NaBloPoMo

This Time of Night

New Order – This Time of Night

Normally I am not around at 3pm on a Monday afternoon but there was no bus transportation for my daughter’s school today and my husband couldn’t pick her up so I took the day off and took care of some local things as well. I turned on the radio and hit the button for the local college station. The DJ said he was going to be down in New York on Friday for Peter Hook’s show at which he and his band are playing Low-Life and Brotherhood back to back. The DJ decided to play both albums in their entirety as a kind of tribute.

As “Love Vigilantes” started up I said, “Oh, I love this song!” and turned it up and started singing along. A surefire way to embarrass your young teenager.

I then launched into an unasked-for explanation about why I was not also going to this show. Lots of the usual logistical reasons but also I’m not sure how I feel about the whole Peter Hook playing New Order and Joy Division songs with the Light and New Order playing without Peter Hook thing. Bands break up all the time or kick someone out, get a new drummer, but this is weird and uncomfortable, like when a couple you know breaks up and you still want to be friends with both of them but they want you to choose sides. I can’t do it!

To say my daughter didn’t care in the least is an understatement. She was further perplexed by my insistence that the voice singing these songs should be Bernard Sumner, even though I acknowledged that he isn’t a “good singer” which is really all my daughter seems to notice at this point in her musical development. Then “The Perfect Kiss” came on and I said, “Oh, I love this song!” Eye-rolling in the passenger seat.

But she wasn’t asking me to change the station and any chance I can get to expose her to music that isn’t on the top 40 station is a good thing. I tried to explain how just because someone may not be a great singer doesn’t mean that the way they sing isn’t great. I don’t think I convinced her but I like to introduce the idea to her. I am not immune to the power of a beautiful voice, far from it, but I love a lot of bands with singers that would never make it in an a cappella group. And I love them, in many cases, not in spite of but because of that imperfect voice.

We made it home and I went in and turned on the stereo so I could pick up where we left off in the car. “Sunrise” came on and I heard her laugh as I said, “Oh man, I LOVE this song!” and she wandered into another room. Just wait, I thought to myself. Just wait.

Peaks and Troughs

We Were Promised Jetpacks – Peaks and Troughs

Lately I’ve been on a Scottish bands kick and last week I bought myself a ticket for We Were Promised Jetpacks with The Twilight Sad opening up. I am hoping there will be a bit of banter in between songs so I can hear those incredible accents and barely understand a word of it.

I don’t know why there seem to be so many shows I’d like to see in the coming weeks, and I missed a bunch back in October that I would have gone to if other commitments hadn’t gotten in the way. In the same week that I am going to the show above, there are at least two others on my radar. There are a couple in December too. None of these are actually near me either. Why is it always like that? Feast or famine.

I had high hopes for today’s NaBloPoMo efforts but it’s nearly midnight and my WiFi keeps crapping out, leaving me with just my phone. I wanted to start out strong but I guess there will just be some times when you actually do have to phone it in.

November Spawned a Monster

Morrissey – November Spawned a Monster*

Perhaps against my better judgement, I have decided to try and do NaBloPoMo this year. I know a number of people who used to do it but it has fallen out of fashion with most of my online friends. So why am I bothering? My posting has been spotty lately, to say the least, and I am hoping it might get me back in the groove.

It seems appropriate though since what inspired me to start this blog in the first place was the 30-day Song Challenge. A friend of mine posted it on Facebook and I thought I’d play along. It was fun, even if some of the daily themes must have been thought up by someone who doesn’t really listen to music the way my friends and I do. Frequently I really wanted to post some explanation for why I picked a particular song for that day’s theme and Facebook, at the time, limited your post length so it wasn’t like you could really get into it. Having a blog where I could do that, but not be required to do it every day or follow some set guidelines, sounded like a great idea.

So 3 1/2 years ago, I took a Tumblr site I had used as a Couch25K tracker, deleted all those entries and started my music blog. A little less than a year later I bought noisycats.com and started a version on WordPress that contained the entries I was posting to Tumblr, but not all the stuff I reblogged. Reblogging and all the other people who are sharing stuff are the great things about Tumblr. The commenting and messaging features, not so much. I had a guest post coming up on a friend’s site and I was hoping to get a bunch of new readers who may not have had Tumblr accounts and who probably wouldn’t have been familiar with the whole Tumblr culture.

Today the two versions of Noisy Cats exist together just fine, I feel, and since I’m the one doing them, that’s all that matters. I like the clean WordPress version and the categories and easy commenting that it allows. I also like reblogging cool, fun, and interesting things that my Tumblr friends post mixed in with my own longer entries that are less common on Tumblr. Lately though, I’ve been doing more reblogging and less writing of my own and that’s the easy way out (for me, and what I’ve been trying to do content-wise anyway).

So National Blog Posting Month, here I am. We’ll see if by month’s end November spawned a monster or if it forces me to try harder and write entries that are worth reading every day. Be patient, guys, ok?

* My daughter looked over my shoulder while I was watching the video and said, “Is that guy a belly dancer or something?” I haven’t laughed that hard in days.