Thursday, March 18, 2010

See, this is just not fair.

If I'm going to wake up with a song in my head, I'd prefer that it be a song I can stand listening to.



I like Don McClean. Really, I do. But his output was...uneven. There's Vincent, which could make me momentarily care about a dead Dutch painter I don't actually care about at all. There's Empty Chairs, which can make me care about...whoever the song is about. There's Castles in the Air, Wonderful Baby, The Grave... The list of ever-so-meaningful songs, folk and pop, is really quite long. And he wasn't always so deadly serious - look up a copy of On The Amazon sometime. When he was silly, he was delightfully silly indeed. I love a lot of them. Others...not so much. American Pie, for example; back in the '70's the radio stations played that blankly indecipherable song over and over, like it was some demented FCC requirement. I started indifferent, and ended just loathing it. Still, there are lots of McClean songs I like a lot.

So naturally I wake up humming Tapestry, his first attempt at a single, which out- Al Gored Al Gore before anyone had ever sadly even heard of Al Gore. It's pretty enough in its way, but I really just completely hate this song. Life is not fair.

But then nobody promised me fair.

3 comments:

The Grey Lady said...

Don't mind me I am still stuck trying to figure out the cultural context of the previous bizarre offering and how you would come to know it so well that it got stuck in your head. This seems rather benign in contrast.

Joel said...

Heh. It's been a long, strange trip, GL.

The Grey Lady said...

Guessed as much...