Oneida - "The Beginning Is Neigh"
Broken Social Scene - "Boroque Social"
Dinosaur Jr - "Over Your Shoulder"
Beirut - "Closing Song" (live)
Sufjan Stevens - "You Are The Rake"
As faithful reader Comoprozac (thanks for your support, by the way) pointed out recently, Sufjan's song titles are long as shit. Well, maybe not this little ditty from A Sun Came. But generally it's true and I feel like taking a moment to find the longest Sufjan Stevens' song title on my iPod. Buckle up, it's a doozy: "The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'" is the second track on Come On Feel The Illinoise. Nice. Shortest title you ask? "Kill" and "Rake" are two tracks also on A Sun Came, Sufjan's 2000 debut. Mr. Stevens apparently hadn't flexed his song-naming muscles quite yet.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - "Gulf Shores"
Ben Kweller - "Thirteen"
The Verve - "Lucky Man"
Bob Dylan - "Dink's Song" [home recording]
I think this marks Robert Allen Zimmerman's first appearance on the blog. Welcome, friend. Obviously I'm a fan, but considering his output there's only a modest 107 Dylan songs on my iPod. This tune comes from the excellent No Direction Home soundtrack (oh no, forgot to add it to my soundtrack list the other day!), which serves as a nice retrospective for a career that is virtually impossible to retrospect. "Dink's Song" has had an impressive 9 previous plays - - making it the second most played Dylan tune after personal fave "Yea! Heavy And A Bottle of Brew" from The Basement Tapes which has played 12 times. It is a prime example of Dylan's early folk recordings. "Dink's Song" is actually an American folk standard with the sad, repeated refrain, "Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well." Dylan recorded it for his eponymous first album, but it never made the final cut. So why, you may wonder, is it called "Dink's Song"? Sounds like a job for Mr. Wiki...take it away: "The first historical record of the song was by ethnomusicologist John Lomax in 1908, who recorded it as sung by an African American woman called Dink, as she washed her man's clothes in a tent camp of migratory levee-builders on the bank of the Brazos River, a few miles from College Station, Texas and Texas A&M College." All I can add to this is, awesome.
And then I got to work.
Today's Stats
Total songs listened to: 10
Total minutes of music (approx.): 41
Song with the most previous plays: "Dink's Song" - 9
Miscellaneous factoid about my trip to work today: Other then being faked out by the weather report this morning and dressing way too warmly, not much to note. Although I did mess around with my phone's camera again on the train, discovering another odd function: borders. There is a pre-loaded assortment of tacky borders that you can automatically attach to your pictures, including hearts, balloons and stuffed bears. This one is equally bizarre, but kind of funny. I call this composition "Mo Money, Mo Problems."
4 comments:
Dag! Those guys are totally rolling in the Fives and Tens!
Thanks for the shout-out. One of these days I'm going to get around to impersonating your blog.
I love your blog. It's fantastic. And your taste in music is pretty much impeccable. I am also listening to music on my way to work every morning, but instead of writing about the music, I write about the annoying and sometimes outrageous Metro customs of Koreans in Seoul.
Anyway, all that to say that I appreciate someone who not only knows good music, but knows how to write well about it.
db
Thanks, db! Although your blog sounds a lot more fascinating and I'm definitely going to check it out.
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