Gaurav's Blog

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I used to have one playlist which followed me everywhere, called SFF (for Strawberry Fields Forever, duh) for those times where I just felt like "no-one I think is in my tree". Luckily, I did manage to grow out of adolescence, so my playlist-to-share instead is the much more blaise Mornings. I have it both on my phone (which can't recognize headphones any more, btw) and on my computer at work. The contents are:

• Kiss Me (Sixpence None The Richer): I'm big on very descriptive songs with a nice beat, which this song has in spades. The wistfulness of this song is very pretty, too.
• 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover (Paul Simon): "Just slip out the back, Jack / Make a new plan, Stan" ... one of those few songs which is just fun, without any real holdups.
• A Day In The Life (The Beatles): Mostly this one's in for the famous orchestral "freak out"s and final crescendo, but the lyrics are also pretty nice - dreamy and biting at once, a difficult combination to pull off at the best of times.
• Band On Every Corner (The Whitlams): Good sarcasm's hard to pull off, and The Whitlams are the masters of the art. "There's a band on every corner / but I'm not in one / I hate three out of every four of them / but I haven't got a gun".
• Born At The Right Time (Paul Simon): Another nice, wistful number. The sheer perfection of the imagined world is so amazing.
• Buy Now Pay Later (Charlie No. 2) by The Whitlams: The second of the three "Charlie" songs, and also my second-favourite of the lot (I love the first one better). This one's downtempo and sad-angry - the singer is frustrated by his friend's inability to help himself, and feels sorry for him, but isn't really willing to help either.
• Cecilia (Paul Simon): Another amazing beat, and what amazing lyrics! "Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia / up in my bed room / I got up to wash my face / when I come back to bed, someone's taken my place".
• Charlie No. 1 (The Whitlams): My favourite of the "Charlie" songs, this one captures the feeling of having a girl come between you and a friend.
• Charlie No. 3 (The Whitlams): The tragic ending of the "Charlie" songs; I won't spoil it for you, but this is a slow, thoughtful, sad, lonely sort of song.
• Dreadlock Holiday (10cc): Like I said, I love snarky, and it's hard to imagine snarkier than this.
• Get Back (The Beatles): Good lyrics ("All that goes around, they said / she's got it comin' / but, she gets it while she can"), and a hard, driving beat. What more could you ask for?
• Globe Trekker Theme (Ian Ritchie): One of only two instrumentals on this list; I bought an entire CD just for this song. Well worth the price, this is the theme which plays over the opening sequence of The Globe Trekker (used to be called Lonely Planet) TV show, where that guy's making the circle in the sand. This music makes me want to travel every time I hear it, and I'll probably be humming it to myself every time I'm heading to the immigration counter at airports.
• Graceland (Paul Simon): Nice lyrics, nice guitar work, what more can I say? Not much, because I'd like to hurry on to ...
• Hallelujah (John Cale): This song's been a favourite for a year or so, now. Amazing lyrics, amazingly different tune, and very nice vocals. Such a sad one!
• Her Floor is My Ceiling (The Whitlams): Beautiful song; it's about a guy who has a crush on the girl upstairs and thinks she'd like him, too, and dump her loser boyfriend for him if he could only just get his act together.
• Hey Bulldog (The Beatles): Another no-strings-attached fun song, snarky and loud and crazy and young. Good stuff.
• Hung My Head (Johnny Cash): It's so hard to do musical tragedy; you can do "sad" pretty easily - boo hoo hoo, she left me, we'll never meet, we're separated forever - but this song about a kid who accidently kills a man and is sentenced to death brings a lump to my throat every time. It's also great to have a song which is so strongly honest: yes, life is like that sometimes. People die for the strangest, saddest, stupidest of reasons. Deal.
• I Don't Wanna Face It (John Lennon): Hard to categorize, really. A guy singing about how he'd like to save the world, but can't really stand people most of the time. Odd, fun, interesting.
• Klaviersonate Nr. 8 c-Moll Op. 13 "Pathétique"　2. Adagio Cantabile (Friedrich Gulda, originally composed by Beethoven): Also known simply as Piano Sonata No. 8, this is probably the most beautiful piece of music in this playlist. With just a single piano, Beethoven - and Mr. Gulda, the piano player on my piece - sums up the sheer pathos faced by a self-conscious being in an uncaring universe.
• Kodachrome (Paul Simon): Another fun, interesting song, with good speed and a nice beat. How badly are we aching for our past, really?
• Laugh In Their Faces (The Whitlams): I have no idea what this song's about; the lyrics are amazing, though ("Letter to your mother says you're doing everything you can / And I'm glad that she won't get the joke"), and the beat is really nice too. Sounds like a nice, hopeful song to me, but I might of course be catastrophically wrong.
• Lemon Tree (Fool's Garden): A beautiful, funny little song, describing the kind of do-nothing bits that my life in particular seems so full of.
• Life's A Beach (The Whitlams): "There's a beach umbrella / couple lying in the sun / and for once in my life, it's not the people from the suburbs / it's me's got it wrong". A beautiful, slow, haunting melody, nice rock beat, and a story about a guy who's girl is leaving, and he's reconciled to it, is busy putting it behind him, trying to figure out which memories to keep and which ones to throw, what to let her keep, and what to keep himself. Lovely song.
• Love Is Everywhere (The Whitlams): Nice song about love, and - I think? - being happy with what you've got. Or, you know, not.
• Loves Me Like A Rock (Paul Simon): A beautiful story-song about a guy who is secure in his mother's love (she "loves [him] like a rock") and goes on to become the President and take on the Devil. Interesting stuff, to say the least.
• Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (The Beatles): Possibly some of the most poetic lyrics ever written. Nonsense, of course, but beautifully done, perfectly handled, crazy lyrics. Did I mention I love songs which are descriptive, which spend their three minutes twenty eight seconds immersing you into another world? The Beatles did that a lot; another favourite not on this list is Baby's in Black: "Oh dear, what can I do / Baby's in black, and I'm feeling blue". The sheer flow of colour!
• Made Me Hard (The Whitlams): "Nobody wants to be the weak one / we all want to go from strength to strength". Another great song with a nice beat.
• Make the World Safe (The Whitlams): A guy, pleading with a girl to let him "make the world safe" for her. Beautifully done, and a lovely, slow melody, with pretty little percussion all over.
• Me And Julio Down By The School Yard (Paul Simon): Mama Pajama! The Radical Priest! The Queen of Corono Herself! If you're into somewhat crazy lyrics, you can't really go wrong with this one. I'm also a huge fan of the opening few bars (the guitars playing slightly out of sync in left and right speakers).
• Melbourne (The Whitlams): A guy is in love with a girl, and with her city, what a pity it won't work out. Beautifully done, and I can totally relate to the falling-in-love-with-a-girl-and-a-city-combo theme. That the girl sounds very cool is a nice touch =).
• Mother And Child Reunion (Paul Simon): Odd little song, but it's got a nice story behind it.
• Mrs. Robinson (Paul Simon): The music in this song is amazing, and the lyrics - "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you / Woo, woo, woo / What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson? / Joltin' Joe has left and gone away / Yay, Yay, Yay".
• No Aphrodisiac (The Whitlams): "A letter to you on a cassette / 'cos we don't write any more / gotta make it up quickly / there's people asleep on the second floor". A guy singing to a girl, is pretty much all I've figured out about this song, but the lyrics are beautiful, sad and inward looking.
• One Jump Ahead (from the Aladdin OST): Nice song, loud and fast, with quick, snappy lyrics, too. From Disney's Golden Era, so what do you expect?
• Pretty as You (The Whitlams): Snipy! "He's better looking than he looks / and his music is better than it sounds ... all of this is true / when you're as pretty as you". Either a rant against a pretty girl who preferred somebody else to the singer, or just a rant against pretty, airheaded girls. The jealousy is so concentrated you could reach out and touch it.
• Real Love (John Lennon): Amazing piano work, and beautiful lyrics too. For something John wrote in his late 30s, it's incredibly innocent, too.
• Revolution (The Beatles): Not to be confused with the equally nice "Revolution No. 1" (or the extremely weird "Revolution No. 9"), Revolution is a kicker of a song, asking the same questions "No. 1" is asking - but this time screaming out for answers, dammit, answers. Very cool.
• So Young (K Klass Remix, The Corrs): Loved this song in college (where I was staying up all nights, etc.); still love it now, although the staying up is somewhat restricted. Sometimes.
• Tangled Up In Blue (The Whitlams): It's a cover of a certain popular Bob Dylan song, the one that famously took "ten years to live and two years to write". Nice, fast beat, and typically complicated Dylan lyrics.
• Thank you (for loving me at my worst) (The Whitlams): This one's a really fun number, with the singer just thanking all sorts of people for all sorts of thing. The music is loud and quick, the lyrics smart and jumpy, and everything just works really well together.
• That Was Your Mother (Paul Simon): Like Kodachrome, it's a song about the past, and how it deals with the present. Nice song.
• The Boxer (Paul Simon): You must have heard this one; it's insanely famous. I like it for the slightly dignified, entirely submissive voice it's sung in. I haven't heard that sort of thing much.
• Would You Be Happier (The Corrs): Another fun Corrs song; "when you stumble on tomorrow and trip over today" - what lovely imagery! And a nice beat and nice singing voices to boot.
• The Obvious Child (Paul Simon): "The cross is in the ballpark" - huh, what? Amazing beat, again, and strangecrazy lyrics.
• The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (Lemon Demon): Check out the video online, then download it from the band's website. If you're into pop references, you'll love this - every major pop hero/villian take each other on in the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny ("good guys, bad guys and explosions!").
• There's No-one (The Whitlams): A guy's all alone, and figuring it's not that bad. Nice, melancholy song.
• Code Monkey (Jonathan Coulton): A beautifully done song about code monkeys. If you're in the programming profession, you will love this song. And it's a free download, even!
• Time (The Whitlams): A guy sings to the girl he's broken up with. The break up is going well - "Time's doing well by us" - and yet, "It's been some months since she came around / Lying where she used to lie / She's so beautiful I could eat her / Been some months, making me love too slow / Making me love so, so long / Making me love so, so long". Ain't that something?
• Unreliable (The Whitlams): A girl likes the guy, kind of, sort of, maybe, and it's killing him.
• Up Against The Wall (The Whitlams): A sarcastic little rejoinder at love in general. Good stuff.
• Why Did She Go? (Fool's Garden): Totally ridiculous song (except for the superficially sad chorus), but so much fun!
• Wonderwall (Oasis): Lovely guitar, decent lyrics, nice voice. There's a longing and an anger there that's captured really well.
• You Can Call Me Al (Paul Simon): "A man walks down the street, he says / why am I soft in the middle now / why am I soft in the middle when / the rest of my life is so hard"

Music being what it is ("'scuse me while I kiss this guy", anyone?) I'm probably wrong about a number of the 'meanings' to the songs. But hey - that's what they mean to me, right? It's the right of the reader to reinterpret and all that claptrap.

Also, apologies if I forgot to write any of the entries, or formatting is wrong, or whatever. I'll fix it eventually.

Labels: music

This post was posted by Unknown at 4:54 pm