Bewitching Kate (Song of the Week, 11/29/2011)

I’ve always loved Kate Bush.

Here she passionately performs one of her biggest hits, with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour adding some blistering guitar that really sets things on fire…

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Dancing Under An Outlaw Moon

I’ve made a YouTube playlist of most of the Songs of the Week and other music I’ve shared on this blog (89 videos in the list at this writing), and will add new entries as I feature new tunes in the future. Of course you’ll need to find individual posts themselves to see what comments, embarassing overshares, memories, or funny thoughts I originally shared with the various tunes.

The link (which is also in the blog’s sidebar, under “Special Stuff”), is:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PLBA769A23F4B98284

More Great Gaga

This morning I posted one of my “Good Memories of 2010,” in which I praised the monstrous(ly talented) Lady Gaga.

I shared a couple of lesser-known acoustic performances of hers, since most folks have probably seen her official vids. There were others I was tempted to toss in, but didn’t wish to overload that blog entry.

So here’s the overflow. ;)

First up is another live take on “Pokerface,” different and possibly more wonderful than the one I shared earlier…(and unfortunately, due to embedding restrictions you have to click through each to watch on YouTube, but it’s worth it)… Continue reading

Good Memories of 2010, Day 2: The Freak Bitch

Lady Gaga is a monster.

And I mean that in the very best way.

Early last year, I actually had the impulse to tweet “I have no idea who Lady Gaga is, and I’m glad.” Rarely listening to the radio, and never watching celebrity-fetish TV, I’d absorbed her name only through some collective unconscious osmosis, and I literally had no idea who she was other than the latest outré pop diva. Which made me reflexively dismiss her as just another turd floating in the bowl of MTV/Perez Hilton culture.

But I didn’t make the tweet, because I don’t like commenting on things I don’t actually know about, and because I didn’t want to be unfair to Gaga, whoever she was. I’m quirkily integrous like that.

Having resisted the impulse to blindly besmirch her, I found my curiosity roused. Did she deserve my scorn or not? I sat down with my good friend YouTube to find out.

She most definitely did not.

Continue reading

Good Memories of 2009, Day 4: 1977

1977

My ex and I started a new tradition last year. Every Christmas, we’re both giving our son some of the music we were listening to the year we were his current age. He’s thirteen now, so she gave him music from 1965 and I gave him music from 1977, the respective years we were thirteen.

I gave him Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and ELO’s A New World Record. I also put together a two CD package of assorted hits I liked that year, which allowed me to revisit the year I really started getting into music in the first place and rediscover just how many great songs came out then.