My Thermos

This week's mission: Top 5 Goodbye Songs

Bye Bye Love - The Cars

I still enjoy this first Cars LP quite a bit. The latter stuff, mmm, not so much.

Goodbye Girl - Squeeze

I wanted to name my cats Difford and Tilbrook, only partially successful. Glenn is one heck of a guitar player as shown in this clip I discovered back in Feb '07

49 Bye-Byes - Crosby Stills & Nash

I've never counted them to see if it's really 49, but a great song anyway.

She's Leaving Home - The Beatles

It's The Beatles.

Goodbye Cruel World - Pink Floyd

Goodbye cruel world
I'm leaving you today
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye all you people
There's nothing you can say
to make me change my mind
Goodbye

The sudden cut to silence is chilling. I still get goosebumps when I listen.

What's on your list?

(via Music Memoirs)

But wait, I hear you saying "it's not Tuesday" and you are absolutely right. I certainly know that it's Wednesday, actually almost Thursday by now. But this is a cool idea for a post I got from Nat and she called it Tuesday Tunes so I'm sticking with it.

So here's the plan:

Pick a music related word and do a Google image search. Post the picture that captures your eye the most and three songs that relate back to it.

My search term - Guitar

The result is the fine looking Martin D-28 to the right (image from here, along with a really great description of this particular guitar which was owned by the legendary Johnny Cash - you should read it. Really. Do it now, I'll wait)

My Three Songs

Guitar and Pen - Pete Townshend's fantastic tune about the songwriting process. Never spend your guitar or your pen.

When you sing through the verse and you end in a scream
And you swear and you curse 'cause the rhyming ain't clean
But it suddenly comes after years of delay
You pick up your guitar, you can suddenly play

While My Guitar Gently Weeps - George's amazing tune from The White Album is next up. A guitar is a very expressive instrument and a good player can convey a tremendous level of feeling and emotion with a string bend or vibrato. Eric Clapton steps in to demonstrate on this classic Beatles track.

I look at the world and I notice it's turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps

Blue Guitar - The Cowboy Junkies have perfected the haunting and beautiful tune, this is a great example of just how well they do it.

I wish I had a blue guitar,
a blue guitar to play all night long
Singing songs of loss and love
Singing songs till morning comes

What did you come up with?

SB

One of my favorite quotes is:

When you have a number of disagreeable duties to perform - always do the most disagreeable first.

Josiah Quincy

I have this printed and hanging in my office.  I try to do this in my work, getting the tasks I dread out of the way so that they stop looming over me and I can get on to other work. It seems to work well for me.

For my BYOBO series, I've created a rather lengthy list of artists I want to feature and each week when I go to choose the artist for the week, there is one that I pass over knowing that it is an impossibility to narrow down a list to just 15 tracks. Their name mocks me when I view the list, each time I hear a song of theirs on the radio I cringe at the thought of trying to decide whether to include it. As much as I love The Beatles, they were wearing me down.

Enough is enough - it's time to bite the bullet and get at this.

So once again inspired by Nat at Mini-Obs, the idea is (almost) the same as always:

Pick one of your favorite bands / artists and list 10-15 songs by that band / artist to compile your own best of compilation.

This week, I'm changing the rules a bit. I decided that to just pull 15 songs from their collected works was going to be impossible, so instead I'm going to take advantage of the fact that there were 15 original CD releases and choose one song from each release. Considering how much they evolved from the first notes of Please Please Me to the end of Abbey Road, this also seems like a good way to make sure the full evolution is represented.

So here goes - The Best of The Beatles as compiled by me: Continue reading "Build Your Own Best Of - The ... »