Category: music

Tonight I will be dancing.

It’s been a while. For various schedule reasons, I haven’t been able to dance since May. I’m looking forward to it enormously, and today’s jukebox is all about that.

The first song, by the fabulous Keb’ Mo’, pretty much says it all. The rest of the songs do it.

Enjoy.

Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!

 
She Just Wants to Dance
Keb’ Mo’

Well
When the music starts to playing
She slides out on the floor
Dancing without a partner
Swaying on the two and four

There’s a rhythm in her footstep
And a flower in her hair
A smile on her face
Cause she’s in a place
Where she don’t have a care

She ain’t looking for no lover
She ain’t looking for romance
She just wants to dance

Well she’s moving kinda lazy
And it’s obvious to me
This little girl ain’t crazy
She’s as wild as she is free

She can feel it in her fingers
And it moves on down her spine
And when it hits her hips
She parts her lips
And you know she’s feeling fine

She ain’t looking for no lover
She ain’t looking for romance
She just wants to dance

Get out the way and let the girl dance…

Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!

These are random happy songs: not particular “favorites” that I seek out, but songs that always make me happy to find them by accident in the world — on the pub CD player, in the supermarket, on the car radio of the guy next to me at the red light. It’s as if I passed someone familiar on the street who suddenly takes me by the hand and says Come on, and walks me to some happy place inside myself.

Happiness is physical; I don’t hear these songs as much as feel them, their rhythms and resonance. I see them, as if they were memories or stories I’ve told myself so often they’ve become something like memory. They don’t make me ecstatic or fierce or electric or take the top of my head off with existential joy, the way some music does. They simply make me happy; although as I get older, I realize that as simple as it is, happy isn’t a door that opens to everyone. I am grateful to this music, and to sunshine and rivers and laughter and cats and my mom’s tuna casserole and the soft ice cream cones my dad bought me in summers when I was a kid, and to so many more simple things that make me happy.

“Hitchcock Railway” by Jose Feliano is one of my oldest music-memories: my parents played Feliciano a lot when I was a kid. Whether it’s true or not, I associate it with parties: our very small house stuffed with loud, laughing people in bell-bottomed blue jeans and fringed vests, or miniskirts and sandals, or golf shirts and plaid sports jackets (we knew lots of different folks) who put their beer in our bathtub (full of ice for the occasion) and ate the artichokes that were constantly boiling in huge pots on our stove, while music played in the background. When I was about 10 or so, my dad started letting me bartend behind a piece of plywood set up on stools across our kitchen door: I served Canadian Club and water, as I recall, and got every whisky-drinking man in the place absolutely hammered. It was one of my first experiences of power over men: in the 60’s South, it was pretty much a time-honored gendered strategy for women to carefully gauge a man’s capacity for alcohol and then use it in whatever way worked best. Since I didn’t have any particular goals at the time, the lesson was simply that if I gave those men a strong drink, they’d sip it, raise a wry eyebrow, say Larry, she’s learning early! and then laugh and wander off to find someone to flirt with. And come back for another, possibly with a conspiratorial Now don’t you tell my wife you’re getting me drunk! It was all very instructive. And boy, those parties were fun.

I became a huge Police fan in college. By this time, I had fled Northwestern University and come home to finish my education at the University of South Florida, and live with my mom. It was generally my job to wash the dishes, which was often a special horror-movie experience in our poor little decrepit house: the kitchen ceiling had partially fallen in, the windows were drafty, the baseboards gapped and it was Florida, kids — every open space was a bug highway. I am not sure I ever washed an entire set of dishes without a close encounter with a Rhode-Island-sized cockroach.

But I had a fifty-foot headset cord that easily stretched from the turntable in the living room to the kitchen sink: so I would put on happy music and stomp bugs to the beat when I had to. I listened to The Police all the time, and “Every Little Thing” always made me feel as though I was moving forward, transcending the dirty dishes and the bugs, going to a place where whatever I did, even this, must be magic in some way. I felt the same way driving to acting classes, or driving home late at night from rehearsal, when the song would come on the radio: hopeful, looking for magic.

I was out dancing last month and DJ Stacey rolled us into “China Grove” and oh my goodness, I thought I would levitate. Some people actually left the dance floor (huh?!!!) as if to say, Well, how can you dance to this? So I showed them. This song is all about the Southern childhood that I never actually had, in a small town full of funky folks who lived their lives to Southern rock and (in my story) made each other pies and fixed their own cars and gave each other space to be (and gossiped like hell about whatever you did with your space).

So here’s some of my happy for you, with the hope that you have some happy today in whatever way works for you.

Today’s theme is:

I am sorry to say that I don’t remember who sent me this image, but it’s just perfect. I was that emo kid sometimes (sadly, sometimes I still am. So much for being a grownup). Today it’s possible to do a cheerful post about All Things Emo because I’m not feeling like painting my room black and then crawling under the bed with my headphones turned up to 11. But I’ve had those days. Haven’t you?

I don’t do this music every day: I prefer my angst a little rougher and in full howl (can you say Nine Inch Nails? I knew you could). But today’s songs get into the part of me that still sometimes goes off into the corner to be a weepy emo kid; and that’s very useful for particular kinds of writing. Much of what I do is about big feelings, and often I use emo to encourage those feelings to come out and play.

Because big feelings aren’t nearly as sophisticated as we like to pretend when we put on our Grownup Boots. I know so many people who intellectualize their feelings, codify and categorize and parse them to their molecular levels, trace the psychology, and consider them “solved” because they have been explained. And meanwhile all those wild inconsistent inexplicable messy feelings are still running and tugging and clawing those rational brains, those controlled bodies, sometimes trashing the joint just because they can. Making us ecstatic, or bitter, crushed or gutted or overcome by any number of desires that roll over us like waves. Sometimes we are simply a big hungry mouth that just wants to be filled. And you want to explain that? Don’t talk to me about rational.

When I write, the irrational hungry space is where I often need to go. Music always helps me with that; it’s my native guide to the I-can’t-breathe-now misery of rejection; the adrenaline rush when someone you’re hot for looks right at you; the moment when we want to hurt someone bad because they don’t love us back, when they become a thing to be broken so that they can’t fuck with us anymore. And you know, at least so far, those things feel pretty much the same at 48 as they did at 14. I have more reference points: I can say oh, it’s you again, and sigh, and sit with it until it’s ready to move on. But recognizing it, knowing it inside out, never makes it stop coming back around.

So if you’re feeling like the big drama of big sad find-yourself-a-corner feelings, here’s a playlist for you.

“The Secret’s in the Telling” by Dashboard Confessional is iconic emo. I listened to this about seven million times when I was writing the middle eight of Dangerous Space, the sadness and rage between Mars and Duncan.

“Think Twice…” by Groove Armada is a song that caught me completely off guard when I first really listened to it — I was standing at the sink in our old house, washing dishes, and I began to cry. There was a window over the sink that faced directly into the kitchen window of the house next door, and I’m sure our neighbor thought I was experiencing some particular personal grief: and it was grief, but without a particular source. Just… well, I don’t know, that’s emo for you. Sometimes feeling just is.

“In a Lifetime” is from the Irish group Clannad. Beautiful stuff, and this song is my favorite of theirs for its passion and its edge of desperation; the wildness within us.

And then there is the spiritual mother of emo, Suzanne Vega, singing “Some Journey” in her delicate voice that gets right to the heart of the road not taken. Surely we’ve all met someone in our life about whom we’ve wondered What if?

Have a great weekend, with no sadness except the musical kind.

Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!