{"id":10004,"date":"2015-04-11T09:31:03","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T13:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=10004"},"modified":"2015-04-11T09:31:03","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T13:31:03","slug":"bright-lights-and-up-tempo-tracks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/04\/11\/bright-lights-and-up-tempo-tracks\/","title":{"rendered":"Bright Lights and Up-Tempo Tracks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The folks on the Hold Steady fan board arranged a Mix CD exchange recently, and I agreed to take part, putting together a playlist of stuff and sending off a bunch of electronic files a couple of weeks ago (I don&#8217;t know if the drive on my desktop can even burn CD&#8217;s any more, even if I had blank CD&#8217;s on which to burn songs). As there&#8217;s basically zero overlap between there and here, it&#8217;s probably safe to share the track list.<\/p>\n<p>The title I used for it was &#8220;Bright Lights and Up-Tempo Tracks,&#8221; a reference to this Hold Steady song:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7QqKM9zgZIQ\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>(Including this on the actual playlist would be a little too obvious&#8230;). The vague organizing principle behind this was &#8220;Hold Steady characters and situations in songs by other artists&#8221;&#8211; a lot of drinking and drugs, obviously, but Craig Finn also has a great way with character sketches, so some of these are selected because they remind me of that. This also deliberately skews a little obscure even by the standards of my playlists, because it was headed for one of a bunch of people who are way more involved with music than I have time to be. I thought about trying to find YouTube links for all these songs, but I did a spot check of the most obscure, and it&#8217;s not out there, so there&#8217;s no way to get the complete set.<\/p>\n<p>So, the songs, and a brief explanation of why I thought they fit:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>&#8220;The Girl I Can&#8217;t Forget,&#8221; Fountains Of Wayne. A really cheery song about getting blackout drunk on a date.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Beautiful Wreck,&#8221; Shawn Mullins. A friend worrying about the drunk at the end of the bar.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Hover Near Fame,&#8221; The New Amsterdams. The drunk at the end of the bar is pissed about poseurs.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Woke Up This Morning,&#8221; Alabama 3. After three days of drinking, I just got an inkling to go on home&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Conrad,&#8221; Jets To Brazil. One of the most incongruously upbeat songs about a suicide you&#8217;ll ever hear.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Drowned,&#8221; Halloween, Alaska. Fits well musically after &#8220;Conrad,&#8221; and is a bit more uplifting.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The World Without Logos,&#8221; Hellsing. Random cool anime theme; the lyrics are just word salad, alas.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Romeo Had Juliette,&#8221; Lou Reed. The only way you can tell that Craig Finn didn&#8217;t write this is that the characters have last names.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;bad sake,&#8221; kingsley. One of those character-study sort of things; lots of great little shorthand in this.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Manhattan,&#8221; Visqueen. A song about the sweet part of The City, with the bars and restaurants.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Dishrag,&#8221; Wide Right. This would be kind of creepy if a man were singing it, but as it is, it&#8217;s kind of funny.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Champaign, Illinois,&#8221; Old 97&#8217;S. Rhett Miller gets Dylanesque.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Somerville,&#8221; The Pernice Brothers. A bitter homecoming that&#8217;s only slightly less awkward than &#8220;I Hope This Whole Thing Didn&#8217;t Frighten You.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Sun In an Empty Room,&#8221; The Weakerthans. John Samson is another great one for character-study stuff.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The First Single (You Know Me) (Album Version),&#8221; The Format. I love the lyric &#8220;Let&#8217;s make a list of who we need, then let&#8217;s throw it away, &#8217;cause we don&#8217;t need anyone.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Red Letter Day,&#8221; The Get Up Kids. How could you do this to me?<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Hyper Enough,&#8221; Superchunk. A song that I&#8217;ve been known to replay several times in succession on long road trips.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Miracle Mile,&#8221; Cold War Kids. I really like the plaintive energy of this.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Torch Singer,&#8221; Buffalo Tom. Probably my favorite song of theirs, and &#8220;There&#8217;s salvation in her band&#8221; is the most Craig Finn lyric not actually in a Craig Finn song.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The &#8220;cover art&#8221; up top (reproduced below for the RSS crowd) is, of course, from this classic song by SteelyKid and The Pip:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wSh621FwkoA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>      <\/p>\n<p>Because, really, you can&#8217;t expect me not to work in a cute-kid reference somewhere&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>So, there&#8217;s some fun musical stuff to enjoy at the end of a long and trying week.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_10005\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10005\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/files\/2015\/04\/cover2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/files\/2015\/04\/cover2.png\" alt=\"SteelyKid and The Pip perform their greatest hits...\" width=\"600\" height=\"505\" class=\"size-full wp-image-10005\" srcset=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/cover2.png 600w, http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/cover2-300x253.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-10005\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">SteelyKid and The Pip perform their greatest hits&#8230;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The folks on the Hold Steady fan board arranged a Mix CD exchange recently, and I agreed to take part, putting together a playlist of stuff and sending off a bunch of electronic files a couple of weeks ago (I don&#8217;t know if the drive on my desktop can even burn CD&#8217;s any more, even&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/04\/11\/bright-lights-and-up-tempo-tracks\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Bright Lights and Up-Tempo Tracks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","category-personal","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}