dailyeatings » music

And This Is How It Goes

David — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:48:58 +0000

When I die, I want this played at my funeral:

Anthology

David — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:55:30 +0000

On the occasion of my first anniversary of working at the Field Museum, a playlist of songs. Fair warning, though: I make no claims to elevated taste or standards. What I listen to at work is mostly intended to help me concentrate by shutting out the world while keeping me from really noticing the music too much.

Oct08	Frou Frou – Must Be Dreaming Most of these songs were holdovers from what I was listening to during those last few boring weeks at the hospital.
	Yelle – A Cause Des Garcons (Tepr Remix) Made friends with a girl at work over this song, right when I started.
	The Gaslight Anthem – Old White Lincoln
	Ladyhawke – Another Runaway
Nov09	The Killers – Human Absolutely hooked on this song when it first came out. Listened to it continuously for a couple days, at least. The same with its remix. Unquestionably the soundtrack of my first month at the museum.
	MIA – Paper Planes
	Van She – Sex City
	Ingrid Michaelson – Creep
	The Sounds – Hurt You Liking this song provided a social entry with certain others that would have otherwise been impossible. Seems silly now in retrospect but was a huge deal at the time.
Dec09	Thomas Newman – Define Dancing The start of my enduring Wall-E fixation, particularly with EVE. It’s one of the reasons why most everything I make is mostly white with grey and blue accents.
	Adele – Right as Rain
Jan09	Miley Cyrus – Breakout Extraordinarily catchy and mindless, perfect for blasting through headphones while concentrating on other things. Left it on for hours while designing BioSync’s website. Sorry, Audrey.
Feb09	Kelly Clarkson – My Life Would Suck Without You See above.
	Johann Strauss – An der schönen blauen Donau I had a brief obsession with 2001.
Mar09	Beirut – My Wife, Lost in the Wild Very vivid memories of my hotel room, being lost in DC, the cute brunette, feeling completely overwhelmed professionally, eating questionable Chinatown food.
	Coldplay – Viva La Vida Needed the cheery optimism to balance out the slow, tumor-like growth of bad vibes.
Apr09	Andrew Bird – Anonanimal Best Concert of the Year.
	Culture Beat – Mr. Vain Mostly to annoy Ryan.
May09	The entire Braid soundtrack. Of the game’s many merits, the music was probably the best.
	El Ten Eleven – Central Nervous Piston I was pretty obsessed with Helvetica at the time.
Jun09	Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Zero The song of the summer: frisbee lunches, interns galore, league games, my sister’s wedding.
	Pains of Being Pure at Heart – This Love Is Fucking Right!
Jul09	Weezer – El Scorcho “I’ll bring home the turkey if you bring home the bacon” remains to this day my favorite lyric ever.
	Bruce Springsteen – Tunnel of Love Falling back to an old favorite, during what was perhaps the nadir of my work experience so far.
Aug09	Au Revoir Simone – Anywhere You Looked Went to their show with Matt, on a whim. He and Kim moved away shortly thereafter, but the music stuck with me.
	Gin Blossoms – Hey Jealousy Described to a new friend how my love for this song was both 100% ironic and 100% earnest.
Sep09	Kings of Leon – Use Somebody Alone in my room in Paris, late at night, over and over again.
	Brian Sharpe – She Drives Me Crazy
Oct09	The Format – The First Single
	Jason Robert Brown – Stars and the Moon This one’s completely the fault of my brother, the composer/songwriter.

Force of Habit

David — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:12:23 +0000

This is what you get when you start to regularly post on twitter: your thoughts get smaller and more compartmentalized, and it becomes exceedingly difficult to compose anything of length and substance. So instead you get this: one of my favorite songs, for as long as I’ve had any meaningful engagement with pop music — which is to say, the period that started when I got my own radio and my parents ordered cable television, thereby exposing me to MTV, sometime around sixth grade.

True Story, pt. 87

David — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:13:40 +0000

She took me to a show to see a musician she knew from her college days in Nashville, an acoustic singer-songwriter I had never heard of. Doors opened at 6.30 and it was 95F outside, so by the time he took the stage, the crushing hordes of undergrads and high schoolers were too much for even the industrial-strength air conditioners. Before the show, she had told me how this was the soundtrack of her life, and that while this was nominally my birthday present she felt guilty that she this was definitely her thing. I’m sooooo excited, she kept saying, with that little jumpy-head-shake-thing she does when she’s giddy. She knew all the lyrics and sang along to every word while I mostly just stood behind her, smiling when she would turn around and ask me if it was great or what. Well, with a single exception: during one of this last songs, one that all the kids there knew, something about where green meets red meets blue, he started jamming on an old song about how love is a temple, a higher law, a song to which I most definitely know the lyrics, and it was her turn to stand mute with her hands in her pockets while I sang my head off.

Hello, I’m Here, I’m Waiting

David — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:22:55 +0000

For the last two months, thanks to a combination of negligence and laziness, the only music on my work computer has been Weezer’s self-titled (Blue) album and Pinkerton. I have a tendency to leave songs on repeat when trying to solve complex problems — it is thus a testament to the level of personal frustration I’ve felt with my current project that there have been entire days when I’ve listened to nothing but “El Scorcho” over and over again.