Why I like this song, No. 2

Today on "Why I like this song" I thought I'd write about a song that to my knowledge wasn't released as a single (and therefore probably never made it to radio anywhere). This kind of song is fascinating because most of the time record executives have a big say on what becomes a single from an album. The fact that this song was not a single meant that either the composer or the executives or both decided that it would not be fit for radio. Let's do Jason Mraz, "Beautiful Mess".

At least on Guam, the only singles I heard from We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things were an updated "I'm Yours" (which I already discussed earlier, though not on Why I like this song) and "Lucky" with Colbie Caillat. So when I heard "Beautiful Mess" I was pleasantly surprised.

Jason Mraz has a (late 90's style) rap- or hip-hop-like cadence to his written lyrics; this is characterized by the meter or rhythm of his words varying almost every line. This song is no different, demonstrating a meter that fits the words, instead of words fitting a meter:

Although you're biased, I love your advice
Your comebacks are quick and probably have to do with your insecurities
There's no shame in being crazy depending on how you take these
Words they're paraphrasing, this relationship we're staging

If you tried fitting these words in the second verse to the actual cadence he sings, it would probably look something like this:

          Al - though        you're    biased,       I  love      your   advice
          Your comebacks are quick and probably have to do with your   insecurities
There's no     shame     in  be -  ing crazy          depending on how you take these
               Words they're       paraphrasing, this relationship we're   staging

It's a proper--if highly irregular--meter, because the stresses are in the right places.

But what really makes this song for me is the first part of the chorus:

Well, it
kind of hurts when the
kind of words you write
kind of turn them-
selves into knives

He repeats the word "kind" three times as the beginning of the middle three lines, all with a stabbing quality to them, singing them in high G-sharps and an F-sharp for the last one, harmonizing with the E, G#m, and F#m in the guitar. It's like he is reacting to being stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife slowly going into him. Whenever I hear this part of the song it makes my eyes well up, because the words, melody, and chords work together towards an effect that translates to the listener as "puti korason," Chamorro for heartache. And who said sound-pictures are dead? ^_^

The whole song itself is actually very easy to play; four-chorders out there would be delighted in its basic progression: E G#m F#m A -> B, and repeat. The "beautiful mess" chords are just "A / B /" then repeat. Incidentally, it felt as if a quarter to a third of the songs in the rest of the album used the same chord progression (albeit in different keys). The creativity is injected in how the song shapes itself around the words he wants to say.

Is it imo? Every time I hear it I become more convinced that it is. The "relationship" being staged is far from perfect, but for the speaker, the fact that he is still hurt by her verbal blades proves to him that there is still something beautiful and worth continuing:

And through
timeless words and
priceless pictures we'll
fly like birds
not of this Earth.
And
tides they turn and
hearts disfigure but
that's no concern when we're
wounded together.

Thanks for reading.

Past time

While I was walking by myself maybe about a week ago, I stumbled across a random thought. I cannot remember the thought that ignited it anymore, but the notion is this: We should never assume that the past was a strictly simpler situation than the present. This immediately seemed true, and I started to wonder how the complexity around us could be compared with the complexity of the life of someone living in the 18th or 19th Century. For example, a twentysomething from the 19th Century would not have known or even comprehended what a computer was, but then again, he or she wouldn't have had to keep up with upwards of a hundred "friends" on some social networking site.

It seems to be true that while progress is certainly being made, there are things that remain the same, allowing our brains to relate these to the new things.

I have a feeling I wasn't the first person to ever say that. ^_^

Song in my head: Maino, featuring T-Pain, "All of the Above".

Why I like this song, No. 1

I don't know whether this is going to be a regular feature of my blog (let alone whether it will ever be repeated ^_^) but tonight after hearing the recording of Cueshe, "Back to Me", I suddenly stumbled upon the reason I liked this song. (Incidentally, I did post a comment on the video that is an outline of what I am going to say here, but I found that "the margin could not contain the proof", as it were.)

There is a certain feeling I get whenever I listen to it or play it. I cannot think of a single word to describe it, but it's somewhere between loneliness and an almost insane hopefulness and yearning.

Most of the drama between these two emotions is illustrated in the contrast between the song's lyrics and the type of music accompanying it. It begins with a four-note motif that alternates between Esus2 and E, which appears to be setting up the song to be a love song--in effect, a love that is ongoing. This creates tension with the words first sung over it:

        C#m A                 E
Sometimes I feel like I'm all alone
Wondering of what have I done wrong.
      C#m A            F#m     B
Maybe I'm just missing you all along
          F#m           B
When will you be coming home
    N.C.    E
    back to me?

(Chords are solely my interpretation.) Oh, so the love was lost. Well, this is weird, because we have already been cued in to thinking about ongoing, current love by the opening motif.

Also, the verse chords resolve to E major (as can be seen in the fragment above) but are mainly the minor chords (C#m and F#m being the main chords in this section). But when we get to the chorus, this happens:

        E        C#m            F#m   B
Can you feel me, see me falling away?
Did you hear me? I'm calling out your name.
           F#m            B
'Cause I'm barely hanging on
      F#m              B
Baby, you need to come home
    N.C.    [Intro]
    back to me.

We get an explosive E major, coupled with the almost screamed words "Can you FEEL me? See me falling away!" The effect is jarring because we finally realize what kind of a song this is--she isn't coming back, but she still "need[s] to come home / Back to me." Then the intro comes back in, washing it all away with that hopeful strain of E's and Esus2's.

So the story that unfolds for me is this: The speaker here is at the brink of despair of ever seeing his loved one again, having just realized that he does love her after all. But kind of figuring they'll never be together again, his yearning to see her again inexplicably increases. Maybe, as in fiction, the improbable should happen and they will end up together again. But as time passes, that hope not only becomes more distant, but also more fantastic, insisting that the speaker keep dreaming against reality.

I began to really like this song when I realized that the feeling portrayed to me in it is very similar to what it felt like a few weeks after my first breakup.

Is it imo? Yes, because the despair is real but the unreal (and even unrealistic) hope is even stronger.

Thanks for reading. Maybe for these posts I can hold off on "Song in my head". What do you think? ^_^

Changing up

Today I walked in the morning instead of at night as I have been accustomed to doing. It was a refreshing change of pace. I don't have to worry about coming home at an ungodly hour, but now that worry is replaced by the worry of arriving at my next destination (be it work or school) on time. I think it's a fair trade-off.

So now what's keeping me busy is writing songs, besting the other me at Sketchup, and work. I hope that next semester I can get back into the school groove.

Song in my head: Gerry and the Pacemakers, "I'll Be There".

Selflessness

Today, as I sat down in front of my computer, I had the brilliant idea that I should record a song or two that I've written recently so that I don't forget the lyrics or arrangement so easily. But just as I completed testing my recording equipment (really just my 9-year-old computer running today's Linux and a microphone attachment) I get two requests for help. One was to help build a teapot on a 3d modeling program. The other one was to help edit a piece of fiction. Weighing my options, I asked myself, "Should I work on my stuff first, or should I help the ones who asked for help?"

Needless to say, it is now almost four in the morning, my voice has left me without me ever singing a single word, and I have finished building a kettle and is now starting on editing the story.

I think that right there is cause for a pause. I just can't say no to people. It's a streak that I have lived with since I can remember. Why help yourself when you can be helping someone else? I keep telling myself that I should be more careful in choosing who to help so that I can make sure that I have time for things that are important to me (like homework, my hobbies, etc.). But somehow, when I turn to the things I do for myself, I keep thinking, "Perhaps I can do this later, I'm still going to be around, right?"

Right?

Maybe. Anyway, it was fun to make the teapot, and even though I am a bit sleepy I will attempt to make inroads with the chapter. Perhaps it's the tutor/teacher in me that wants to keep helping.

Thanks for reading. And Happy Mothers' Day to all the mothers.

Song in my head: Jim Jones, Ron Browz, feat. Juelz Santana, "Pop Champagne".

Sucker

Every so often the question comes up and is asked of me: How come you didn't leave Guam for college? The answer is a bit more complex than "Because it would've been cheaper here than anywhere else I would've liked to study."

When I talked to people back in high school and the conversation turned to what the plans for college were. Almost invariably they were to move away somewhere else to study. When I asked why, the replies were varied, but they were along the lines of:

• UOG might not stay accredited.
• There are too many problems here.
• I'm sick of being on this rock.
  
• I wanted to experience life without my parents for a while.

My opinion only, of course, but I suspect that reason #4 could be a hidden agenda backing up the other three.

But I turned my attention to Reason #2: there are too many problems on Guam. I was fortunate enough to have already have some rudimentary understanding of how the world worked by the time our family moved here, and I realized that the problems were indeed numerous. The schools are crowded and the children are being left behind, the local government seems more inclined to keep paying their employees than actually fixing the problems, crime is not addressed correctly, and almost every attempted "solution" to any of these problems has been a band-aid fix instead of a systemic realignment of priorities that would have been much better.

In my opinion, however, the last thing to do would be to leave. Each person who leaves is one less problem-solver or complainer that would be left here. In fact, the very reasons we would like to leave are the very reasons we shouldn't. I felt that I could have a hand in the solution of some of these problems we are facing, and that's why I ended up staying.

So here we are, almost 8 years later, and it's true that I have slacked off quite considerably from my once lofty goal. But the goal still stands. Once I graduate I will become the math teacher my high school teachers and college professors all blame for the lack of mathematics aptitude in Guam school children. And in some unseen small part, I will make a difference.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "Far Away".

A note concerning friendship

As I sat here, I realized that one of the most valuable things in the world is a person's confidence or trust in another. Why? Because it's so hard to build yet so easy to lose. I guess this is the lesson that the past few weeks has been trying to teach me.

Song in my head: Kanye West, "Paranoid".

T-shirt wisdom

It occurred to me that there is a certain kind of philosophical wit or wisdom that is not serious enough to be expounded upon in a monograph but is too mind-expanding not to express. Let us call this kind of wit "T-shirt wisdom". I got the idea from an episode of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, where he meets a duck and goose processor who was especially quotable.

I guess I'll start.

If you want to scratch your nose, you've got to find it first.

Song in my head: Seether, "Careless Whisper".

P.S. If you haven't already guessed, "nose" in the above t-shirt wisdom did not originally read "nose". ^_^

Accretion

I'm betting that when I clean my room tomorrow, I'll discover that at least 10% of the things in it aren't even mine. ^_^ If you own something that I have, don't worry; it'll be coming back to you soon.

Song in my head: Rihanna, "Disturbia".

They don't write music like this anymore

Lately I have been doing a lot of cruising on YouTube in order to listen to songs that I may want to cover with the Imaginary Friends. Almost invariably, when I get to a video that features music from more than twenty years ago (mostly 70s classic rock or 80s R&B or something similar), and I read the comments, I read the same line over and over again:

"They don't write music like this anymore."

Now, I've seen this line hundreds of times, both online and in the real world, and I may have even said this a couple of times in different occasions, but tonight, as I read it being said about Champaign, "Try Again", I felt a small but insistent irritation in the back of my head.

For some reason, the fact that I had the most excellent jam session with my bandmates just this past Saturday night where we played and sang the music of our decades (the nineties and this side of the millennium) kind of gave me a different skew on the above line when I read it tonight. When that particular poster said in the text comments, "...they don't write music like this anymore," (correct grammar and punctuation mine), he or she is implying that the music that was conceived of after that time frame intrinsically has less literary or otherwise musical merit.

Now, I know that's not true, because had it been true, we would not have sung any of those songs we sang on our hang-out. Why would we enjoy singing a musically inferior song?

Second, upon more reflection, I realized that the statement is patently true. Of course they don't write music like this anymore. There are now many more artists than there ever were when "Try Again" came out, thanks to the Web, mostly. Now, that makes the probability of hearing a "bad" song much larger than it was decades ago, but it also increases the probability of you hearing a song (or artist) that is much closer to your tastes. That's because older bands and artists couldn't burrow into a niche; they had to appeal to more people in order to succeed as musical acts.

Anyway, in the end, the annoyance passed, because I pictured a time thirty years from now, and we check out YouTube (or a future descendant program thereof) of, say, Usher, "Love in This Club", and I pictured myself leaving a comment, "They don't write music like this anymore." ^_^

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: John Mayer, "Sucker".

A wet guitar

I had the thought that perhaps my grasp on conventional reality is actually a bit less tight than I suspected at first. It always happens that whenever I think that I finally have every aspect of my life figured out and under control, there are always a few areas where I drop the ball, so to speak. The feeling is like checking out nine books from the library and discovering, as you cross the front door to the outside, that you only have space in your hands for seven.

Perhaps it really is a blessing that we do not live forever, no matter how much our bodies yearn to survive for as long as possible. It is the enlightened creature's torment; there is no such thing as turning back to a simpler time, when all you needed were seven books.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Click Five, "Just the Girl".

Late or early

I have got to stop staying up late. My three extra awake hours ended up being spent on chasing rainbows about some new thing I can do with my Linux machine that would allow it to share files with... yadda yadda yadda, I can't even remember why I was "improving" my system in this manner. Maybe I have a natural affinity for following directions... ^_^ Anyway, in the end I was not able to get the result I was looking for, and all I have to show for it are red, swollen eyes.

Maybe resting them a while would do the trick.

Song in my head: Kidz Bop, "Stickwitu".

Inauspicious

Actually, I don't know for sure whether the title for this post is an actual word, and it seems too trifling to actually open a new browser tab to look up a definition, but that's the best way to describe the end of April.

Now that the song is written, it's like a huge load off my back, and now I end up a little richer than before. It got me thinking that maybe I held on to the feeling so long precisely because I felt that there was a song in there somewhere. ^_^ Then again, I don't think that's true, because I am still a bit imo over the whole thing. Then again, maybe that's because I needed to feel imo every so often to be reminded of how that really feels.

Finally, the Imaginary Friends (I'm shooting for all four) will come together and watch Spinal Tap this weekend. That kind of fell together without much fanfare, either, but so much the better.

I think the best thing for me to do is to write "2010" in bold letters and paste it somewhere in my room, as a reminder of what I should have been focusing on all this time. I already changed all my profile pages to say that I graduate on Spring of 2010, and maybe, just maybe, the finality of that statement will allow me to sharpen my focus and hit the books harder than I have this year.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Foo Fighters, "My Hero". The Nickelback spell is over. ^_^