Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Madonna

2007 Song of the Day #1 – Holiday (Madonna)

by

In the midst of all of my NaBloPoMoing in November I was reminded of how fun it can be to turn on my mixer and record a song – especially something I’ve never played before. In fact, my favorite results of the month were all songs I barely rehearsed and slammed through in a single take (Other Plans, Under My Skin, & Dilate).

In the spirit of that, in 2007 I’m going to slam through as many songs as I can, posting the results as Songs of the Day for your listening pleasure.

In keeping with my last post, I make no promises that this will occur every day, or even once a week. I’d just like to fill out my catalog of recordings, and to offer you more of me to hear. I plan to focus on some specific artists and albums, but past that I have no idea where this is headed. Some songs might be recognizable hits, while others will be b-sides or originals. Many could be forgettable, but a few could be gems.

My first effort is a cover of Madonna’s “Holiday.” You can read some background about “Holiday” at Mad Eyes, which is the only Madonna site I found with a complete itemized list of every one of her songs (both published and unreleased). It’s pretty awesome.

If you want chords, performance notes, and lyrics for “Holiday, keep reading. [Read more…] about 2007 Song of the Day #1 – Holiday (Madonna)

What’s In My Wallet?

by

Capital One not only boasts commercials with various vikings and other barbarians, but also a strong claim of fraud protection. It was with that in mind that i rang them up last night, as i was about to drop some major expense onto my Capital One card, including a purchase from a new website that would be shipping to an alternate address. AKA, recipe for a declined charge.

Calmly and with the air of one resigned to the large amount of money he was about to spend i explained my predicament to the phone rep. She told me never-to-fear, that we would add the alternate address as a note on my file so that any questions about the validity of my purchase from vendors or the fraud department would be headed off at the pass.

Having found a rare phone rep who sounded as if she knew what she was talking about, i let her do her thing. I think i almost offered to send her flowers, but settled for passing my complements along to her supervisor.

Fast forward to today, twelve-hours post buying binge, when i check my email to discover that one of my transactions had declined. Not the special, weird transaction, but a normal one with Amazon.

And, a few minutes later, so did another. And a third. And a fourth.

None of the transactions to the new address declined. Neither did those paid in Pounds or Euros. Just the standard American purchases that probably comprise half of my credit card statements from 2006 – sheet music.

Because, clearly, someone had stolen my card and was using it to buy obscure Madonna sheet music to send to my house. Oh my god, please save me from the fraudulent horror of rare, out-of-print Madonna sheet music. In two of the declined cases we’re talking about a single copy of a piece of sheet music out of the entire internet, verified via approximately six hours of hunting.

On this phone call i was much less calm, and i spoke to a much less confident phone rep. His name had a ‘v’ in the middle of it. He, uh, thought that, um, maybe my card had been flagged for fraud? Possibly. Because, ahhh, because of the amount of online transactions I made on the card over the past week.

“Levine,” i said, “I think every purchase on the card in 2006 was made online. From the same stores that are being declined.”

Devon “ahhed” in agreement.

“So, why is it declining now that I’m relying on it to pay for twenty-year-old, nearly one-of-a-kind sheet music?”

Irvin “ummed” in confusion.

“Howabout we just put a note on my file that says, ‘Book purchases will never be fraudulent?'” I resisted the urge to add, “or any itemized charge including the word Madonna.”

Slevin “uhhed” for a moment before agreeing that this was doable.

The upshot of that story is that fourteen days from now I will have in my possession sheet music for all but a dozen of Madonna songs (not counting Evita tunes), and of the ones I’ll be missing most people have only heard three.

At that time my office will be officially dubbed the International Madonna Sheet Music Library.

(In case you’re interested, the three common tunes are “Burning Up,” which inexplicably doesn’t exist as sheet music, “Beautiful Stranger,” and “American Pie.” Though, if you’re a connoisseur you will probably also know the trio of “Physical Attraction,” “I Know It,” and “Think of Me” from her first LP. However, I’d be surprised if anyone would really miss my ability to play “Gambler,” “Spotlight,” or “Time Stood Still,” and would be outright shocked if many people have heard b-sides “Cyberraga,” “Your Honesty,” or the crazy-obscure “Supernatural.”)

Trio: Season Five, Suite #5!

by

Trio: Season Five, Suite #5:
Influences (Pt. 1 of 3): Childhood
Like a Virgin (Madonna)
In My Life (Beatles)
Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie)

Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – typically features original songs, but for the first in a special trio of trios I am covering some of the songs that have influenced me and my songwriting.

You can download the entire Trio, or start from a past suite of original songs:

See the rest of this post for chords to all three songs. [Read more…] about Trio: Season Five, Suite #5!

All While Shivering Like A Junky

by

I really don’t get sick all that often, but, boy, when i get sick do i get sick. All weekend was spent either shivering or sweating to death, with the periods in-between spent reading the first issue of my Atlantic Monthly subscription. Mmm, highbrow magazines with senses of humor.

I love reading technical descriptions of how musician’s make their music happen, but the mass media isn’t usually too keen about asking about songwriting methods, guitar tunings, and rehearsal processes. Drowned Madonna did a terrific interview with Mike McKnight, Mad’s touring technology director. Even more revealing is an early rehearsal set list.” Some interesting tidbits: “Crazy For You” down a whole step (guess she’s too good of a singer now to wail like she used to), an originally included rock version of “Love Profusion” (the Headcleanr Rock Mix released on her 2004 EP is probably one of my top ten Madonna songs of all time), and “Dress You Up” in Eb (which is, um, the key that it’s actually in). Almost makes me wish i had shelled out $300 to see the damn concert.


Also in this vein, Tori Amos’s Piece By Piece – half biography and half breakdown of her songwriting process – comes out February 8th. “In passionate and informative prose, Amos explains how her songs come to her and how she records and then performs them for audiences everywhere.”

Meanwhile, now that i own an iPod i’m much more interested in the idea of PodCasting than i was previously. Reading some descriptions of the phenomenon shows that it’s essentially just providing audio content in an RSS format so that people can aggregate it with a souped up RSS reader/stripper/downloader for future listening. I suppose i was suspecting something more revolutionary, but in blogland every invention to aid the lazy is a world event. Trio is, of course, perfect material for a venture into PodCasting, as it’s RealAudio format has become a bit of an antiquity. We shall see.

One Good Move is a quicktime video blog, which is great way for persons like myself who have quit the teevee cold turkey to hold their own at the water cooler. The movies don’t last forever, so make haste and watch Michael Moore sharing an “Over the Rainbow” duet with Phantom of the Opera starlet Emmy Rossum. Hilariously cute. Also, Ashlee Simpson being booed at the Orange Bowl, another classic clip in her quickly growing scrapbook of terrific televised moments. The Daily Show clips make me wish you could subscribe to just one cable channel (though, i suppose i’d need a television for that, eh) – anyone out there a Daily Show bittorrent fiend who can point me in the right direction?

Also, reminder to self: Gawker can be funny when i know what the hell they’re talking about.

Art as Reduction as Art

by

Picking ten favorite songs is a labor that I do not envy. Yes, it is easy to name ten, dash them off of the top of your head, but are those ten you could live with? Ten you love now, will continue to love a decade from now, and would have loved a decade before their release?

However tempting it might be to rattle off a list of greatest hits by my favorite ten artists, these songs are more than just that. I might not pick these songs as the ten I would bring to a desert isle, but they would undoubtedly be the ones stuck in my head while I was there. Not really the best, and not all my favorites, but definitely ten of the most enduring songs in my collection.

My list is rooted in the 90’s, where my taste was truly formed, but for me they are about moments, not tastes. Each chord is a suspended image, and each image a thousand words I could never hope to express so succinctly as they are summed up by a melody or hook. Please excuse my attempt to sum each up in a single paragraph.

Lisa Loeb, Stay

-There is something remarkable about a song with no chorus and no hook that can capture the nation’s imagination so completely that it goes to number one without any label backing at all. Every songwriter hopes to write one song so perfectly formed; the irony is that Lisa actually has dozens.

David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust

– I do not like concept rock, or epic rock, but Ziggy Stardust is both without being either. Petite and digestible, half autobiography and half imagination, it is the centerpiece of one of the most subtly crafted concept albums of all time.

Madonna, Vogue

– Coming at what is now the middle of a career, Vogue is a snapshot of all that is Madonna; at once celebrating and debunking glamour, cribbing musical notes from the latest dancehall trend, and turning something that should have failed (her classic spoken word interlude) into a mark in the public’s consciousness. Not as simple as “Lucky Star” or as incendiary as “Like a Prayer,” but still a perfect pose to strike.

Ani DiFranco, Untouchable Face

– Such a simple kiss off, but only so much as it was an attempt to outwardly distance herself from someone that was not so far away as she might have liked. The eight seconds of silence that come before the first reverbed chord are the sweetest anticipation in my entire collection.

The Supremes, Stop In The Name of Love

– I challenge any five-year-old to not want to mime along to the chorus. Pop in it’s most undiluted form.

The Beatles, Oh Darling

– How do you choose one song by the Beatles rather than an entire album? I hardly know, but I do know that every time I hear this I feel the wind in my hair as my mother and I speed across the Whitman, bound for cheap hotels and salt water taffy. Each note triggers another frame of the ride; the song is an 8mm film strip, peeling at the edges as Paul’s voice reaches its own.

Sheryl Crow, All I Wanna Do

– Alanis might have been the angry woman of my generation, but Sheryl was our beatnik. Later proclaiming that love was in fact a good thing, her lateral advancement of sound never surprises me so long as I keep this in mind; how all the good people in the world floated away like so many balloons in the video, finding themselves suddenly weightless in the face of this carefully careless tone poem.

Carole King, I Feel The Earth Move

– Yes, she may have penned the now-clichéd words that have become as famous a feminine mantra as Aretha’s demand for Respect, but echoes of these clanging chords and chunky guitars can be heard all the way from Tori Amos to Garbage; it seemed excessive to list my favorite songs from that when I could just as easily include this one.

Weezer, Say It Ain’t So

– How can a song about sharing an apartment and reminiscing about an estranged alcoholic father be so primary in my personal glossary of rock? Because, perhaps, it is a perfect marriage of angst and that glimmer that there is perhaps something beyond. Until then, though, you are drowning in the flood of distorted guitars quoting riffs back and forth into a stunning crescendo that slowly leave you the way it began – minor, discordant, and so simple that it cannot help but be familiar.

Veruca Salt, The Morning Sad

– There are a lot of songs about the morning after, whether it be literal or figurative, and for me this one is symbolic of them all. How wrenching, when you know that an attachment so vital has suddenly lost its luster, so that you find yourself suddenly trading on the afterglow of what you once felt to even register a reaction. Perfect rhythms, perfect harmony – perhaps one of the finest pop songs never to have hit its mark and, sadly, effectively the last single of Veruca Salt as it was once known. I wonder, could they have known how apt their words would be in a few years time?

I’m sure I could come up with a different list tomorrow. I’m sure next week I will kick myself for leaving off “Morse Code Love,” “You Wanna Be Starting Something,” “Hallelujah,” “Losing My Religion,” or “Closer To Fine.” To artificially reduce your love of music to a list of ten is the most artificial of exercises, to be sure, but through it you might grow to understand exactly why the undertaking seemed so hard in the first place.

(Per Desh’s nod to this week’s XPN countdown.)