Friday, August 8, 2008

reversing the optical eye

What song makes an artist ?? Lately I have been driving around quite a bit and my CD of choice for the past week and a half has been Craig Morgan's I Love It. This is his debut release and the hit song on the release is Almost Home.
It seems that 99.99% of the time once this song is over I'm replaying it as the lyrics and the song itself is so powerful. This got me to thinking that I find myself doing this quite a bit on other CD's as well.

George Strait's Greatest Hits "The Chair" & "There's One Coming Home"
Ricky Van Shelton "Statue of a Fool"
Garth Brooks "The Dance" & "Unanswered Prayer's"
Martina McBride " Broken Wing" & "Independence Day"
(this song was ruined for me by Sean Hannity)
Daryl Worley "Letters from Home"
Chad Brock "The Visit"
John Michael Montgomery "I Will"
Tim McGraw "Like You Were Dying"
Vince Gill "When I Call Your Name"

I guess for me each of these artist are defined by that particular song and always will be in my mind. I guess there are some artist in the rock genre that I have my personal favorites as well but none as strong as the songs listed above

Is it strange to get a CD then only to listen to one song over and over again ?

4 comments:

Kevin Craig said...

I don't think it's strange to listen to one song over and over again. But maybe that's because I do that a lot.

What is strange is people like you who don't listen over and over to the same songs I do. :) While I've heard the Hannity theme song, I've never heard a single song on your list. (Maybe I heard one of them when it was playing in a restaurant at some time in my life, but I wasn't paying attention cuz I didn't know it was one of your songs.)

Here's one I zoned out to a few weeks ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfLCHQHndRo

(Ignore the totally unrelated and stupid video.)

Then there's my favorite 12-year-old Chinese guitar virtuosa:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvmcNaMLYXs

But not only can I out-weird you on which songs I listen to over and over, I only listen to fragments of songs over and over. Like the first 90 seconds of this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFFE92H9sMI

(really lousy audio, I hate the video, the CD is infinitely better)

Another fragment I listen to over and over is 30 seconds in the middle of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be Nice." (Don't know if that link will work for you or not, but it works for me and repeats over and over.)

"Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true,
Maybe then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do."

Might be some kind of Libertarian manifesto there somewhere.

I listen to the cello part on this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPJhVggWgY

(amazing what's on YouTube. I've never seen these videos before; just thought I might search and find the music and, voila!, they're all there.)

There's an economics podcast called EconTalk and I love their opening theme. Finally found it here. But the part I like doesn't begin until about 2:30 and lasts 90 seconds. I cut that part out and saved it in a separate file so I can repeat it endlessly for hours at a time.

When I was in high school I hated the Carpenters (at least publicly), but I secretly created a loop of the "Wah" part at the end of "Close to You," endlessly repeating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKh86kOoiWQ

So you can see this "repeating song" thing has been a problem for me for some time.

Maybe you and I need to start a support group.

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tom said...

Kevin,

That was but a short list of me personal favorites. I have other CD's that I have purchased that either all the selections are good in which case I listen to the whole recording, or the best song on the recording doesn't have an impact for me in which case rarely ever will I listen to it again.

In terms of just listening to portions of songs I do this with the Guess Who selection of "These Eyes".
I like the whole song but the synthesized portion at the beginning of the song is something I could replay for quite some time and it only last 30 seconds or so

Kevin Craig said...

That hairstyle post should tell you what's the purpose! :-)