kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2023-04-20 06:46 pm

50 new things in 2023, part 15/50

I almost forgot to try a new thing this week! But I remembered at the end of my weekend, and listened to Billy Bragg's 2021 album The Million Things That Never Happened last night.

I was a huge fan of Billy Bragg in the late 80s. (So much of a fan that a friend once somehow got me a pre-release bootleg cassette of Workers' Playtime so that I wouldn't miss the release while I was studying abroad. It turned out to be perfectly possible to buy the album in France, but I was happy to hear it early.)

Round about 1991's Don't Try This At Home, I started falling out of love with Bragg's music. The great strength of Bragg's early songwriting was his gift for story, and in particular for getting his political points across via story, without being obvious or preachy. And even the songs that were obvious were sharp and clever. But by the early 90s it felt like Bragg was giving in to two fatal impulses: didacticism/moral-drawing, and Big Anthems.

Around the same time I got very interested in Irish traditional music anyway, and stopped listening to rock much for several years. I came back to rock but never to Bragg.

He reappeared on my radar via Twitter, of all things. He's been doing very good work there (and offline) standing up for trans people and sex workers against the likes of J K Rowling. If you're on Twitter, he's worth following.

Anyway, I decided to give his latest a listen. I'm afraid I continue to like his politics better than his post-1980s music. Thematically there's a lot interesting going on: aging, the difficulty of being an older activist seeing young people take new approaches, the transformation of politics by social media, and some looks at depression that feel very personal. But the music and lyrics don't rise up to the themes. Even the best songs have moments of cringe-inducing banal lyrical obviousness, and there are musical choices I can't comprehend, such as the twangy country-and-western sound of a lot of the songs (it feels like musical cosplay) and the painful overuse of a background chorus of women's voices (especially on "Good Days and Bad Days," which is a quiet, affecting song about depression and, specifically, isolation right up until that chorus kicks in and ruins it).

The best song, by far, is the title track, which reflects on the bits of our lives we've lost to the COVID pandemic without ever saying those words. I also enjoyed "Reflections on the Mirth of Creativity," the most joyful song on the album as "The Million Things That Never Happened" is the most elegiac. "Reflections" is a jaunty, boppy look at a day when things go right for the first time in a long time, a feeling we could all use more of.

Some other songs are half-good. "Freedom Doesn't Come for Free," is a funny but over-obvious tribute to the (true) story of a bunch of libertarians who tried to create their own utopia in New Hampshire and predictably failed, while "Pass It On" begins with the aftermath of a parent's death and seems like it's going to be a successor to "The Million Things," but goes very wrong when it tries to be uplifting and anthemic. "Lonesome Ocean" is slight but nice, which is kind of a relief amidsst so many songs that want too badly to be important.

The truth is, a lot of musicians peak early and then decline. How they cope with that decline matters. I may not want to listen to much of his music, but I'm glad that Billy Bragg is still around and still (unlike my other 1980s idol, Morrissey) a person worth admiring.
kindkit: Sailing ship at sea. (Fandomless: Blue ship)
2023-03-29 10:15 am

50 new things in 2023, part 12/50

It's back to music for this week's new-to-me thing; I listened to Jean Redpath's 1973 album Frae My Ain Countrie. It's mostly traditional Scottish songs, with a few Burns songs and modern ones (notably "A' the Week Yer Man's Awa'," aka "The Fisherman's Wife," by Ewan MacColl) thrown in.

It's the kind of thing that you'll like if you like this kind of thing? I do, to be clear, and the album covers all the folk song bases (rejected love, lovers gone away to war, forbidden love, exile, oppression of the powerless by the powerful, and women getting stuck with an illegitimate child while the men get away scot free) in Redpath's incomparable voice. There are even a few surprises, like the rich townswoman in "Kilbogie," who, when faced with the reality of her poor suitor's highland life, hightails it back to town in a coach and six, or the rejected woman in "Farewell He," who survives her jilting via careful application of . . . common sense.

Sadly, there's nothing as mind-bogglingly weird as "The Grey Silkie" (from Redpath's eponymous 1975 album), but it's a good collection and I enjoyed it.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
2023-03-01 07:53 pm

50 new things in 2023, part 9/50

Back to music again this week, with Paul Simon's eponymous 1972 album.

Simon's Graceland is one of my favorite albums of all time, and I know and enjoy most of Paul Simon's hits, but he's never been an artist I seek out.

Paul Simon was maybe not the place for me to start, though it seems it's widely considered a classic. To me, it felt like an album of B-sides and experiments. A few songs hold together: "Peace Like a River," "Congratulations," and of course " Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," but otherwise it's all over the place and mostly feels unfinished. There's a lot of trying on of styles and personas (including entirely too much of Simon trying to sound like a Black blues singer, which was probably already weird in 1972 and has not aged well) and not much of the wry observational wit I associate with Simon.

On Spotify, the album contains a few bonus actual demo versions of its tracks. I only listened to the demo of "Me and Julio," but it was eye-opening. That demo version feels of a piece with the rest of the album, instead of being the absolute standout track. So I'll say: listening to Paul Simon is like reading a fic that isn't bad, but could have been great if it had been revised a couple more times.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
2023-02-08 02:09 pm

50 new things in 2023, part 6/50

Some music this week! I listened to Jens Lekman's 2022 album The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom, which is a re-release of his now-discontinued 2007 album Night Falls Over Kortedala plus some new songs. I've previously listened to a few songs from NFOK but not the whole album, so it counts as new to me.

It's interesting to hear Lekman's early style along with his later style; I prefer the later one, which is less indebted to twee 1970s pop and syrupy strings. (Having said this, there are some fantastic songs from the original album, including "The Opposite Of Hallelujah," "Your Arms Around Me," "Shirin," "Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo," and the song that made me start listening to Lekman in the first place, "A Postcard to Nina." And most of these are on the less strings-and-ridiculous-synths side of things.)

What really draws me to Lekman are the lyrics--I'm much more a lyrics appreciator than a music appreciator--and his lyrical style has matured too, without fundamentally changing. There's the slice of life plus punch in the gut stuff, the melancholy (shoutout to "Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death," which does a hell of a lot with its opening line, "We're all gonna die"), the self-conscious and sometimes self-puncturing romanticism, the intense focus on little moments.

To me the greatest delight was the title track, "The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom." It's a follow-up song to "A Postcard to Nina," which not only adds to the (apparently true) story in the original song, but directly addresses the fact that homophobia's not a thing of the past. It made me cry, and not much does that these days. I hope Nina sent him that postcard.
kindkit: Text: Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than to curse than darkness. (Discworld: light a flamethrower)
2023-01-17 05:21 pm

50 new things in 2023, part 3/50

This week, it's an album: Bleed Out, by the Mountain Goats, from 2022.

Fair warning: my reaction to Mountain Goats songs is often, "That was awesome. What the hell was it about?" And I haven't read any reviews of this album.

But having said this, to me, Bleed Out feels like the flip side of 2020's Songs for Pierre Chuvin (an album I adore, which was one of very few new things I tried or enjoyed from 2020 to now). SfPC, inspired by historian Chuvin's work on pagan holdouts after the Christianization of Rome, was about resisting to the last breath, knowing you're going to lose, but resisting anyway. Mourning as resistance, resistance as mourning. Released after 4 years of Trump and the early months of the pandemic, it was--at least for me--the perfect music for that moment.

Bleed Out revisits those themes in light of the right-wing backlash since Biden's election. None of that's specifically mentioned, because (as the Mountain Goats tend to do) it's all filtered through pop culture tropes, specifically thriller/action movies. There are a lot of killers in these songs, a lot of people out for revenge of one kind or another, who feel lucky to have the opportunity to die or kill in a good cause. And the songs are nearly always from their point of view.

That's the tricky and brilliant thing. John Darnielle clearly wants to explore the rise of the violent neofascist right, but he's also thinking a lot about the common myth of redemptive violence, and how every political mass murderer is a hero in their own mind. I've been thinking a lot about the lure of violence myself lately; in the current atmosphere of attacks (journalistic, political, or literal) on trans (and other queer) people, some queer people have said, "We need to get armed and look out for ourselves, because we can't trust anybody else." The other day I saw a truck with a bumper sticker showing a trans flag; superimposed over the flag was an assault rifle, and the caption was "Defend Equality."

I get it. I feel it too. I'm not even sure it's wrong. But it scares the hell out of me.

The album ends on a quieter, but equally bleak, note with the title song "Bleed Out." It takes the big themes of the rest of the album and reworks them on a smaller scale, looking at failure, self-destructiveness, the inevitability of death, and the even greater inevitability of someday being forgotten. (I find this kind of thing weirdly comforting; you may not. I would recommend taking your emotional state into account before listening to this album.)

BTW, I know I've talked entirely about themes and not at all about music. That's because I know nothing about music! I can tell you that there's a "1970s thriller soundtrack" feel to a lot of the album, and some amazing trumpet (really) in "Extraction Point."

Tracks are on YouTube courtesy of Merge Records. Here's my favorite song from the album, "Hostages."


kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2021-08-14 07:25 pm
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our retired explorer

Some months ago, the Spotify algorithm dropped the Weakerthans' "Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris)" into a playlist for me. Proving that algorithms aren't always wrong.

I'm giving two links: the first is to a live version (no video) and the second is to the album version, with video. I strongly recommend listening to the live version first. The video is cool, but it puts the song in a very different and much grimmer context.

Nothing else by the Weakerthans has delighted me as much as this song (for a minute, I thought I'd found a new--to me--favorite band). You know how the Decemberists have a lot of really unexpected, strange, glorious songs, and then every once in a while they just decide to do a love song? And it's a good love song, a clever love song, but it's not as amazing as their other stuff? That's what the Weakerthans seem to be like, except the ratio is reversed: a lot of good, clever love songs, and a few weird ones I like a lot, and then this ridiculous masterpiece. (Yes, I do have a tiny favorite subgenre of music I call "Songs about people whose work I read in graduate school." There's this, and the Magnetic Fields' "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" and a few others.)

So, here's the video-less live version:





And then the video of the album version:

kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2020-08-21 04:07 pm
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and also some questions

From the question-a-day meme:

August 19: What was the first musical record/tape/CD you ever bought with your own money?

It was either the Style Council's first EP Introducing the Style Council, which is slightly embarrassing, or something by Styx, which is much, much more embarrassing. I would have been about 13, still young enough that I found Styx's concept albums profound.

I think my urge to listen to music by queer* men, which led me to try the Style Council and later the Smiths, made my taste a good deal better than it might have been otherwise.

(*Paul Weller and his Style Council partner Mick Talbot were widely rumored to be romantically involved; I literally read about it in a music magazine before I'd ever heard anything by them. Weller has denied it, with a sometimes unpleasant level of vehemence. Morrissey certainly seems to be some flavor of queer, however little we now want to claim him, but I know he was very cagey about it in interviews back in the 80s and I don't know if he's gotten more outspoken since. It would be just like him to keep silent about the one thing he could--maybe--do some good with, while he ceaselessly airs his racist politics.)


August 20: How well do you take criticism?

I try to take constructive criticism well, but it's a struggle. I do best if I have time to be calm and reflect, and worst if it's face to face, with some kind of immediate response expected in a moment when I'm feeling hurt, upset, embarrassed, defensive, angry, guilty, etc.


21 What lifts your spirits when you’re feeling down?

I don't think anything does, to be honest. Sometimes you're just down, and you have to live with it. (And by "you" I mean me. Your mileage may vary.)

Being near water is something I used to find helpful. Now, alas, I live in a near-desert.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2019-10-22 09:14 pm
Entry tags:

reading and listening and watching and stuff

There is, in fact, more to my life than medical stuff, although you wouldn't know it by reading my posts. Here's a start on correcting that.

Reading: I've spent the last few weeks mostly reading all of Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels. It was an odd experience. I liked them, although they're neither strongly plotted nor, for the most part, deeply characterized, and the early ones especially have a cringey level of sexism. Also one book has, of all things, an anti-abortion plot. And while Peters clearly did an enormous amount of research, there are things I think she got wrong (such as the abortion thing, where the discussion has to me--though I'm not an expert--the feel of a modern conservative view rather than a medieval one). For all their flaws, though, the books have a streak of compassionate humanism which is appealing, and at times (often the times when they're most medieval) they touch the genuinely strange and wondrous.

If Peters were just a generation later I would suspect her of having dabbled in early fan writing, because she loves to write what used to be called smarm (heavily homoerotic but officially non-sexual relationships between men). And in one book, her glee at writing homoerotic scenes just leaps off the page, Spoilers for something you will probably figure out almost immediately if you read the book in question ) There are some textual references to same-sex desire, as well as one Genuinely Bisexual Character, although we're told that he is bisexual because he is too heterosexual to be in a monastery.

I know there's a TV show with Derek Jacobi, and I've seen bits but I don't think I've ever seen a full episode. Is it worth watching? Is there any actual gay or is that too much to hope for even with a gay man in the lead?

I'm currently reading Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, which is interesting so far. I'm getting the sense that it's going to be one of those books where the main character never gets to have a rest, which is something I increasingly find tiring to read.

Listening: My usual podcasts: This Podcast Will Kill You (excellent podcast about diseases, mostly infectious diseases), Radiolab, Pop Culture Happy Hour, sometimes In Our Time when the topic is interesting enough to make me tolerate Melvyn Bragg, sometimes Throughline. I gave up on Medical Mysteries, despite my interest in the subject, because both the presenters have such affected deliveries that I couldn't bear listening to them. I keep trying true crime podcasts and then quitting them, although I do highly recommend CBC Uncover's miniseries "The Village," which is sober, thoughtful, and responsible about the serial killer who preyed on men in Toronto's gay village, and about the whole context of violence against gay men.

In music, Spotify's algorithm got one right in directing me towards Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman. His latest, a collaboration with Annika Norlin called Correspondence, is stunning. Lekman and Norlin alternate songs in the form of letters to each other, responding to each others' ideas about everything from the fear (and the liberation) of failure, to rape culture, to the history of the song "Silent Night." You can buy it here and no doubt in other places. Here is one of the more stand-alone songs, "Forever Young, Forever Beautiful," a good intro to Lekman's work. I recommend giving the much earlier Lekman song A Postcard to Nina a listen too--it's the song that first caught my ear.

Watching: I haven't settled into anything much since the latest season of Shetland. I've tried a lot that hasn't worked for me, mostly crime shows.

I'm not loving S4 of The Good Place, which seems even more directionless than S3. I can't imagine how they can end the show satisfactorily, unless pure speculation, spoilery only for aired episodes of S4 )

I'm nervously looking forward to the final season of Bojack Horseman, which is about to drop. Last season's finale would have made a perfectly good series ending, and it's hard to see what else they can put Bojack through. On the other hand, most of the other characters' arcs feel much less finished, and I'm hoping for good endings, in every sense, for them.

I'm watching the Bake Off, of course, though nobody this year has grabbed my affection the way some bakers have in the past. I like them all but don't have a favorite, except in the sense that some of them are better bakers than others. Also, the challenges have gotten so difficult that I find them kind of stressful to watch. This may be good in a sense, because it means I get less of an urge to bake, and alas my diabetes means that delicious baked goods have to be much, MUCH less of a presence in my diet than they used to be. *sigh* (NB I know sugar substitutes are a thing. I have to restrict not just sugar but all carbs. Believe me, if there was a loophole I would have found it by now. Suggestions not needed, thanks. Commiseration always accepted.)

I want to watch the new Watchmen series, and several other things I'm not remembering right now. Suggestions for good things to read, listen, and watch ARE accepted, gladly.

And now I will end this long post.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2018-03-29 09:21 pm
Entry tags:

music and food

1) Did you used to love the Smiths? Has Morrissey's racism and Islamophobia made it hard for you to listen to them now?

If yes, let me commend to your attention Rosegarden Funeral Party, a band out of Dallas, Texas who recently released what seems to be their first EP, The Chopping Block. Some of their songs are astonishingly Smiths-like without being either pastiche or parody; others are more punk/Goth than the Smiths ever were, but even those have a mood and a verbal style that Smiths fans will recognize. Singer Leah Lane has a powerful, androgynous voice and a vocal phrasing that, again, often recalls Morrissey at his best.

"Ill and Getting Worse" could just about be a Smiths song from the Meat is Murder era; here it is on Youtube:



The rest of the EP, and it's all worth listening to, can be played on YouTube and Spotify that I know of, and can presumably be bought from all the usual sources.


2) Tonight I cooked a risotto with fava beans and asparagus. It took almost three hours to prepare and cook, because fava beans have to be peeled and then blanched and then peeled again, and risotto itself isn't fast. But it turned out to be the perfect just-spring food, and I feel I have made a good life choice.

Not quite a recipe under the cut )
If using fresh fava beans sounds like too much work--and it is a lot of work--you may be able to find them frozen. They're not quite as good as fresh but they're still nice, and much easier, though you'll probably still have to do the second shelling. Markets that carry Indian or Chinese foods are a good place to look for less expensive frozen favas; they may be called "broad beans." Dried and canned favas or ful mudames won't work in a dish like this risotto, alas.

Do any of you have favorite recipes for fresh favas, in case I give in to temptation and buy more?

kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2018-03-16 04:26 pm
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we all die young

The new Decemberists album, I'll Be Your Girl, was released today. I listened to it on Spotify and was very pleased. It feels like new life and new focus after the self-indulgent, self-referential stagnation of What A Wonderful World, What A Terrible World. I was very dubious about the dance-y, synthesizer-driven new sound that kept being talked about in interviews and promotions, but they still sound like the Decemberists. If anything, the changes make their sound harder and less poppy than it's been in a while. The album is also a lot more explicitly political than I can ever remember them being before. It's very much a "surviving/resisting Trump's America" sort of thing, with lots of rage and despair, ironic examinations of the urge to just give up and hide, and a few glimmers of hope. Plus there's still a good dose of everyone's my favorite Decemberists thing, which is folk-song-influenced pieces in which everyone dies.
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2017-12-24 04:12 pm
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a little Christmas Eve treat

"Baby It's Cold Outside," rewritten to be 100% less rapey.


kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2017-07-16 09:01 am
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30 day music meme, day 26

26. A song that makes you want to fall in love A political song

I don't like many of these last prompts, so I'm just going to change them as I see fit.

One great thing about Billy Bragg's early work is that he got his political message across by telling stories. Later, his political songs got more abstract and preachy, and I don't like the later ones as much. (The same thing happened to Paul Weller, sadly.) This isn't one of Bragg's best known songs, but it's always meant a lot to me. The myth that if you work hard at your education you'll get a good job has been proven wrong in my own life over and over again.

Billy Bragg, "To Have and to Have Not"





All the prompts )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
2017-07-14 07:35 pm
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30 day music meme, day 25

25. A song by an artist no longer living

I intended not to repeat an artist on this meme, but the answer to this question has to be Bowie, doesn't it?

A song from Ziggy Stardust, because when I was about 14 I wanted to be Ziggy Stardust (this was the early 80s, the era of "Let's Dance," but it was the earlier album that really moved me). I wore weird makeup and weird jewelry and got ferociously bullied for it; the fact that it was primarily Ziggy Stardust* and not wanting to a "a pretty girl" that inspired me to try makeup should perhaps have been a clue. Anyway, this song and this album were a big part of my covertly queer youth.

*Full disclosure: and Duran Duran, who were also boys in makeup. I loved my poster of them more than I ever loved their music, I think.


David Bowie, "Lady Stardust"




All the prompts )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2017-07-13 07:10 pm
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30 day music meme, day 24

24. A song by a band you wish were still together

I can't really imagine the Smiths still together in 2017--few bands can last that long without becoming a sad parody of themselves, and the Smiths' last album was already showing all the signs of a group past its best. Then again, it's nice to fantasize about them lasting just a little longer, releasing one or two more good albums, putting off the moment when Morrissey, away from Johnny Marr's counterbalancing force, disappeared up his own ego and re-emerged as an Islamophobic Brexiter.

I'm giving two links again on this post, the first because it's a song I really love, and the second not only because of the songs, but because of the video(s), directed by groundbreaking queer film-maker Derek Jarman.

The Smiths, "This Charming Man"




The Smiths, "The Queen Is Dead/There Is a Light That Never Goes Out/Panic," dir. Derek Jarman





All the prompts )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
2017-07-12 07:30 pm
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30 day music meme, day 23

23. A song you think everybody should listen to A song by a band who probably should have broken up after their first album

I'm not confident enough in my musical taste to recommend something to everybody; I don't think my taste in music is bad, but it's very limited. So I've created a question I like better, inspired by question 24 ("a song by a band you wish were still together").

I loved the first Mumford and Sons album. I adored the banjos and the folk-rock fusion, and the lyrics struggled with religion and ethics and doubt and temptation in a way I found interesting. Then came the second album, and it was not good. The music was more conventional, and worse, the lyrics had become preachy and all the doubting humanity seemed to have vanished in favor of doctrinaire Christian assertions. So here's a song from the first album. I like it because it's very human, often emotionally ugly, and because it can be very easily be read as queer, though I'm not sure it was intended to.

Mumford and Sons, "White Blank Page"


kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2017-07-07 07:53 pm
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30 day music meme, day 22

22. A song that moves you forward

I'm not entirely sure what this prompt means, so I'm interpreting it as "a song that gives you energy."

Frightened Rabbit, "Old Old Fashioned"





All the prompts )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
2017-07-05 09:19 pm
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30 day music meme, day 21

21. A favourite song with a person's name in the title

Yeah, I know. This song has problems. It uses stereotypes and it includes imagery of deception that is not healthy for trans* people. But fundamentally, it's a love song. It's not about hatred or violence, and for 1970, that's pretty damn good.

Also, I love the Kinks and wanted to include a song by them.

The Kinks, "Lola"





All the prompts )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2017-07-01 01:23 pm
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30 day music meme, day 20

20. A song that has many meanings for you

This is a song about ghosts, and about love, and about the Second World War, and about a place, and about some kind of liberation that is joyous or terrible or both. I love it so much that I requested it for Yuletide a while back and wonderful people wrote me wonderful fic for it.

Thomas Dolby, "Cloudburst At Shingle Street"





All the prompts )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Airship)
2017-06-26 02:44 pm
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30 day music meme, day 19

19. A song that makes you think about life

"Thinking about life" seems to me a fundamentally adolescent thing. I don't mean that as an insult; it's just that in my experience, as people get older, the questions become more specific. There's a loss of ambition, or arrogance, or energy; "life" is just too big a topic.

So here's a song about adolescence and (I think) about the looming spectre of adulthood.

The Mountain Goats, "Damn These Vampires"





All the prompts )
kindkit: A late-Victorian futuristic zeppelin. (Default)
2017-06-25 04:44 pm
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30 day music meme, day 18

18. A song from the year you were born

This was an easy choice.

This version of the song, the best known one, is I think later than 1969 (my birth year), but I like it better so that's what you get. It's worth looking at the original 1969 video on YouTube, though, if only because both video and song version are so hilariously 1960s.

David Bowie, "Space Oddity"





All the prompts )