have a break, part n + 1

in honor of a major revamp of my iRiver playlist. here are the newest and most notable additions.

foo fighters, everlong -- this triggered my most recent music recall phase. i'm now going through in your honor after about two years of ignoring the darn mp3s. i'm pretty sure this song will be a subject of a future "songs of my life" post so i won't pre-empt that. but having seven foo songs on my player (plus marty's rockstar inxs performance) is kinda telling how much i like them right now. and this is the first time i heard the original version of times like these (i've only ever heard of the acoustic version, same as everlong) and it rocks.

btw, i read somewhere that when dave letterman came back to his show after having heart surgery or something, he introduced the foos as his favorite band, playing his favorite song, which was everlong.

chris cornell, black hole sun -- i normally stay away from anything chris cornell, but i kinda like this mp3 from the bbc sessions that i picked up over on the office network. there's also a cover of you've got to hide your love away that isn't bad at all.

akon, smack that -- having a seatmate who is into so much r&b and all that kinda stuff sometimes does rub up on you. so maybe i'm a closet r&b junkie (or whatever this stuff is actually called). i always think of it as good driving music.

katharine mcphee, over it -- another great (and most fortunate) find from aforementioned officemate. i just can't get over this song, so lyrics are posted here:

i'm over your lies
and i'm over your games
i'm over you asking me
when you know i'm not okay
you call me at night
and i pick up the phone
and though you be tellin' me
i know you're not alone

oh and that's why your eyes
i'm over it
your smile
i'm over it
realized
i'm over it, i'm over it
i'm over

wanting you to be wanting me
no that ain't no way to be
how i feel, read my lips
because i'm so over
(i'm so)
movin' on, it's my time
you never were a friend of mine
hurt at first, a little bit
but now i'm so over
i'm so over it

i'm over your hands
and i'm over your mouth
trying to drag me down
and fill me with self doubt

oh and that's why your world
i'm over it
so sure
i'm over it
i'm not your girl
i'm over it, i'm over it
i'm over

(oh) don't call, don't come by
ain't no use don't ask me why
you'll never change
there'll be no more crying in the rain
no, oh oh
i'm over it

-- katharine mcphee, over it

time may change me, but i can't trace time

will the dice ever roll? when will i ever know?

i wasn't going to write anything tonight. not even when one of the few topics my best friend brought up during her mercifully short phone call today was lack of blog activity. but this was something i can't pass up.

the last few months i've been looking for a copy of trapt's lost realist, to no avail. i've tried my usual sources but wasn't successful with them. then the other day, i tried googling it - a desperate move not for the lazy. i tried it before with another song, and it was so tedious a task that i swore i would only do it again if i was desperate. which i was.

anyway, i was getting discouraged with all the russian characters that kept popping up in the google results, but i did manage to find an mpeg file - or so i thought. it was quicktime embedded in a page, and the parent directory was "forbidden". i'm just a hack, so i really don't know what to do with it. but later tonight (or is it early this morning? it's already past midnight) i got the brilliant idea to save the web page. and what do you know, even if the download was so quick it was disheartening, i read the file description and it looked like a regular mp3 file. whoopee! finally i got it! and it played properly!

the moral of the story is: if you want something bad enough, you have to think out of the box.

unfortunately for me, i'm just too darned lazy to do it.

song of the week: storm large, changes (originally by david bowie. anyone have this mp3?)

i blame it on the black star (i heart radiohead!)

48 hours away from my laptop + hundreds of mp3 blog links = radiohead bliss

i get home from work...

i seem to have a really weird hangover. i have less than 8 hours sleep in the last two days, and i must be crazy if i'm still up at one a.m. surfing instead of sleeping. it's not that i can't get enough of the internet, it's just that there are some things that rank higher in my list of priorities. namely, love. pair that with one of the greatest rock bands in history. it's a no-brainer.

i think it was last week or so that my best guy bud and ultimate mp3 resource (the boy's name is mike by the way) sent me a link to a blog that featured a thousand covers of leonard cohen's hallelujah. here i thought jeff buckley was the genius behind the song. and man was i overwhelmed. not only does my old kentucky blog have gazillions of other bands featured (like, the ones you never hear about) as well as an opinionated commentary on rockstar:supernova, it also lists an impressive number of mp3 blogs. i'm telling you, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

it started with me downloading patrice pike's performance of my iron lung (pretty neat), and then one click led to another... and i'm drowning in links to various radiohead live mp3s. it was like having my birthday three months early. if i'd been on dsl i would have downloaded them all according to show, but since i don't i had to pick and choose and leave the rest for another day. listening to the live performance of black star in copenhagen gave me a rush much like staring at my phone wallpaper of lee dong wook. 10 minutes after my last listen, my heart has not stopped pounding.

disclaimer: i'm not really a big, big fan of radiohead. i'm yet to buy the rest of their albums because at the time they came out i was just a poor college student. or a poor entry level actuarial student. only last monday tower gave me a big surprise when they put out 3 cds on the shelf: kid a, ok computer and hail to the thief. i don't think it's ever happened before. so when i've stopped being a poor actuarial analyst (hopefully by next week ) i *might* get ok computer, arguably their best album. so that my copy of the bends will have a companion, finally.

here are some of the other blogs that quenched my thirst for the boys from oxford:

http://musicisart.blogspot.com the kroq performance is here
http://gillmoreboy.blogspot.com linked to musicisart
http://neileslife.blogspot.com copenhagen and other stuff
http://www.bestweekever.tv/category/mp3/ start here

another btw: thom yorke just came out with his solo effort, the eraser. nope, the band is not breaking up.

song of the week: trapt, lost realist

nothing to say

a couple of days ago i finally got down to reorganizing some of my music files. in particular, i found the patience to scrutinize all my dashboard confessional songs. best bud mike burned a whole batch of 'em last year, but when i fiddled with my wmp last month i think i messed up the titles and the file names. so i really had to sit down and compare the song with the lyrics, which i got from the official website.

for a long time i wasn't in the mood to listen to those songs. i only had ears for the songs that introduced me to dash: a plain morning, best deceptions, screaming infidelities, and hands down. and there's vindicated from the spiderman2 soundtrack. i found the repetitive theme of chris carraba's songs too tiring to listen to, and too depressing. fortunately i managed to sit through the whole batch, which include most of the tracks from all his albums, as well as mtv unplugged versions. personally, i found some of the mtv unplugged versions to be better than the originals. and as i listened through the songs while reading the lyrics, i remembered why i was attracted to dash in the first place. however, i would still recommend moderation because too much emo can affect your mood. on the other hand, it was perfect for the time in our lives that we were wallowing in sadness and the futility of love.

here's a sample of chris carraba's genius. i think he's a poet (or whatever you call it, when it's actually prose) first and foremost.

i'm starting to fashion an idea in my head where i would impress you with every single word i said would come out insightful or brave or smooth or charming and you'd want to call me

and i would be there every time you'd need me i'd be there every time...

but for now i'll look so longingly waiting... for you to want me, for you need me, for you to notice me

-- dashboard confessional, for you to notice