Tag: music

Today’s Theme Music

Sometimes the theme music is about trying to influence my mood, reflect a more general mood, or capture a sentiment. Today, pining for the end of 2016 and commencing the countdown to 2017, I turned to Bruce Hornsby and the Range and ‘The Way it Is’, 1986.

I selected it because he sings, “Some things will never change.” He alludes to judgments based on appearance, beggars and the unemployed, and people’s callousness. “That’s just the way it is.”

I’m one that doesn’t believe that’s just the way it is, and things will never change. I’m not a student of history but I enjoy reading history. I know of other times when matters were worse for many in almost every term we can think of to phrase it.

But that’s not how it stayed. People hunted medical solutions to reduce and eradicate disease, or sough technological advances to benefit our planet and civilization, economic improvements for all classes in all societies, or pushed for freedom and equality for all without regard to how they, as individuals, differ or conform with anyone else.

I am one that believes that if we c0ntinue developing and articulating visions of a better world, we will achieve such visions of better lives for everyone. I turn to Bruce and the Range because that’s what one stanza states:

That’s just the way it isI
Some things will never change
That’s just the way it is
But don’t you believe them

Yeah, I don’t believe them. Things will change.

For the better.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

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Today’s Theme Music

No particular reason for this song today. It’s a classic R&B tune, flows through the head like an unraveling thread, easy words to remember and sing, with an appropriate key and subject matter. It helps you have a legendary singer and group performing it.

Here is ‘Shop Around’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 1960.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

It’s an ordinary winter Sunday in an extraordinary year.

The statement causes a reflexive gaze across history at all the extraordinary years in recorded history. The statement requires adjustment to put me more accurately upon the spectrum of what I know and have experienced. I ‘know’ a sliver of American history and a granule of western history. I need to context ‘know’ because I ‘know’ what was often taught in books as fact and knowledge. Much was later revealed to be false or misleading, part of a paean to the victors who wrote or interpreted the history.

We could take a swing at our Christmas practices, beginning with the time of year that we celebrate and the pagan rituals we practice, processes adopted to encourage people to be Christians. Or we can take a deep dive into how Jesus is often portrayed as a blue-eyed white man with brown hair compared to the image of a dark-haired brown man forensic scientists put forth early last year.

‘For those accustomed to traditional Sunday school portraits of Jesus, the sculpture of the dark and swarthy Middle Eastern man that emerges from Neave’s laboratory is a reminder of the roots of their faith. “The fact that he probably looked a great deal more like a darker-skinned Semite than westerners are used to seeing him pictured is a reminder of his universality,” says Charles D. Hackett, director of Episcopal studies at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. “And [it is] a reminder of our tendency to sinfully appropriate him in the service of our cultural values.”

‘Neave emphasizes that his re-creation is simply that of an adult man who lived in the same place and at the same time as Jesus. As might well be expected, not everyone agrees.’

~ Mike Fillon, ‘The Real Face of Jesus’, Popular Mechanics, January 23rd, 2015

It all leaves me a little ‘Unsteady’. The song is a repetition of many of the same words but I like it. Hold onto me and sing along with the X Ambassadors’ song from 2015.

At least it’s more recent than most of my theme music.

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Today’s Theme Music

Everything’s so blurry
And everyone’s so fake
And everybody’s empty
And everything is so messed up
Pre-occupied without you
I cannot live at all
My whole world surrounds you
I stumble then I crawl

You could be my someone
You could be my scene
You know that I’ll protect you
From all of the obscene
I wonder what you’re doing
Imagine where you are
There’s oceans in between us
But that’s not very far

~ ‘Blurry’, by Puddle of Mudd, 2001

I have a good life when you consider everything but it sometimes still gets all blurry about how good things — and how bad it could be. ‘Blurry’, though, is about emotions. Emotions care little about a situation logic, something often forgotten during passionate discussions and angry debates.

‘Blurry’ also show us that emotions can help us overcome ‘logic’:

There’s oceans in between us
But that’s not very far

I might be adding layers and insights. They’re clearly writing about love and a tumultuous relationship. I see more. That’s the point of art, including literature and music, isn’t it? The composer, writer and artist are drawing their vision. Their vision, though, remains unique to them because it must be shared with others through the filters the viewer brings upon the scene. And these individual, personalized interpretations of words and intentions can make it all seem very ‘Blurry’.

 

Hope this all comes out properly. It’s relatively colder than usual outside (17 F). Google Chrome apparently has some problems when it’s cold.

 

 

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

I thought something about dreams would be appropriate for me for theme music today.

There are a lot of offerings available. ‘Dream Weaver’, by Gary Wright, came to mind. How about The Chordettes with ‘Mr Sandman’?  Susan Boyle, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, would fit. There are so many songs about dreaming and issues with dreams out there, but I decided upon Aerosmith, ‘Dream On’. 

As I write and think about dreams and dream music today, I think, there’s a novel there, about a man who becomes obsessed with understanding his dreams, and dreaming more and more frequently. It’s not the freshest feed for a story but it could be fun to explore.

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Today’s Theme Music

The big questions arise. Didn’t we just do this? Didn’t that just happen? Didn’t we learn anything? I feel like we’re going around in circles. Sing it with Billy Preston – ‘Will It Go Round in Circles’.

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Today’s Theme Music

I reached out of my usual sphere for today. I enjoy this woman’s voice and like the message behind the song’s lyrics. The song reminds me of ‘Philadelphia Freedom’, but it’s not.

Here’s Heather Small, ‘Proud’.

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Today’s Theme Music

I use the idea behind today’s theme music hours every day, every day of the year. Other fiction writers must do the same. Writing for myself, I look for change, I look for what could be and what might be misunderstood, and what we have missed. I look for insight, I look for fun and I look to understand and tell. I look for hope and I look for dreams. And I’m going to keep on looking, living up to the person I’ve become, to always look and always imagine. So here it is, ‘Imagine’.

Thanks, John Lennon. RIP, October, 1940 – December, 1980. And yes, I can tell you exactly where I was when I learned the news.

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Today’s Theme Music

“One, two, three, what are we fighting for?

“Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.

“Next stop is Vietnam.”

Yeah, Country Joe and the Fish, for you protest connoisseurs, a flashback to when we were saying the same thing about Vietnam that we said about Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

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