Music

30 Day Song Challenge, Day 15: A Song People Wouldn’t Expect You To Like

Hands down, today’s prompt is the hardest of the whole month.  I’ve written so much about music on this blog over the years that I really don’t know what people wouldn’t expect me to like anymore, except the things that I actually don’t like.  When I first did this Challenge back in 2011, I chose…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 14: A Song You Like Hearing Live

Today is the first day in the 30 Day Song Challenge that I think I’m going to register a semi-controversial pick.  I know a lot of people who would rather be dragged out behind the shed, rode hard and hung up wet than hear this song live or recorded. It’s cheesy, it’s corny, it encourages…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 13: A Song You Sing In The Shower

I’ve gotten a few days behind on this month’s 30 Day Song Challenge, so today’s entry is going to be semi-brief, partly because I’m trying to catch up but in larger part because there’s really no reason for any of us to spend too much time thinking about what I do in the shower. For…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 12: A Song That Reminds You Of Your Best Friend

That couch-full of awesome to your left is my best friend, Dr. Adriel Trott, mugging like a boss at one of my favorite local nightlife hangouts Mollie Fontaine’s. I met her for the first time more than a decade ago in March 2001, when I visited Villanova University as a prospective graduate student.  Due in part to…

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30 Day Song Challenge: 2014 Edition

Once again, I’ll be participating in the 30 Day Song Challenge on this blog for the entire month of June.  I did the Challenge for the first time in 2011 (read my picks here) and then I did it again last summer (read those picks here), though I used a different prompt-list the second time.  The Challenge works…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 11: A Song That Reminds You Of Summer

I tried– and I mean I REALLY TRIED– not to pick a Beach Boys song today, but all my efforts were for naught.  Asking people to associate a song with “summer” and expecting them not to pick a Beach Boys song is like asking them what they associate with shooting a man in Reno and expecting…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 3: A Song That Makes You Laugh

There’s a world of difference between something that’s funny and something that makes you laugh.  Over the past decade or so, the real magnitude of that difference has been lost, what with all the ubiquitous lol‘s (and “lol”-variants) showing up in our texts, Facebook feeds and Twitter pages. The truth is, it’s really not that easy…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 5: A Song That Has A New Meaning Every Time You Hear It

[Ludwig von Beethoven and Friedrich Schiller] Today’s prompt in the 30 Day Song Challenge presents a very tall order.  A song that has a new meaning every time you hear it?  The way I figure it, this selection had better be either (1) a song you don’t hear very often, (2) a song that is written in…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 4: A Song That Reminds You Of Something Sad

I may be interpreting the 30 Day Song Challenge prompt (“a song that reminds you of something sad”) a bit liberally with my pick today.  As much as I tried, I couldn’t think of a song that reminded me of any particular sad thing.  There aren’t any songs that I associate with my grandparents’ funerals, or the…

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30 Day Song Challenge, Day 6: A Song You Can Always Relate To

My selection for today is a song that, if you gave me nothing else but the title, I’d most likely say “yeah, I can relate to that.”  I’m picking “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”— yes, that’s three uses of the male possessive–  originally recorded in 1966 by James Brown and intended as a pun on the…

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