Today’s song was invited in by the group’s name. Traveling and planning, I was mapping a way through time squeezes. With squeeze in my mental stream, Squeeze’s 1981 song, “Tempted” soon began flowing.
Enjoy.
Tuesday’s Theme Music
Today’s theme music is “Havana” by Camila Cabello (2017).
A lovely song about a brief love affair, it’s in my music stream this morning, background to routines, but I don’t know why. I had a smattering of dreams that felt inchoate. Little is clearly remembered except for an instance of awakening in alarm with the urgent question, “What was I supposed to do?” occupying me. Leaping up, I hunted for clues in a blended zone of sleep and consciousness. Anxiety ebbed back as I realized it was a dream, but I wondered about its roots.
So how does the salsa-influenced, bouncy “Havana” figure into this? Call me clueless in the morning.
As I enjoy the song, I played the video after Cabello’s SNL appearance a few weeks ago, chuckling at the reality send-up that bracketed the song.
Monday’s Theme Music
I was with family yesterday. Two of my little sisters are grandmothers. One of them has been dubbed Bebop by her granddaughter. I was trying to remember a specific bop song and could not. I half-heard it in my stream. Everyone thought that I must mean “Bee bop a lou, she’s my baby.” No. I gave them the rhythm.
Oh, yeah, they said, “Unskinny Bop.” Two of us – older people, thought, White Snake? No, the young corrected us: Poison.
Here you go, from 1990 — before sis was Bebop.
Sunday’s Theme Music
Today’s music emerges into the stream from interactions with others – hearing tales and stories, wondering about the truth, searching for nuances of understanding about who they are and what they’ve gone through.
Pictures of the situations pool and splash, shifting with more, diluting with doubts. Just one clear moment, you know?
That invites the old Little Feat song, “One Clear Moment” (1989).
I see you cryin’ and I don’t know why
The way you look you should be flyin’ high
In that one clear moment
Little Feat was already in my head, as one of the members Paul Barrere, passed away. Some reflection is always demanded when one of those that provided the music to our lives departs the scene.
Saturday’s Theme Music
Dreamed about being ‘slathered in yellow’ — again — so I awoke with “Yellow” by Coldplay (2000) in my stream.
Friday’s Theme Music
Today’s music choice is a song that keeps stirring during my writing thinking session this week. I’m mulling three different novel ideas. One of them ends up with this song, “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin (1975) in my stream.
I have some vivid impressions of this song on the album that it came from, Physical Graffiti. Nineteen years old, I’d completed basic training the year before, and technical training at the beginning of the year. After that, I was assigned my first duty assignment at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. I met two other guys there. One of them had a Ford Mustang Mach I. He used to play Physical Graffiti on his car’s eight track or his room’s stereo almost all the time. He especially loved “Kashmir”.
Haven’t seen him since 1976, when I left for the Philippines. Wonder what he’s been up to.
Thursday’s Theme Music
As I landed in Pittsburgh last night, a Smith cover of a Beatles/Shirelles song began streaming. I haven’t lived in Pittsburgh, PA, since the early seventies. I usually visit the city for about five days at a time every two or three years. But it offers that energy that says, home. My soul feels more settled among the neighborhoods nestled among the western PA. rivers, mountains, and bridges.
Here’s “Baby It’s You” (1969), written by Burt Bacharach, Luther Dixon, and Mack David, and performed by Smith.
Wednesday’s Theme Music
Flying today, left for the airport at no coffee dark thirty. Now at the second stop and awaiting the next conveyance. Naturally, my stream turns to flying and jet songs. There’s a lot out there. One immediately springing into the stream was Frank Sinatra, “Come Fly With Me”. I banished that, replacing it with Steve Miller’s 1977 offering, “Jet Airliner”.
Enjoy!
Tuesday’s Theme Music
I’d been blue last week, you know, a few days of WTF and WTH coursing through me as I read news, experienced disappointment and weariness, took a jaunt down what’s-the-point lane, and pouted a bit in the pity-poor-me cul-de-sac. Yeah, a helluva neighborhood. Other streets include, who-cares boulevard and nobody-gives-a-damn avenue. We share drinks at the I’m-tired-of-this-shit cafe.
Some blues music periodically trickled through the street. Eventually, a song that was released in 1965, when I was nine, gained momentum in the stream. That would be Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. I listened to covers from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Harry Nilsson, and others, good work all, but the original’s rhythm and tone carried me most.
So here it be, from me to thee, courtesy of technology and Youtube. Gotta admit, watching young Bob and his signs puts a smile on my face.
Monday’s Theme Music
The sadness of aging is often not what happens to you but the losses of others, from friends who age and disease, to our heroes.
I, and my generation, has seen a lot of our heroes passing away. The inevitability of death can’t be denied. It happens, but we don’t know what goes on past the door. There’s a lot of guesses and conjecture, and some promises and prophecies, but most of us need to wait until we go through the doorway before we find anything, if there is even anything there.
These reflections came as I thought about my dreams last night. I didn’t remember much except one. As I went through the exercise, though, the first lines of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” (1992) entered the head stream.
Oh, my life is changing everyday
In every possible way
And oh, my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems
Never quite as it seems
Those lines reflect my life philosophy. Nothing is what it ever fully seems. We live on spectrums of seeing, remembering, sometimes understanding with a glint of blinding insight, but more often, applying hopeful explanations to what we don’t know, all in efforts to uphold and sustain this stubborn illusion of reality. But then, hearing Dolores O’Riordan’s unique voice in my head, I remembered that she’d passed on, slipping through the next doorway when she was forty-six. She’d drowned in a bathtub. Reading about it now on Wikipedia, I learn her blood-alcohol level was .33. Empty alcohol bottles were found in her room.
So, in memory of dreams and life, here’s today’s theme music.
