered one single backup of my music that iTunes hadn't eaten), and so now I'm listening through a thousand songs figuring out what I actually want to keep on here.
The issue is, of course, that by habit, I talk on my blog about pretty much everything that passes through my mind. I had to lock down my old blog due to a plague of trolls that got me kicked out of my house last summer, but if I want to talk about my music specifically (and I do), the question is of course - how much do I share? My music is so closely linked to my life. There are songs on here that I first heard before I was born. There are songs I got five years ago and have never heard because I simply didn't have the spoons. This is supposed to be the blog where I talk about fannish things but without personally identifying information (with the occasional help of my friendly neighborhood white-hat stalker), but my sense of what information is personally identifying... is frankly shite. ;P
Also I'm still figuring out how to code Dreamwidth's new version of HTML without the quote marks, or whatever it is. Does anyone have a handy guide to that? I haven't managed to track one down yet, so renaming cuts is not a thing that is happening.
But anyway, a brief history of the JT, with reference to music.
* In utero: Brandenberg concertos (J.S. Bach), Sousa marches, and the Beach Boys. This is also the general spectrum of music I grew up listening to.
* I saw Mary Poppins first as a very small toddler. It's pretty much the perfect musical to me, and I think (I hope) I still have the entire soundtrack in this backup. The filenames and metadata on this whole backup are a wreck though. I really need to actually sort those all out, but let's get the songs I don't want at all deleted first, and the duplicates too.
* Early childhood: Raffi. So much Raffi. All the Raffi. I think I checked out all or nearly all of his albums from the library at one point and ripped them to my laptop, so there are Raffi songs in this backup that even I haven't heard, but we had a lot of Raffi tapes growing up and we pretty well wore them out. (I recently learned, a couple years back, that Raffi cites Pete Seeger as one of his influences, and I can absolutely see that.)
* Also early childhood: this singer called Janice Buckner that like nobody else has heard of. I don't even know if her songs are on YouTube. They're super quotable and catchy though. The album I have is called Strange Friends.
* That one Bing Crosby Christmas special, every Christmas season, without end and without fail. I don't know that I could recite/sing it from beginning to end without prompting, but I can do every one of the intro/outros individually. (Incidentally, one thing I'm noticing is that Bing Crosby had a really nice voice. He was sort of oversaturated in both my childhood and his era, so I hadn't really thought of him as an artist that qualifies for a whole lot of respect, but it's a really unique sound and style. It's just that he became the mainstream.)
* Early teens: Frank Patterson, an opera-trained Irish singer with an absolutely fucking beautiful voice. He died in his fifties of a heart attack, but he died singing, which is a pretty damn good way to go out. I think I have most of his albums, or had; my CD collection has probably gone the way of all flesh, like most everything else I've owned, over these many bouts of homelessness. I want to get the rest of his work.
* Mid teens: an album of international folk dance tunes performed by a group of musicians from the small Catholic liberal arts college my bio-parents went to. (I was supposed to go there as well but wound up rejecting the whole Catholicism thing instead, after a fuckton of soul-searching.) I know most of the dances, have taught some of them to gaggles of homeschooled small children in church gyms, because growing up homeschooled you kind of crowdsource culture. They're catchy tunes, a lot of them. I never quite got to the point where I could call the Virginia Reel (aka "Turkey in the Straw") in proper square-dance lingo, but I bet I could draw a diagram of it. Oddly, they don't have a lot of traumatic memories attached to them, probably because they're instrumental and my memory is so extremely verbal. I know two instrumentals well enough to hum them, and those are "Stars and Stripes Forever" and the Imperial March, both of which sort of have words even though it's more of a "doot-doot-doo" than lyrics with meaning.
* Late teens: The Monkees. My bio-incubator was a preteen at the right time to be a Monkees fan, and eventually she showed us the TV show, which I love with all my heart and would not recommend to anyone who isn't extremely willing to be a fan of problematic things. One of my better memories with her is that I managed (by a string of coincidences that may have eaten up my luck for the next seven years) to take her to one of the concerts on their 45th anniversary reunion tour, which turned out to be their last, as Davy Jones died the next year. That's still the only live concert I've been to, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.
* Also late teens, I think: Gilbert and Sullivan. I don't know that I actually have the soundtrack to the version of The Mikado that I like, or indeed the soundtrack to The Pirates of Penzance, but at least I have the DVD of the latter (and can of course sing along with the whole thing). Well, I don't have the DVD, it's in storage, but I own it.
* Early twenties: Pete Seeger. I have a long-standing interest in traditional folk music, which I have absolutely no idea where it came from, but once I moved out of my bio-family's house - well, let me rephrase. After the Remodel of Doom, during which I literally wore out the little iPod Shuffle that I had at the time, when I finally moved out into my own apartment and started going to college, I had a little more freedom to listen to music that was not Approved by the powers that be (aka my bio-incubator). So I went to the library and picked out a couple dozen CDs from the folk section and started exploring, and Pete Seeger was the one whose style really grabbed me. Not least because it's almost all live recordings and they have that amazing sing-along energy that I loved from Raffi's work, but without the bad associations.
Like I love Raffi songs, don't get me wrong, but Raffi and Bing Crosby were playing almost constantly in our house as a counterpoint to the screaming and quarreling, and the way my memory works? I think most people reading this are aware that I have a near-photographic memory for the written word. Well, my episodic memory is about that good when it exists at all (I lost most of 2010 permanently), so when I do the thing where you hear a song and flash back a little bit to something that happened while that song was playing or in relation to that song? Every goddamn song. :P Well, all but one. Somehow, Raffi's cover of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" never did get broken for me. I listened to it on loop literally thousands of times, maybe hundreds of thousands, between the start of the Remodel of Doom and now, through the worst of my depression. But that one's a bit magic, because - and I only found this out when I ripped it from the library in preparation for abandoning my old life - the backup singers on that track are in fact Stan and Garnet Rogers.
* Stan Rogers. This would be in the depths of the Remodel of Doom or in 2010. I'm not sure, because I was starving and sleep-deprived and generally traumatized and not really forming memories, but it was sometime after when I found fandom in 2008, because my first fannish friend and internet mom
lolmac Beth recommended me the song that has become somewhat of an anthem for me, "The Mary Ellen Carter". I listened to a fair amount of Stan Rogers' music; a lot of it was too sad for me to want to own it, but I bought "The Mary Ellen Carter" for 99 cents off Amazon at some point, which I think was the first piece of music I ever actually bought. And I may or may not have "The White Collar Holler" somewhere because it entertains the fuck out of me.* Then I wound up abandoning, you know, my entire life to that point when
bookblather came along and swept me off my feet and got me into therapy and away from my abusers. I brought my music with, but couldn't listen to almost any of it because of the memories. Kat gave me a bunch of new music, Dar Williams and John Barrowman and Christian Kane, very little of which I've listened to yet, and also tracked down several Terrence Mann OBC (original Broadway cast) albums at some point for me because we were watching The Dresden Files and I had kind of a crush on him. Also he has a fucking amazing singing voice. (God, his breath control... I'm out of shape now, but even at my peak when I could match Frank Patterson pretty well, I would never have had the ability to put the kind of power into a long note that Terrence Mann can do. I had trouble listening to him for a while because - you know, genderfluid, every so often I get a pretty bad bout of dysphoria, and for me a lot of it centers around my voice. Terrence Mann is from the Midwest so he's got almost my exact accent, but in this amazing baritone, and it's the voice I wish I could have, but if you go on testosterone as a trans adult there's no guarantee you'll ever have any kind of singing voice in your new register at all. I still think about it every so often though. Right now I seem to be female and not minding my natural alto voice, but the obnoxious thing about genderfluidity is that the dysphoria and the transness always come back. Uh. Sorry? That got weird and awkward, possibly.)* And then Kat stopped being able to put me up rent-free, and I wound up bouncing around homeless in various states for a while (there was this one calendar month where I lived in Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, and Arizona in that order, and had mailing addresses in each one in turn), and then lived with my aunt who was also rather abusive but I put up with it for a long time because she was so much less bad than my bio-incubator, but now she has kicked me out twice and I don't care what happens, I'm not giving her the chance for a third time. My aunt did give me an iPhone when my old flip phone died, so that's when I started having music on my phone.
* And now here's me, and I have an apartment and meds and a new laptop and a new phone and some really nice gaming headphones that I can no longer use for work because they changed their adapter system, and I'm perplexingly un-depressed and able to listen to "All I Really Need" without cringing. And! Now I've got my diabetes medicated and am not constantly having this weird hacking cough that seems to indicate low blood sugar for me, I can sing again! I sang a sea chantey last night for my D&D group, because our DM who knows literally nothing about boats keeps building these water-heavy worlds and sending us on boat trips, while I and one of the other players know a great deal about boats.
***
* Uh. Anyway. So I actually have no idea where this post is going, hundreds of words later, except that I've been listening to my music and having opinions and wanting to write those opinions down and share them, and Tumblr seems to be working very hard on going poof sooner than anyone imagined. So the rest of this post will be like... random notes on random songs you've probably never heard, and no links to YouTube videos because I'm almost out of my mobile hotspot data and it's only halfway through my billing month, because even though I set up my new laptop at McDonald's I had to use hotspot for some of it.
* So John Barrowman did a medley of Amazing Grace and Loch Lomond where it goes back and forth interspersing verses, and it's just intensely confusing to me because the moods of those two songs are so different even when you play them in the same key and everything.
* Yup, still have a strong antipathy to most songs about romantic love. They sound so unhealthy, with the "I'm nothing without you" and "I'll keep after you until you give in" and "my whole previous life means nothing" themes. Shame, because I really like the sort of acoustic ballad style of singing and songwriting, but... yeah.
* Being a fan of problematic things really is tricky. Tommy Makem's cover of "The Whistling G*psy" is a beautiful song, but... ethnic slur. Still a little iffy on whether to keep that one around.
* Tanglefoot! I almost forgot about this band,
sophia_sol introduced me to them. They're a Canadian group that do sort of folk-styled original songs, often about Canadian history - I'm listening to "Angel of Long Point" right now, they've got one called "Secord's Warning", and so forth. I really like their musical style, it's a little peppier than you'd expect from the narrative ballad tradition but still very much tied to that tradition. My favorite of theirs is "Traighli Bay", which is a pirate ballad but more in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson i.e. not depressing. XD I'm me, so I nitpick a couple of modernisms in there (ships having third mates is an innovation that came in with the eight-hour workday), but it's a really fun song to belt out very loudly on roadtrips.* The reason it's taken me five years to get to any of this new music Kat gave me is that I have to be in a very particular frame of mind to try new songs, and I feel like I have to give each one a fair shake and listen to it all the way through, and it takes a lot of mental and emotional energy and honestly a fuckton of time. I may not get through all thousand songs in the next year or so, even now, but I'm in a lot better shape than I have been... possibly ever in my life before.
* Seriously, a thousand songs at a rough average of three minutes per song is about fifty hours of just sheer listening time. Some of those are duplicates, but... it's a lot of work. Let alone renaming the files and fixing the metadata and - yeah.
* Tom Chapin! Another children's musician from sort of the genre that Raffi created or popularized. His brother Harry Chapin is better known - "Cat's in the Cradle" is I think Harry Chapin's most famous song - but Tom Chapin does solid work. I don't love all his songs the way I do Raffi's or Janice Buckner's, but I have a few I really like.
* God, you know what I haven't gotten yet and really need to is the Moana soundtrack. I found the Lilo and Stitch soundtrack in here and that's reminded me. There's so much music in the world I need, and I haven't had any music for so long, and... yeah.
* You know, I have a fuckton of hymns on here, because of course, Catholic upbringing. For the longest time I couldn't listen to most of them. But Pete Seeger used to say "You know, us old atheists sing a lot of spirituals", and I'm sort of coming around to where I can listen to them as like art, as beautiful songs or catchy songs, without being as... bothered by all the religious implications I left behind. Some of them or most of them, anyway. I don't know if I'll ever be able to listen to the Pange Lingua without having feelings about the Easter liturgy and how I've cut myself off from that for the sake of my own sense of ethics. :S
* Yeah, this happens. I'm about to the end of the A's and I'm bored of listening to every song all the way through. So what I start to do is skip through the songs I know I want and just listen to the new ones, and then I don't want any of them and I get depressed and bored and stop altogether, and then my music is still full of stuff I don't necessarily want. Organizing is hard. ;P
* You know, for a half-hour direct-to-video show intended to teach kids about Christianity, VeggieTales did some really weird shit. This bullet point brought to you by the song "Belly Button", which if you're not familiar was a boyband-style music video about not having a belly button. I've never actually listened to either of the Silly Songs With Larry albums straight through, but that would be a trip and a half.
(Personally I think VeggieTales jumped the shark when they started focusing more on the visuals and riffing on current movies instead of on their message. I mean, obviously there are issues with the whole Christian children's propaganda genre, but if you start out with a message as your raison d'etre and then lose the message, you don't got much left.)
* This is so fucking much music. And a bunch of it is near-duplicates - I have four different Frank Patterson covers of "Danny Boy", and there's at least one I know I don't like as well (sounds like it was recorded on an off day, just a tad), and my inability to hold music in my head for very long means comparing them all is just hell, and yeah. Blargle. :P I'm still working on this, but I'm like halfway through the B's, and this is why I haven't had any music on my phone since I bought it. Sorry, this post is turning into just bitching. The near-duplicates are really annoying though.
And then I went and got my car from the mechanic and now I have work in the morning, so there may or may not be more of this later.
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Date: 2018-12-22 04:43 am (UTC)Wait, what happened to Dreamwidth HTML? It was working fine the last time I posted with it.
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Date: 2018-12-22 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-22 06:56 pm (UTC)So the form of LJ-cut HTML you have modeled here is the same that I use (see Patreon posts for examples, since movie reviews are the only time I use LJ-cuts outside of major photo posts) and your personal profile tag showed up just fine as a link I can follow to
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Date: 2019-05-26 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-26 07:16 pm (UTC)(I'm glad!)
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Date: 2018-12-23 06:31 pm (UTC)I know that feel. (Well, I think my oldest are only 3.5 years old. For now.)
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Tanglefoot sounds interesting, but see above.
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I'm sort of coming around to where I can listen to them as like art, as beautiful songs or catchy songs, without being as... bothered by all the religious implications I left behind.
Also same, although not so much the leaving-them-behind bit. But yeah, I've been feeling more amenable towards Christian music lately too.
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and this is why I haven't had any music on my phone since I bought it.
I'm not sure how that follows. I keep a full copy of my files on my phone, including quite a bit of media I have never actually consumed and in some cases might not ever get around to. Is this part of your issues with hoarding?
(While I am not big on hoarding physical objects, I find I've been getting increasingly information-hoardy over the years. I think it's partly a coping mechanism for getting more of a sense of safety and control, and partly a direct response to the accumulation of instances of linkrot biting me in the ass.)
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(with the occasional help of my friendly neighborhood white-hat stalker)
:)
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Date: 2018-12-24 06:23 am (UTC)I think so, now you mention it. My goal for music on my phone is to be able to hit "shuffle all" and always bring up something I'll enjoy. I'm not bothered by sheer quantity the way I am with Flight Rising dragons and hoard stuff, and I'm good to keep backups, but having songs I don't actively like on my phone gives me the same kind of "I have too many Clutter here" twitch.
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Date: 2018-12-24 03:36 pm (UTC)At first it *was* a little annoying to set up, because music apps always seem to assume playlists are going to be small and opt-in, and "I want 551† out of my 613† songs to be on this playlist" tends to involve pressing 551 buttons. I eventually found that the app "foobar2000" (weird name, I know) has a button for "add all tracks in this file folder to the playlist", which is great because I *do* keep my "only listen to when I specifically want them" songs in a separate folder from my "haven't listened to yet" songs in a separate folder from my "yes, please put these on shuffle" songs.
(I think for the slightly more restricted playlist of "put these on shuffle while family members are listening" (a rare but not unheard of occurrence), I started by making a playlist with the same folders in it, then went through and individually removed the very-much-an-acquired-taste ones and the kind-of-kinky ones. (you don't realise just how many of your songs are about mind control until you decide you're uncomfortable including them on a family playlist, and of course "High" (by Sarah Slean) is specifically about subspace AFAICT...))
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Which, I mean, you would still have to fix the "which of these songs are even which" problem in order to do that, but it might help with being able to keep around songs you haven't tried yet.
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†Actual numbers, because why not.
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Date: 2019-05-26 07:21 pm (UTC)I got them from
You know, for a half-hour direct-to-video show intended to teach kids about Christianity, VeggieTales did some really weird shit.
I was introduced to that show with "I Love My Lips," otherwise known as the patter song performed by the cucumber in analysis with the monocle-wearing asparagus. I didn't understand anything about how it had happened, but I was impressed.
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Date: 2019-05-26 07:51 pm (UTC)I didn't understand anything about how it had happened, but I was impressed.
Nobody understands anything about how that happened. It's part of the charm of the Silly Songs segments. ^_^