Magic moments
Oct. 13th, 2015 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brightly_litSomething straight-up magical happened today. I took a nap afterward, and when I woke up, I was like, did that really happen, or was that a dream? BUT IT REALLY HAPPENED.
Some of you (if you were big music fans like me) are old enough to remember how it was in the old days, how maybe the record you most wanted was rare and hard to find and was never in stock. My first favorite song by my first favorite band wasn't even that obscure, but I couldn't find it for two whole years. When I pulled it out of the bin, in a kind of basement, corner record shop in a distant mall I almost never got to go to, I couldn't believe I was actually holding it in my hands, and that feeling of "Oh my God, I can actually listen to this song any time I want from this day forward," that wonder and gratitude, sometimes strikes me when I hear it to this day. I'd only ever heard it before--rarely, after its brief heyday--on the radio. Sometimes the song itself seemed too good to be real. (It's a really good song! And is, perhaps not coincidentally, about magic.)
But the internet changed all that. Nowadays, if there's a song I want to hear--no matter how obscure or bizarre (such as this one)--all I've got to do is go to YouTube or iTunes or Amazon and maybe drop a dollar ... which is great, instant access ... but we lost something in having that. That sense of magic couldn't happen in this day and age ... or so I thought.
The band I've been obsessing over for quite a while now--the one that has me up late at night watching videos and paging through pages of Google images like some of us may have on occasion been known to do with SPN and our boys and con vids--broke up a while ago. Recently I learned that they completed six songs of another album before breaking up. Today I thought I ought to have a look and see if they'd released those songs somewhere so I could hear them (despite coming across an interview with the lead singer in which he said you could hear in the music that all the passion was gone), because in spite of what he said, I figured there might be some goodness in there, and I'm kind of a completist.
I didn't find those. They never released them. They only released four albums total, the latter two of which are each amazingly awesome and amazingly different. The second-to-last betrays a certain immaturity as songwriters, but it still has some really incredible music on it, and the last--fugeddaboudit. I had indeed come across mention a couple of months ago that they actually recorded that last album multiple times before they finally made the recording they were happy with, and I didn't think more about this ... until today, when I discovered that they DID in fact release (some of? all of?) those recordings--but in limited release, via their website, long ago.
Scarcely daring to hope, I went to Amazon ... only to find they're available via MP3 ... and that they number ten full songs: a full album's worth, released as five two-song mini-albums. These songs must be a well-kept secret (in a bandom with no secrets), because while their other albums have hundreds upon hundreds of Amazon reviews, each of these recordings barely has twenty, and they don't ever seem to be mentioned when people are talking about their records.
If I could have wished for an album by this band to manifest out of thin air and suddenly appear in my shuffle, it would have been a full record recorded between their last two albums, the missing link that delineates the process of maturing from the one to the other (after which they got so good, there was nowhere further for the band to go, or so I think). Who knew, that even in this day and age, that magical feeling of finding the obscure record in the bin could be mine once more?
Okay, after writing this with the burned CD beside me on my desk, I think my feet are starting to touch the earth again, just a little.
It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.
Some of you (if you were big music fans like me) are old enough to remember how it was in the old days, how maybe the record you most wanted was rare and hard to find and was never in stock. My first favorite song by my first favorite band wasn't even that obscure, but I couldn't find it for two whole years. When I pulled it out of the bin, in a kind of basement, corner record shop in a distant mall I almost never got to go to, I couldn't believe I was actually holding it in my hands, and that feeling of "Oh my God, I can actually listen to this song any time I want from this day forward," that wonder and gratitude, sometimes strikes me when I hear it to this day. I'd only ever heard it before--rarely, after its brief heyday--on the radio. Sometimes the song itself seemed too good to be real. (It's a really good song! And is, perhaps not coincidentally, about magic.)
But the internet changed all that. Nowadays, if there's a song I want to hear--no matter how obscure or bizarre (such as this one)--all I've got to do is go to YouTube or iTunes or Amazon and maybe drop a dollar ... which is great, instant access ... but we lost something in having that. That sense of magic couldn't happen in this day and age ... or so I thought.
The band I've been obsessing over for quite a while now--the one that has me up late at night watching videos and paging through pages of Google images like some of us may have on occasion been known to do with SPN and our boys and con vids--broke up a while ago. Recently I learned that they completed six songs of another album before breaking up. Today I thought I ought to have a look and see if they'd released those songs somewhere so I could hear them (despite coming across an interview with the lead singer in which he said you could hear in the music that all the passion was gone), because in spite of what he said, I figured there might be some goodness in there, and I'm kind of a completist.
I didn't find those. They never released them. They only released four albums total, the latter two of which are each amazingly awesome and amazingly different. The second-to-last betrays a certain immaturity as songwriters, but it still has some really incredible music on it, and the last--fugeddaboudit. I had indeed come across mention a couple of months ago that they actually recorded that last album multiple times before they finally made the recording they were happy with, and I didn't think more about this ... until today, when I discovered that they DID in fact release (some of? all of?) those recordings--but in limited release, via their website, long ago.
Scarcely daring to hope, I went to Amazon ... only to find they're available via MP3 ... and that they number ten full songs: a full album's worth, released as five two-song mini-albums. These songs must be a well-kept secret (in a bandom with no secrets), because while their other albums have hundreds upon hundreds of Amazon reviews, each of these recordings barely has twenty, and they don't ever seem to be mentioned when people are talking about their records.
If I could have wished for an album by this band to manifest out of thin air and suddenly appear in my shuffle, it would have been a full record recorded between their last two albums, the missing link that delineates the process of maturing from the one to the other (after which they got so good, there was nowhere further for the band to go, or so I think). Who knew, that even in this day and age, that magical feeling of finding the obscure record in the bin could be mine once more?
Okay, after writing this with the burned CD beside me on my desk, I think my feet are starting to touch the earth again, just a little.
It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-10-13 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-13 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 10:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-13 10:40 pm (UTC)The three ones I most remember are Look Who's Talking 2 (which lol my mother helped me out with because apparently she can ID this ridiculous movie within on sentence of me describing it), The Quick and the Dead, and the book, The Bronze Bow. LIFE CHANGING REDISCOVERIES, even though I have literally no intimate connection to any one of those things. Just knowing what they were called was such a relief, though! XD So I can only imagine the epicness of uncovering something you, you know, actually want!
:DDDDD
no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:20 am (UTC)Then there's the video I wrote to the local video-playing program begging them to play, and when I found it on YouTube recently ... I saw why they refused to play it. WORST. VIDEO. EVER. But it was my favorite baaaaand ....
It's the best when someone else remembers something and can tell you what it was.
But yeah, it was epic. EPIC.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 02:10 am (UTC)I loved this story so much! I'm old, so I totally remember waiting for music to come out, not finding things, hearing a song on the radio and going nuts because there was no title/artist given, etc.
Glad you had that moment again!
no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:15 am (UTC)Argh, when they didn't tell you who the artist was! Or when you called up the DJ and BEGGED him to play your favorite song and he just never would because it wasn't in the top 40 ...
Nice to meet ya!
no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 03:18 pm (UTC)I know, right? I wasted many evenings like that, just WAITING. And then they'd run out of time or whatever.
Nice to meet ya!
You too. Take care!
no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 03:24 am (UTC)Glad you had that moment, and that it gave you such pleasure.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-14 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:25 am (UTC)I listened that to death and beyond. I think I snapped/stretched the tape on it, lol!
It had two cassettes....this was the track listing, lol
Record/Tape 1 Side 1 (1)
Paul McCartney : "No More Lonely Nights"
Giorgio Moroder with Philip Oakey : "Together in Electric Dreams"
Bronski Beat : "Why?"
Limahl : "Never Ending Story"
Nick Heyward : "Warning Sign"
John Waite : "Missing You"
Michael Jackson : "Farewell My Summer Love"
Lionel Richie : "Hello"
Record/Tape 1 Side 2 (2)
Culture Club : "The War Song"
Elton John : "Passengers"
Julian Lennon : "Too Late for Goodbyes"
The Style Council : "Shout to the Top!"
Thompson Twins : "Doctor! Doctor!"
Heaven 17 : "Sunset Now"
Kane Gang : "Respect Yourself"
Tina Turner : "Private Dancer"
Record/Tape 2 Side 1 (3)
Queen : "It's a Hard Life"
Status Quo : "The Wanderer"
Big Country : "East of Eden"
U2 : "Pride (In the Name of Love)"
Feargal Sharkey : "Listen to Your Father"
O.M.D. : "Tesla Girls"
Kim Wilde : "The Second Time"
Nik Kershaw : "Human Racing"
Record/Tape 2 Side 2 (4)
Ray Parker Jr. : "Ghostbusters"
UB40 : "If It Happens Again"
Pointer Sisters : "Jump (For My Love)"
Level 42 : "Hot Water"
Eurythmics : "Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)"
Rockwell : "Somebody's Watching Me"
Malcolm McLaren : "Madam Butterfly"
Eugene Wilde : "Gotta Get You Home Tonight"
Yeah, I may be having a little trip down memory lane ;) ♥
no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:44 am (UTC)Me a youngling? LOL!
I'm an old soul, by all accounts. According to my Mama and my hubby, I have the music taste of someone older than me, and I think I was born in the wrong decade! lol! Music wise anyways ;)
I have a hugeeeee collection of vinyl here, Most are Steve's singles that I inherited when he threatened to throw them out and I was all *HORROR* and then there are some I got from my mama and papa, my all time fave is the original extra length 12 bar blues from Status Quo :D
I had to do that weird glue thing with it because I'd played it so much it got a little scratchy O.o (bad girl)
I'll have to get my arse over to youtube and listen to that one, I don't think I've heard it before. - Ignore that comment, I couldn't see the video in my comments in my gmail, DOH!!! *clicks play*
Thank you for letting me rattle on, lol! I could chat about music alllll day ;)
no subject
Date: 2015-10-21 04:07 pm (UTC)We can chat about music any time!!
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Date: 2015-10-24 08:42 am (UTC)I've noticed an upsurge in the kind of music that really grabs and grips me in the last five years. Mumford and Sons, for example, they always manage to make me feel the journey of the song!
I'm just jealous that I didn't get chance to enjoy the music I love the first time round! Steve's FULL of stories of going to see people like Hawkwind and White Snake and Led Zep and it just makes me gnash my teeth, lol! He's so much fun to listen to, but I get so jealous, lol!
*smooches* Yeah, I've really gotta get this rambling bit of my brain under control :)
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Date: 2015-10-28 05:14 pm (UTC)Aww, poor Milly. It WAS a pretty great time for concerts and such. I was even a bit too young to get to enjoy that; I was 13 or 14 when imo the best music was coming out, and I wasn't allowed to start going to concerts until I was ~16. BUT YOU AND I STILL SHARE THE LOVE OF THAT MUSIC, THOUGH. :-D <3
no subject
Date: 2015-10-30 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-11 02:45 pm (UTC)