Time for a Random 11

(This is a complete, total ripoff from here)

I haven't done one of these in a while. It was finally, finally hot here today (which means over 90-it's been a depressing summer) and I celebrated by overdoing it outside. Tomorrow it might be over 95, and I'm playing golf. Let's hear it for sweat.

1. "A Certain Girl"-Warren Zevon. Look! He's linking to videos! Yes, this is another way I am ripping off from another blog. On to Warren: I miss this man. This is the first song of his I remember hearing, around 1979, on WEFM, the first classic rock station I ever got into. Within a year of discovering the station, it changed formats to country. I started listening to another station, WMET, and they switched to jazz within a year as well. When I was a pre-teen, apparently I was the Typhoid Mary of FM classic rock. As someone who used to practice lots of unrequited love, this song speaks to me. Ah, those were the days.

2. "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down"-Elvis Costello. Truth be told, I am not much of a dancer. I tend to only dance at weddings, and then only if I have had a few beverages. This song makes me want to dance no matter the circumstance, and if I were to jump up on the coffee table in front of me, and there was not another awake person in the house, I'd find myself rocking back and forth while swinging my arms in the opposite motion. Take a look at the three dudes in the background while EC sings the refrain: they are doing it all wrong.

3. "I'll Fly Away"-Allison Krause. Someone else named "Gillian W" sings this as well, but the screen on my 'pod is too small to display here entire name. I'm sure it's here somewhere...Welch! It's Welch! This is from O Brother Where Art Thou, a severely underrated movie (Do not seek the treasure!). I love it. When I first met Kristen she told me that she was a big George Clooney fan, and I told her that this was one of my favorite movies (We thought you was a toad!). She had never seen it-really? I mean how can you be a Clooney fan and not have seen this? I forgave her, and we moved on. No, not really. I still hold a grudge. Hi Honey! She's seen it several times since (I've counted to three!). This song gives me a bit of comfort when I think about those who have gone before me. Imagine how I'd feel if I took religion a tad more seriously.

4. "Departure"-REM. From the vastly underrated CD "New Adventures in Hi-Fi." The video is a little, um, weird. I'm not sure why Michael Stipe thinks he is a purple raccoon. Anyway, any song I hear from this CD makes me think of a road trip I took out west in the summer of 2003, and I recall hearing this song as I passed the Salt Lake City airport heading towards Nevada early on a Sunday morning (the song talks about heading out over the Salt Flats). The rest of Utah after Salt Lake on Interstate 80 is a little, shall we say, barren, but yet fantastic, if you are into looking at things that you've never seen before. We don't have salt flats in the Midwest. I ended up in Sacramento that night, and saw more from less in fourteen hours behind the wheel (there's nothing in Nevada either) than I could have possibly imagined. I don't think I'd make it through an hour of the same drive without falling asleep though.

5. "Waiting on a Friend"-Rolling Stones. It'd be hard to a favorite Stones song, but this is in the top five. We got cable television for the first time when I was a freshman in high school, and there was a public access channel that ran community bulletin boards for every city on the system. They'd play the best music on it though, and I recall sneaking into my parents' room to turn this channel on just for the music. My father busted me frequently, and it drove him nuts that I'd turn on a television for music. One time he busted me as this song was on, and I said "Dad, come on it's the Stones." He replied: "I don't care if it's a meteor. Get out of here."

6. "Yellow"-Coldplay. Ah yes, before Chris Martin got all Gwenyth on us. I like this band, but they haven't been the same for me ever since "Fix You", which is the worst song ever. My niece Erin was a baby back when this song was popular, and she loved it, kicking her feet like crazy whenever it came on. Three years later I played "Fix You" for her and she cried. Really.

7. "Follow Your Bliss"-B52s. OK, there are times when the Internet freaks me out completely, and this is definitely one of them. I didn't think that there'd be a video for this song, and there isn't. Stick with me here: I remember being in Iowa City in the summer of 1990 (just before my senior year) and turning on the Weather Channel before I walked to class to see if it was going to rain, and was a little put off by the fact that this song was being played during the local forecast. It seemed (then, and still does now) a little depressing that someone at the Weather Channel would coordinate music for local forecasts, and that someone would have to contact the B52s and get permission to include this. And I thought this would be an interesting anecdote, but as it turns out, you can see it for yourself at the link, because someone has posted on YouTube a local forecast for Jackson, Mississippi from July 9, 1990 featuring "Follow Your Bliss." Of course, that means the use of the song was national. Unbelievable. What did we do before the Interent again?

8. "Save Me"-kd lang. Whatever happened to her? My very first apartment was in Oak Park, Illinois and had one of those big old fashioned basin bath tubs. The first time I used it I put 6 CDs into the player, hit random, and stayed in the tub for two hours. This is the first song that played. I bet no one else anywhere in the universe hears this song and thinks about a bath tub.

9. "Daughter"-Pearl Jam. As with dancing, I am not much of a singer, but there are a few songs that for some reason I can just nail. This is one of them. I sing it better than Eddie Vetter, and no, I won't sing it for you. Another song that was written for me is James' "Born of Frustration" though I refuse to do the "woo woo wooo woooooo" part at the beginning. Those might be the only two.

10. "Just Like Heaven"-The Cure. Winner of the "Let's Turn a Great Song Into a Crappy Movie" award, which is different from the "Let's Turn a Crappy Song Into a Crappy Movie" award. What the hell is Reese Witherspoon's problem? I digress. Remember the annoying guy in college who played his guitar on the roof of his rental house across from the dormitory where you lived, the one who annoyed the hell out of you and made you wish you had a catapult and several small sheep? The only time I found him mildly entertaining was on a very foggy night in the spring of 1990 when he was playing "Just Like Heaven" and I couldn't see a damn thing. I wonder if Reese Witherspoon was over there.

11. "Romeo and Juliet"-Dire Straits. We started with unrequited love, we finish with unrequited love. Back in my pathetic 20s, when I was blindly carrying a torch, I used to listen to this song and think of how cool it would be when she finally came around. Then a few years later it was featured in Can't Hardly Wait (which is a great song and wasn't a bad movie, so it doesn't win any awards from above) and seemed completely pathetic. It makes me laugh now, especially since I am married and all that pathetic 20s shit is behind me (Thank you, Kristen; when I met you, you made me 56000% cooler. God love you). I do admit that there are times of my life that I could scrub out of my brain with a Brillo Pad, but experience makes us who we are today, doesn't it?

Stay thirsty my friends.