Still Dwelling

You have killed me by Morrissey

I don't share this view of how things ended, but this is how I would respond to it. But then, it's not forgiveness from me that matters.

My thoughts about Teabaggers and other neoconservatives

Once upon a time there was an alternative rock band called Creed. They made lots of great music that was very popular.


One Last Breath from Whisper (2001)
Then one day for no apparent reason, they suddenly broke up. Not long after that, like the very next day, there was a new band, called Alter Bridge. Completely different and separate from Creed in every (legal) way.


Open Your Eyes from One Day Remains (2004)
It was made up of every member originally of Creed except one. I guess they didn't want him to be a part of them anymore. And they lived happily ever after.

Somewhere in that tale there's a lesson to be learned, I think. Especially for the current Republican Party.

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Note: the above version of events is how I heard it as a casual fan of alternative rock. I'm not a hardcore Creed/Alter Bridge fan and probably there are lots of additional details to the story that aren't accounted for in this post. Also, there's a sequel: five years after they disbanded, they reunited last year. Which could also have analogies to the current GOP after some growth and maturity occurs...


Overcome from Full Circle (2009)

Some of my favorite German metal

Before I discovered Pandora, I listened to a lot of Internet radio broadcasting from other countries. I was mainly interested in music in languages other than English. My favorite was a metal/alternative station in Germany, which introduced me to all sorts of great songs and bands popular in Europe, but then they started broadcasting ads not just between songs, but in the middle of them. o.O After that, I moved to a Dutch station, but their music just wasn't the same and some of the announcers were annoying (yes, even in Dutch). I found Pandora and, although they didn't have very many of the songs from that German station, they also didn't have ads, and thus I was going to live happily ever after.

I'd still be at Pandora if it weren't for their new 40-hr per month cap. I run out of that after the first two weeks. T.T I'll happily give them money to let me listen to more (only $0.99 per month for unlimited) just as soon as they accept PayPal, but in the meantime, now I'm on Youtube.

It's nowhere near ideal. I have to go back every five minutes to hit "replay" and find new songs all by myself instead of having it all stream past me. However, I've been looking up songs I used to like. Some of it is finally making it onto Youtube. Such as:



And, as I wander, I find more good stuff that I hadn't heard before. For example, my new favorite:



5. Marz by Megaherz and Ohne Dich by Eisbrecher have the same singer. Megaherz is so named because they wanted to make "metal with heart." These two songs succeed well, I think. Both are actually love songs in disguise, though angsty rather than sappy. Yay emo metal. :D

Then, for something completely different, there's also Gottmensch by Schock:



and Vollmond by In Extremo:



and Walpurgisnacht by Schandmaul:



which isn't technically metal, but it comes to mind whenever my friends in Europe talk about Walpurgis Night, which is a major holiday over there.

And finally, because I can't very well post about German metal without mentioning Rammstein:



Dalai Lama is one of the few songs that doesn't have extremely disturbing lyrics. Rammstein is totally awesome so long as you don't go looking for translations to anything. o.O

But I don't know how to leave you

And so the knight in shining armor, who spent the last six years never having time to be with the princess that he worked so hard trying to keep, failed. And the shared dream came to an end, even though it was never like that at all.

I don't know what I can say or do to make it better. I'm sorry too. And I still love you anyway.



I wish you could come with me.

Mies Del Dolor

Blind Guardian is a Swedish German metal band that gets regularly recommended to me, based on what else I like (Rammstein, Megaherz/Eisbrecher, Nightwish, symphonic metal in general). Most of their songs make no impression on me whatsoever - it's pleasant enough background music in my Pandora seed rotation, but doesn't draw my attention enough to find out what it is or who's playing it.

Except for Mies Del Dolor. It's in Spanish, unlike most of their songs which are in English, and it sounds nothing like most songs in Spanish I'm exposed to. This is more like a ballad.



So far as I know, there isn't a readily available English translation of the lyrics. I have no idea what they're singing. Which is not unlike the current state of my thoughts on romance in general, which might be part of why I like it so much. :)

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UPDATE: Figures. There's a version of this in English, under a different name!



I think I still like it better in Spanish though.

Big Machines

What caught my attention about Warrel Dane's cover of Lucretia, My Reflection was, first, the singer's growly voice and impassioned lyrics, and second, the fact that the opening lines reminded me of Billy Joel's No Man's Land.



(actual song starts at 0:39)

Both talk about being near big machines, and at the time I couldn't remember what No Man's Land was about. Though someone better at BS than me could probably make a profound statement about the similarities between empires and suburbs.

Anyway, it turned out to be a cover of a Sisters of Mercy song.



I've never been a big fan of Sisters of Mercy (a classic goth band), possibly because I once had to listen to one of their albums on repeat every week for several months. It was the mood music for our Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop until I finally complained about it. After that we tried other music until we finally settled on silence.

Maybe what I really need is metal versions of all of their songs. ;)

Family

This is what my mother needs to sing about my brother.


It's from the Buffy Musical - a hit for Buffy fans, possibly makes no sense to non-fans since it's a non-self-enclosed part of a larger story arc. Yes, I really am nerd enough to listen to that as an actual musical from time to time, and occasionally watch the extended version that I have on tape. The very first time they aired it, for a total of 1:20 rather than the usual :45 (or whatever it is), it had a ballet sequence with Dawn that got completely cut in all later airings. As did a couple of Spike's verses. I'm glad I have a copy.

(None of which was the original point of the post, but I wasn't planning to explain further, so I guess this post is just going to look like a non-sequitur of itself.)

((I probably shouldn't write blog posts immediately after 11-hour road trips.))

Hrm. Upon further research, it seems that they've also since replaced Tara's original singing. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

One of my favorite odes

An ode has a three-part structure: strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The strophe is a theme statement, and the antistrophe is a response to it. Within an ode, it might go back and forth between strophe and antistrophe several times before everything meets up in the middle and ends with the epode.

It turns out that my favorite Billy Joel song, Leningrad, is in the form of an ode. There are stanzas about Victor who lives in Leningrad, followed by response stanzas about Billy Joel growing up in America. They are set to very different musical themes. Then, the very last of those is about Billy Joel visiting Leningrad and meeting Victor - and it's set to the Russian theme. The epode has no words. Its music is completely different from either the strophe or antistrophe.


lyrics

In general, I'm not a fan of poetry. But that may be because so little of it is as masterfully crafted as this song is.

UCF Back Fence | Chain of Inspiration

Well, it's been around for a couple months now, and so far we've had visits from Tom, John, Nathan, Shawn, Jeri, Michelle, and Tania. Most people seem to show up between 9 and 11pm, EDT. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be in there more than three of us at a time. Anyone want to work out a day/time to all show up en masse?

A couple other notes. If I'm in there not talking, all you need to do is type out my name ("Nerwen") and it will make my computer ding, which will make me look at the window within a minute or two. If there are no dings, I tend to rotate past the chat window once every ten minutes or so while doing other things. Please wait around for a bit. :) (If I still don't show up, it probably means my boss ate me.) If the only instance of me says "Nerwen-afk" it means I'm not there.

For people who aren't interested in the UCF Back Fence, here's my favorite song at the moment:

Hand of Sorrow by Within Temptation was inspired by the Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb. The song lyrics in turn have stirred up inspiration for a story of my own. It'll be interesting to see how my story compares to the trilogy, which I won't be reading until after I'm done.

Work It Out - Jurassic 5 (with Dave Matthews)

I'm not much a fan of hip-hop, but I like Jurassic 5's "Work It Out." This video was made by some kid in high school, but to my mind it captures the spirit of the song much better than the "official" video. The second verse especially speaks to me.

These are different times but we feel the same pains
The blood of mankind running through the same veins
We'd like to make it right some which it remain tame
Same crimes even though the names change
And we're like different minds working off the same brain
Passengers on different cars stepping off the same train
In the end, making it right's the main aim
Different parts of the picture highlight the same frame

(Actually I'm not convinced that he really says "some which it remain tame" but have no idea what it might be instead. All the online lyric websites, which basically just copy back and forth from each other, say the same thing.)

Lily's Eyes

"Lily's Eyes" is from the musical Secret Garden, based on the book of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This version of it, sung by Anthony Warlow and Philip Quast for a production in Australia, is the most beautiful male duet I've ever heard.

I was introduced to it by a fan of Philip Quast, who is probably best known for playing Javert in Les Miserables in productions in England and Australia (but not the London Cast version of the CDs). In the course of our discussions about various musicals, my friend and I decided that cast recordings of Broadway productions of any musical are inferior compared to recordings of productions elsewhere. If anyone knows where I can get hold of a copy of the Australian production of Secret Garden, I'm all ears.


This post inspired by Jeri. Apparently I was unfond enough after all. :)

On Earth - Samael

(Song is four minutes long. The other 3:55 of video is skippable silence.)


Samael is a black metal band from Switzerland. On Earth is from their 2004 album Reign of Light. What first caught my attention was the way the singer enunciates "dancing" in the chorus. After that I was hooked on the bountiful joie de vivre. Upon further research, it turns out that their music as a whole makes great theme music for about half of my Nanowrimo novel. Better, their Myspace page is set up to continuously loop five songs, which makes writing flow even easier. Life is good. :)

Parodies of parodies

Road trippin' across America
In my station wagon at 80 miles an hour!

Road trippin' across America
Boldly going northward, I think my back's gone sour.

-- parodied from the chorus of Star Trekkin',
which is itself a parody of Star Trek:
The Original Series by The Firm.

Most people in the U.S. know of the song from Dr. Demento's radio show. For anyone who might've never heard it before, here's a video version that reinterprets it for Stargate: Atlantis (another parody!):



Mmmmm... wraiths. I would so be a wraith worshipper. While I'm waiting for that to ever happen, I'll be driving 800+ miles today. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves while I'm gone. :)

Kitaro

New Age instrumental music is like classical music, only better. Kitaro is one of my favorites. His album Kojiki tells the story of the creation of Japan in seven parts. The 1990 release explained the full story in the liner notes; the CD I bought later left it out. There is now also a DVD, which I hope put it back in.


Track 2: Sozo (second half)


Track 3: Koi


Track 6: Matsuri. According to the liner notes, the sun goddess has gone into hiding, the world has gone dark, and everyone else throws a fake party to lure her back out and shine light once more upon the world. She comes out near the end of the piece.

My favorite track is actually Reimei, which comes after Matsuri. It basically says "and everyone lives happily ever after" and sounds like a grander, more epic version of Sozo. Unfortunately nobody has posted that one on Youtube. Maybe I will later, if I can figure out how to turn an MP3 into a video...

edit: Success! Here it is now.

It's amazing how one 8mb song plus one 1mb picture can become 25mb of video. Pay no attention to the psychedelic pulsing flowers - I have no idea why it's doing that.

The importance of lyrics

Nicole C. Mullen's Always Love You is well outside my normal preferences of music genre. First, it's what I would call "girly" - the kind of song that my female relatives would pick at a karaoke while the male relatives sit out. Second, it's somewhere in the "black" range - the kind of music that black people typically sing and enjoy, to which I've never paid enough attention to tell the difference between the various genres (rhythm and blues? reggae?). And third, the singer's style is in the direction of one that I really don't like - where it has an "ah-ah" sound breaking up the middle of the melody line rather than a straight-through "aaaaahhh" and breaks only at breaths.

It also turns out to be "gospel" - and the theme song for the Christian movie End of the Spear. Christian music is about as far outside my musical interests as one can get. This particular song, however, is about love rather than God, so I kept listening.

What caught my attention was the lyrics. They're unusual for having a three-line rhyme scheme, and the singer does a wonderful job of matching emotion to lyrics to melody. The song as a whole is very well constructed, and I have it as one of my current top ten favorites.



Meanwhile, Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars has everything I could ever want in a song, musically speaking. The slow, melancholic start, the gradual introduction of different instruments adding their parts to the greater whole, the strings that come in last, the way it all builds and falls and comes back in again, even the sound of the singer's voice.

But good lord, the lyrics make me want to stab myself in the head repeatedly with a fork. Each stanza sounds like it's going to say something profound ... and then it doesn't. Nothing goes anywhere. It's an insipid mess. It doesn't even slightly rhyme, and the choice of words is like fingernails on chalkboard. This is one song I would enjoy a whole lot more if it were in a language I don't understand. Someone needs to write better lyrics to fit to this song. :p

Emerald Sword

Every year, there is a contest known as the Labor Day Novel writing marathon. In short: write an entire "novel" (with a beginning, middle, and end) in three days. In practice, the actual stories tend to be in the range of 25-30k, which is more of a novelette - but close enough for marathon purposes! It starts tomorrow and ends Monday night.

Also, Emerald Sword by Rhapsody of Fire is a great song for inspiring fantasy stories:


Its lyrics are available at LyricWiki.org.

My good friend Robert has decided to write a novel based on the song for Labor Day Novel this year.

Unfortunately, his enthusiasm is contagious, and so despite the many excuses that come immediately to mind for why I shouldn't do this, both I and an innocent bystander (alcar) are going to write stories based on Emerald Sword this weekend too.

Any of my esteemed readers want in on this last-minute madness too? Drop a comment here. Write a Ficlet if you have no time for anything bigger. :)

Creek Mary's Blood

Creek Mary's Blood is a symphonic metal song by Nightwish. I first heard it on Pandora. Here's a beautiful video of it, made by Ivan of Estonia with footage from the miniseries Into the West:

(Downloadable high resolution version available)

While the song itself didn't immediately catch my attention, the spoken poem at the end did. I was instantly fascinated with who the speaker was and what he was saying.

What he was saying turned out to be a poem that Tuomas originally wrote in English, then John Two-Hawks translated into Lakota. And then someone on Youtube posted a translation back into English, which in some parts I like even better than the original version:

I still dream all night long with the wolves, the horses, these endless meadows
the unquiet winds over the mountain
the safe and sound frontier of the good friends and relatives
I still believe in the sacred earth where the Great Spirit inhabits
Every night
Every day
I am like the elk
And you as the wolves that make me stronger
We have no obligation to you
Our only debt is a life for our Mother
Good times when we could sing to her

our spirits were here long time before yours
long time even before us
and for a long time it still will be
until the day your pride leads you to your own end.

Here's the video where the above translation was posted, of a live performance where John Two-Hawks steals the show:

The "prelude" before the Nightwish song in this version of the video is actually the tail end of a song written and performed by Two-Hawks (full performance here). The video itself is from a DVD of the entire concert, End of an Era.

As for who the speaker was...

I watched those End of an Era videos until I had them memorized, and I couldn't take my eyes off him the first several hundred times.

I read both of his websites in their entirety, then Googled everything else I could find about him.

I wrote him a Wikipedia article. It was how I got sucked into Wikipedia in the first place.

I suddenly redeveloped a childhood interest in American Indians. Back then, I had to stop looking because it just got too depressing (the good guys are supposed to win!!). Now, I'm delighted to have discovered that they're still with us and in some ways even thriving.

I am inspired to stand up straight by watching his posture, which will no doubt please my mother to no end.

I signed up to receive his monthly newsletter and am still too chicken (nearly six months later) to actually try talking to him directly.

How to sell me music

The first time I hear a future favorite song, it generally makes no impression on me whatsoever. Then, as I hear it repeatedly on the radio, something about it will catch my attention - could be a particular musical phrase, could be something in the lyrics, or just something about the singer's voice or one of the instruments.

After about ten times, I start paying attention. Ten times after that, I become obsessed, track it down over the Internet, and start playing it on repeat. I also start looking up info about the band. Then, when I'm done playing it on repeat, I consider buying it.

I also start browsing other songs by the same band, either by playing whatever else is available in full for free, or by putting the song on one of my Pandora stations and seeing what else turns up to catch my attention. Lather, rinse, repeat. If enough songs by the same band turn out to catch my attention, I start thinking about buying full albums.

If the song isn't freely available somewhere for me to hear in full on repeat, I will never reach the stage of wanting to buy it.

Country Western Music

A wise man once said, "To understand a people, study their art."

I listen to country-western music for exactly that reason. I live in a country where at least half the population I don't understand at all, and country-western music - the most popular genre of music in the United States - is their music.

It does sound pleasant. Mellow. The lyrics tend to tell stories rooted in very concrete and specific details - descriptions of actual real people, places, and things. Lyrics of modern alternative rock and metal tend to describe emotions and ideas in more abstract terms.

Anyway, some of my favorites so far (links from Youtube):

I Just Came Back From A War by Darryl Worley
Suds in the Bucket by Sara Evans
Watching You by Rodney Atkins
Twenty Years Ago (lyrics only) by Montgomery Gentry

Shut Me Up

One of the most godawfully rudest songs I've heard in a while - Shut Me Up by Mindless Self Indulgence:



Love that whipcrack. :D Also the part in the video where he impales the goth.