One of Those Days!

I'm fidgety. It's one of those days: the weather is beautiful and I should be somewhere other than in a computer lab entering exam grades. Even if my body cannot be out doing other things, at least my mind should be, right?

Have you ever noticed how items can lump themselves together in our minds? The weather has immediately conjured up the following constellation of diversions:

Musically, it is a day for Beirut, DeVotchKa, the Decemberists and Andrew Bird.

It is a day for Indiana Jones, The Life Aquatic, Tombstone or Apollo 13.

It is a day for Mickey Mouse and Tintin, The Twenty One Balloons and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.

It is days like these that make me want to join the Explorers Club, the CIA or Mission Aviation Fellowship.

In a word: it's a day for adventures!


Alas, I'll get back to my exams now...

Incongruous Music

Have you ever heard a song where the lyrics and music just do not match? (I know I have had this conversation with some of you.)

The song that first made me aware of this phenomenon is the Decemberists' Crane Wife 3 (which you can watch live here, or see with someone's cheesy slideshow here). The tune is really catchy stuff, and I have heard a Quincy living room full of young folks belt the chorus together. But the lyrics are actually quite depressing, a retelling of a Japanese folk tale (also developed in Crane Wife 1 & 2). As the narrator tells the story he confesses his guilt. That chorus, so exuberantly sung: "I will hang my head low."

Attentive readers, I have two questions for you: (1) Can you share other examples of this phenomenon? I know there are plenty more out there. (2) What explains this odd situation? Are the Colin Meloys of the world just sloppy? Is there some larger purpose at work here? Or is he (and those like him) just trying to be provocative?

Sixteen Military Wives

For you fans of the Decemberists out there, here's one of their videos I came across:



Stephen Colbert described the Decemberists as "hyper-literate prog rock." I once mentioned that in a loud bar and someone thought I had said "hyper-lyric." It could be true; you would be hard pressed to find another musical act with music so full of rich vocabulary, esoteric allusions, dramatic twists and buckets of pathos. (I think pretty much any of their albums could safely be titled "Love and Death.") One of the fun things about their videos is that they do not content themselves with a few shots of the band playing, interspersed with fairly vague and generic scenes which probably have to do with the lyrical content of the song. No, they usually proceed to tell another story, similar to - but often different from - that told in the song. It is almost as though the song is simply the soundtrack for a film short, rather than the film simply being the image side of a music video. In any case, the result is a highly complex assemblage of instruments and vocals, words and images. Like their music generally, the Decemberists' music videos are probably considerably denser than our usual fare, but I think they are quite worth the added digestion.