from Humble Daisy to Hurricane Eye

Day 693, Session 128:
When/Where: Tuesday May 13th - Pounding the pavement on the post office route.
First song: Humble Daisy by XTC
Last full song: Hurricane Eye by Paul Simon
Progress: 2056-2064 of 5946
Total Songs Heard: 1628

I'm running into recurring problem now where whenever I want to load something new onto the iPod, I have to unload something else. (I've probably mentioned this before.) Today, something else has taken the form of Hungry by Draxon. As I hit more and more of these "metal ballads" I've really started to wonder what the hell people were thinking when this type of music became popular. Sure some of it ended up having staying power, but so much of it is crap. Total crap. I refuse to take blame for it as I'm pretty sure metal ballads came into play while I was too young to be the target audience. My target audience years come with the rise of grunge and "alternative" music so I think I'm ahead on that account. If you're doing the math at home, you've probably noticed that I'm cutting a pretty fine line here. I'm 32, but I'm perfectly prepared to throw you under the bus for the metal ballad years if you're between say 35 and 42. Same way I'm blaming you between 21 and 26 for the boy band era.

Of course, maybe you love this song and have been looking everywhere for it. Who am I to deny you?

His goal in life was to be an echo
Riding alone, town after
town, toll after toll
A fixed bayonet through the great
southwest to forget her

That's how Hummingbird by Wilco begins. This song has become one of those reasons I'm glad I'm doing this whole thing. Somehow when I first listened to "A Ghost Is Born" I missed the goodness of this particular song. I love the idea of being an echo. The faded memory that still occasionally reverberates off the gray matter of someone I once knew... or maybe even someone I didn't know. A path crossed and an impression made that I didn't even know I was making.

I have echoes. They come to me when I sleep. People I haven't thought of in the light of day come and we talk. They look like I remember them even though I know they wouldn't really look like that now. When I wake I usually take a few minutes to try to figure out why I heard that echo and most of the time there's no reason. I always feel good about remembering, even if only for a minute, before the echo fades and the day comes in.

Being an echo seems like a good enough goal to me.

This particular version comes from one of Wilco's live concerts in Chicago. It features a favorite moment of mine from any concert; the moment when the band steps back and lets the audience sing.



(It may be a while before the mp3s show up here. The service I was using has completely changed (man, the internet moves fast) and I'm trying to figure out how to log back in.)