Tag: 1997

Tuesday Theme Music

I woke up streaming Third Eye Blind’s 1997 song, “Semi-Charmed Life”. Although the song arrived after a flotilla of dreams, I don’t…oh, wait, there might’ve been a connection. Just saw it.

“Semi-Charmed Life” sounds very poppish, with it’s varying cadences, the doo-doo-doo, and softer, gentler inflections. Much of the words are sung fast, but trying to hear them when it came out, I thought, “It sounds like he said she goes down on him.” Eventually, search engines developed the wherewithal to fulfill powerfully important tasks like learning song lyrics.

Yes, she did say she goes down on me. Yes, they were also singing about chopping a line, and that part about crystal meth? Yes, it’s in there, too. Later, though, on other stations, those lines were gone, yes, edited out, censored. Don’t want people hearing that sort of thing. Close your ears, children.  Don’t want to poison the air with words about drug use.

(Reminds me of those places like North Carolina who FORBID using those blasphemous words, climate-change. If they don’t talk about it, it won’t happen, right? And everyone will live happily on the beach, building new developments and golf courses forever. Love that logic.)

You really should listen to that bouncing, free-association, sing-song sloppy rhymes, besides the soft ones when he sings, “I want something else.” When you put it all together, it’s reflective and powerful, with desperate edges, but ironically poppish.

 

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Thursday’s Theme Music

I was humming this song to myself today. Actions are connected to thoughts and thoughts are connected to memories, and memories yield songs. I was quoting Popeye, “I yam what I yam”, which introduced thoughts about changing, providing the opportunity for a song to stream in:

But I’m here in my mould, I am here in my mould
And I’m a million different people from one day to the next
I can’t change my mould, no, no, no, no, no

Read more: The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony Lyrics | MetroLyrics

I was living in Mountain View and working for PAS in Palo Alto when the song came out in 1997. Two years later, another company acquired PAS. My new boss, the director of marketing, came out on a meet and greet. I drove him to a restaurant. This song was playing in the car, and he said, “I love this song.” Music became our bond.

He was a good guy to work for, a person I wouldn’t hesitate to work for again.

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Yesterday’s late afternoon was spent at Lake-of-the-Woods Resort. We’d been planning to go to LOW for a couple weeks. A favorite local band, Colonel Mustard, was playing, and friends have a cabin and boat there. We’d do a boat ride, have dinner, listen to music and dance. As a bonus, the air was much clearer in that area, so we’d give our respiratory systems a break, too.

We had a fun time. Colonel Mustard closed with Chumpawamba’s song, “Tubthumbing.” Most people know the part of the song that goes, “I get knocked down, but I get up again, ain’t never gonna keep me down.”

That’s how life goes for most of us. We’re hit with something that floors us. Getting up, we stagger forward, only to get hit again. Each time we’re hit, it’s a little harder to get up, but we usually grit out teeth and declare, “I’m not staying down.”

Suits my mood, so WTF? Here we are, from 1997.

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Friday’s Theme Music

Let’s pop back to 1997.

The scene is San Jose, California. The group is Smash Mouth. They were the summer’s rising flavor. One song that caught on was a little ditty called “Walkin on the Sun”.

It ain’t no joke I’d like to buy the world a toke
And teach the world to sing in perfect harmony
And teach the world to snuff the fires and the liars
Hey I know it’s just a song but it’s spice for the recipe
This is a love attack I know it went out but it’s back.
It’s just like any fad it retracts before impact
And just like fashion it’s a passion for the with it and hip
If you got the goods they’ll come and buy it just to stay in the clique

h/t to azlyrics.com

It’s just a song, but it something to help you think. Cheers

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Sunday’s Theme Music

I’d forgotten the Indigo Girls until I saw a Tig Notaro comedy special on Netflix last night. When I thought about forgetting IG, I realized that I don’t hear them on any of the many FM and Sirius XM stations and channels that I listen to. I guess I’m not the only one that forget them. Yet I love the energetic, infectious style that they deliver.

“Shame On You” from 1997 is one of my Indigo Girls favorites. I hope you listen and enjoy.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

It’s been twenty years since this was recorded in concert, spit in the cosmic wind as far as time goes, but a chunk of living for humans on Eath. These humans are renown for their musical performances. These humans are David Bowie, with the Foo Fighters. These humans were performing this song, “Hallo, Spaceboy,” at Madison Square Garden in New York to celebrate Bowie’s fiftieth birthday.

Fun to watch. There will be drumming’.

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Today’s Theme Music

I find myself singing a song, and then consider when I heard it, and where I was when it was released. With this song today, I thought, oh, when did this come out? I was living in Mountain View, California, wasn’t I? But that means the late nineties.

That couldn’t be right, but I look it up, and confirm, yes, this song is twenty years old.

No way, I react. It seems so recent and fresh. But it says it on the net, on Wikipedia, so you know it’s true.

Songs, politics, and technology are my time markers. When this song came out in nineteen ninety-seven, my email account was on Hotmail. My computer was a Zenith. I’d graduated to a monster VGA monitor. My hard drive was twenty meg, and I had both three and a half inch and five and a quarter inch floppy drives, along with a R/W CD drive. I think we were running about twenty-five MHz, and Windows 3.1. Bill Clinton was the POTUS, and the economy was flying. As an aside, Must See TV, with Friends and Seinfeld, filled the top ten television shows.

The U.S.S.R. had collapsed, and the Berlin Wall had come down. There was talk about the Peace Dividend. We thought there was a glorious future ahead of us.

Twenty years. As everyone finds out, significant changes take place in twenty years.

Here is Sugar Ray, with “Fly.”

 

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Today’s Theme Music

The music today is a product of a triple coincidence. There could be some causality, but it might just be linkage.

I’ve been streaming the song, “I Will Buy You A New Life.” It’s part of my mental shuffle set. I like the lyrics, and often sing or hum it to myself as I meander through activities. Everclear members wrote the song, and the band released it back in nineteen ninety-seven, a year that puts thoughts in pause to reflect on how much time has sneezed by since that song came out. Everclear had a number of terrific albums with fab songs like “Santa Monica”, and “Father of Mine,” but it’s amazing it’s been twenty years since I was driving around Half Moon Bay listening to them, dude.

Please, join me and observe a moment of silence for nineteen ninety-seven.

Zoning back into this post, the three coincidences that lands the song in the august position (get it?) as today’s theme music is one, I was singing it several times this week; two, Everclear headlined at the Jackson County Fair last month; and tres, I read that Everclear, from Portland, Oregon, is the state’s highest grossing musical act ever. With that power of three pushing the nomination, victory was assured.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Woke up feeling like some Squirrel Nut Zippers.

I began listening to them in nineteen ninety-seven. I was working for a medical defice startup called P.A.S. in Palo Alto. A young co-worker introduced me to the S.N.Z. sound with the second album, “Hot.”

I became particularly fond of “Hell.” It was a good song to sing along to while seat dancing  when I was stuck in the SF Bay Area traffic. I still smile when I hear this song.

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Today’s Theme Music

Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody’s comin’ to get me
Just say you never met me
I’m runnin’ underground with the moles
Diggin’ in holes

Hear the voices in my head
I swear to God it sounds like they’re snoring
But if you’re bored then you’re boring
The agony and the irony, they’re killing me

I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And I’m so hot, ’cause I’m in hell
I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And it’s a sin to live this well
(One, two, three, four)

(h/t to songlyrics.com)

Yes, that’s a couple choruses outta ‘Flagpole Sitta’, Harvey Danger, nineteen ninety-seven. Living in Mountain View, California, I worked for a medical device in Palo Alto. This song just knocked me out. Lyrics, beat, pace, it all worked for me. It became a “crank up” tune, one of those that causes my hand to gravitate to volume control.

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